Tag Archives: writing life

I’m Not Alone!

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Oh, my!  It happens to other writers, too!  Even Pulitzer prize-winning former film critics/favorite PowerLine novelists like Stephen Hunter who had the following to say today on that blog about his newly released thriller Soft Target:

Some books write themselves. Some don’t. The former are beloved as labors of love. The latter are labors of, er, labor, and are the unwanted step-children of the writing business.

My novel Soft Target started as the latter. At a certain point, I think it was trying to kill me. It was the Thing in the Office, reeking of malevolence. It stank of mediocrity, infantility, and sheer inertia.

Okay, I don’t think Sky has quite reached the point of trying to kill me, but it’s definitely had its moments of being “the Thing in the Office, reeking of malevolence!” 

I loved what he wrote in his PowerLine blurb about how he overcame all this. articulating, more or less,  the very thing I know I haven’t found yet in my own WIP — the spark or seed or core that resonates with me and gives the book its life. His blurb not only encouraged me, it gave me an example of how it happens — and reminded me that it has happened for me a number of times before.  

Plus, I now have another book on my list to read. Not that I need any other books, mind you…

Quote of the Day: Vinita Hampton Wright

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“For some people, the beginning is a time of complete chaos. You see bits and pieces of what is before you. You have a sense of what it is you must set out to do. But nothing will form yet. When you sit down to write or paint or form movement, it’s like stepping over a cliff or into a dense fog. All you can do is trust that this impending masterpiece is going to somehow manifest itself as you work. But you do know that there is something specific ahead, and you feel the excitement of that.” ~ Vinita Hampton Wright , The Soul Tells a Story

Flipping Priorities

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Lately the Lord has been giving me lots of messages from various sources about the importance of focusing, of having priorities and following them, of knowing where your heart is by looking at where you spend your money and/or time. They’ve all been urging me to get more serious about the book and making me think about priorities.

I thought I’d already gone through all that, and had set up my morning routine to take care of things that had to be done every day or week as my first priority. The routine is always done and there’s no dithering about that. You just get up and do it.

And I have been. The first portions of it have become automatic. The second half, not so much. Plus I would often get distracted or sidetracked with some other project before I finished the second half. Was my morning routine too long? Maybe.

Worse, by the time I got around to writing — say between 10:45 and 11:45 — I was tired from all the other stuff I’d been doing all morning.

So I decided to change it up. For the last couple of days I’ve done only part of the morning routine and then went straight into the office to work on Sky for a bit, until I was hungry for breakfast. At which time I would do the second half of the routine (which includes hanging out clothes and doing tricks with Quigley)

So far that has been working really well, not just because I don’t end up out of gas before I get to the writing, but because once I’ve started working on the book, I tend to want to get back to it, and am thinking about it and not new housework projects I can work on. The other way, the new projects bombarded me.

Monday I alternated home chores and writing all day long. Today (Tuesday) I wasn’t quite as good on that, because after all the progress I had yesterday, today was more of a stalled out day. I spent a good amount of time being distracted, still, and being blank. But toward the end of the day I began to find a way to at least collect and organize my thoughts (which are mostly questions and possible answers) in such a way that I’m hoping tomorrow will see a few more pages added to the total.

One of Orson Scott Card’s recommendations is to always has why.  Why are the bombers in the basement? Why did she ask Lago to bring the ambassador up to the office to see the video? Why would she ask him to make the bombers go away?

The problem with that, is that I open up a world of questions I often don’t have answers to. Hence the distractions and protracted periods of staring out windows.

Wait. Maybe I should rephrase that.  “The problem with that is that I open up a world of questions I don’t have answers to …yet.  🙂

And tomorrow is another day. As it stands, in two days I’ve moved from the end of chapter 1 to almost the end of chapter 2.

Interview at Cristy Zinn

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I don’t know where my head has been the last few days. In the Twilight Zone, I think.

Recently I was contacted by Cristy Zinn, an aspiring writer living in South Africa, who asked if I’d be willing to answer some interview questions for her blog, Cristy Zinn … Writing in Progress. I said yes, went to work on the questions and finally completed them Monday. She immediately posted the Interview, and I immediately fell into a fog of forgetfulness in not making note of it on my blog.

Realizing what I’d done later, I promised myself I’d do it next post. And forgot again.

Well, I was in a crash-stupor from the weekend for the better part of three days, even though I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t. Nevertheless, with apologies to Cristy for my tardiness, and thanks to her for inviting me to do this, I direct you now to the Interview on Cristy-Zinn… Writing in Progress.  Her questions include a number that are not usual fare in interviews, which made them fun to answer…

Aggressive Trust

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Today I was back to being distracted and doing the avoidance thing in the morning. In an attempt to get myself going, I pulled a couple of old journals off my shelf, wondering if the earlier me might have advice for the later me. Did I really feel this negatively, and flat and blank about the other books I’ve written when I’ve been at this stage with them?

