In high school, my best friend
Author Archive
I’ve discovered a new addiction, and it’s delightfully awful.I have a long history of loving awful things. One of my favorite ways to spend time with my best friend in high school was to hang out at her house watching Army of Darkness. A few years ago, I had the time of my life spending a weekend sprawled out on my bed, reading a truly terrible romance novel and giggling about it to my college roommate over IM.I think I’ve lost a lot of my patience for bad things lately, though. I’m not sure if it’s because of the critical eye I’ve been developing as I grow as a writer, or if it’s because now that I work full time, there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to spend on the quality things I enjoy, much less the awful ones.But this past weekend, I discovered the BBC show Sanctuary, and somehow managed to stick with it past my initial “Oh my god, this is terrible writing” reaction. The next thing I knew, I’d finished the first season and was frantically waiting for the second to finishing downloading from iTunes.It is so insanely cracky, and the best part is that it’s completely deadpan about it. It’s like, “This woman is a hundred and fifty seven years old! Because she injected herself with a serum distilled from vampire blood! Also, back in the day, she was in love with the guy who was REALLY Jack the Ripper. And conceived his baby! But she wasn’t ready to have a kid so she froze the embryo until ‘the time was right’. Oh, also, Jack The Ripper can teleport. And he’s still alive today, too. Oh, and they were both BFFs with Nicola Tesla! Who is really a vampire. And is trying to recreate the race and take over the world. Also John Watson, who’s really Sherlock Holmes. (He’s alive, too, but only because a bionic exoskeleton is keeping him that way.) Also, she was present at signing of the peace treaty at the end of WWII. And watched the sunrise with the Beatles. (But only one of them.)”When I told my writing buddy about it, she accused me of making that up, and I can’t blame her. But cross my heart and hope to die, I swear I didn’t make up a single word. It’s all there.Is it any wonder I love it? Talk about kitchen sink writing! It’s been a very fun lesson in remembering that sometimes throwing quality to the wind and just having fun with something can be one heck of a ride.Not that I’m taking any writing lessons from this. I’m not about to start taking this as permission to write terrible, over-the-top fiction. I am going to keep watching, though. 
I’ve recently received more than a little flack from writers on Twitter for setting daily word counts for myself, which mystifies me more than I can say. When I observed that it’s difficult to count your progress in daily words when you’re editing instead of writing new material, someone commented, “It’s easy if you don’t track progress at all!”
I’ve got many years of writing experience under my belt and I’m pretty comfortable with my process, so I didn’t have any problem answering him, “If I did that, then I wouldn’t make any progress at all,” and continuing on with my day. But if I’d received that sort of advice as a new writer, unsure of myself and what I was doing? Just the idea makes me shudder.
I thrive under the pressure of a deadline. Give me a goal, even an insane one, and I’ll be stepping up to bat trying to figure out a way to accomplish it before you’ve even finished speaking. I once tried to write 50,000 words in a day, just to see if I could. (I made it to 16k and decided I wanted food and sleep more than I wanted to achieve some arbitrary ambition) But without a goal to propel me and keep me typing away?
I web surf. I catch up on my TV shows. I knit. What I don’t do is write. I need that pressure to keep me going, keep me moving forward, keep me choosing to write when there are so many other ways to squander my time that require much less effort.
The prevalence of this attitude that tracking progress, setting goals, and keeping yourself accountable is a bad thing has bewildered me since I first encountered it, but I ran into a situation today that I think may be what people fear when they give this advice. Things snowballed on top of one another for me this morning and before I knew it it was almost lunch time and I hadn’t written a word. Every time I thought about writing my chest clenched a little bit tighter and another burst of adrenaline clawed through my system. I was staring at the clock practically hyperventilating in my seat, and every time I started to think about putting words to paper, all that came to mind was, “Oh God, I have to write three thousand words a day for the rest of the month in order to finish this book when I want to. It’s 10am and I haven’t written anything. I will never make it. I’m not going to make it today, and I’m not going to finish this book on time, either. It’s too late. It’ll never happen.”
It’s a truly awful state to be in, and if this is what people are imagining others devolving into when they give the advice not to set goals, I can understand it at least a little. It’s not a productive state of mind, and does far more harm than good. But it’s not a reason to not to set them.
The problem comes, I think, when people get in a mindset where they can’t reevaluate goals. When I realized the state I was getting myself into, I didn’t try to force myself through it. That would have done more harm than good. I took a step back and said. “Okay, you know what? Sanity is more important than word count. I’m giving myself the day off.”
Gnothi Sauton. Know thyself. That’s is the part that’s important. Not the setting or abandoning of goals, but the ability to look at what you’re doing and evaluate whether it works for you or not, instead of stubbornly forcing yourself down the road you think you ought to take, when all it ever does is lead you to a dead end. I know that goal setting is vital to my process the same way I know that phase drafting, which everyone seems to be getting excited about these days, would be lethal to it. Does that mean that every time someone mentions the technique, I suggest that they’d be better off pantsing it?
