[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13, Day 14]
Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 34 minutes.
The second week of the challenge has ended. I have now worked on writing fiction every day for the last two weeks – the longest writing streak of my life, for sure. So if nothing else comes of this challenge, I have at least accomplished that.
Here’s where things stand:Read More »
[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13]
Yesterday I wrote for 4 hours and 4 minutes.
I’ve run into an interesting hiccup with this 30 Day Writing Challenge: I’m discovering that I am much more interested in the actual writing (writing my fictional stories based on these prompts – I’m on #4 now, by the way) than I am in doing these update blog posts.
Don’t get me wrong, I do find satisfaction in writing up the occasional book review (list here) or analysis piece – but I find that I am dragging my feet when I wake up in the morning because I’m secretly dreading the roughly one hour that I spend on these posts. I feel like there is some pressure to make them good – whatever that means – because I don’t want to waste your time, Dear Reader.
And the whole point of this challenge being to see whether I can bring myself to put in “full time” hours writing, this is a rather relevant aversion. Hmm, something to think about…
The Darn Ecologist
[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12]
Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 59 minutes.
I recently finished reading Slapstick, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut (see my reading list here), and I was trying to figure out the way he puts together his narratives. He has a very distinctive style – if you’ve read any Vonnegut, you’ll know what I mean. Here’s my theory: nested narratives.
[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11]
Yesterday I wrote for 4 hours and 26 minutes.
Some career advice that I’ve heard repeatedly goes something like this: Either stay with your current employer/industry and develop new skills; OR, Keep your developed skill set and apply it with a new employer/in a new industry.
Let’s see how the same idea might look with respect to writing and novelty, swapping employer/industry for the “topic” and skills for “writing technique”. [Note: When I use the world “novel” in this post, I’m not talking about a book.]
1. If you’re going to write a story with a conventional topic using conventional techniques, it had better be extraordinarily well-executed. Because what else is going to help it stand out? Why else would a reader chose your story over many others?
2 and 3. These combinations are similar to the career advice. I think these approaches are appealing because people like to be entertained, but they don’t actually like too much creativity (e.g. teachers say they like creative students, but in reality don’t). And it works similarly for both reader and writer: one foot on solid ground to feel comfortable and the other dangling over the ledge to feel excitement.
4. The challenge here is to keep sight of land. You might find your story about the ancestry of a Nebraskan grasshopper told in the second person to be groundbreaking, and maybe it is, but it has to be deeply relatable and relevant to the reader – otherwise why would they try so hard to understand it (and it will take a lot of mental effort). The wilder things get, the more attention should be paid to relatability and relevance to the reader.
I don’t think that any of these 4 quadrants should be “off limits”, although commercial success is probably dominated by 1 (extremely well done at minimum) and 2 (gene stories with some interesting twist or quirk, competently executed at minimum).
Write on!
The Darn Ecologist
[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9, Day 10]
Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 56 minutes.
If you’ve read more than a couple good books on writing (unfortunately, and counter to their own raison d’être, there are bad books on writing), then you probably already know most of the core essentials that you’ll ever need to know. Oh sure, there are special techniques for plotting or characterization…whatever. These are individual functions in your programming toolbox (explanation), and you’ll probably eventually develop and use your own customized functions anyway. You could spend hours reading about these special techniques, and maybe they are helpful in your writing, and maybe they are just procrastination under the guise of learning craft. Really, once you are halfway up the learning curve, the only thing left is elbow grease.
Which leads the modern writer into a weird, introspective hole that is equal parts inspiring and pathetic. To wit:
I am finding that turning off the Internet during the day is working for boosting my writing concentration and productivity. But then again, that isn’t much of a surprise is it? Of course it would. The revelation isn’t that it would work, but that I can do it. Which leads to this kind of mental dialogue:
Me: You did it! You focused on the work at hand without giving into distractions!
Also Me: Wait a minute. All you did was turn off the Internet (or insert your modern tech vice instead) – a luxury than many people don’t have at all – for a few hours. And you want a cookie for that?
Me: But it was hard.
Also Me: No, it wasn’t.
