Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

To Sleep, Perchance to Stay the Fuck Asleep

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’ve been waking in the middle of the night again. Three nights in a row now, for reasons I cannot adequately explain, although the safe bet is that it’s either related to the apnea, or related to the treatment that keeps the apnea under control.

This is coupled with a tendency to wake ahead of my alarm. Not unusual, for me, but what used to be a habit of getting up fifteen minutes earlier is gradually becoming forty minutes to an hour. I wake up lethargic and irritable, like you do when something rips you out of the deepest parts of sleep, and it takes me a good half-day to shake of the effects of that.

In short, it’s the worst run of sleep that I’ve had for a while. A worrying one, given that the tendency to wake in the night was one of the earliest warning signs of apnea, way back when I first started to notice things were going wrong.

One of the things I’ve learned from dealing with the apnea over the last six months: when things go wrong, look to the ruptures in your habits.

It seems simple on the surface, but small changes or lapses in my habits tend to have big effects on my sleep quality. Get lazy with my diet and put on a few kilos? I’m going to pay for that. Change my regular bed time by twenty minutes? I’ll pay for that, too.

Eat certain foods I know better than to eat? Leave cleaning my CPAP gear an extra day or two? Store my gear in a slightly different way? They all impact on my sleep and my ability to function the next day.

Being aware of that makes it easy to tackle a problem, once it becomes clear there’s something going wrong. I run through the things I’m doing differently, alter those habits and see if things clear up.

As in sleep, so it is with writing.

I’ve been tracking time-spent-writing and word-count achieved for a bout a month now, courtesy of some manual processes and the use of tools like RescueTime, and it’s amazing how often what I used to call a bad writing day can now be tracked back to a change in habits.

Turns out, I’m remarkably consistent in terms of word-count: a handwritten page takes me between seven and nine minutes to write, often split into two short bursts. Factor in the gaps where I figure out what comes next, or check Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr, and I average about four or five pages an hour.

When I have a day where I’ve written less than that, it’s usually a sign that I’ve gotten distracted in one of those gaps and not come back to the story. When I have a bad writing day I used to beat myself up, but now I look at stats and figure out where I’ve leaked time like a sieve.

It all comes down to habits and gaps. The gulf between between what I want to be like and what I’m actually doing.

Everything Will Be All Right Once We Get to Tir Asleen

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

I’m not a consistent writer. Not in terms of my work habits, not in terms of my approach, and not in terms of the genres that I’m interested in or my long-term goals. There is something inherently mercurial about my approach to all this, despite my best efforts to try and constrain my natural tendency to rapidly change my mind about things in response to external stimuli.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure how to get the hell out of my own way. The days where I’m successful are roughly equal to the days where I fail.

I am distractable, and fallible, and often lazier than I feel comfortable with. Frequently, when I post here, I’m engaging in a pep-talk that I need to hear above all else.

Right now, that pep talk is this: for the love of god, slow down. Pay attention to what you’re doing now, not what you want in give years time.

Partially this is a response to the looming reality of the new year. People start posting end of year reviews. People start posting about new year resolutions. Everyone is abuzz with fresh plans and shiny new ambitions and it’s tempting to start building your own alongside that.

I like goals. They’re always tomorrow’s problem, something I can adapt to and evolve my way towards. They’re like a little tiny adrenaline shot of ambition that keeps me buzzing for…well, two or three weeks, on a good day.

My goals are usually moderately insane and ambitious as hell, and they’re probably about as useful as a heroin habit. Goals open up the possibility of failure and, as I fall behind on my expectations, give me a mental out when it comes to abandoning them. Oh well, I’m not going to come close, so it won’t hurt to fall even further behind…

Goals shape expectations in weird ways. It puts all the benefits way, way off in the future. It’s why writers – even me, from time to time – get tangled up in the disappointments that things will not work out, long-term, and slip into occasional despair. Goals are often come up with as a solution to problems, and all too often they aren’t. It happens so often that I find myself repeating a single from Willow, inside my head:

“Everything will be all right once we get to Tir Asleen”.

 

Because, well, do you know what happens when you get to Tir Alseen? There are trolls and two-headed dragons and an army camps out on your doorstep. And I do not have a sword-wielding Val Kilmer handy to fight them all off.

When you get right down to it, goals are my response to the possibility of failure. An attempt to exert control over things that I cannot. Goals will get me to the keyboard or get me to crack open a notebook, but they won’t keep me there on their own. Nothing will kill a story idea faster than getting caught up in the idea of making it good instead of getting it done. 

Goals are about intentions. Practice is about actions. The reward for writing today isn’t getting a book published or getting things read. The reward for writing today is writing – an activity inherently pleasurable enough that I will produce thousands of words every week for fun in the form of pro-wrestling fanfic and RPG sessions with my friends.

None of which is saying I’m swearing off goals. I am, after all, mercurial as hell and likely to change my mind six seconds after posting this entry. But my resolution for 2016 is pretty simple: it’s not about where I want to be, it’s about what I’m doing. Every hour. Every day. Every month of the year.

I’m paying attention to what I’m doing, not where I want to be.

 

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Stuff, Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Sunday Circle Banner

Four days left in the year, but there’s still seven days in the week. What are you trying to get done, fellow creative types? What’s inspiring you? What’s keeping you from getting your work finished?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, Throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in week two (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week? Starting today, I set the space marines aside for a while and start rewriting the Gothic YA novel I wrote in the lead-up to GenreCon. I’ve got three weeks remaining on my leave and two notebooks worth of novel to redraft.

What’s inspiring me this week? I picked up John Steakley’s Armor after reading this piece about it on LitReactor. It’s a very weird little book written in a very distinctive style, and the switch between third person and first after the first quarter completely does my head in, but its depiction of the high-tech armor in question is one of the best I’ve come across since starting off my space marine reading stint.

I also watched In Your Eyes, which is probably the most interesting thing Joss Whedon has written in years and made me wish for a period where we saw more of him as a writer than a director. It’s a weird little SF love story that will annoy people who want their SF to be strong on the speculative, as the conceit is utterly subservient to the character story and never really explained.

What part of my project an I avoiding? It may be the most clichéd thing imaginable, but I need to clean my house. Yes, instead of writing, although it will technically be something I do after writing. My house of a den of filth at the moment and it’s hit the point where it’s affecting my writing habits. I’ve actually avoided sitting down on my desk-top for the last week ’cause the chair is covered in laundry and the desk piled high with books.