Recently in Intention Category

Quite awhile back--so it seems, anyway--I wrote a bit about a year-long workshop, the purpose of which was to produce a novel entire; that is, a polished manuscript ready for shopping around. Long story short: yes, I got in, no, I didn't sign up.

Lynn was very positive about the 30 pages I'd sent, in a genuine way that didn't seem to have anything to do with the fact that I would have been paying her money to go through this workshop (although, of course, it flatters me to believe that). That's something you've got to be careful of: there are lots of editors/publishers/agents and what-have-yous out there who will tell you that you'll get published if you just give them x amount of dollars and take their course or workshop and maybe watch their cat while they're in Tahoe.

But that's not what Lynn was about; she was much more concerned that I get this book out of my head and onto paper in any way I could, whether that involved her particular workshop or not. Complimentary words were spoken about my chops that didn't involve much in the way of rectal smoke.

But in the end, there were financial considerations, and, much more importantly, the sense that the project (and, more likely, its author) isn't a good fit for this particular methodology. Finished in a year? Maybe. But if, in the middle of chapter twenty, I have a smashing idea for a short story, I need to feel free to run off and spend four weeks on that at the expense of chapter twenty-one. It's not so much a matter of not being committed to the novel as it is being committed to whatever strikes me as worth doing at any particular moment, whether that's a book, a short, a poem, or copy for a packet of chips.

Still, it was nice to get such a positive response to those 30 pages. I'm not much for pats on the head: that nebulous, "I really liked the way you use language" sort of criticism that does absolutely nothing to help anyone further their craft and is often, in crit groups or workshops, offered with the hidden expectation of reciprocation. It's fine to hear that something's decent, but I need to know where The Suck is. If something's good it doesn't need to be fixed--at least, not right away--so I don't care much about it.

That said, what strikes me as worth doing in this particular moment apparently isn't much of anything at all, which is another way of saying "uncommitted," and that makes me a lump and a terrible person who needs to be beaten about the head with the hardcover edition of W.T. Johnson's Stop Being a Prat and Write You Slothful Puking Dilettante.

As I've mentioned before, I refuse to turn this venue into a detailed portrait of my psychology. Writing, like all acts of creation, requires a healthy amount of outward-directed energy, and in certain states of mind such energy is damnably hard to come by.

Nonetheless: I've got an unfinished story mewling over there by the wardrobe, a half-made bloody mess, and it's cruel of me to leave it cold and alone and blind in its naked lack.

I've blogged before, see. Had a veritable empire. Branded shirts and coffee mugs, you dig? I sold them. Had one of my 'toons translated into German. Got shown at psychiatric conferences in France, too. Not huge. Not entirely small.

This space is different. It's supposed to be focused. All about the words, see. So if the words aren't flowing in the non-pixellated space offline, then nothing shows up here. Not going to bother turning this into a screaming portrait of the bad wiring in my head.

So forgive the silence, here. When the words pick up offline, the online words will follow with somewhat greater frequency.

Or perhaps the wee spark of the ghost. An unexpected and unwelcome lack of oomph! has overtaken me for the past few weeks, known poetically as malaise and psychiatrically as dysphoria, which, saying it aloud now, is somewhat poetic in its own right.

The reason I purchased a writing desk was so that I could finally have a place dedicated to the purpose, and at the moment it's covered with decidedly un-writing-related flotsam, including the big crinkly plastic Space Bag full of bedding that fell off of the closet shelf one morning and onto my head. I threw it onto the desk to keep the Qat from crinkling it in the middle of the night, which she does because she is evil and the only thing standing between her and world dominance is a lack of opposable thumbs, but its placement there actually indicates my utter distraction from the purpose for which I purchased the desk. The process of burying the desk beneath inappropriate objects--the Serenity DVD, a crescent wrench, nail clippers, two condoms, a waterproof stuff sack, and so on--began when my wireless router died. In order to get online, I had to plug the laptop directly into the modem, which meant sitting on the couch, and the space formerly occupied by the computer quickly became a creativity-sucking astronomical structure, as posited by Hawking.

It's important to keep one's surroundings clear and focused, unless having them chaotic and disheveled actually helps the creative process. For awhile, the desk was an altar, holding nothing but the furniture of writing: computer, books, pens, a thumb-sized nub of Khaibar hashish, a notebook. Stuff happened! Words were slung. Then, a few receipts, casually tossed from emptied pockets. My keys at the end of the day. After my mind had slipped out of gear a bit, the router died. The desk rapidly became just another bit of disorder in a disorderly house, and now here I am after a month with a head full of hot ideas cooled into gray lumps.

