Category: Writing

My mother is a wonderful artist. She paints in acryllics and oils and I think she is just brilliantly talented. Over the years she’s produced many, many beautiful things. She’s sold a lot of her work, but she’s never really broken out and made her painting more than a hobby. She’s never taken her art to the next level.

There are a lot of reasons for that, the primary one being that she really didn’t WANT her painting to be more than a hobby. That’s absolutely fine with me. If she’s happy, I’m happy.

But as I try to take my writing to the next step, I’m trying to figure out what really made the difference. What made my mother a comfortable hobbyist and not someone striving for more? If she wanted to take her painting to the next level, what changes in habits and attitudes would she need to have made?

One big thing I’ve noticed is consistency. My mother never paints unless she feels like it. She can go weeks, months, or even years without lifting a paintbrush. She might produce other artistic-type things during those dry spells, but she’s not producing paintings. She’s not really practicing her art.

And because she never paints unless she feels like painting, she’s never really learned how to produce regardless of her feelings or her life circumstances.

I think that’s fine for a hobbyist. What’s the point of a hobby if you aren’t in the mood for it? But it seems to me that if you want to take your hobby to the next level then you need to do it whether you’re in the mood or not.

In the same way that you go to work whether you feel like it or not, you need to practice your art – whatever that art may be – whether you feel like it or not. If you don’t go to work because you don’t feel like it, you eventually lose your job. If you don’t practice your art because you don’t feel like it, you eventually lose your art. And every time you lose it, every time you step out of the stream of consistent practice, it takes longer to get the juices flowing again.

Believe me. I know.

So, I’ve decided that I will touch my writing every day, whether I feel like it or not. I set a ridiculously low word-count goal for myself because the important thing at this point is not volume but consistency. I’ve been practicing this for the last two months. No matter how I feel, no matter what kind of day I’ve had, no matter what I’m worried about, I touch my writing.

I’ve been finding that it’s working. Most days I write far more than my ridiculously low word count goal. Touching the WIP every day has kept it in the forefront of my mind and its kept the juices flowing. I highly recommend it.

Besides, if you can be consistent over the holidays, I figure you’re golden. 😀

 

The original title of this post was “It Should Be Fun”. I was planning on talking about how writing needs to be enjoyable. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wasn’t quite what I believe.

It’s not that writing shouldn’t be fun. It’s that “fun” is too weak a word for what writing is. And writing is not always “fun” in the “it’s party time” sense. I don’t think it should be.

Writing should be a passion. The passion for telling a story is what drives you back to your computer or notepad day after day, even when you’ve hit a roadblock. Even when you just want to play video games.  The passion makes you despair at what you’ve written, and makes you strive to be better.  The passion is what hooks you and keeps you at it until you are pummeled into submission.

Writing should be intense. I don’t care what you’re writing, whether it be a children’s book, a romantic comedy, a thriller, or the next War and Peace, writing is an intense experience. Something about the act of creating a story will bring forward emotions and thoughts you might not wish to face. You are the god or goddess of your writing universe and that, my friends, is an intense and often wrenching experience.

Writing should be important. Writing should be taken seriously. What you write might not be serious, but the act of creation is serious. This is a gift that you are giving to yourself and to the other people who will read what you’ve written. It should have importance in your life because it is miraculous. If done correctly, other people will see what you see, hear what you hear, feel what you feel. Being a writer, creation of any kind, is an awesome privilege.

Writing should be gratifying. There is such gratification in watching something you’ve created come to life in your hands. There’s nothing like coming up on a roadblock in your story and finding your way around it. There’s absolutely nothing like looking back at your story and thinking “I wrote that. That world did not exist, but now it does. That story was not told, but now it is.”  When you write, you take things you’ve observed and heard and internalize them, then mold them into something else like a kid in a mud puddle.

And, finally….

Writing should be fun.

Sometimes you run across exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.

Exhibit A – Chuck Wendig over at the terribleminds blog put up this terrific post  last Wednesday about doubt and writing and finishing what you start.  Please take a moment and go read it.  (By the way, if you’ve never read this blog before,  potty mouth language is used with abandon.  If this offends you, feel free to substitute the word “flock” or “freak” for the other “f” word.  But you should still read it. 😀 )

This post pinpointed EXACTLY the way I’ve been feeling.  I’m at a point in my work in progress where I feel like it’s a piece of pretentious crap. I’m at the point in my “career” where it seems like a joke. I’m stuck in the mud, mired in doubt.  The voices I’m hearing in my head are the ones you hear whenever you try to take a step forward, when you, an ordinary muggle, make a break for the fences.  Doubt, doubt, doubtedy doubt. Bad, bad, smack-self-in-face doubt.

So Mr. Wendig’s post struck a chord, as his posts so often do.  In it, he’s mostly talking about NaNoWriMo, but his advice works even if you, like me, are merely trying to slog through your next creative endeavor. Just the acknowledgment that other people feel the way I do, helped. Just the direction to throw off the expectations of myself, other people, and society at large, helped.  I stopped, took a deep breath, and said “yes, I can do this.  I can finish this. I can finish what I started”

Or as the penmonkey drill sergeant says:

“You can do this.
You will do this.
This is who you are and what you want.
Don’t stop.
Don’t blink.
Keep writing until the writing is done.
The end.”

