Hearts & Guns 2
Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 6:23 amI’m still tidying stories up. Probably going to be doing this for the rest of the year, slowcoach that I am. I’ve put The Art of Dying and The Love of Beauty in the too-hard basket for the nonce, and have been working on Alsiso and We the Enclosed. I’ve found things I want to change on every page of both of them, but they’re not big things, although I rewrote Alsiso more than I thought I was going to. Anyway, actually making some progress on these.
Gillian and I have passed the story for Baggage (add Jack Dann to the contributor’s list at that link) back and forth a couple of times, and it’s now officially almost ready, except for one short but important paragraph that might not be working. I’m going to see whether I can get a couple of other readers to have a look at it and tell me whether they think it’s saying what I’m trying to make it say. The trouble is that I’m trying to say something quite complicated, which would usually be stated in academic language informed by feminism, from the POV of a 14 year old in the 1950s. The character doesn’t have the mental tools to understand, let alone articulate, the entirety of what she’s feeling.
I need to find a way for the character’s thought to seem believable in context, and also to mean what I want it to mean, even though it won’t be able to outright say what it means, I don’t think. The most sophisticated and eloquent record of human experience to which this character has access would be the King James Bible, and at the moment I’ve got her thoughts referring to a New Testament metaphor, as if she’s latched onto the Bible as the best available teacher and psychoanalytic tool. I don’t know if I can do it any better, to be honest. I thought the paragraph was working, but I was brought up C of E, and Gillian’s Jewish, and maybe I’m not communicating past the Christian (or even just the C of E) sphere — which will matter, because this book will be published in Australia, and a lot of Australians are brought up with no religion except football.
Aaaaand Book#2 continues to get written. I do wish I didn’t find writing to be quite so much like wading through half-set concrete. I’d love to be faster. The other night I went to a meditation class, in the name of starting out on trying to improve my concentration and mental alertness. The meditation itself — some sort of Tibetan vipassana, apparently — was incredibly tedious (as meditation is wont to be!), but the next day I woke up with a clear and quite energetic brain. However, I had also given in to a craving for red meat on the day I went to the class, so I don’t know whether my abnormally zinging mind was due to the vipassana or the cottage pie. I’ll have to go to the class a few more times under controlled conditions (or eat cottage pie a few more times under controlled conditions…)
At the end of the session we had to recite a Buddhist prayer in English, which kind of sucked. When prayers were required in school assemblies I used to mumble blasphemies or the lyrics of Toucha Toucha Toucha Touch Me, but you can’t really do that in a room with only 15 people. It’s much better when foreign prayers stay in the foreign language and you have no idea what sort of thing you’re saying. Thing is, I’m decisively not a Buddhist. If there’s a cycle of reincarnation, I’m not praying for my own or anyone else’s release from it. As far as I’m concerned, we can all stay here and learn to live with grace and flair within the limitations of mortality and the separation of minds, or until we work out how to ease or break those limitations. I think it’s far too early in the human story to be thinking about packing it all in. Sure, life is a bad job for millions of people. But it doesn’t have to be. There’ll always be suffering, but there could be a lot less if we’d get our act together. So I guess if I were going to pray for anything, it would be that — that we become sufficiently compassionate and liberated from ignorance that human life in general gets better. But anyhow, if the meditation really does work, I guess I can put up with a certain amount of religious garnish. Being made to pray just brings out the shirty teenager in me, lol.
EDIT: The moment a bubble bursts. Beautiful image.
July 25th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Kirsten,
When I first heard about your writing process, I was amazed you managed to publish anything!
The results are most definitely worth it.
I’ve personally struggled with getting in the groove. Once I’m there, I write like a fiend, but it can take a while to write anything comprehensible or sensible.
I know different author’s writing techniques often don’t work for others, but I have picked up a few things that help.
* I know that being without the Internet helps me get stuff done when I’m in a crunch. I go to coffee shops with my little 13 inch Macbook Pro and just get on with it.
* Deadlines are good for me. Many arbitrary deadlines are not – they can just whoosh by. Having a deadline even two days away is not that good for me. I don’t know why this is.
* For some reason, I find I write faster (and more) with a laptop keyboard than a normal keyboard. I bought a new Apple Aluminum external keyboard as it has the same clunky feel as a laptop keyboard. I always felt that crutches like blaming tools was a poor excuse for non-performance, but…
* I find certain things help me get into a flow. I try to avoid the things that aren’t flow inducing, such as phone calls, IM’s, meetings, e-mail and so on. Luckily, working from home now, this is a lot easier to achieve.