Answer:  yes.

Anyway, I picked one that began in February 2005 during the time I was working on a second draft of Shadow Over Kiriath.  I opened the book and on the very first page — the frontispiece  — I’d written the following:

“The Lord has told me, again and again to trust Him aggressively  and to wait for His solutions with CONFIDENT  EXPECTATION.

To trust Him to guide and to trust Him to come through — that I won’t be ashamed, nor will my enemies exult over me or ridicule me…

…the blankness and the deadness are good things — they call to mind the lesson of stepping back and letting

God reveal things in His PERFECT timing

WAIT

and let God Gather together the waters so that the dry land appears.

***

Sit back, relax, give God time to work in your life. Don’t enter into struggle, condemnation and bondage trying to change yourself. Most Believers have a hard time realizing/accepting that God does not hurry in His development of the Christian life.”

Nor does He necessarily hurry in His development of a book. In fact, as I considered today, I realized that releasing it slowly, releasing things at a very rudimentary, incomplete level, when the story doesn’t seem very good, is definitely a lesson in trusting Him. If it came out great the first time through, there’d be no need to trust and I would unquestionably develop a fat head. Instead, if it comes out ragged, full of holes, wandering around, limpid characters having lengthy discussions about inconsequential matters — all words I need to tell myself the story, even if they aren’t words that will survive to the final draft — it forces me to trust Him. It forces me to have patience, not seeing, and to trust that He will indeed make all things, even this, beautiful in its time.

And having learned that, somehow, in fits and starts, I worked my way through the rest of chapter 1 to page 21.

An Inspiring Video

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My agent posted the following video on his blog last Friday.  It made him laugh.

It made me laugh, too. And in the days that have followed I’ve found myself going back to it over and over. In some strange way it’s been inspiring me to write. I don’t know why exactly. I can definitely relate, though my reactions are a bit more dramatic than hers. In my office there is a lot of staring at the ceiling, then frantic typing, then more staring, then sighing, pushing away from the desk, more staring at the ceiling, more typing. Then the part where I bury my face in my hands and cover my eyes,  so I can’t see the screen… I talk a lot  more too… And not to Quigley, though he sometimes thinks I am.

Still, I think it’s the understatment in this one that makes it funny. Particularly in light of its title: The Excitement of the Writing Profession.

I especially like the “thinking” part. 🙂

UPDATE: Sadly, the creator of this video has changed the settings to “private” so it’s no longer viewable. I might just have to make my own…

Make my own????

DISTRACTION ALERT! DISTRACTION ALERT! DISTRACTION ALERT!

A New Writing Book

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I ordered a new writing book from Amazon last week. I have no idea why. No one recommended it. I had no real intentions of ordering any book at all, but I saw it on one of those links from something else I was looking at… to tell the truth, I can’t remember exactly how I came upon it, only that I did and for some reason it looked interesting.

It’s called One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft and it’s by Susan M. Tiberghien, an American-born writer, married to a Frenchman, with French-speaking children and living in Geneva Switzerland. Not the sort of person I’d generally choose for writing advice.

“Tiberghien’s advice, encouragement, and wisdom make this an invaluable book for writers at all stages of their writing lives.”

So says Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching. I have no idea who he is, and have never heard of Fourth Genre nor Still Pitching.  I can’t for the life of me figure out why I got this book.

I think it might have been God the Holy Spirit prompting me to do so. I say that because the book came a couple of days ago, and when I opened it up, the very first thing I read, on the page immediately following the dedication was this:

“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

That quote reached off the page, grabbed me by my shirt and pulled me close. It’s exactly what I had been thinking about, remembering what it was like to actually write a first draft, develop a new world, a new set of characters… It’s been awhile. And this just drove right to the heart of it all.

There’s more to this than just that, though —  the part about the work being done “beyond the reach of one’s intelligence” echoes what I wrote in That Nameless Faculty Again about an aspect of ourselves we don’t understand and can’t control.  The part of our souls that brings forth a story. Or a song or a painting…  Mostly without our conscious control or even awareness.

Anyway, I’ve barely started it. Read the Introduction and part of Chapter One. Already I’ve got underlinings and comments in the margin and things I want to think about, ideas being added to things I have already been thinking about. If all those thoughts coalesce into something coherent, I might even blog about them.

And I did all this and still managed to work a bit on Sky — moved on from page 10 to page 14 in Chapter One (covering material that reached to p 17 in the original so I’ve cut another page…).  Hooray!

Greater is He Who is In Me

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So Monday I was reading in my old journal as part of my pre writing routine and found this, dated 25 November 2000…

“Just getting started. I’ve again wasted the morning and I suppose I need to stop blaming my circumstances… [My husband]’s gone hunting and [my son]’s playing computer games before getting read to go to his friend’s… maybe… I find myself just waiting, feeling like a leaf blown here and there — no goal, no target, just whatever moves me. Not good.