But I know how these things work, with me. I feel the embers warming again. I'll clear off the desk and get back to it, and then, O my peeps, I'll tell you all about it, because I'm just fascinating that way.

401 creaking, tortured words, not suitable for much of anything except existing as words that I've managed to write. However: I do feel, somewhere in my diaphragm, a kind of glimmering energy, and I recognize it. It's what I used to feel when I had a project going that I was excited about. It feels like the glow in a puff of tinder that's been sparked by the friction of a bow drill, and I'm huddled around it at the mouth of my cave, blowing gently on it lest I snuff it out. It's windy and overcast outside my hovel, and rain still spatters the earth. Must make fire big. Big fire!

A friend of mine has suggested that I'm being too hard on myself. So, in that spirit, I'll make a little list of what's happening, rather than what's not.

• Anchovies. Flash fiction. Accepted for publication, will appear in August.
• One Sunday in Kentucky. Short story. Submitted. Response pending.
  
• Deflecting Lives in Flight. Short story. Submitted twice, rejected once, response pending.
• Unrelated Incidents. Short story. Submitted. Response pending.
  
• Movement. Short story. Submitted once, rejected. Researching markets. Oh, and it really needs a new title.
  
• Prophet. Short story. Submitted once, rejected. Needs a rewrite.
• The Test. Short story. Submitted once, rejected. On its 6th rewrite.
• You Can't Go Back, Mr. Mountain. Short story. Not submitted. 1st rewrite in progress.
  
• Walk of the Night People. Novel. In progress. 23,000 words
• The Steady State Man. Novel? Fallow. 23,000 words.
  
• Boomtime. Novel? Fallow. 13,000 words.
• Carnival. Novel. Way fallow. 25,000 words.
  

So that's nine active projects, and three fallow projects, which I suppose don't really qualify as "happening." I've got other projects as well, but they're so stale at this point that they don't even qualify as fallow. The three I've listed still have some small place in my heart and mind, and thus have some potential. They represent fallback projects if I decide I need to let Walk of the Night People sit. More than it already has, I mean. It's also interesting to note that of the four longer projects, three of them seem to have stalled out at around the 25,000 word mark. Hmm. I should find out what's supposed to happen in a good tale at that point, and figure out why I can't make it so.

This weekend, I'd like to get Movement (or whatever I decide to call it) out the door, finish the rewrite on You Can't Go Back, Mr. Mountain and, if I can, find a potential home for it as well. Plus write something new, of course.

I guess I am doing some stuff, after all. Still doesn't feel like enough. I read wonderful pieces like Kent Meyers's Rudy Valen's Second Life (Georgia Review, Fall/Winter 2006) and realize how very far I have to go.

See, also:

Catherine Tudor's interview with Kent Meyers.

They can be tough to break, especially if they're negative. By that I mean, if you're in the habit of not doing something, you have to actively engage in the doing of something in order to break the habit. It seems simpler to me, somehow, to stop doing something, but maybe that's just because it's late, and hot out, and I'm all sweaty and freaky.

In my case, I've got this terrible habit of not writing. Which is kind of a problem, if you're a writer. In fact, it makes you less of a writer and more of a sitter, or a reader, or a Jai-Lai player.

In my case, I used to write when the muse struck me with her frying pan. And I came across a wonderful quote about that very thing just yesterday, and failed to jot it down. It was essentially this: writing with the muse is wonderful, but she doesn't come all that often, and you've got to have a plan for the rest of the time.

Well, I haven't got one. Not yet. I'm working on it.

I did submit a short story this morning, which is good, and worked on revising another one this evening, which is also good. On the face of it, that's a productive day, but the bit I haven't told you yet is that both these stories were written quite some time ago. In fact, they only existed as hard copy, which I entered into the computer, revising as I went. So I'm still in the not-writing hotseat.

An interesting thing happened, though. I read through the first story a couple of nights ago, and thought, "Huh. Not bad. Not bad at all." It was, in fact, better than anything I've written recently, in terms of voice and use of language and so on. Smooth, you know? And I thought, "I used to write like that? Jesus, what the hell happened?"

I'll tell you what happened. I stopped writing except when the muse threw a lawn dart at my ass. And she did that less and less frequently. So instead of an ongoing practice, writing became a thing that happened occasionally when all the stars were aligned properly and I bloody well felt like it. It became a passive activity.

Another thing happened, as well. I got rusty. My chops, they are dull. Which is what happens. When you don't. Use. Them. Kind of a well, duh! moment, I know. But it was also galvanizing. Use it or lose it. Put up or shut up. Writers write. All of those things rolled up into a single, tightly-wrapped ball of Oh, shit!

