Tag: writer’s block

  • Surviving the Creative Wilderness—Attitude is Everything

    Surviving the Creative Wilderness—Attitude is Everything

    How Not to Die in The Woods

    Tom Browns Field Guide to Wilderness SurvivalI own a book called “Tom Brown’s Field Guide to Wilderness Survival.”  It’s a great book.  It doesn’t teach you how to read a map or use a compass.  It doesn’t explain what gear is essential for an extended wilderness trek.  It does explain how to keep yourself alive in the wilderness if you have absolutely nothing with you but the clothes on your back.  And for creative folks navigating this life, isn’t that a great analogy for how we must exist?  We’ve got nothing but the clothes on our back.  Metaphorically only, I hope.

     

    Tom Brown’s book is divided into four parts, arranged in order of importance from the perspective of not dying.  Parts two, three, four, and five are (in this order): Shelter, Water, Fire, Food.  If you stop and think about it, that order makes perfect sense.  You could die of exposure in the first few hours without shelter from the elements.  You could die in three days without water, give or take.  You can go for a long time without food, but most of it will kill you if you don’t cook it first, so fire comes before food. 

     

    The first part of the book, and therefore the most important in terms of not dying when lost in the woods, is Attitude.  It’s all about psychology.  About the inner voice that gets louder and louder as things get tougher and tougher, whispering, stating, screaming that the situation is hopeless and we’re stupid, that we deserve to die out here.  Tom Brown argues that most people who get lost in the wilderness and die do so because they give in to a creeping attitude of defeat.

     

    Why, you might ask, am I writing about a wilderness survival guide?  Because I’m a creative writer.  I’m a creative person. I spend a lot of time wandering around in the wilderness of my psyche. And, like all creative artists, I find myself, from time to time, lost in those woods.  Tom Brown is right.  Whether the forest is real or psychological, attitude is the first and most important determiner of whether we’re going to make it out alive or not.

     

    The Creative Life is a Hostile Wilderness

    Between January 8th and May 7th, I wrote and revised 51,000+ words of a YA fantasy novel for my MFA thesis project at Lesley University.  My goal was to finish an entire first draft of the novel by April.  That, I’m sad to say, did not happen. 

     

    Wooded PathThe writing process for grad school is interesting, especially during the thesis semester.  Most students enter their final semester with a first draft of their thesis already written.  They’ll spend four months revising it before submitting it.  They’re traveling a well-worn path by that point.

     

    I didn’t do that.  I started from scratch.  I took the road less traveled. 

     

    Fallen Trees

    Let me tell you, the less-traveled path is not easy-going.  It’s grown in and full of brambles and twisting roots to trip on.  It’s hot and buggy, and most of it is uphill on a treacherous slope.  There are many places where the trail just peters out and vanishes.  And there’s quicksand.  No one tells you about the quicksand! 

     

    Chris Lynch
    My most excellent mentor!

    For this final semester, I found myself wandering, slightly lost in the forest, losing the path and then stumbling upon it again.  And as someone who does not plot well, I rarely knew in which direction I was traveling.  But, I did manage to write 51,000+ words of a story that, with the help of my incredible mentor—Chris Lynch—was of graduate-level quality.  I’d bushwhacked my way through some pretty dense, unforgiving territory.

     

    I formatted everything according to spec, typed up the synopsis for the rest of the story as I imagined it, the path I thought lay before me, and I sent it off.  I was out of the woods! 

     

    Losing the Way

    And then I stopped writing.

     

    Which wasn’t supposed to happen.

    See, in my head, I’d have the rest of the novel written by June 1st.  It was going to be excellent.  But, my brain was experiencing a level of fatigue I wasn’t prepared for.  I just… couldn’t do it.  Couldn’t even write a blog post.  I looked around, and realized that I wasn’t out of the woods quite yet, as I’d thought.

     

    A week went by.  Okay, I thought, Time to get back to it.

     

    Nope.

     

    Two weeks.  Surely, now.  Two weeks must be enough time to recover from the mad dash I’d just been through, but no.  In fact, something new had snuck into my brain to replace my mental exhaustion.  As I stood looking around and what now seemed frighteningly unfamiliar territory, something snaked its coils around my chest and started to squeeze.

     

    Fear.

     

    Each time I thought about sitting down to work out the details of the next chapter of my story, my pulse quickened, and not with excitement.  I started shying away from the story out of fear, though fear of what I didn’t know.  Heck, I didn’t even know what was happening at the time, only that it had suddenly become very important that I not work on my writing.  My writing was stalking me like some unseen creature in the underbrush. 

