As I mentioned last time, I’m going to be putting my daily writing habits to the test in a difficult new way this year. I have to travel more than I did last year. In fact, I will probably travel more this year than I ever have in a single year ever before.
To answer the obvious first question, yes, I’ll be very unhappy about leaving The Bern behind. But I’ve tried taking her out in the RV and she just makes cat-in-a-microwave kind of noises until I bring her home. It’s too bad, since I had her in mind when I got the thing in the first place. But sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to. Anyway, I think I have good arrangements made for her to stay with people who she likes. It’ll be even better if their dogs don’t eat her.
To answer the obvious next question, the reason why I have to travel so much this year, especially by RV, is that I want to move in the next year or so, but I don’t know where I want to move to. So I need to explore a lot of different places and see if any place appeals to me in a special way. As some short guy once said, I’ve put this off for far too long…I’ve lived where I am for three times as long as I’ve ever lived in one place before, and being fundamentally nomadic in mindset, I have to move. I’ve also been in a rural environment for a really long time, and while I like that kind of isolation and will probably go back to a rural setting one day, I think I’d like to be in a city for a year or so. We’ll see.
So that’s a key goal for me: to find the place where I want to move. Could be Seattle, or Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. Could be Austin, Texas, or Kansas City, Missouri. Could be Atlanta, or Florida, or who knows where. That’s sort of the point.
But another key goal is to keep writing daily. It is unacceptable not to do that. I want to finish the first book and get going on the next. I have to do it. Furthermore, isn’t the point of a writing career that you can do it from wherever you are?
However logical all of this sounds, it didn’t work out so well last year. As I mentioned before, it was a total failure; I did not write on road tripsat all. So what’s different now?
I’m counting on one thing: routine.
Before, I didn’t have the infrastructure of writing software, backup routine, familiarity with the tools, etc., but now I have. I hadn’t developed the writing every day habit, but now I have. The question is whether the write-every-day habit will carry over from a daily Starbucks routine to the much more involved task of finding a place to park the vehicle for a couple of hours (ideally with a view), parking myself on the RV’s little sofa, and really doing the work.
If someone else is with me and taking a shift driving, in theory I’ll even be able to write while on the go. Carsickness is not a concern. Loss of road trip cameraderie time is, though. The kind of conversations my friends and I tend to have on these kinds of trips often offer a gold mine of humorous dialogue that I really need to start writing down. It’s possible that would qualify as writing time.
That’s not even rationaliziation: I can’t imagine a better real-life source of hero’s journey banter than road trip banter. But I have to be careful not to let myself slide; documenting conversations to later mine them for dialogue is not something I’ve practiced, just like I haven’t practiced writing down descriptions of the places I’ve visited around the country and the world for later use as setting or backdrop.
A friend suggested that I could also look for Starbuckses on the road and do my writing there, and that’s not a bad idea if I happen to run across them. City people might say, but they’re everywhere, how could you not run across them? Of course, out there in the massive open spaces of most of the US, they are a little harder to come by. But it’s not at all out of the question that I would come across one every day or two, and when I do I could at least go and do the work in there.
So I guess we’ll see what happens. Bottom line is, one way or another, I will write every day on the road.
Conversely, I doubt I’ll update this blog as often on the road. On the other hand, there’ll be some nice photos and certainly some humorous anecdotes.
Well, this should be interesting. I’m going to put my hard-earned habit of writing every day to the test, in a crucial and hardcore fashion.
Last year I got a little RV after many years of wanting one. So far I’ve used it for road trips ranging from a couple of days to a 2-3 weeks in duration. I’ve driven it around about half the country so far, and up pretty far north in Canada. I’ll probably blog about the RV and some of those travels in more detail later, and you can see my photo record of previous trips (RV and otherwise) at http://gryphontravel.shutterfly.com. (Please let me know what you think of the photos and the trips, BTW.)
Last year, at the point when I was first seriously contemplating getting started on the writing project that this blog is about, I had planned to derive out of these trips the motivation, inspiration, subject matter, and excuses to write. I set up a dock for the laptop, the same one I’m using to write on now, where it’s rigged to the LCD TV in the vehicle and has a wireless keyboard and trackball. The TV is across from the little sofa, and there’s a table I can mount in one of two collars in the floor, in case I want to put the keyboard or the laptop itself right in front of me. I put a lot of thought into getting set up to be able to write.
As you probably guessed, the plan was an utter failure. I had all the starting problems that new writers always have, plus my own unique ones, but there was more. Being out on the road was a hindrance, not a motivator. There was always another 50 miles to cover, or exhaustion to give in to, or something distracting to see, or movies to watch, or books to read (my all-time #1 dominant excuse).