I'm not bemoaning all the wasted years or getting pissed at myself for wasting them, because that's just so far away from productive the mere thought of it causes entire factories' worth of ideas to sit idle and smoke cigarettes.

It's such a simple thing, really. Everybody who's anybody does it, and they'll tell you so.

Write.

Every.

Day.

Idiot.

I was hung up on the novel, at first. Had to write that. Which quickly grew constricting and crazy-making. Then I got hung up on everything else. Gotta write this or that short story. Also crazy-making.

So, I'm just going to start writing any damn thing I please, whether it has a plot, a purpose, or any intelligibility whatsoever. Hell, I used to do that all the time on my old blog; it was full of random fictional bits that read like they were lifted out of some longer work. And some of those bits, despite being fragmentary, are actually not terrible, and may contain the seeds of other, better things.

It's such a simple concept, but then most truths are. You don't exercise, you get flabby. You don't practice with your language of choice, you get stiff and creaky. At this point, I'm not going to go nuts trying to discipline my output. I just need to put out.

So to speak.

It doesn't matter what it's about, or whether it sucks, or whether it's a workday or a weekend, or if I'm tired, in a foul mood, or feeling about as inspired as the scudge under the dumpsters outside my window. Gotta do it. Every day. Like lifting weights. Doing scales on the trumpet. Or any one of a dozen other examples of the routine, standard exercise that is the foundation of any practice and upon which craft is built.

Honestly, sometimes I could just smack myself. People tell me the same damn things--people I trust and love--but until some wacko switch in my brain goes off, I don't listen.

Anyway. Listening now. Firing up the laptop, and doing the literary equivalent of jogging along the beach until it's time to stop.

I've said it on these pages: I'm a good writer. That's not entirely a self-evaluation; other folks have said it, and I think they're probably right.

Am I successful writer? Nope. None of the people who have said that to me have then followed it up with, "...and I'd like to publish your novel/short story/chapbook/whatever." None of them were in a position to do so. There's no denying that the opinions of peers, friends, and family are of a different order than those of people who can publish you. It's the difference between the opinions of laymen and experts.

We live in a culture where the honest proclamation of one's own abilities is often perceived as arrogant. You may, in fact, be thinking that very thing of me, right now. However, that's not where I draw that particular line. For me, arrogance is somewhere around the point where you are so enamored with your own genius that you think no one else could possibly have anything to teach you.

So, yeah. While writing, I do a lot of things instinctively that I see many other people struggling with. But capability does not equal success. Ability and capacity are passive. Success is active. And I've been lazy. Because it's easy for me to knock off a well-constructed sentence, I've shied away from the parts of the craft that are difficult. That's why I've got a file cabinet full of half-finished crap. I have a lot more respect for someone of moderate talent who's in print than I do for someone with technical chops who hasn't grasped that it's not all about their supposedly self-evident brilliance.

It's easy, when you know you're good at something, to fall into the trap of arrogance. I've done it more frequently than I care to admit, and I'm not happy about it. But at the same time, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to deny what I can do and mope around saying that I suck, because I don't. The worst part about the trap is that it's usually hidden, and I don't realize I've fallen into it until after I've said or done something thoughtless which gave the impression that I was convinced of my own vast superiority. I'm embarrassed by these failures. Fortunately, I usually learn something important from them.

Writers are a funny lot. We have to have enough confidence to believe that we might have a chance to succeed against truly daunting odds, or we wouldn't bother. Yet I don't know a single one (myself included) who isn't plagued by self-doubt and insecurity, or who doesn't experience bouts of loathing for his or her own work. My happiest moments are when I return to something that I've written, and can honestly say, "That's OK. Not bad." At the same time, I have never been so convinced of the quality of a piece that I have been angered or crushed by a rejection. I sometimes read about the accusatory letters that rejected writers have fired back to editors, dismissing their intelligence or artistic perception. I can't imagine doing such a thing. If I get a rejection with a comment on it, I'm a happy man. If I get a form rejection, I'm indifferent at best. Tack it to the cork board, and move on.

I've said it before: doubt keeps you sharp. One of the more interesting bits of psychodrama that I've experienced since starting this site is the onset of anxiety. Real, medicine-ball-in-the-chest, sweaty-palmed panic. Why?