* I don’t like working in the mornings as I’m in a bit of a waking fugue for a few hours. I find afternoons better, but I have to fight back sleepy feelings as well as the inertia of not doing anything truly productive in the first few hours of the day. This is a bit career limiting as a technical writer, and even more so as a fiction author as I have to get my paid work done before I write for pleasure, thus eliminating any chance for out of hours fiction writing. I know many authors like early mornings, but I dislike them even more than mornings or afternoons.
* I don’t know about you, but I’m almost certainly the world’s best procrastinator. That doesn’t mean I’m lazy, just that there’s a lot of other things that I could be doing, and my fiction writing is often put off for months at a time. I wish I had a solution for this.
* I find outlining really helps me understand where I am going. Sometimes I can’t be buggered writing that bullet point or fleshing out that line of thinking right now, but does help me with endless re-writes as I know I’ve committed a reasonable path to completion that I shouldn’t have to re-visit that often. I rarely chuck away work. I can’t recall the last time I simply shelved more than 250 words.
* I tend not to get bothered with the small finicky details and thus rarely re-write a sentence let alone a page more than once, and rarely if ever re-read more than twice.
These last two may be why you’re a published award winning author, and I’m not.
Hope this helps. Or even gives you a laugh.
thanks,
Andrew
July 26th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Andrew – you’re a dark horse! I knew you write non fic, but didn’t know that you wrote fic as well. Yeah, I’m amazed that I manage to publish anything too.
When I was working regular business hours I used to write at night, into the small hours, but I don’t seem able to do that anymore. I like to write in the mornings, but I need to be up for a couple of hours first, otherwise I feel like I’ve got a night clerk in my head doing the work. The night clerk is often quite competent, but it’s still a weird, bleary feeling.
Coffee lounges here are so noisy (loud piped music is everywhere)
that there’s no point me trying to write in them, but there’s a quiet hotel lobby I can go to if I really have to get away from distractions. Still, if I have a deadline, I can generally keep to the work I’m meant to be doing. If I have a deadline and I’m getting well paid, I can really concentrate, lol. When I don’t have a deadline, I slack off more; but cool ideas sometimes come in the slacking time. Thus I assure myself that slacking is justified.
I really suck at coming up with plot, so I rarely outline extensively. Or rather, I can come up with simple little plots for very short fiction, but I’m very rarely able to do more than a sketchy outline of longer pieces. I’m attempting to outline a longer piece right now, actually, as I think this collection could do with just a leeeetle more in the solidly plotted department…
I ignore my phone when I’m writing. I do check email, because it reassures me that I’m connected to the rest of the world. Most of my email is social, and I think it gives me little boosts throughout the day.
I’ve got a laptop, but I work with it on an ergonomic desk, with a separate keyboard on the tray. The extra keyboard is short — about laptop size — since the full-length ones force me to stretch my right arm out too much to use the mouse, and my muscles get stiff. Along with shortness, I need light key action, and the quieter the better. (This one could be quieter; I just haven’t found the perfect keyboard.) But I really like writing with pen and paper. If I need ideas to flow, pen and paper is much more likely to get results.
Procrastination, my old friend… When I’m passionate about something I don’t procrastinate. But when I’m not so passionate, I have that trouble too, and honestly, I don’t know what the solution is. (If I did, I’d have marketed it and would be living in my own palace in Luxembourg right now.) Like you say, a deadline is helpful.
Re rewriting – I don’t think my stuff would be publishable if I didn’t rewrite it. I also have a different attitude towards paid and unpaid work (in which I include short stories written on spec). When payment is guaranteed, I just do the job to the standard the boss wants. The money’s a good enough reward. But when I’m writing without that guarantee, the reward is in the quality of the work, so I tend to grind through quite a lot of rewrites in order to get some satisfaction at the end.
I got a wry grin out of your comment, because it seems like just about everyone who writes has some kind of trouble with writing. I’ve never seen artists having this sort of discussion. Got pencil, got paper, got a free hand, ok! Obviously, visual art can be extremely effortful, but it doesn’t have to be. You can scribble great stuff in two minutes with a crayon. But what’s the written equivalent of the supple two-minute sketch? A haiku, maybe; but I don’t know how many people write great haiku in two minutes.
