Kelly Link on collaborating with your subconscious

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

A few years back, Kelly Link dropped an interesting writing exercise during the promo tour for Pretty Monsters (it’s old, and the formatting is gone, so I’m repeating the relevant parts below). 

Link refers to this exercise as collaborating with your subconscious, and it basically consists of making a list of all the things you enjoy in other people’s fiction, whether it’s themes, characters, tropes, or just a general vibe.

Link’s list is fascinating if you’re familiar with their work, as there’s a definite relationship between the things she enjoys and the stories she manifests as an author.

Here’s the list: 

theme parks 

cults 

haunted houses 

funny! 

subterranean lakes 

book within a book, also made up tv shows — any kind of invented narrative 

dog walkers 

pet tragedies 

twins 

old mysteries — bad things that have happened in the past 

people who know they are doing stupid things, but keep on doing them 

people who are blamed for doing things they didn’t do 

people who make things 

people who stage amateur plays / make amateur movies 

ghost stories 

governesses & parole officers — people with power who can make you miserable, or make you do pointless tasks in order to demonstrate their power 

electrical outages 

imaginary friends 

Cat in the Hat-types 

characters/antagonists/allies 

poltergeists 

owls or infestations of wild animals 

demolition 

ne’er-do-well relations 

the octopus 

the color green 

pet named “the unsub” b/c mother loves forensic mysteries 

mocking celebrities 

metafiction 

fraught family dynamics 

weird sexual dynamics 

plague 

zombies 

attics or basements full of things 

girls who kick ass, not necessarily for a good reason

The point of the list is simple: sometimes, Link peruses it for story ideas, kind of like window shopping. 

An interesting thing I’ve noticed about writing vignettes to post here: they’re often broadly different from the kinds of stories I’d pursue if I sat down to write a full story. Not always — Sweltering Fruit is close to a story I’d pursue, and Four Mohocks Sent Abroad leans into my love of distinctive and untrustworthy narrators — but the vast majority of the vignettes that sit in my “edit and post” folder are a departure in tone, in subject matter, and in voice.

Often, when I go to post them, I find myself noting the ways they stem from my love of a particular SF trope or concept. Often, particularly cheesy tropes or concepts, straight out of the spec fic TV I grew up watching in the eighties and nineties. Yesterday’s story, On The Corner of Caxton and Petrie, 12:04 AM, is basically fanfic for a a cheap Sliders-meets-Herculese knock-off that never actually exists; Knock, Knock owes a debt to childhood exposure to Star Trek and Doctor Who. 

They could all be longer works, but that’s unlikely to happen because there’s writing is constrained by available time and publishing opportunites. Just because I could make Heathcliff the protagonist of a longer story, figuring out who sent the vikings through the time portal, doesn’t mean I should. The reward for doing so is unlikely to match the effort required to make that story, but the vignette pins it down so I’ve got the option to go back and expand if circumstances change. 

In a lot of ways, the vignettes are my verson of Kelly Link’s list: quick sketches that lock down things I enjoy in fiction, and somethig I can revisit and draw upon if I ever find myself stuck on a larger project. 

The Tipping Point

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

I just hit 3,967 words on the new essay that will accompany the Winged, With Sharp Teeth re-release. More importantly, I’ve hit the point where I can see the shape of the essay itself: the arguments I’m making; the points serving as way stations along the way; the lesson I want readers to take away.

Currently referenced over the course of the essay:

  • Baby Sitters Club books.
  • Zoe York’s Romancing Your Goals.
  • This 2015 Tweet by Kathleen Jennings.
  • Neil Gaiman’s The Sweeper Of Dreams.
  • George Orwell’s Why I Write
  • Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours.

I’m forcibly restraining myself from adding some of the theory from my PhD there, because it’ll turn this into a monster that’s longer than the short story it’s written about. 