Because in my whole life, I've never actually set out to do what I am now, finally, trying to do. I've never really had to face the fear of failure, or confronted the possibility that my self-assessment is just wrong, that my entire image of myself as a writer is an ill-constructed, neurotic phantom. This is a new level, for me. I am going to subject myself, not to the opinions of a friendly writer's group, but of people who do this sort of thing for a living. The gatekeepers. The ones to whom I have to actually prove my worth.

I'm scared out of my damn mind.

So, am I good writer? Yes.

Am I good enough? I don't know.

That, it seems to me, is the crucial difference between honest self-assessment and egotism.

As it turned out, I could pick any 30 pages I wanted. So I did. Chapters seven, eight, and nine, sealed in a Tyvek envelope and sent off to Northern California.

I never have as little confidence in something I've produced as I do the moment I put it into an envelope.

Still: it's a new and different thing I have done. We'll see what comes of it..

But it certainly is coincidental.

The day after I declared that I would not, in fact, devote this here site to the production and publication of a novel in one year's time, I got an e-mail via the folks at the SBWC. It was an about a year-long workshop, the goal of which is...to write a novel.

Not publish it, mind you. Just write it, and bring it to the point where it's ready for submission.

Lynn Vannucci, the person who's running the show, had this to say in the e-mail:

In all the years I've been working as an editor, I find the biggest roadblock for the new writers I work with is accountability. Their talent is apparent, their ideas inspired, but their projects languish because they don't yet know how to use their time like a professional writer to bring their work to fruition.

Which is exactly what I was talking about on June 2 when I referred to responsibility. To say that that I'm intrigued by this opportunity is a bit of an understatement. But I do pay attention to coincidences of this depth, and I call them by the fancy name of synchronicity.

So, I'm going to give this a shot. I need to have the first 30 pages of my project to her by June 20, which means that I need to rewrite the first chapter (it's not very good, being, as it is, an unpublished short story from 1995), and possibly create an entirely new second chapter.

I discovered, via a helpful ass-kicking by a friend of mine, many of the reasons why I stalled out on this particular book. Beyond my usual penchant for never finishing things, that is. She had me commit to producing a 500-word synopsis of the book, which is difficult enough, but even more so when the book isn't finished.

There are two main reasons it's not finished. First, I don't have an idea about the ending that's clear enough to keep me moving forward. I've always had a couple of major plot points that I knew were going to occur, but without at least some idea of the end point--even if it turns out to be the wrong idea--it's damnably difficult to keep things moving. There's nowhere to move towards.

Second, the major event of the book was something that happened to a friend of the protagonist, rather than the protagonist himself. I should've realized, back when I was half-heartedly asking myself why anyone should care about what happens to this secondary character, that this was an issue.

So. Because the decision to push the major event away from the protagonist was a result of events that happened in the first chapter, which was written as a short story and not a novel chapter, I need to rearrange a whole bunch of stuff. And because the second chapter flows from the plot error in the first chapter, and is in fact entirely dependent on it, I either need to write a new one, or see if one of the subsequent chapters can serve in its stead. Or I might just pick another chapter to serve as the first. Or maybe write some entirely new chapters. Or maybe, maybe write two entirely new chapters of an entirely new book I haven't even thought of yet.

I'm trying to subdue my panic. Breathe.

I have a lot of work to do, not much time to do it, and no guarantee that my offering will secure me a place in the workshop.

But it's something. At least I'm doing something different, instead of sitting at my desk with a sick heavy ball in my stomach, wondering how the hell I'm going to fix my entire life so that I can do with it what I wish.

Instead, I have a task: 30 pages by June 20. Manageable. Doable.

I'll let you know how it goes.

This site was to meant to serve, in part, as a public declaration of intention, which is why I've got an intention tag. It was also meant to be a self-wielded goad, something to motivate me and keep me going because I said on these pages that I would do this or that thing. The distillation of the declaration that I wrote on April 28 is as follows:

That's what this is about. Within 365 days, I intend to sell my first novel.

I've come to the...well, I won't call it sudden...but I've come to the realization that that's well, stupid.

Not just the practical aspect of it, I always knew that I was asking the near-impossible of myself. But: it's a stunt. Let's see how clever and good and talented I can be. More importantly, it is, quite simply, a recipe for failure.

I've gone through some sea changes over the past few months which I won't go into here. But the mere fact of writing and publishing a single novel is not enough. There's more to writing, more to a writing life, than pulling that particular rabbit out of the hat. More has to happen than simply finishing a manuscript and then shuffling it from agent to agent to agent, passively hoping that my self-evident brilliance will strike the right person at the right time.