     

    As the days continued to slip by, a horrible pressing guilt settled on my shoulders.  I should be writing, I chided myself, but I’m not.  I’m failing.  This is me, failing.  I’m awful.  I’m a loser.  A joke. I’m never going to succeed at this because I’m supposed to be writing and I can’t even muster the simple will power needed to do touch my fingertips to a keyboard.  It became a nasty feedback loop.  Each day I didn’t sit down and write made it that much harder for me to get back to the chair, sit down, and write.  I started hating myself.  I stopped trying to get my bearings.  I sat down on the cold, wet ground and started to let the ruinous forest of my blackest doubts leech from me my will to continue.

    Forest at Night

     

     

    Odin help me, I was lost!  Lost in a hostile forest, with the shadows of fear, doubt, and self-hate blinding me so that I couldn’t see a path forward, couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten there.  I was becoming more and more certain that my journey was at an end.  It was awful, and it felt inevitable. 

     

    The thing is, getting lost is a hazard of living a creative life.  In some ways, getting lost really is inevitable, because the creative path is not well-travelled.  I’d argue that if you’re doing things right as an artist, you’re blazing a new trail through the deepest, darkest woods of your own psyche.  There are no paths here, children.  Only shadows, and stones, and giant trees that might eat you if you get too close, and creatures too beautiful and terrible to look at directly.  And, wait, haven’t I gotten snagged in this same bramble patch before?  Oh, Thor!  I’m going in circles!  I’m lost, and it’s cold, and the sun’s getting low, the night creatures are coming, and I’ll never find my way out of this forest.  Why did I think this was a good idea?  I’m an idiot.  I’m going to die in these woods, and no one will mourn my demise. 

     

    Countless talented artists wander into the creative forest with good intentions and never make it out again.  They get lost, hit that moment of doubt and despair, give up, and die.  Metaphorically. 

     

    For me, May has certainly felt like a slow death in a wild and inhospitable landscape. 

     

    Finding My Way Back

    But then I received my feedback letter from my thesis reader—Jason Reynolds

    Jayson Reynolds
    That’s him, the self-professed hater of fantasy stories. And the guy who got me moving again!

    Quick back story.  At the residency program back in January, Jason sat in a classroom with a bunch of us from the Writing for Young People concentration, and went off on a (gentle) tirade about how irritating he found the fantasy genre.  Details are not important here.  Suffice it to say, the man is not a fan.  As he spoke, I sat with a polite smile cemented to my face and did my best not to freak out.  You see, by that point, I already knew I was going to be writing a YA fantasy story for my thesis, and I’d already requested him as my thesis reader. A guy who hates fantasy is going to put final eyes on my fantasy thesis. Fantastic.

     

    Anyway, four months later, I’m slipping into creative hypothermia, curling up in the fetal position, and making peace with my end, when I open his feedback letter and read it.

     

    I was expecting lukewarm but professional feedback on my prose, my character development, my pacing, scene structure, etc.  You can hate a story, after all, and still give constructive feedback on the writing, right?  Lukewarm but professional feedback was not what I got. 

     

    For almost three weeks at that point, I’d been lost in the shadowy part of my self-made forest, under thick canopy, feeling the slow creep of horror setting in as I realized that the trees were endless and I was a hopeless, pathetic fool.  Jason’s feedback was like discovering a high-powered flashlight in my back pocket, switching it on, and finding out that I’d been following a path the whole time without realizing it. 

     

    Sunlit ForestI can see again.  Maybe I don’t have to die out here all alone in the cold, unforgiving forest of my mind. The book I’m writing is my destination once again.  Chris Lynch had been my shelter.  A few close writing-friends I’ve connected with through the program had been my water, my spouse is my fire, and all the fine books I’d been reading this semester have been my food.

     

    So, with the help of Jason Reynold’s incredibly generous and encouraging words, I’m standing up, brushing the duff off my backside, and moving forward again.  Sun’s up.  The canopy is starting to thin out again, and I’m pretty sure this trail is not leading to pit trap filled with poison-tipped spikes.  If it is, I know I can find a way to disarm it.  I’ve shifted my attitude.  I’m getting out of this alive.

     

    Have you ever gotten lost in the darker parts of your creative forest?  How long did you wander before finding your way out?   

  • Good News, Bad News, and Trouble in Writing Town

    Good News, Bad News, and Trouble in Writing Town

    I’ve got a thirty-minute break before my next parent-teacher conference, so I thought I’d use this time to do some writing. I know I won’t be able to get any meaningful creative writing done, sandwiched as this moment is between long and stressful blocks of trying to calm down nervous parents and stressed-out students. My stress levels are elevated today, too. Not a great place to be, mentally, when you want the ideas to flow. The doors of my imagination just can’t swing freely on their hinges at the moment. 

    Since I’m currently stress-blocked and don’t feel up to generating anything creative right now, I figured I’d use this time to sneak in a blog post and try to unpack a problem that has been dogging me of late.