And a little proof of progress sample:

I’m forty-five now, which means I’ve had thirty-eight years of strangers helpfully telling me what success looks like for writers. These suggestions are rarely overt, but hdie in the subtext every aspiring writer gets asked when they reveal their ambition to new acquaintances:

Can you make any money doing that?

Have you written anything I might have heard of?

Can I get your book in a bookstore?

You should write something like Harry Potter, yeah? Make a lot of money?

Very rarely, someone would ask about collaborating on work, or hiring me to take on a writing job they want done. In these instances, I quote them my going rate for freelance — based off the Australian Society of Authors recommended rates — and resulting sticker shock usually triggers a response somewhere between, “wait, how much?” and “oh, fuck off.”[i]

I’m hardly unique in this; any aspiring writer will run their own gauntlet of responses when they start discussing literary ambitions, let alone have the temerity to call themselves ‘a writer’. Art sits at an interesting nexus point in the collective psyche of western nations, a pursuit that should be done for love instead of money, but success is measured by monetary rewards and the financial investment of a publishing company willing to distribute your book to the four corners of the globe.

What does success look like in the eyes of those outside of writing? Money, a vast readership, and the kind of acclaim that makes you notable even if someone doesn’t read your genre. The kind of extreme, outlier success that is notable enough to attract news attention and make writers into celebrities, whether that comes on a mass scale[ii] or simple notoriety within a small, cult genre.[iii]

The 5-2 Focus List (A Useful To-Do List Alternative)

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad.

The 5-2

The process goes like this:

Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc.

Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then:

  • If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list. 
  • If you finish a task, just cross it off.

Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end and repeat this process for the rest of the day. 

Foster argues that five is the optimal starting length because it’s just long enough to pull your forward, without feeling like you can achieve everything without putting in effort. 

The structure of the list means you’re often making small amounts of progress at a regular interval, rather than doing long stretches of work at once, so it’s both less intimidating to start and more likely to accumulate more work than you would have done. 

IN PRACTICE

For those who don’t want to read my scribble in the photograph above, here’s what that looked like on 19 June.

I started the day with five tasks, pulled from my master-list of projects and tasks on Asana:

  • Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
  • Write 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
  • Do my quarterly checkpoint
  • Clear the dishes
  • Clean and reorganise my desk

In my first cycle, I finished writing 250 words and cleared all the dishes, but merely made progress on the other three tasks. As I finished work, they got added to the end of the list (And while I list 250 words, the actual goal on my asana is “write 750 words”, and so it’s actually a thing I repeat three times).

Ergo, my “round two” list features four repeats, and one new action: 

  • Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
  • Write another 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
  • Do my quarterly checkpoint
  • Clean and reorganise my desk
  • Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damaged.

This time around, I crushed it—I finished my reading, the writing goal, and my checkpoint with no need for a third entry, so as I hit cleaning the desk and fixing the door, I got to add another three targets: 

  • Clean and reorganise my desk
  • Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damage
  • Draft a “would you like to do the introduction to this collection” letter that was causing me some serious anxiety
  • Print the manuscript I have to do a cover synopsis for and proof this week
  • Write another 250 words

This time around, I not only finished everything, but I overshot on some (reorganising my desk also led to experimenting my webcam set-up, so my spouse doesn’t risk walking into shot; writing the letter that was causing me anxiety quickly became proofing and sending it).

I would have done another five, but I was heading out to dinner with my sister at the end of the day, so I settled for one last entry before signing out. 

That might not seem like a lot for a Sunday, but lots of those were several-hours long jobs. Cleaning the desk means literally pulling everything off and wiping it down with antiseptic wipes, and I read about 75% of the book in one day. Even the writing, which basically involved hitting my average daily word count, was breaking a month-log failure to work on creative projects. Ordinarily, I’d have celebrated getting one of these done on a Sunday.

And it’s not like these are all I did in the day—they were just the focus. I squeezed little things in around the edges, like prepping today’s Facebook posts, and did a couple of “task of opportunity” jobs when I was stuck on how to progress.