The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: why I write

  • Thoughts Post-NaNoWriMo 2013

    I managed to finish NaNoWriMo by November 24th, but two weeks later my muse is still a withered husk lying crumpled in the far corner. I had an easier time of it this year compared to last, due in large part to pacing myself more and a wonderfully supportive writing group, but it was still far from easy.

    Thanks to NaNo and the Lawrence writers, however, I’m slowly beginning to understand what it means to be a writer. I’ve never been the type of person who had to write. I feel like a bit of a hack to admit it, but I have none of the overflowing passion that flings me from my bed to my keyboard every day like I’ve read in so many author interviews. I wish that I did.

    I love stories and I’ve always gotten great enjoyment from writing, but I also used to wait until my muse was fit to burst before I did anything and then rode the wave for however long it lasted. I could go months and even years between writing stints that way.

    It wasn’t until early last year that I became serious about writing and I’ve found that, while still great fun, it’s also a lot of bloody work. NaNo just compresses that workload into 30 days. Even without the frantic pace, it takes continuous effort to push back distractions, sit down every night, and really write.

    I’m writing this now, with no inspiration and dead tired after a long shift at work, as a testament to that. Thanks to NaNo and thanks to the Lawrence writers who have helped me learn what real writing takes.

  • Selling Out

    There comes a time in each person’s life when you have to give up on the dream of becoming a dot-com millionaire by thirty and take whatever job will keep a roof over your head and allow you to visit the dentist on occasion. If you’re really lucky, you’ll even earn enough to buy the expensive food— the kind that comes with both flavor and nutrition. So I write to order in exchange for money. If it’s a program manual or an annual report or a web page or a property history, I’ll write it because that’s what my employer needs. If I worked for somebody else, I’d be writing something else.

    Is writing for a salary a giant time suck that takes up energy and attention and creative juices? Yes, it is. Does it use up resources I could be using towards producing a pretentiously significant work of Great Art? Damn right it does. Bur here’s the secret, from someone who has been there— so is poverty. Dealing with the day to day hustle of surviving on no money is a giant, soul-killing hassle. I worked harder at being poor than I ever have at a day job, and while at the end I suppose that “my time was my own” to work on my own projects, I was perfectly happy to trade 40 hours or so a week for a modest yet sufficient paycheck.

    All that said, if I weren’t paid to write, would I still do so? Probably. I am first and foremost and from time immemorial a reader, and reading led me to a friend who led me to a friend who led me to Nanowrimo, which has led me to more friends, who led me here, to the Cafe. I find as I get older and inadvertently somewhat wiser, I have more things to write about, so let’s see where it goes from here.

  • Putting on the Sorting Hat (Week of 13 January 2013)

    Genre is a French word meaning “kind” or “sort” according to Wikipedia. Genre, though, for writers is what we write, how we express ourselves, where we want to take our readers away from their everyday lives. Certain genres are overdone, some are less explored, and many are confused with the medium in which they are delivered. TV westerns are not necessarily the same as Hollywood westerns which are different still from Pulp westerns. However, they are ALL westerns.

    Some of us here in the Cafe write in distinct genres, others still crossover from into another and then back again or perhaps into a third. As readers we are attracted to certain genres for entertainment: science fiction, romance, urban fantasy, high fantasy, etc… As writers sometimes we eschew what entertains us in favor of what we like to write or are good at. Or think we’re good at.

    This week we’re exploring why we write in the genre we’ve chosen. We’re going to tell you what’s attractive about that genre to us and we hope you’ll tell us what you like. The regulars here know we run the gamut of any list of genre you might find anywhere, but why we write in these milieux is a topic of conversation over coffee, tea, or cocoa on a cold winter’s day.

    Pull up a chair. You’re always welcome here but you’ll have to bus your  own dishes.

  • Where Am I, and What’s the Deal With This Handbasket?

    A number of years back I was poking around on LiveJournal and ran across the blog of a friend of mine who was describing this thing called National Novel Writing Month. Which sounded really interesting, and I decided I wanted to try it.

    The only problem was that Nanowrimo runs from November 1 to 30 every year, and it was already the day after Thanksgiving.