I sympathize with Me, but Also Me is right. Also Me is the one who gets things done – things that Future Me will appreciate. Here’s hoping that your Also Me wins today.
The Darn Ecologist
[Previously: Week 1 Review, Day 9]
Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 34 minutes.
When an idea keeps showing up in a number of different disciplines, you know there’s something to it. There’s an idea central to the arts that’s also central to the sciences and to nature generally, a process that underlies them all – a “master” process.
Here it is: iterative revision.
[Previously: Week 1 Review]
Yesterday I wrote for 4 hours and 24 minutes. A new record for this challenge!
Reading and writing both seem to revolve around altered mental states. With respect to reading, John Gardner in The Art of Fiction refers to this state as the “vivid and continuous fictional dream”:
If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page, but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on – dream on – not passively but actively, worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in characters’ successes, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things – sights, sounds, smells – as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as through they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge.
The best reading is when we slip into this spell quickly and have difficulty leaving it: we lose track of time while in the book, and we keep daydreaming in its world for a while after we’ve stopped reading.
At the end of the day, all the elements of good writing (grammar, punctuation, plot, theme, characterization, etc.) are in service to that reader’s dream. It isn’t bad, per se, to break the “rules” for any of these elements; it’s that breaking the rules often interrupts the reader from the dream – at that is the sin. The spell has been broken, they’ve been pulled out of the story, and are now just looking at the writer’s words.
But writers seem to have their own ideal state. From what I can tell, it’s a state of seamless switching between the dream state of the reader and flow state of the builder: both passenger and conductor at the same time. Stephen King calls writing “self-hypnosis”, and it brings to light why so many professional writers have strict and stereotyped writing routines: these are cues and rituals which help prime their minds to enter the writing state.
Which brings to mind the second, personal craft of writing: learning how to avoid breaking your own spell when you sit down to write, so that you can get in and stay in “the zone” easier and longer. This week I am turning off the Internet during the afternoon afternoon hours when I normally write to see if that helps.
[Random But Related Tip: I am highly distracted by environmental sounds, and I have found that wearing noise reduction safety ear muffs (e.g. the kind that people use at shooting ranges) to be great for minimizing this distraction. They are cheap too.]
The Darn Ecologist
[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6]
Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 8 minutes.
I’m going to write about bullshit today, and apologies ahead of time to those who are sensitive to base language, but I’m actually intending a very specific usage of the term. In On Bullshit, the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt identifies different groups of people relative to their orientation to the truth when communicating with others. Both honest and dishonest people care about the truth – they are just oriented on opposite sides of it. Bullshitters, however, don’t care if what they say is true or not – they only care if what they are saying is persuasive to their audience. They’ll say whatever they need to (might be true, might not) if it gets them the desired outcome.
Many people other than con men and hucksters try to get away with bullshit. Friends, family – ourselves if we are being honest (wink) – we’ve all tried to convince people of something, whether a big deal or something trivial, regardless of the truth. But because we all hate being bullshitted by someone else (it feels like such a violation of trust!), human beings have evolved a pretty finely tuned sense of when someone is bullshitting us.
Why am I bringing all of this up? Because writing is communicating, so writers need to seriously consider bullshit. Because generally, writers want their stories to “ring true” with audiences. Because convenient plot devices that wrap up the story nicely but don’t fit with the characters or reality you’ve written are bullshit. Because forcing a character to make decisions that go against the characterization you’ve given them just to arrive at some event you want to write about is bullshit.
And readers are better at spotting this bullshit than you think (after all, you’re good at it, aren’t you?), and they generally don’t like it. Be careful how you write, because you might be undermining your own goals of connecting meaningfully with the reader.
Or, if you’re going to bullshit anyway, get really good at it.
The Darn Ecologist
[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5]
Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 20 minutes.
There’s no shortage of books on “the craft of writing”. Today I’d like to take a position that often doesn’t show up in these books: It’s not the craft of writing, it’s the crafts of writing. Because as far as I can tell, there are two distinct skill sets (at least, maybe more!) that every aspiring writer must develop to reach full potential, and they have an interesting relationship to each other.
Darn Ecology 