Process Notes

On Writing In the Morning

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , ,

Putting this one here as a kind of addendum to my last post: it’s time to start bringing the laptop to work and spending my morning writing-shift down in the State Library cafe. With everything being all NOW NOW NOW inside my head in the lead-up to GenreCon, it’s becoming increasingly easy to come into work early and start putting out fires (metaphorically speaking) related to the event.

This isn’t why I come into work early every morning. Much as I like my job, I don’t like it enough that I’m willing to spend an extra hour a day working on it without getting paid (well, I am, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve stayed late to get some urgent stuff done a couple of times in the last month, but I’m not willing to give my job this particular writing hour). 

The morning writing shift has become increasingly sacred to me over the last couple of months, which is weird, ’cause I’m not a morning writer by inclination. I keep having conversations with people who normally follow my progress on twitter and it’s interesting to see their perspectives too: To me it frequently feels like I’m just hanging in there – getting the bare minimum done in order to continue thinking of myself as a writer while working full-time. To others, apparently, the habit of banging out 500 to 700 words every morning makes it seem like I’m storming forward (less so, now that I don’t tweet my wordcount every morning, but you can bet that’ll start again once GenreCon is over and I’m back in the swing of fiction).

All of which has meant that I’m thinking a lot about process of late. My period of full-time employment is just about done – sometime towards the end of the year I’ll be transitioning back to a four-day working week (thank god), and it’s highly likely that I’ll be back to three days a week in 2013 based on my conversations with the new Boss at the centre (which is awesome – three days a week is kinda optimal for me and dayjobs). At the moment I’m looking at a 2013 where there are whole days I can devote to writing, instead of a 50 minute window in the mornings before I start answering email and getting shit done at the dayjob. As they say in Monty Python: LUXURY.

Still, there are advantages to the morning writing shift beyond getting the words down on the page. And, ’cause I’m me, I made a list (the damn dancing monkey posts got me addicted to the damn things).

FOUR REASONS I’M ROCKING THE MORNING WRITING SHIFT AT THE MOMENT

The usual caveats abound on this one – my process is not your process, etcetera and so forth, so if you disagree with any of this and you’re getting shit done, more power to you.

1) IT MAKES WRITING THE FIRST PRIORITY OF THE DAY

Well, not actually the first priority, since that usually involves a combination of urination, showering, and breakfast, but I figure you can catch my drift on this one. I think every productivity guru in the world has advocated this – find the most important thing you have to do in your day and get it done first. If you’re fighting a holding pattern against your dayjob in order to keep yourself writing, there’s an awful lot of power in making the first thing you do every day getting words down on paper. After all, you’ve just made words your priority. It’s the thing that gets done, no matter what, and you can spend the rest of the day doing your other tasks without fretting about when you’re going to find the time to get your wordcount done.

It has to be said – I like that feeling. It’s nice to clock up my 500 words early in the day and spend my working hours secure in the knowledge that I’m a goddamn writer and I am mighty. That nagging thought that you should really get some writing done doesn’t hang around, clogging up your psychic real-estate.

2) GOOD PROCESS OVER BAD INSTINCTS

So here’s one of my dark and terrible writing secrets – I am, by inclination, a binge writer. My natural inclination is to sit down at a keyboard and pound the fucking shit out of it until there are thousands and thousands of words on the screen and I can limp away, weeping and exhausted, with blood seeping through the broken cuticles of my fingernails. I love the adrenal rush of chasing a deadline, living on pizza and fried chicken, pouring litres of cola down my gullet, and I love the post-writing crash that inevitably follows. Not for me is the slow, steady pace of writing X number of words a day and getting things done that way, unless X number of words is so phenomenally crazy that I can tell other people and they’ll step back and be all, like, whoa, this dude’s crazy.

Thing is, that shit isn’t healthy. Let’s set aside the damage all that pizza and cola is doing to my body and look at the utter freakin’ stupidity of embracing a crash-and-burn cycle for something that you’re hoping to make your long-term career. Most of my life has been spent fighting that impulse, embracing the slow and steady progress, and trying to avoid the deadly mistake of tying my word-count to my masculinity (yes, I know, I was young. I’m not proud of it, let’s move on). And it works, that method. Small goals, regular increments, building things piece by piece. I’m a much healthier man, physically and mentally, writing 500 words every morning than I am chasing two or three big writing binges a month.

3) I’M LESS LIKELY TO CANNIBALIZE WRITING TIME FOR OTHER THINGS

I’m a night owl by nature, which means I jam all kinds of shit into my evenings: gaming, reading, tooling around on the internet, the Trashy Tuesday Movie ritual that seems to have become a permanent part of my week for reasons that elude me (American Ninja, btw, totally bad-ass in a god-awful kind of away). Occasionally I’m even inclined to go out and catch up with people, or have dinner/drinks with friends.