Of course not. There are as many ways to write a book as there are people writing them, and what works for me may not work for everyone else, or even anyone else. It’s my process — that’s all.
I think a vital part of learning to write is learning what works for you, and what doesn’t, and too the ability to reevaluate when circumstances change. And it’s just as important that we let others do the same. One True Way-isms hurt more people than they help.
I’ve heard it said that the question writers most dread hearing is, “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, not this writer. I could wax rhapsodic for hours about where I find my inspiration, about how I love to take fairly well-known legends like the romance of Eros and Psyche in Greek lore, or more obscure tidbits like the gwrach-y-rhibyn of Wales and twist them on their heads to find something new. That question is an easy one for me.No, the question that I hate to hear, that I absolutely dread, is “What’s your book about?” Arrgh! Bad enough that we writers are expected to condense tens of thousands of words of story into a few pages for our synopses, or a few lines for our blurbs. Now laymen expect us to be able to spout out a pithy one-liner that will adequately convey to them the story that’s in our heads? I don’t know about any of you — but I can’t do it!This morning, I told a coworker that I started writing on a new book this weekend, and this was the first question out of his mouth. Now, for all that I’ve just started, I feel I have a fairly solid grasp of what this story is and what it’s going to be about. But in order to convey to him what’s in my head, I’d have had to sit down with him for an hour. Not exactly an appropriate answer for an early-morning run to the cafeteria.If we’d had the time, I’d have told him that it’s about the choices we make without even knowing it, and how the repurcussions of those decisions can shape the rest of our lives. It’s about learning to love — others, yes, but mostly learning to love ourselves, flaws and all. I’d have told him that it’s heavily based on the lore of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, and other apocrypha, and that it’s influenced by the steampunk genre and the Hero’s Journey structure.If I’d had the time to tell him, and the time to prepare, I could have shared a glimpse of this story that’s growing in my head. Instead, I stammered out, “It’s about fallen angels. Kind of,” and kicked myself for the rest of the morning. Because it is very much about fallen angels — kind of — but that’s not the half of it.What about the other writers out there? Do you dread this question as much as I do? Or is there another question that makes you cringe at the thought of having to answer it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial promise lately. It’s a term I first heard used in regards to the explicitness of sex scenes in romance novels, and why readers sometimes get angry when an author fades the scene to black. The idea is that the tone and frankness an author chooses to use creates an expectation within the reader of what the sex scene will be like, when it finally comes around. It’s when the frankness of the two don’t match up that problems happen, readers get annoyed, and books hit walls.And I think this holds true for more than just sex scenes. I’m currently reading Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, and I was absolutely engrossed at the beginning. I loved the way she was able to make the narration sound lke a fairy tale. In the opening chapters, we learn about the main character, the princess Lissar, her beloved sighthound, Ash, and her somewhat-unusual life in the palace. I loved seeing how Lissar came into her own as she grew to adolescence, how she shrugged off what ws expected of her and followed her passion. I was very thoroughly engrossed, and very much enjoying the woman I was reading about, and looking forward to reading more.And then Lissar suffered a terrible trauma, ran off to the mountains, and forgot pretty much everything. She doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from, or why she left. She doesn’t even remember what farmland is until she happens to see some. A goddess heals her wounds, and in doing so drastically changes her appearance so she will not be recognized. She also gives her magical abilities.If this were the opening of the book, I think it might be another matter, but as it stands, this is just about at the halfway point. All those promises the book made to me when I started are thrown out the window, and I feel like I’m reading about another woman entirely. I’m a little miffed about it. It is not what I was led to expect.The part tht breaks my heart is tht it’s an incredibly well-written book. But it’s not the book I thought I was reding, and I’m having a little trouble moving past that and enjoying it for what it is.I’m not sure what’s to be done about it. I’m not sure what can be done. Should authors stop throwing plot twists and surprises into their books? How boring that would be! Should readers suck it up and deal with it? I’m not sure that’s the right answer, either. There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m sitting here thinking, “This is not the book I signed on for,” and feeling slightly betrayed, and I don’t think that’s a thought any of us want to be going through our readers heads about our books. This isn’t the book that’s had this effect on me, either. I’ve read other books that have caused a similar reaction, that turned away from the course I thought we had set, and left me impatient, irritated, or frustrated.I don’t know that there’s an easy solution for this, from either a reader’s or a writer’s perspective. But I’ll be keeping it in mind, especially as I look at my own work.And I’m going to keep going with Deerskin. Because it is a very well-written book, even if it’s not the one I thought I was reading.