On these trips, sometimes I had internet access. But it didn’t motivate me to figure out the angles of getting started that require connectivity, such as researching and downloading and evaluating writers’ software, or trying to learn about social media. Sometimes I didn’t have internet access. But the isolation didn’t motivate me to buckle down and write.
Many of these trips were solo. Being alone didn’t motivate me to write when I stopped for a break or for the night. The rest of the trips were with a friend. Having another driver didn’t motivate me to write during the times I didn’t have to drive.
So basically, the idea of writing on the road was a total failure, despite the fact that there was nothing in the way but myself.
But that’s not gonna happen this year. It can’t. Because I have to keep up writing every day, and I have to take a lot of road trips this year.
So what’ll be different this time?
In the interest of shorter blog entries, to be continued tomorrow…
Twitter seems to be the place where writers, especially independent, i.e., indie writers, find each other and keep each other up to date on what they’re doing. So I started looking for people to follow on twitter for the first time, and it quickly became overwhelming. Now I’m afraid to write blog entries because I feel like I ought to wait until I’ve made more of a serious effort to attract followers first.
Clearly this is like trying to drink a whole river, so I guess I’ll just keep on blogging. I wonder if it’s acceptable to repost your own blog entries periodically, if they remain relevant? I’ve seen people do a ton of reposting of things ranging from pertinent to trivial, so I guess it must be acceptable within reason. If I ever do that, I’ll try to make it clear it’s a repost.
In any event, I’ve actually been too busy to do much of it the last week or two anyway. More info shortly.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-cut-e-book-prices-104805832.html?l=1
I don’t like government intervention into anything unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I’d have to say I disagree with this move. Frankly, it seems like there are a lot more important battles out there to be fought, and if not, they can lay off some bureaucrats and lower taxes accordingly. It would reduce the amount of pent-up government wanting to do what it does, specifically, apply force to make people and businesses change their behavior for noneconomic reasons…which usually means, for unreasons. But I digress.
I’d much rather see a market solution to the problem of excessive ebook pricing, and I think it’s already underway. People are actively looking for alternatives to expensive ebooks, looking for lower-priced similar material. And there’s alot of similar material. Given the amount of material out there at all, and the number of new self-publishing stars that are rising, it really seems unwise for traditional publishers to continue to insist on pricing ebooks higher than print books, even higher than hardbacks. But let the market handle it over the next couple of years.
I happen to prefer Amazon over the others, and I doubt I’ll be buying many ebooks through Apple, though anything’s possible. But this has nothing to do with team-picking and flag-waving. I just like their product and their pricing.
I’ve always been able to set words together, naturally, easily, so I’m not used to learning new things pertaining to writing. There had to be some place where people like me go to learn to use whatever talent they have at it. Probably lots of places. I didn’t have a lot of time to waste, and I wasn’t going to be able to wait around for classes or workshops. And I didn’t feel ready for workshops, and the idea of sitting in a classroom after suffering through a string of degrees so many years ago made me want to cry. Though I can’t. Man, wouldn’t it be great to be able to cry? Must be nice.
Anyway, I was left with two resources readily at hand: the entire web, and a bunch of books on writing on a shelf in my bedroom, leftovers from a friend’s studies on the same subject. The web seemed big and impersonal, and seemed like the kind of place where bad advice is a common as good advice. In fairness, awhile back a friend had sent me a link to an old blog of Jim Butcher’s relating to writing technique, and I had found it useful. But the books seemed like a better source of concentrated knowledge.
So I looked through the books. I chose one called How to Write a Damn Good Novel by a guy named James N. Frey. It seemed like a good general guide to dealing with the types of issues I had.
I would like to pause for a moment and point out two things that made this experience nightmarishly miserable for me. Not Frey or his book, but reading these types of books in general. First, I find nonfiction of any kind just brutal to read. It’s like being in school, but where the school follows me everywhere I can carry a book. I have friends who only read nonfiction, and they seem like reasonable people, but I think they must be sick or insane in some way that will only reveal itself when they start eating brains in public, or something. Personally I read exclusively fiction, and don’t feel like I’ve missed out on any knowledge. As everyone knows, huge swaths of history are fiction anyway, a lot of science turns out to be fiction in the end, and let’s not even get started on biography, philosophy or religion.
Second, these books were made out of paper. I hadn’t read more than a couple of books on paper since getting my first Kindle, what, three years ago? That’s two out of easily five hundred books in that time. And I hadn’t read even one paper book in at least a year before this event. I couldn’t believe how annoying it was to have to carry a stack of paper around, turn pages, etc. I think I wrote about this stuff in a previous blog entry, so I won’t belabor it, but it horrifies me freshly thinking about it now.