“Anyway, even now I need to do Bible class, I don’t know when my hubby will be back, I want to start (writing) but I don’t want to if I’ll just have to quit. Plus I still haven’t developed any momentum. I feel detached from the work. It’s like when you read a book in small increments over weeks. It’s hard to bring it all together in your mind. Right now I can hardly remember where I am (in the book).”

Well, that’s exactly where I’ve been for way too long in this current work. I could’ve written those words on Monday (or today, for that matter) and was excited to copy them into my current journal (don’t ask me why but I like copying things down into notebooks and journals — I guess it makes the thoughts stand out more; and I think I hope it will make they stick in my mind though clearly, that’s not often the case the way I keep getting surprised by things I’ve written down in the past that could describe today.)

Anyway, as I copied it, I recalled how Satan will send distractions — and it seems there have been a lot of hindrances, distractions and interruptions of late… come to think of it, not just of late, but for a really long time. Some are big and obvious, some are small, some are things that get me sidetracked and focused on stuff that may not be what I’m supposed to be doing but I’m so caught up in the moment, or the focus of “getting it done” I don’t think about that. (At least not clearly enough to STOP what I’m doing and get to work).

And he sends more than just distractions. At this point  I recalled a little excerpt from notes from Bible Class  I’ve got tacked to my bulletin board where I can see it every day, if only I’d look (one I’ve probably posted here before, but obviously it doesn’t hurt to be reminded):

“Satan knows how to attack your mind, body and emotion(!!) and his intent is to STOP you from going forward in God’s Plan for your life. That could mean the intake of doctrine, the application of doctrine, and specifically the function of your spiritual gift (!!) If we saw the invisible realm, we’d be shocked at the plots to disrupt concentration, cause problems and get us to quit. To rip apart our mental attitude and get us sidetracked with something that doesn’t matter. He destroys patterns and routines. He loves to tear the mind apart with negative viewpoint. He attacks the emotions, gets you to react, beats you down. And he’ll attack your body…”

I had forgotten much of this but as I read it, it all jumped to the fore. I’ve been experiencing a lot of this. Even the attack on my body in the form of sleep deprivation… Could this be a reason I seem to have been stymied at every attempt to get back to writing?

And lately it seems almost worse to get in a day or two and then be interrupted for five, then not to do anything at all. Why? Two reasons.

First, because the days I do get some work done make me think that the interruptions are just anomalies, happenstance. That today was just an aberration, but tomorrow it will be back to the “routine”. Then I let my guard down and when tomorrow doesn’t work out either, I give up and just let things go and days go by… filled with legitimate activities — it’s not like I’m sitting around watching old movies. I’m getting stuff done, I’m doing good things, worthwhile things… just not functioning in what I believe to be my spiritual gift.

Second, because when I only get in a day or two and then get interrupted for five, and come back, I have to start all over and when you keep repeating that cycle, you really do get worn down. I never make any progress so when I finally get back to it, I start to dread a repeat of what’s happened so many times before. I also get bored with the work, since I keep going over and over the same stuff and never breaking out of it.

I confess I’ve been waiting for circumstances to change, to “settle down.” Today, right now I believe they are not going to settle down. I’ve realized this is just like the decisions you have to make when you embark on making sure you listen to Bible class every day. As soon as you do, all kinds of challenges come up. And if you give in to them, each time you fail to do the class, it gets easier the next time.

I know this sequence well. I’ve been very hard-nosed about making sure I get class in every day. I think it’s time to apply that (once again) to writing — though it makes me uneasy to declare it so clearly here on the blog because now the enemy will know what I intend. And adjust accordingly.

Fortunately greater is He who is in me than he who is in the world.

The Post that Wasn’t

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Well, I’ve been trying to finish up a post for today and it’s not happening. I think I’m too tired to make the thoughts come together. What I’ve written is seeming increasingly disjointed, and that’s telling me I’m too tired and need to give it up. At least for today.

Instead, I’ll just report that I’m continuing with my little routine of 15 minute tasks, though today’s stint of actually working with Sky went for about an hour and a half. I’ve upped that portion of the routine to 30 minutes and so far, not too bad.

I read some really cool stuff in my old journal as well. It pretty well describes how I felt today:

“Even the tenuous concepts I’d begun to develop have been shattered by these new questions. Questions I don’t seem able to answer. And then I begin to shrink away even from thinking of the questions. I don’t want to open the door and see all that chaos. I don’t even begin to know how to put it into order…”

Yup, that’s how I felt today. But I also came across another entry that was backed up by something I read online to the effect that I have to be patient. That it’s unrealistic to expect it all to come together easily and quickly. I need to just relax and trust the process, something I’ve never done well.  But after six books you’d think I might have reason to trust. To just keep going back to the work, not demanding that I come to a decision today, or that it all fall into place, just keep coming back, keep reading, and thinking and eventually, things will gel.

And now it’s after ten and I need to go to bed. Still have ironing to do… 🙁