The simple fact is, nothing in this universe happens unless you make it happen. It doesn't matter how good I am or think I am, it doesn't matter how saleable my manuscript is, how well it fits with what's going to be published in the 2010 season. What matters is whether I make the changes to my entire life that I need to make so that I can create a life of writing.

What matters is whether I take responsibility.

What matters is whether I make this happen.

Every day that I don't do something that relates to my writing is a day that I've let go by without making something happen. It doesn't matter whether I'm working on the novel, working on an old short story, jotting down thoughts for a new one or looking at markets. The idea that I was just going to pop onto the scene with my precious manuscript and watch the world open up before me was worse than stupid. It was arrogant, and short-sighted.

So, I've changed the blog's tag line, up there in the banner. The arbitrary, 365-days to publication is gone. I'm keeping the novel's word count up there, because it is a bit of a motivator, but that's all.

Back in 1995, I had my first short story published in Home Planet News. The editor professed amazement that it was my first publication, which I took as the compliment that it was. She invited me to New York to do a reading at the issue launch party, which I did. And then what happened?

Nothing, that's what.

I'm not going to go into all the psychological complexities that probably underlay that long fallow stretch of nothing. I'm tired of trying to figure out how I got where I am. I'm only interested in where I'm going and how I'm going to get there.

I also said, back in April, that I would be chronicling three separate processes here: writing the novel; reorganizing my life around writing; selling the novel. I was wrong about that, too. There's only one process. One life to live, one process.

So, that's what this place is about.

And what did I do today? Well, I rewrote the first 500 words of chapter one in third person, because I've been wedded to my first person narrative, and I'm not at all sure I need to be. I'm still not. Tomorrow? An outline. Because during the struggle to produce a 500 word synopsis of the book (which I will also write about later this week), I realized that I really have no idea where this thing is going, which makes it awfully hard to move forward.

So there's that.

Moving on.

I'm still writing about writing instead of, you know...actually writing. I am two weeks into my declared year of writing dangerously and I have yet to write one word on the actual manuscript. Any new words, that is.  I've got about 22,000 old words, but I have problems with many of them.

It's true that there is a certain amount of manuscript work that doesn't actually involve writing. I'm in the process of reviewing what I wrote last year, and trying to be brutally honest about what's working and what's not. There's also mental work that I can do any time...turning the plot over in my mind, exploring story possibilities, that sort of thing. But I'm well aware than none of that is the important part of the effort, and it's no substitute for adding to the word count.

So: I am "gearing up." This weekend I intended to go to Ikea in Burbank and acquire my writing desk, among other necessary items of furniture, but my Social Security Number puts me in the batch of citizens who will be getting their Economic Stimulus™ on the 16th. I'll be heading south this coming Saturday instead. As I've mentioned, Ikea figures into all this because I'm rearranging my surroundings to support my writing, which means a desk in a room with a door. Yeah, the fact that I haven't got the desk yet is one of those "excuses" I'm trying to identify and quash. I could write on the couch. I just haven't.

It's tough to create new habits out of whole cloth. I'm not whining, that's just a fact, so I'm cutting myself a little slack. I'm engaging in a number of different activities that support writing, including research on craft and technique, ramping up my own fiction intake, that sort of thing. Some of those efforts show up here: videos about the creative process, my own thoughts on craft, and so on. None of this is a substitute for sitting down in front of the computer and stringing words of fiction together. I know this.

I've read a lot of what writers have to say about writing. Without exception, any writer who has had any success whatsoever has said the same thing: writers write, and the ones who succeed do it every day. If they're not powerhouses like James Patterson, David Baldacci, or Stephen King--in other words, if they still have day jobs--they carve out time whenever they can. So my plan is to write every day at my new Swedish writing desk, once I have it. An honest-to-God writing schedule. Merciless. There will be a word count indicator on the right side of this page, and it damn well better go up every day. You have my permission to berate me if it doesn't.

It's important, I think, not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. All my life I've written in fits and starts, when the mood struck me. I've never been much of a believer in "the muse," but I certainly know that there are some times when it's easier to write than others. To meet my stated goals, I'll have to write when I don't feel like writing, when I'm pretty sure that every sentence I write will be unadulterated crap, when I am most assuredly not in the zone.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that for all of his life, he was frightened at the moment he sat down to write. Margaret Atwood said that blank pages inspired her with terror. John Steinbeck spoke of his fear of putting down the first line. The fact that you've heard of them is a testament to their courage.

So. Next Saturday, in a frenzy of allen wrenching, I will remove the last practical excuse that I've been hiding behind. I'll put my ass in my new chair, fire up the computer on my new desk...and make my leap.