Since I spent a damn decade avoiding these things on account of the fact that I was a broke freelance writer/student who couldn’t actually afford to leave the house, I’m kinda bad at saying no to this kind of stuff now that I have a regular income. This means any kind of evening writing ritual is destined to fail. There’s too many interruptions to the process and I’m generally inclined to cannibalise my writing time for other things if there’s no pressing deadlines to keep me on track.

Morning’s, though? No-one wants to do things in the mornings. It’s a total get-up, get-ready-for-work, go-to-work kind of dead space in our culture. The odds of other people planning activities that take place in the morning is rare on weekends and practically non-existent during the working week. This means that all I need to do to earn myself an hour of uninterrupted writing time is get up an hour earlier than usual and ignore the damn internet, and no-one will ask me to give that up (although, note, I’m a single guy without kids; I imagine this is significantly less true should the latter part of that statement be different).

4) IT KEEPS THE WORDCOUNTING OFF THE BLOG

Here’s one of the habits I picked up as part of the morning writing shift ritual: posting the wordcount to twitter’s #AmWriting hashtag. This is because the internet is AWESOME and mutates in increasingly interesting ways – five years ago I would have been posting regular wordcounts to my blog and boring the shit out of people since they’d be the only updates (eight years ago I would have been posting them to my livejournal, but that was a different time, man).

Posting wordcounts is part of the ritual, a means of shutting off the writing brain and telling myself it’s time to go to work now while simultaneously serving as a means of reinforcing and rewarding the writing habit. It’s useful, but it’s dull as hell for people who show up to a blog and don’t really care if I wrote 400 words or 4000 words in a given day (although, if I wrote four thousand words in a day, I’d be shouting about it right here without giving a damn if I bored you or not).

Twitter, though, is the perfect medium for this kind of thing. A fluid, fast-moving social media hub where people are used to conversations flowing past them. Those who want to pay attention can, those who don’t, won’t. Plus, let’s be face it, I’m probably alienating far fewer people by posting wordcounts to twitter than I am bombarding their twitter stream with movie tweets every Tuesday night.

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process , , ,

You know what’s handy when you pre-write a bunch of blog posts and set them to post while you’re away? Actually remembering to set them to post. Seems I forgot to hit the all-important Publish button in my rush to get ready for the Adelaide trip last week, which means we’re starting the dancing monkey series a little later than expected. If there’s a topic you’d like to throw into the mix, you can still do so by pitching it here. 

A Few More Ideas About Ideas

A few years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the often-maligned question of where do your ideas come from. I wrote it ’cause I didn’t like the way most writers behaved when they were asked that question, and ’cause I kind of like understanding my process. Plus, as a guy whose occasionally asked to teach people how to write, it’s a useful thing to be able to talk about process without pulling all that form a little shop in Schenectady bullshit on students who are paying good money to learn things.

I haven’t changed my approach much since I wrote that original post, but since then I’ve had a lot more opportunities to talk about process with some friends at the beginning of their writing careers. This is a slightly different experience to teaching classes, and I’ve found it changed the kind of advice I offered about ideas. So when Nathan Russel suggested where/how to find ideas to write about? as a dancing monkey topic, I figured it was as good an opportunity to build on my original post.

Here’s what you need to know about ideas: they don’t actually mean shit in the writing process.

Don’t get me a wrong, there are moments when story ideas do descend upon you like a bolt of lightning, forcing you to hit the keyboard and belt out a story. This is generally a shiny, happy moment and it’s generally good for all of about an hour of work before you hit the first major plot point of your story and have to actually think about shit.

The thing is, ideas aren’t actually hard to come up with all the time. People have them all the time. They just get used to ignoring them, or they don’t see the ways an idea can be developed into a story, so the idea goes by the wayside. I generally assume that the question being asked, when people ask where ideas come from, is either how do I develop an idea or how do I come up with the perfect story idea?

The latter question is easy to answer: you don’t. You just come up with ordinary, grubby, half-formed, everyday ideas and work like a sonofabitch to turn them into a story. Occasionally you get lucky and hit on an idea that speaks directly to the cultural zeitgeist and your story explodes with 50 Shades of Harry Potter in the Twilight Code-like popularity, but most of the time you’re just writing stories. Stop searching for the perfect idea and start writing. Learn how stories work so that when you’re zietgiest-busting idea does come along you’ve got the chops to make it work.

Developing a story is a trickier process, since it’s not easy to sum up in a sound-bite type answer. I mentioned it in my original triangle because it’s important, but over the years I’m coming to think of the triangle metaphor I originally used as something that’s less equilateral and more scalene-like, with knowledge of how a story works as the largest side. After all, once you’ve got that down, you can actually turn some fairly middling ideas into pretty cool stories.

One of my favourite pieces of writing advice ever comes from Samuel Delany, who breaks writing talent down into two parts: the first comes from absorbing a series of complex models regarding the construction of sentences, characters, plots, narrative. These become internalised rather than learnt, a part of the writer. The second part of writing talent comes from the ability to submit to these models, adjusting it to the idea at hand, until finally you’re forced to change it slightly.