    I had just finished (? Was finishing?) grad school and I was looking for another all consuming obsession to fill the anticipated void. I had matured as a technical writer and writing term papers and giving in-class presentations was coming easy. Challenging, yes, because I still had to master the material, but the actual effort of repackaging [0] was running smoothly.

    Writing fiction, however, was a nut I had yet to crack.

    I remember that when I was a kid I had written a short play— the kind you act on a stage, not on a screen. I must have written that play three separate times because I was so in love with the story [1]. I never did get a chance to put it on, though, because as a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child I didn’t have enough friends to fill out the cast. Thank all the Muses that none of my schoolteachers ever found out about my playwriting— no doubt they would have considered producing said play the perfect social therapy for a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child. In the 1970s, the Geek had yet to inherit the Earth, and a girl who was smart rather than sociable was simply Not On.

    Anyway, I had to wait eleven and a half months for my first Nanowrimo. By the time it finally rolled around I had already read No Plot, No Problem! and tried my hand at creating story out of the motion of pen over page. However, I looked forward to the discipline of having a series of deadlines as I experimented with long form fiction.

    The book I eventually wrote was dreadful. But the experience was a revelation.

    For some reason it has never been the online Nanowrimo community that caught my passion, which is actually pretty weird considering that I have been participating in online communities since approximately 1989 [2] and at the time lived and died by email. The greatest part of the Nanowrimo experience turned out to be sitting at a sticky table in some random coffee shop with a dozen perfect strangers, most of whom I would never see again, and bonding over writing absolute crap and bitching about it. Cheering those who caught up with their word count goals. Speculating about those mythical Nanowrimoers who supposedly hit the fifty-thousand word mark within the first week. Responding to challenges. Sagging in relief when your own fifty-thousandth word was completed on November 29 or thereabouts, and you could Have A Life once more. Applauding wildly those who met their own fifty-thousand word goal at the write-in.

    A few years later some in my local Nanowrimo group started this thing they were calling the Lawrence Writers Group in order to continue that special energy of a Nanowrimo flash community throughout the rest of the year and for some reason the universal expectation was that of course I would be involved. I’m not sure why— fiction writing isn’t really My Thing, I don’t generally do recreational writing except in November, and I sure as hell have no intention of trying to get published. But Lawrence Writers turned into the Confabulators turned into the Cafe, and here we all are.

    Like writing a Nanowrimo novel, I’m going to keep moving pen over page and see where it takes me.

    [0] An actual term of art in library science meaning taking the stuff you learn for class and turning it into term papers and in-class presentations.
    [1] I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what that story is now. But when I was 9, it was the stuff of brilliance.
    [2] Yes, Virginia, that is three years before the formal invention date of the World Wide Web. Yes, I am older than e-dirt.

  • Why I Write

    Because I’m paid for it. In a career that has spanned multiple mighty professions, writing has always turned out to be my most salable skill.

    I work in a space that librarians and search algorithm authors call the Long Tail of Information. Think of it this way— a little bit of information is important to vast quantities of people. How to eat properly. The date of the next general election. The price of tickets to The Dark Knight Rises. After that the graph tapers off pretty sharply. The vast majority of information out there has a very small, but very enthusiastic, audience.

    When I write a report, I’m pulling together data from various sources, online and offline, and repackaging it into a product that is of vital personal importance to anywhere from, say, five to thirty-five people. It may be of casual interest to a couple of dozen or a couple of hundred more. And it will have absolutely no impact on the lives of the other seven and a half billion people on the planet.

    None of this means that this information isn’t valuable! People will use it to make important decisions. Somebody could end up spending a million dollars. Somebody else might or might not get sick. The collective IQ of the planet will increase by an infinitesimal amount. Work will get done. People will get paid.

    And I’m one of them.

  • Writing: It’s Just This Thing, You Know?

    Ha. Um… Oh dear.

    Why do I write?

    It took a while, but I remember why I started writing: I wanted to tell the story better. I was reading something (Star Wars novels. Babysitter’s Club and Trixie Belden books. Fanfiction on a dial-up connection in 1998.) and I would think, “Hey, that’s cool and all, but…”

    In the beginning, it was just about having an idea and wanting to tell you all about it.