Bottom line, I didn’t have any choice on either count. It was this or put the project on hold and find a class, or keep writing in the dark while fully aware that I was missing something. I soldiered through the hardships of learning new stuff from reading nonfiction, making my way through the entire book and folding over pages to mark passages relevant to my specific issues. I’ve never liked highlighting, but dog-earing and maybe taking some summary notes later always worked for me.
I will stop short of recommending this book in particular over others. I have nothing against it. I suspect there are a lot of books that teach more or less the same information. I will say this, though: it turned out that I’d found the answers I needed to get past that first wall.
It took me a day or two to read that book, and immediately afterward I spent another day or so reading a second one, How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein. That was the book that yielded the horrible quote I posted early in this blog, but otherwise it was informative and useful for the most part. Even if it was a physical book, hardback, full of nonfiction.
I might later review individual books on writing, but that’s not my purpose right now. What happened next was that I was able to go back to my writing with some new tools that gave me two new capabilities:
In addition to these key new powers, there was an important rule I learned, one of those things that you read and know it’s true but still hate it and rail against it:
“All first drafts are crap.” - Attributed to Hemingway, though I haven’t verified that.
For me to accept that I would spend as much time rewriting as I have been writing was hard, but I understand the wisdom of it. Some days the writing was slow going, and after I got this point from the Stein book, I realized that I could just pound through sections that were dragging, rather than getting bogged down, because the odds are I’ll have to rework them anyway.
I haven’t decided whether to cover any aspects of writing theory and craft in this blog. I’m no expert and I’m no teacher, certainly not of this stuff. But I have written a lot of articles, and it might be worth covering some of these points one by one down the road. We’ll see.
And so, after about a week of struggling and finally solving the problem with my least favorite bitter medicine combo—learning by reading non-fiction—I got past that wall.
After I had been writing consistently, daily, for a couple of months, I hit a wall. I sat down in my usual chair…which was at Starbucks…and nothing happened. And I didn’t know what to do.
Actually, it wasn’t nothing that happened. “Nothing” would be writer’s block, I guess, and it wasn’t that. I assume that must be horrible, though I haven’t had it happen to me. What happened to me was that, over a period of a few days, I had been getting less and less confident about what I was writing. It was partly about not being able to gauge the quality of it, and that is something I would imagine most writers have to go through for a long time in their own careers, possibly without ever ending. I don’t even know if that’s solvable, although the solution to my own problem seems likely to help in this area as well.
In this case it was more about not being able to know whether the pieces I was writing would fit the final picture. I would write a scene and not know whether it would add or detract from the book. I would contemplate another section and wonder whether I should write it or hold off. I despaired of being able to consistently achieve any kind of emotional resonance, or to make sure the final product would feel complete but not bloated. And so, bogged down in these concerns, I started grinding to a halt.
At first I thought I could just bull through, and I did for a few days. Writing every day is rule #1, and I was doing it. But it became clear that there was a wall in front of me, and I wouldn’t get past it without doing something new and different.
I gave myself a hiatus from writing every day, for a couple of days at least, basically because I had no choice. I decided to try something. I would fire up the Kindle and go back to reread some of the books I have liked in the past, books where the stories built up empathy and excitement to a crescendo and left me feeling like I’d been on an emotional journey.
I happened to read some Jim Butcher books in this case, because I like them, and they’re quick, and they’re modern. There are a lot of other books that some would say have more staying power, classics like Dune and Shogun, that I love for the long term, but those take days to read, and I wasn’t in the mood. I think some of the Dresden Files books, and the very well-planned and executed Codex Alera, are good examples of modern dramatic fiction with relatable characters and excellent emotion management, if that makes sense.
I thought that I could read books like these for inspiration and try to analyze what worked about them. But instead, all it achieved for me was a kick when I was down. I am not the type of person who can analyze a movie while watching it, and predict what’ll happen next to annoy whoever’s with me. Reading the books was enjoyable but not educational, and I despaired of being able to accomplish the same kinds of things. And I was drifting.
But quitting was never an option. It never really is, not until you’re in the ground or at least physically can’t make yourself take another step. And so I cast about for another answer.
And in the spirit of short blog entries, we’ll get to that next time.
Well, as far as I can tell, I’ve gotten all the pieces of tech set up that I wanted to for this blog:
Of course now I need to work on some new content, and I will. Been writing consistently for 2-3 hours a day the last 7 days with one day off (meaning less than an hour of writing).
Next I’ll cover a topic I’ve been wanting to talk about since the beginning: walls.
