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Posts Tagged ‘writing advice’

The Sneaky Faces of Doubt

I’ve talked before about how I suffer from depression and how it often affects my writing. It is tough to push away the many negative voices that I think most writers suffer from when you already feel like life sucks and there is no point to anything.  Part of living with chronic depression is learning coping mechanisms and how to pull yourself out of the deeper pits.

While I’m aware that some of my coping mechanisms aren’t the best, I had thought I was getting pretty good at identifying and eliminating the writing doubt voices.  I have three pieces of paper posted above my desk.  The first is a poster of Heinlein’s Rules. The second is a sheet with “It Never Ends” written on it to which I’ve added dates and magazine names for my published stories (I got this idea from Dean Wesley Smith. I’m hoping to fill that sheet front and back someday).  The third piece of paper has the five elements of a blockbuster novel according to Al Zuckerman (which I think are good things to keep in mind while writing anything).  On another wall, I have a super cool poster a friend made me of Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot. I have yet to write a story directly from his formula, but I often glance at it and ask myself some of the questions he poses about whatever I’m working on.   I also have a bunch of smaller pieces of paper with things like “what is the bad guy up to?” and “parade the tag!” and lists of plotting tools (timebombs, crucibles, reversals, revelations etc).  All these things are here to surround me with tools to shove past the writing doubts and get the work done.

In the last couple months, these tools have been failing me. I’ve been failing me.  I got most of the way through a novel through sheer determination and a lot of self-talk. But it wasn’t fun. So I told myself that hey, I have no deadlines. No one is waiting for this book. No one is going to hold me to the writing plan I set out for myself. I can write whatever I want.  Which sounds very freeing.  It should have been.

So I moped sat around and thought about which of my ideas for things would be the most kick-ass fun to write.  And I settled on a series of novellas I’d been turning over in my head for the last year or so.  They are adventure fantasy in the vein of RA Salvatore or Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion books, basically following one group of adventurers as they go around and kick some monster ass, help people, and spit in the face of evil.  With fireballs. And a small pink unicorn.

Sounds fun to me. I decided on my course of action, roughly outlined 15 of these novellas, and on Tuesday got to work.

On Wednesday, I hit a huge mental block. A million negative thoughts and voices flooded my brain. Wasn’t I just writing derivative crap? Shouldn’t I be spending this time working on further books in series I already have started? No one is going to want to read books from the PoV of a mute elf with a bit of a god-complex (to be fair, she did used to be basically a god).  Don’t I know that this sort of fiction would never sell to a publisher? Will never win any awards? This is too fun to write, it must be terrible.

Voices like that.  Wow. Ouch.  As soon as I realized I was avoiding working on the project because of these voices, I paused the Starcraft 2 game I was watching and had a serious conversation with myself.  (Hey, I’m not crazy. We writers do this all the time. Right?)  Where was all this coming from?

Apparently some myths are still stuck in my head and I’m not the freewheeling, commercially-minded mercenary writing machine I like to wish I was.  Some of the senarios in the back of my mind were tied so deeply to things I never consciously think about that once I examined them I laughed.

Like the little scene in my head of being at a con and having someone ask me why I write that DnD knockoff crap. Or why I’m not writing serious novels.

The funny part is, when I stop to think about it, it is always a fellow writer in my fake scene who asks this stuff. I don’t think a reader would or a person who had no idea who I am anyway (ie most random people anywhere).  I was stuck and had stopped working on a project that was the first thing to really thrill me in months because I was worried about hypothetical writer guy in my head.  Yep. Stupid.

I know where a little of that worry comes from. I was privately slammed recently by a fellow writer and the negativity definitely didn’t help my already pretty low esteem. I don’t even know this person well and I have had one IRL conversation with them ever, yet they apparently wormed their way into my subconscious and fed doubts I had thought my mercenary, hack’n’slash-loving intellect had long since defeated.