    It’s not a bad beginning, but it doesn’t sum up why I keep doing it. I’m afraid the overall answer isn’t really awesome or deep. It’s just — I do. I imagine that being a writer is something so built into me that I can’t really be anything else. I’m not really good at anything else.

    (more…)

  • A System of Belief

    http://www.crafty-games.com/forum/index.php?topic=342.0
    I played with these as a child. Likely the inspiration for my belief in The Line. Pulled from here.

    I believe in The Line.

    When humans first demarcated space they started telling stories. “Yours,” pointing to one side of a Line drawn in the dirt with a finger or a stick; “Mine,” pointing to the other side.

    Humans have evolved the line as they themselves have evolved, using it to define shapes of animals or other people in the service of telling a story. This culminated in the storytelling of cave paintings that started as early as 40,000 years ago.

    As far as my limited research has gone on the subject of cave paintings it’s obvious that scholars don’t know what purpose the paintings served. Whether for religious purposes or to brag or communicate that hunting in the area was good is a mystery. For all anyone knows, it may be the earliest form of “Kilroy was here”-type graffiti. Regardless, the paintings are a form of storytelling. Pictograms go back at least as far as cave paintings and culminate in Sumerian and Egyptian cultures, becoming more than just ancient versions of Powerpoint presentations, but actual language. (more…)

  • The Effective Intertext

    In teacher training classes, once we had to make a visual map of “A Day in the Literate Life.” The instructor intended us to examine all the literary tasks we performed each day, the better to understand the types of reading and writing we (and our students in the future) must be able to process. And I realized that I floated from one type of writing to another type of reading back to writing, constantly, throughout every day. My writing life is a natural extension of my reading life.

    On days when I feel pretentious and long for grad school, I might say that my inner voice constitutes a rich intertext, that I am the intersection between the many texts of my reading life, and in writing I bring all those input sources together. I honor the writing that has fed me by writing back at it.

    Or I might just say that I feel lucky to have read a lot of great books and want to express that gratitude back with some books of my own.

    Also, I have always been a hand raiser, one to talk in class–not because I wanted to show off, but because my larynx would burst if I did not get to talk within the next three minutes. And writing allows me to sound that barbaric yawp in quieter, better controlled ways. I write because I talk, because I am grateful, and because I want to participate in the conversations that have shaped my life and mind.

     

  • {Insert Clever Title Here}

    Wasn’t sure how to approach this week’s assignment, so I went for simple: here’s a brief history of my writing experience.

    Years ago during a drive back home from graduate school with my then girlfriend (and now wife) to visit my parents, I took some NoDoz. I’d never taken any kind of anti-drowsy medication before, and I was skeptical that it would work. I was known to chug Mountain Dew right before going to bed, with no ill effects. How could two little caffeine pills matter?

    About an hour into the drive, my eventual spouse turned to me and asked, “How are you doing?”

    “I’mdoinggreat!ButIhaveawholelotofthingsIwanttotalktoyouabout!”

    Yes, it was that frantic and fast. No, I’ve never taken NoDoz since that day. What did I need to talk about so frantically? My first idea for my own science fiction story. The best idea ever for a story.

    Yes, really.

    (more…)

  • Take My Hand — We’re Going Elsewhere

    A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honore Fragonard c.1776

    It would be easy for me to tell you that I write because I have to — that it’s in my blood and my heart, and I can’t help myself. That wouldn’t be true, exactly. I make up stories because I don’t know how not to. When I was a little girl, I told myself stories to fall asleep, and today I make up outrageous scenarios for people I see walking their dogs or sitting across a crowded restaurant.

    But I don’t write those down. Making stuff up is not writing.

    I would love to tell you I write for the money, but it’s too soon for that. Ask me again in a few years. Still, even if I were rich, it wouldn’t be why I started writing. Anybody who starts writing because they think it’s a good way to get rich quick is facing a huge letdown. That’s not it either.

    I write because I read. (more…)