The sad truth is there’s very little that’s creative in creativity. The vast majority is submission – submission to the laws of grammar, to the possibilities of rhetoric, to the grammar of narrative, to narrative’s various and possible structurings. (About Writing, p. 121)

This isn’t exactly a popular thing to explain to the crowd who really wants to believe there’s something magical about ideas. They get seriously fucking cranky when you try to point out that writing isn’t a magical playground where muses fire shit into your brainpan and allow you to make millions off the back of inspiration alone, and thus they ignore you and go on believing in the primacy of the idea as the most important thing in writing instead of the least.

Truth is, much of writing is about interrogating an idea, figuring out what model it’s going to fit into. If I start with an idea such as drag races are run with genetically engineered dragons*, it’s not actually a story. In fact, the story it naturally suggests is kind of uninteresting, since the only conflict comes from whether a protagonist will win or lose the race.

And so we go to town, looking for structures I can fit that idea into. Narrative structure suggest there should be internal and external conflict within the primary character, so as I fit characters into the idea, I look for archetype that can be adapted and altered. I pick a name – Jimmy Locke – and I give him James Dean’s look from Rebel Without a Cause, but I look for places I can twist it and ask questions. He’s a smart kid who desperately wants to belong in the street racing culture he’s found. Why? ‘Cause it’s an escape from things he doesn’t want to deal with at home.

What’s he escaping? I start a scene at his home, after a race, start throwing details at the story and let the structure of a scene guide me. My subconscious is more than willing to spit up details once I give it frameworks – Jimmy’s got a sick parent, a home-life he has no control over, and so racing becomes his escape because it offers the illusion of control. I come up with people who oppose him – parents, other racers, friends – and give them internal conflicts as well, looking for ways they can be brought into physical conflict with Jimmy and reflect his own internal conflict back at him…

It’s all patterns, structures, and as Delany suggests, many writers don’t even think about them. They just learn, internalise, and let the structure guide them through the process.

Or they learn, plan, and fit details in where they look useful.

Or they scribble, and keep scribbling, and apply the pattern once they’ve assembled a rough draft. Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, the structure comes into things somewhere along the line. And you learn the structures the same way everyone else does – reading, engaging with narrative, talking to other writers, pulling other people’s stories apart.

Once you’ve got the structure down, ideas ‘cease being difficult. They’re just things that you sort through and discard as necessary, trusting in the process to deliver what you’re really looking for. You can get down to the business of actually writing, and shaking your head at the occasional asshole who says “I’ve got this great idea for a novel – you write it and we’ll split half the money.” Just make sure, when they try your for murder, it truly is a jury of your peers – no other writer is going to blame you for stabbing the guy.

*Where did this idea come from? Confluence and Other People’s Stories. I was watching Fast and the Furious, remembered reading about Vin Diesel being a D&D fan, and found myself thinking what this film really needs is dragons. And lo, there was an idea, and I started writing it.

Stories told, Stories Consumed, and a link to Cats Sleeping

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , ,

There was no story unlocked when I walked across the Kurilpa bridge this morning, which is a matter of some sorrow to me. I was counting on that moment today, since I’m looking askance at the second chapter of Claw and trying to figure out what’s going to go in there. I know some things, yes: corpses, cheerfully gloomy coroners, a modicum of angst. It’s just the details that go around that I’m struggling with at the moment, writing a paragraph or two before thinking, no, that’s not right, and going back to the well for a new idea. I’m sure there’s something coming, sooner or later, but it isn’t quite there yet. Everything that’s been written thus far is weighed down by the burden of history, calling back to Horn and Bleed, and the thing that made me happy about the draft of chapter one is how much less of that it does than the last time I tried to write this story.

I’m not sure blogging will help solve the problem, but I can’t see how it’ll hurt, either.

Apropos of nothing, I’m going to take this opportunity to direct your attention towards the new ABC comedy, Outland (now avialable on iview).

There are very few television programs that actually make me wish I still owned a television that actually got TV reception these days, and short of someone reviving The West Wing, The Gilmore Girls, or the WWE being broadcast on free to air TV, I rather doubt there’s going to be one that’ll lure be back into the fold. I’ve been one of those curmudgeonly TV-less types for a few years now, absorbing my sequentially broadcast entertainment in one fell swoop courtesy of DVD boxed sets to the point where I now prefer it.

But Outland…well, Outland comes damn close to luring me back, and probably would have if the ABC hadn’t chosen to add it to their online viewer so fast. It’s a very sweet, geekishly joyful series about a Queer group of SF fans. It’s not a perfect show, not by a long shot, but it’s funny and there’s potential there and its a goddamn TV show portraying geek culture (and queer geeks) without being horribly mean about it.

In a world where the nearest analogue to this show is the highly problematic Big Bang Theory, that’s something to be celebrated and encouraged. And should Outland not float your boat, then I’ll just link to this blog full of the 25 most awkward feline sleeping positions and encourage you to make gooey noises at the litany of cute kitties so you won’t hear me talking about how wrong and lacking in taste you are.