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*)

I need to be able to shut down my personal bios default.

Check email? Y(yes)N(no)?
Y
Checksum invalid!

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. :-/

(Not an expert, anyone reading should take with a grain of salt)

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

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…

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