So what is it about writing that satisfies you? It’s a weird pastime; one wants to do it, yet one doesn’t; it supplies an exciting sort of tedium, or a tedious sort of excitement…
July 26th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
I’m not sure “satisfies” is the right term for “what is it about writing that satisfies you”. I think I have to write. I just get antsy when I am not writing or thinking about writing.
I started writing fiction back in the mid 1990’s to improve my technical writing. English is a beautiful expressive language that is mangled by most technical types. Technical reports still need a start, middle and end. Without structure, the sort of reports I produce could easily be totally incomprehensible.
I just wish I had a more reliable muse. I’d spend more time writing fiction. Sometimes I get a flash of inspiration for a story, and start fleshing it out, and then I shelve it when the procrastination takes over. I find it hard to recover the enthusiasm for that story idea if I leave it too long.
I read the writer’s markets from time to time, and I know the two major markets are sci-fi / fantasy and romantic fiction. I don’t have the romance within me for the latter, and the former is the subject of more than a few false starts. I’d have to say most of my outlines for stories are contemporary fiction. I find setting up the protagonist’s background, the milieu and making characters believable are the hardest things for me. Exposition is a nightmare – it reads like a 12 year old’s essay assignment. Plot comes easily and is usually the thing that gets me to start Word in outline mode.
If I had even one completed short story, I’d share it as I know the first few things you write (and complete) are turds that need polishing. I’ve got a lot of turtle heads waiting for a polish on my hard drive
I felt very relieved when I finished both the OWASP Developer Guide and the OWASP Top 10 2007. I’d hate to think my only feeling about a completed work was “relief”. It’s certainly not the driver that makes me want to write.
I’m sure some folks can knock haikus out in 2 minutes, but I struggled with this doggrel I wrote for a car forum haiku thread in 2006 for hours:
Antarctic gales:
blow through my heart
furry friends remain
I don’t know if it sucks or not, but I think I managed the form at least.
Andrew
July 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
A lot of Zen Buddhist teachers (I don’t know if it’s a minority or a majority) teach that the whole Wheel of Samsara thing and reincarnation are metaphors – that we’re actually recreating the illusion of self every moment (reincarnation) and by doing so we’re stuck in Samsara. “Nirvana” is when we let go of that illusion of self. Likewise most prayer is praying to ease the suffering of all beings (all of which stems from egoistic desire and rejection, which are symptoms arising from the illusion of self).
(Not an expert, anyone reading should take with a grain of salt)
July 28th, 2009 at 8:57 am
You might find this interesting.
The first topic alone is the cause for half of my writerly waffling. Now I never check email first if I intend to write that day because hahaha it won’t happen. :-/
July 28th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
@ Kirby: Painfully hilarious. (Painful because it’s so true… Sob.)
July 29th, 2009 at 2:20 am
@Laurie: I knoooooow and I checked email before I could stop myself today!
I need to be able to shut down my personal bios default.
Check email? Y(yes)N(no)?
Y
Checksum invalid!
July 30th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Andrew – writing is indeed a pernicious addiction. In my case I know that there are things I want to communicate, which are difficult to communicate, and for some reason I want not just to communicate them but to turn them into art. Muses can be like starter motors, I think. I was very lucky to have, for a long time, a muse who did a heavy share of the work. But I think they ultimately want us to learn to be like they are; they want us to build our creative muscles, and that means lifting…
I like the haiku. It has heart and humour. Don’t think it needs the colon in the first line.
Laurie – the thing about reincarnation as a metaphor sounds terribly plausible. And somehow terribly depressing. I like to think that there’s a *chance* of coming back for real. The illusion of self is a thorny one for me. I think you can go that route, but I think you can go another where you accept the illusion and solidify it, accept the suffering that goes with having an individual self, but work to make that self as awesome as it can be; and I don’t think the human race has begun to unpack the possibilities of the latter option. (I’m sure I’ve blathered about this before, orz.)
Kirby – Oh…dear… I think I do all of those? D: Except that I kind of disagree about the email. Email is just human communication, and we know that people in ye olde days, writers included, used to spend half the morning doing their correspondence. Interesting conversation and a reminder that you have friends can be just the thing to sharpen you up for a bit of the old creative effort. (Aren’t my arguments just shiny? *u*)