    Creative Constipation

    Writer's BlockOver the past week, forward progress on my WIP has slowed to a snail’s pace. I need to figure out what’s going on. What has changed? What can I do to unblock myself?  

    You know how everyone always says stuff like, “You can’t edit a blank page,” or “The first draft is supposed to be terrible?” Of course, you do, if you’re a writer. It’s inescapable, especially during the month of NaNoWriMo. I firmly buy into those clichéd tidbits of advice. If I had more time (hahaha) I’d needlepoint it onto a cushion and then sit on that cushion as I wrote.

    However, something happened on the 15th that seems to have changed things and not for the better. We (being the folks in Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program) received our mentor pairings for next semester. Fourth semester students (like me) work on one thing and one thing only: our creative theses. Or, in layman’s terms, we’ll be trying to shine up a reasonable draft of a book. Up until last week, I was feeling pretty good about that. Looking forward to it, in fact.

    Good News, Bad News

    Then, we got our pairings. Good news: I got my first choice for a mentor. The esteemed Chris Lynch, author of Inexcusable, Little Blue Lies, and Angry Young Man, and others. I also got my first pick for my Thesis Reader: Jason Reynolds, author of Patina, When I Was the Greatest, and All American Boys among other books. To invoke Chandler Bing, “Could I be more excited?” Maybe, but it would be difficult.

    Chandler Bing Gif

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Anyway, I got that news and fist-pumped the sky, did a dance of joy, and then froze. Oh, sugar-honey-iced-tea. Chris Lynch and Jason Reynolds are going to see my story.  Turns out the good news is also the bad news.

    Grocery Bag FailureHere’s what that sudden, stark realization felt like. Imagine you’re at the grocery store, heading back to your car carrying two extremely heavy and overpacked bags of foodstuffs, and you’re feeling stoked because you hit some sweet sales and managed to stock up for the week and then some. You’re crossing a busy throughway in the parking lot when the bags let go. All at once, the bottoms rip wide open and vomit your stuff all over the pavement. Cans are rolling everywhere. The milk carton is ruptured.  A white puddle expands at your feet. Dented boxes, broken eggs, bruised apples racing away, and cars coming at you from both directions.  What you thought of just moments ago as an awesome bundle of tasty treats now looks like an embarrassing heap of trash. 

    My “book” now feels like those groceries lying broken and hopeless and ugly on the pavement, and Mr. Lynch and Mr. Reynolds are the drivers who have to stop and get out of their slick cars to help me to scrape all my crap up off the ground.  They know how to bag groceries.  This would never happen to them.  I’m a schmuck, and now they have to deal with my foolishness.

    Perception versus Reality

    I’m not saying that’s my actual situation. Maybe my “book” isn’t as big a mess as all that, but that’s how it feels right now.

    I’ve got this thing, this rough draft, and it’s terrible in all the ways that I usually tell myself a first draft is allowed to be. But…

    Two authors whom I respect (and, okay yes, idolize) are about to put eyes on it. All of a sudden it no longer feels okay for my rough draft to be messy. I want to turn my work-to-date over to Chris, have him read it, and then get an email from him expounding upon how wonderful it is and how excited he is to help me cut and polish this diamond of a story.

    I want that, but I don’t have a rough diamond to give him. I’ve got a pile of ruined groceries hastily scraped up off the blacktop, possibly destined for the garbage. And he’s going to judge me!

    He’s not going to judge me.

    The man is amazing. So is Jason, who will read my “finished” product at the end of this semester and either give it the thumbs up (I pass) or thumbs down (I still pass, but let it be known that I am a talentless hack). Every student who has worked with these two men has sung their praises.

    The point is, I no longer feel okay with my rough draft being terrible. In my desire to impress two incredible authors, I’d want it to be perfect, spotless, shiny. Glittering to the point of blinding in its utter fabulousness. Is that too much to ask?

    We’re Our Own Worst Critics

    Tom Hanks WriterYes, as it turns out. Perfection is too much to ask, and my self-imposed, unattainable new expectations have bogged down my writing process. My muse has curled up in the fetal position at my feet beneath my desk. She’s utterly useless under pressure, I guess. Meanwhile, I am getting hung up on every single sentence I try to write. Is this description strong enough? Are these verbs punchy enough? Am I rambling? Should I cut this? Do I need to elaborate here?  Why’s there so much dialogue in this scene?  What the H am I doing?

    That’s me, snail-crawling along, doubting EVERYTHING about my writing and my characters and my story.  Whereas I normally can pump out a solid 1,500 to 2,000 words a day, I’m now down to less than 500. 