Sir, yes sir! And thank you, sir!

No. Really.

 

Sometimes I get hung up in the minutia of day-to-day living. The work I do at my day job. Whether I’m writing. Whether I’m not writing. Whether I’m working towards my goals. Whether I’m not working towards my goals. Whether I just want to say I have goals, but I don’t really want to work towards them. Details.

But every once in a while, life or God or the universe or whatever you want to call it, slaps you upside the head so you’ll pay attention. That’s when you get down to the basics.

So, last week when I was driving home in a blizzard-like conditions on untreated roads because I had to deliver groceries to my elderly mother, I was not thinking about my goals.

While I listened to the tree branches popping and breaking all around my house, when I looked at the 60-70 foot cedars and spruces bowing under the weight of the snow, when I realized that the 90 foot oak across the street was bent almost double, I was not thinking about bad reviews or my Goodreads rating.

When the power went out and it was cold and dark and quiet, except for the wind and the breaking branches, I was looking for light anywhere, not worrying about NANORIMO. When I realized that my mother’s electricity was off as well, and her cable digital phone was dead, and the only thing she had for communication was a cell phone she does not diligently charge, I was not thinking about my author brand or the fact that I didn’t have an internet connection.

When I was trying to think of how I could help my mother stay warm and what I could take her to eat, when I was wondering what I would eat myself, when I was wondering if we’d both have to abandon our houses and I’d have to leave my animals and find someplace with a little warmth, I was not worried about the fact that I’m still working on my next book.

Stephen King said in his book ON WRITING that “art does not support life, life supports art”, or something to that effect. And I think he’s right. Because when it came right down to it, life won. The bare essentials of survival won. Heat, shelter, food, and family won. Last week, life pushed the reset button for a lot of people here in southeastern Pennsylvania, and everything else became meaningless.

But now the power is on again. Now that there is warmth and food again. Now my family is safe again.

Writing is not an essential of life. Warmth and food and shelter and family and friends and love are essentials of life. But I’ve realized that for me, writing is part of the magic of life. It is something I enjoy, something that I love.

And now that the reset button has been pushed, I can once again see how incredibly fortunate I am to live a day-to-day life where I have the opportunity to do it.

It’s all about perspective.

So let’s say that you’ve decided to be a writer. Great! Go you! But how do you figure out what KIND of writing you want to do?

By the way, I’m talking about writing here because that’s my experience. But I think this same issue crops up in all creative endeavors. How do you decide whether you want to study French cuisine or Italian? To paint landscapes or abstract murals? To photograph puppies or homeless people? What do you actually WANT to do?

If you want to be a writer, there are a lot of ways you can go. You can write fiction or non-fiction, literary or genre, essay or poetry. There are a lot of forks you can take on the writerly road. Sometimes the problem is not finding characters or a plot or outlining. Sometimes the problem is simply figuring out which fork in the road to take.

First you have to start out with what you like. What do you read? What fires your imagination? When you’re at the Amazon or Barnes and Noble site, where are you browsing? What part of a bookstore do you find yourself spending the most time in? Where do you lose the most time?

Just as a side note – if you don’t read, you’d better think twice about being a writer. More on that in future posts.

For me, the answer to the questions posed above is fiction. I read non-fiction too, but for the most part I’m drawn to storytelling of the fictional persuasion.

Okay, fiction. But that doesn’t narrow it down far enough. There are still a lot of ways you can go. There’s literary fiction. Science fiction. Fantasy. Romance. Mystery.  And those are just the bigger categories.

Again, I look back at what I love to read. And if you’ve read my biography, you know that I love romance. Romance in its various forms is the bulk of what I read. The last literary novel I picked up was Weird Sisters by the delightful Eleanor Brown (and it was well worth it, by the way). I haven’t read straight out (non-romance) science fiction or fantasy in ages. I love mystery, but I find myself disappointed if the detective doesn’t end up with a happy ever after at the end.

Okay, romance. But wait, the romance category itself is pretty broad. And even though I read all romance, there are parts of it I love more than others. I absolutely LOVE to read romantic suspense, contemporary romance and paranormal romance. I read historicals, but I don’t feel passionate (hah!) about them. I read in lots of other more niche categories – science fiction romance, erotic, GLBT, etc – but thus far I haven’t felt compelled to write one of my own.

In other words, when I drill down into my own likes and dislikes, I come up with romantic suspense, contemporary romance, and paranormal romance. That’s where I spend my money and my time. Those categories are where I have the most reading experience. Those are the genres I love and feel passionate about. So those are the genres I should be writing.

And I think that the same thing can be applied to any creative endeavor. What is it you really love? Forget about what other people tell you that you should be doing, what do you love? What is your passion? Where do you spend your time and your money? That is what you should concentrate on.

In my humble opinion.  😀