So, to most of you it has only been a week since I gushed about my plans for NaNo and confided to all of you about my fears. For me it’s been three weeks and in those three weeks I realized something.
I may pretend to be crazy, a lot of people maythink that I’m crazy, but I’m really not. Or at least, I don’t want to be.
I decided to sit this NaNo out. What’s that mean for me? It means that I’m getting eight hours of sleep. It means that I’m able to maintain a social life. It means that I am responsible for cooking my own meals.
Hmm… maybe it’s not too late to change my mind again… I was really looking forward to having all my meals catered.
All of that aside, I think sitting NaNo out was the right decision for me this year. I haven’t had any down time since May and it was beginning to show. If I have some extra time, I’ll flip through my novel from last year. Maybe with a fresh set of eyes I’ll be able to get it scrubbed up enough to start sending out. But if I don’t this month, that’s okay. I’m not going to stress about it. I’ll be the well-rested one at the write-ins. The person who isn’t guzzling coffee at ten pm.
It may take a lot of coffee to work through Writer’s Block. Are you prepared for that? Picture from here.
Writer’s Block is the invention of a scribe who couldn’t turn an assignment in on time, who had too many other things on his mind (yeah it was a man who invented the cop-out, go figure), or was just plain lazy.
Well, maybe not. Maybe being blocked is real. Maybe. But there are ways around it, over, under, through it and the determined writer has to be prepared to find those ways. Most of those ways are constituted in actually doing the work.
Anxiety is what it is. One isn’t necessarily ‘blocked’ but rather is anxious about either the work or something associated with it. Overcoming it is basic problem-solving:
1- What do you want?
2 – Why can’t you have it?
3 – What are you prepared to do to get it?
Being blocked is when the writer gets to the second question and says “I don’t know!” and that’s where the cop-out is. Right there? See it? I. Don’t. Know.
Block is continued when the writer doesn’t have any idea of how to overcome the anxiety that has afflicted him. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do to get what he wants, which is to Write. So instead of calling bullshit and working through the ‘block’, some writers crawl into a bottle (liquor, pills, whatever) and go down for the count, making the anxiety worse.
The best cure I’ve found for being blocked is to actually write. Not what I want to write, but something else, something light and fluffy and not at all related to what I should be working on. The old brainbox is stuck on something, some problem, and it’s all rooted in the subconscious. Time to dig our your Freud, kids, and examine what’s in your head. For instance, I’m writing this post in early June because I’m stuck at a point in my novel where I need to solve a problem that’s going to get out of hand if I don’t think it through a little better.
So yeah, writer’s block is real and has been studied and studied and studied by people smarter than you or me. Being blocked is no excuse. It’s a cop-out to say “I’m blocked so I’m not writing.” That’s an unacceptable response to your craft if one is a serious writer. A lack of inspiration is one thing and also easily solved by a writer who wants to write: go somewhere and open your mind.
You need stimulation but don’t go overboard. You still need to sit down and write. Remember the recipe for a good story: butt in chair, fingers on keys.
I hate editing. I have failed every goal I’ve ever set when editing. I stumble in the same spot every time.
It’s not killing my darlings. Whatever, kill those bastards. I never liked them anyway. (Oh my god that’s such a lie, please, come back, babies.) I like going through the novel and finding the things that worked. I like those moments when you realize, “Wow, this is a legitimate novel,” and the moments where you throw the manuscript across the room and scream, “I WILL NEVER WRITE AGAIN.”
Just as writers get ideas from all around us, we also are influenced by everything we come into contact with. I dedicated a portion of my own personal blog entries to this phenomenon, which I affectionately call the Input/Output modes. Anything we take in inevitably affects what comes out.
As a writer, I talk a lot about other writers and books that influence me, but sometimes I forget how much the other categories of art inspire me, as well.
Music is a powerful one. When I listen to instrumental music, new worlds unfold inside my mind, and I envision scenes to fit with that music. When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed listening to my favorite movie soundtracks and make up new stories to go with them. Hell, I still do that sometimes. For some novels, I’ll create a Pandora station based around certain songs or bands for a certain mood. For others, I will pick one specific instrumental movie soundtrack and listen to it over and over, which shapes my story quite a bit, inspiring scenes I wouldn’t have otherwise fathomed.
Visual arts – paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs – also trigger stories in me. I have always struggled with setting and description. I have a vague idea of what a person or place looks like, but the details are usually missing in my writing. Visual representations help me really consider the details. Sometimes a picture will really speak to me and I’ll be driven to write a story that fits the scene. I’ll want to tell the story of how that domed city on the cliff came to be, or why the sky has inexplicable green miasma in it, or where that dragon got all of those books. Then characters will start to wander around inside the images to answer all of these questions for me.
The arts aren’t the only other medium that influence my writing, however.
When I entered college, I was suddenly required to write—and to take notes in class. My days in high school writing fanfiction in a spiral notebook while Coach “Drone-On” was discussing the civil war were over. I was completely unprepared. I needed to find a way to squeeze in hours of homework along with a suddenly active social life (they didn’t have those back in the small rural Texas town where I went to high school). Something in my life had to give and I decided, rather foolishly in retrospect, that of everything, sleep was the least necessary. At this point I discovered a tendency to binge on Mt. Dew and chocolate, pulling all-nighter after all-nighter to spew words onto a page. Sometimes I wrote for pleasure, but more often it was for an assignment. I’m not sure which part of my new lifestyle was the least healthy, but combined it was a terrible force to be reckoned with that my system still has yet to recover from.
I came to a few realizations about what helped me to write during those exhausting years, so the self-induced torture sessions actually had some lasting worth. I couldn’t listen to music with vocals in it without trying to pay attention the lyrics and not my writing. So I would queue up my Final Fantasy soundtracks on my Zune—I was too cool (cheap) for an iPod—and delve into my writing. It was the perfect amount of background noise to drown out the sound of other people typing.
Out of extreme laziness, I discovered another writing assist. I didn’t want to haul a backpack full of reference books up three steep flights of stairs only to find out halfway through my paper that the books weren’t what I needed after all, so I took to writing in the bowels of Watson library. If I was lucky, I could find a desk where the overhead lights only flickered occasionally. I nearly gave up when I turned on my computer and couldn’t access any wi-fi networks, but then I looked at the mountain of books, remembered how much I’d struggled just getting them all the ten feet to the desk, and decided I could tough it out, just that once. When I finished the assignment, it felt like I’d been down there for hours, possibly days. I was suffering extreme Facebook withdrawals. But after looking at the time, I realized that I’d written the paper in about a quarter of the time it took when I had access to the internet.
Over the final two years of my college career, I perfected the technique. It quickly descended into a quantity over quality approach to writing as I rushed through assignments so that I could go check the latest staff updates. Thi method is one I heartily recommend for college students trying to squeeze short stories in between lengthy research papers that all coincidentally happen to be due the same week, but not for people who with aspirations to publish.
Then I went and graduated college. I was too busy job hunting to devote any time to writing something that wasn’t a resume and for a while I despaired of ever having time to write again.
The inevitable happened: inspiration struck me and I suddenly couldn’t write enough. I spent two weeks typing furiously, turning out words faster than I thought humanly possible. I wrote from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep… with the occasional pit stop for food. And after two weeks, I was burnt out. I then attempted to bribe myself into writing which was great for the word count but not so much on the bank account. A new pair of heels every few weeks adds up pretty quickly. I attempted to set goals and deadlines for myself. That didn’t work with the same successful results as bribery. (more…)
