Stuff

Two links, to start with.

First, Lifehacker has a really interesting post about finding your real goals by asking why you want/do certain things, which is one of those things I urge writers to do an awful lot in You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’s also a remarkably useful skill in other aspects of your life–I’ve used it to solve problems in day-job gigs, supervisor’s meetings, and personal relationships, and it proved to be a remarkably big part of the conversation I kept having with my psychologist last year.

Second, the bullet journal is my productivity system of choice because it’s hackable and adapts to my schedule, getting complex on the months I need complexity and streamlined on the months when my workload is relatively focused. I picked up the BuJo habit from Kate Cuthbert, and it’s slowly spread through a whole bunch of friends and family, to the point where a large chunk of our family Christmas is now spent talking notebooks and layouts.

With all that in mind, this article where a behavioural neuroscientist is interviewed about why the bullet journal system works is one of my favourite things this week. Go check it out.

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Two years ago, right about the this time, my GP surprised me with a diagnosis of anxiety and depression. It wasn’t surprising because I thought I was okay. Just surprising because I assumed that the not-okay was normal, that the constant anger and frustration I’d been feeling for a while was the result of short-term stress.

The stress, of course, had been there for a few years and never seemed to end. That was beside the point. I’d gotten used to the feeling that I was a dysfunctional, inhuman fuck-up masquerading as a competent human, and largely assumed everyone was like that and just better at coping or wearing the mask. I assumed these things weren’t signs of my mental health deteriorating because a) I could always point to a cause (or causes) for my stress, b) I didn’t seriously think about killing myself, although I had all kinds of intrusive thoughts about self-harm during really bad days, and c) I assumed people would notice if something was really wrong.

I wasn’t sad enough to be depressed. Things weren’t bad enough. I got really good at talking myself out of getting help. Once I started getting help and recognising how out-of-whack my baseline was, I noticed a couple of friends using much the same rationalisations, which ultimately how I ended up pitching this post about the ways we talk ourselves out of getting help at my former blogging gig.

I mention this today because getting help was incredibly useful, and I wish I’d done it earlier. Ignored the little voice that told me it may be depression, but it’s not particularly bad and got help immediately, instead of waiting for things to build to a crisis point.

This doesn’t change the fact that asking for help is fucking hard. When your mental health is wonky, you get really good at convincing yourself there’s nothing wrong.  avoided it as long as possible, only went because I’d started crying in front of people at work.

I got myself through the clinic door by saying I was only there to assuage my parents fears, but I went. I got help and getting help led to tools that helped me manage things. All that weight that had settled around my life ceased being a crushing pressure, and became something that could be cleared away or shaped into something useful.

Getting help is hard, but it’s fucking worth it.

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Today was not a good day for marking, which makes me wonder if the day off was a mistake. I dragged my feet getting to the computer, daydreaming about actually writing something of my own instead. I spent far too much time writing the section above this, then deleting it, then writing it over again.

Somewhere amid all that, while deleting a section about self-care and watching for warning signs, I realised that reading The Writers Room was entirely the wrong call this week. All these interviews with people thinking deeply about the craft of writing just fed into the unsettled feeling that has set in after a week of marking, making it harder to fend off the whispering anxiety that tells me I’m taking too long or doing the job poorly.

Twenty assignments to go at time of writing. 60,000 words or so. I think my plan of being done by Sunday may be a little ambition.

Yesterday was my favourite kind of winter morning. Cold enough that it was pleasurable to hide beneath the blankets for a while; warm enough that I could get up, shower, then spend the morning without shoes and socks on as I padded worked on the laptop. I like having cold feet as I work. It’s a thing.

Six assignments marked yesterday, bringing me to the halfway point.

On Friday, I took a break from marking and took my partner out to lunch at a nearby dumpling bar we’d been meaning to try for ages. There was far too much noise and far too vegetarian options for it to be a particularly effective date,  but over spring roles S. asked if I was getting any of my own writing done amid the marking.

I’m not, but writing is a particularly weird thing. There’s no words on the page happening, but the days spent toiling in the marking minds are usually fertile ground for coming up with new ideas or figuring out details I’ve been stuck on for a while.

This time around I’ve been pondering a novella idea I’ve been kicking around, based upon the Warhol Sleeping vignettes I’ve published over the years, and how it needs to change given that those vignettes were written in 2000 or so when television was still the dominant means of distributing content. It presumes a rating system as a meaningful measure of success, and a type of cultural dominance that is largely impossible to achieve given the fragmented and customisable nature of content distributed via the internet.

Intriguingly, the core idea at the heart of the vignettes–a search for authenticity in art and counter-cultural thought–is still relevant. It just needs to be handled differently than it was back in 2000, and I need to update the storytelling approach in order to reflect that. I’m toying with ways to do this in the back of my brain at the moment, figuring out how to do new POVs while keeping the core conceits that I like.

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There are things you start to notice when you read a whole bunch of works-in-progress at once.

For instance, there are certain beginnings to a story that just don’t work, but aren’t apparent unless you’re the kind of person who reads slush or marks a shit-ton of creative writing assignments. Every time I mark, I’m reminded of the inevitable evil that is the story that begins with a character waking up. Everything I wrote about this subject back in 2014’s post on The World’s Worst Story Opening (and How to Do It So it Works) remains staggeringly true today.

I’m snarky in that post, as I often am when frustrated, but its a phase writers go through in their development. First, you get into the habit of figuring out things on the page. Then, you get into the habit of figuring out scenes, learning the patterns of story and how to handle the microstructures of conflict development. The latter isn’t easy, and it’s rarely talked about in any great detail–Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid entry on Beats is one of the few pieces of writing advice I’ve seen that talks about the internal structure of scenes rather than using scenes to generate a macro-structure like the three-act narrative arc.

Another resource I’ve used over the years: Lit Reactor’s post on punctuating dialogue, which walks us through the basics before talking about how dialogue can be used to control pacing and achieve other effects.

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If there’s a flaw in the rise of the gig economy, it’s that people are often doing some shallow engagement with their job rather tan specialising. This may not seem like a big deal–the most popular of the gig-economy set-ups are built to manage food delivery, driving, and other gigs with a low barrier of entry–but occasionally you get reminders of exactly what that means.

Like yesterday, when we ordered up a pizza from one of the delivery apps, only to have it dropped off by a rider who didn’t realise that pizza isn’t designed to be transported vertically.

Irritating as hell when it happened. My partner’s response as I curried the pizza into the room: “What kind of monster does that?”

I had no answer, but at least it’s slightly funnier now, twenty-four hours later. Largely because a series of complaints and photographic evidence resulted in a full refund of the meal.

I really should go mark things now.