Thankfully, these doubts are lessened by working through them. I had a serious conversation with myself, identified some of the issues I was having, and talked myself through them.  It’s amazing what looks stupid and trivial once you bring it out into the conscious light.  Especially things like “if it isn’t hard, it isn’t good” which is a dumb myth that gets reinforced a lot with idiot phrases like “no pain, no gain” and that mentality. Pain is bad. Ask anyone who suffers from chronic pain (would you like to trade shoulders with me? Or knees?) how they feel about it? Or people who suffer from emotional pain.  Not a plus. Not a gain.

So I’m adding a couple new pieces of paper to my collection here.  One says “writing should be fun”.  Another says “My path is mine”.  I know that more hidden fears and doubts will show their faces eventually, but now I have a few more little weapons against them.

Follow your writing joy. And kick out anyone who says you should do something else.

Neo-pro Interview: Nathaniel Lee

Who are you?  What’s your genre/history/etc?

Nathan: I’m Nathan, or Nathaniel Lee for my Srs Writer Name.  I write oddball stuff that probably would get stuck in “magical realism” or “slipstream” or whatever the term du jour is.  My standard approach is a basic modern-day setting with Something Different About It, and a dearth of explanation as to how or why, for example, words now cause physical damage to match their emotional damage or a hole in the ground is swallowing all the water in the world.  I think of myself as mostly a fantasy author, if that helps, treading on the borderlands of horror every now and then and rarely dipping into SF.

What’s your Race score?

Nathan: I’ve got 21 stories out right now because that’s all the stories I have in a finished state.  I’m a little behind with my polishing; I’ve got three or four stories waiting for revisions/edits, whereas normally I keep that down to two or fewer.  Duotrope says I’ve submitted somewhere around 140 stories in the past twelve months.  My policy is to juggle them right back out as soon as they hit my inbox with the rejection note.  I’ve got a “Writing” label in Gmail that is a deep purple, so when I look at my e-mail and it starts looking like a bruise, then that’s my To-Do List for the weekend.  Once they’re sent back out, I can archive the rejection letters and move on with my life.

  When did you “get serious” about being a writer?

Nathan: Around about 2008.  I am not making tons of progress, but on the other hand, I was fairly desultory about it for the first year or so, writing only a half-dozen stories or so.  I’ve written 20 stories so far in 2011, which has been much more satisfying.  I joined a support group of sorts where the ostensible goal was to produce 25 stories for the year, or one story approximately every two weeks.  I think I’m the only person left actually trying to achieve that, but it really helped for the early bits.  I cannot emphasize enough how much even the tiniest bit of outside accountability helps boost one’s productivity. The effect is astonishing, even on someone as lazy as I am.

  What are your goals with your writing?

Nathan: Well, it would be nice to be able to support myself with it, but I am fully aware that is a pipe dream.  I would be content as a D-grade celebrity, able to go to tiny local conventions and attend events as a Serious Writer or have the occasional successful signing at a local bookstore.  Be one of the names that gets scooped out of slush at a few decent magazines rather than languishing with the hoi polloi. Even just having a book published that I can go to a bookstore and see on the shelves.  I do not want fame and fortune; very mild success will suffice for me.

I’m frankly skeptical I’ll ever achieve that, mind you, but I’ll keep plugging away.  Next year is Novel Writing Year, where I will force myself to finish at least one Damned Book.  (I have three or four 50K+ half-finished manuscripts lying around.  My ADD and general pessimism keep sapping my will to continue on such long projects.)

Where do you see your career in 5 years?

Nathan: Well, barring some kind of unexpected surge, I might have a book and maybe an agent to go with it by then.  Judging by my progress to date, there will be an awful lot of running without much forward motion on the old treadmill.  I think this video pretty much sums up how I picture my writing career: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMO8Pyi3UpY

Do you have a particular story or idea you are dying to write? Or, if you could write a tie-in to any established universe/franchise, what would it be?

Nathan: Usually if I want to write something, I just do it.  I have a list of story seeds right on my desktop, and I open it up whenever I finish a story to pick the theme for the next one.
I’m not hugely into fanfiction – due to Sturgeon’s Law, mostly – but if I had the chance to work on, say, a novelization of an Avatar: The Last Airbender story/sequel/standalone, that would be a ton of fun.

What are your hobbies outside writing?

Nathan: I am a gigantic nerd.  Like, massive.  I read a lot of spec-fic, naturally, and I also enjoy neuroscience and psychology books or interesting science books in general.  I love roleplaying games – much of my writing skills were honed playing forum-based Vampire and D&D and so on, actually – and I am deeply into board games.  We have an entire walk-in closet that is pretty much full of board games.  I favor abstract strategy games, but I also like word games, war games, and your basic Euro-game with little wooden cubes and no way to burn down your enemy’s huts, alas.

I’m also a total hipster/snob about this stuff.  I’m really insufferable.  Like, I don’t play just D&D or GURPS; that’s so *pedestrian*.  No, the games I really like are weird offbeat indie games, like Don’t Rest Your Head and Nobilis and Mouse Guard.  I’m the guy who will cheerfully sit and chat in-character for hours but gets antsy after twenty minutes of combat.

What’s your writing process like?

Nathan: I call it “gumbo.”  I get an idea, and I jot it down.  Then it goes into the Pot of the Subconscious and simmers with all the other stuff down there.  Periodically, I pull something out and look at it more closely, see if I can see characters, a plot, etc., to go with the original striking image or phrase or thematic idea.  Often, I toss it back in the pot to keep cooking, but sometimes I can tell an idea is “done” and ready to go, at which point I dish it up, add spices, and serve.

To drop the metaphor, I am primarily a “pantser,” but not a pure one. I rarely just start writing without any forethought whatsoever.  I just don’t write any outlines or character sketches in advance; it all builds up in my head, organically, and I leave the details vague.  As I write, I find the specific notes I want to hit flow very smoothly out so long as the basic idea has “simmered” for long enough.  If I find myself hesitating a lot or dithering over whether, say, the protagonist has a beloved father or a lost spouse, I know the idea wasn’t cooked all the way through when I pulled it out.  I usually complete a story in one or two marathon sessions of two to six thousand words.  More rarely, I will work on a story slowly over a week or two, but I find those stories tend to need a lot more editing and refining afterward.

What’s been toughest about your journey so far as a writer?

Nathan: The resounding “meh” with which I have largely been met.  Hatred is fine; apathy is hard to swallow.  Given that I tend to love stories that everyone else also says “Meh” to and to dislike stories that receive widespread acclaim, I have attempted to resign myself to being a niche taste with a relatively limited audience.  Which I’m fine with; I just would like to find my audience already.

How do you keep yourself going?

Nathan: Well, I’m going to be making up stories no matter what; if I weren’t writing for publication, I’d be putting excessive amounts of time into some forum roleplaying game or something.  I figure, I might as well send the stories out and see if I can sell ’em, y’know?  It costs nothing, or almost nothing.  I keep a pessimistic outlook and assume failure is a given; that way, when I get rejection notes, I get the grim satisfaction of being proven right about how crappy my writing is, and when I manage to score a sale, it’s pure frosting.

Any tips or tricks you’ve figured out for improving your writing?

Nathan: Nope.  There’s only one way to expertise, and that’s practice.  Read a lot and write a lot.  That’s all you can do.

And finally, got anything you want to pimp?

Nathan: I maintain a daily writing blog of 100-word stories at www.mirrorshards.org.  It is called Mirrorshards, creatively enough, and it is the closest thing to an Author’s Website I have.  (There’s a link to my bibliography on it and everything.)  I’ve been writing a story a day since November 2008, though last year I dropped it to six days a week.  I do not update regularly enough, but I try to catch up whenever I miss a day or two.  I flatter myself that I have developed a decent level of talent at microfiction at this point.

All the stories there are under a CC license that explicitly allows derivative works so long as the original is credited, so anyone who wants to steal my ideas and write a “real” story with them can freely do so.  Not that anyone but me thinks they are interesting ideas, but still.