    Which I guess would be okay if it weren’t for the fact that I’m supposed to turn in 13,000 words of new material on December 1st in preparation for my January residency. I’ve only got 6,200 words so far, and that has taken me almost two weeks to generate. And it’s all rough draft quality work.

    Sigh.

    This really should be an IWSG post, because I am feeling more insecure about my writing than I have probably ever felt before in my entire life. It’s cool. It’ll pass. I’ve doubted myself before this, and I always get over it…

    Eventually.

    Until then, I’ll continue to plug along and hope that, with the help of an incredibly talented (and patient–dear Freya, please let them be patient) mentor and reader, some of my groceries will turn out to be salvageable.  Because what else can to do?  It’s part of being an aspiring writer, right?  I either quit now, or I push through the doubt and continue to dribble the words onto the paper.  

    Okey-dokey.  Break time’s over.  Back to the day job.

    Has anyone else had nearly paralyzing moments of doubt brought on by the prospect of having a legitimately talented author/agent/editor reading your stuff?  Please, tell me I’m not the only one.

  • Chuang-Tzu, Things with Wings, and the Writer’s Life

    Chuang-Tzu, Things with Wings, and the Writer’s Life

    At some point between 369 BCE and 286 BCE, western philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) wrote what is commonly known as The Butterfly Dream Parable. Here’s an excerpt:

    “Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

    The butterfly parable popped into my head today as I stood at my kitchen sink, gazing out at my back yard with unseeing eyes. This morning’s writing session was a darned good one. I’d written just over 1,200 new words and wrapped up a lengthy scene in one of my two current WIPs.

    For weeks, I’ve been banging my head against this particular project. The first third of the story had its own set of wings. I mean, the story just flew out of my brain. It was great. Then… it stopped being great. I hit the dreaded “middle” of the plot, and mental quicksand sucked me down. What was the point? Where was it going? Ugh.

    So, for weeks I ruminated and whined and avoided trying to write anything. The one scene I did write was absolute trash. I’m convinced it won’t survive the second draft. Frustrating? Oh, you bet.

    Then, someone posted something on Facebook about Mary Carroll Moor and the idea of writing “islands.” The general idea is to abandon the process of writing a story chronologically from scene to scene when you run up on writer’s block. That’s the moment, this person said, that one might benefit from writing whatever scene happens to bubble up into your mind without worrying about where it would fit into the story, or even whether it will end up being part of the finished product. It’s a form of discovery writing, I guess. Since I discovery-wrote that first smoking hot third of my WIP, I figured I’d give the island writing thing a try.

    A few night’s ago, a flashbulb scene popped brightly into my brain, of my characters attempting a hairy river-crossing. The scene in my head was only a few seconds long, but it was incredibly vivid. For the past three days, I’ve been writing that scene. Today, it sprouted wings, caught an updraft, and took off.  I disappeared into that scene completely.

    When I returned to myself near midday, I felt a little hazy, like I was in that half-awake-half-asleep place. Which brings me to my moment at the kitchen sink and Chuang-tzu’s butterfly parable.

    As I stared out into my back yard, it occurred to me that I have spent very little time in the outside world this summer. Sure, there have been a few days when I’ve set up camp at the teakwood table in the shade of our massive maple tree. Even then, though, I was elsewhere. I was inside my writing, my other world.

    It can be easy for writers to disengage from the real world, to forget about it as they immerse themselves in their self-generated fictional worlds. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful feeling when the writing comes alive so vividly that you don’t want to leave it. On the other hand, my doctor informed me at my July physical that I have a vitamin-D deficiency.

    My back yard is gorgeous. We’ve had a good amount of rain this summer, so the lawn has stayed green, and all of our flowers and fruit trees are lush and vibrant… and I’ve barely noticed any of it. Maybe I should take a moment to wake from my fictional world and spend some time in my non-fictional world.

    So, I spent a bit of time outside today, and I took some pictures of all the beautiful things I’ve been missing. Here they are.

    Have you had the experience of vanishing into your writing? Do you ever struggle to come back from that place? How do you balance your two worlds as a writer?

  • Scrivener: It Helps Me Produce

    Scrivener: It Helps Me Produce

    There are tons of writing platforms out there, and I’ve found that writers have some seriously strong feelings about them.  I’m no exception. For me, it’s all about Scrivener.

    For a long time, I wrote my stuff in Google Docs, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would pay extra money for some fancy-schmancy writing program.  Google Docs was good enough (said my inner crotchety old geezer). But then, in 2015, I took part in my very first NaNoWriMo event.  I won it, too.  Aw, thanks so much, imaginary reader.  That’s so sweet of you to say.

    Anyway, as part of my “winnings” I received a 50% coupon for Scrivener, which is already a pretty inexpensive piece of software at full price.  At $20.00, I figured I had little to lose, and I’d heard plenty of people rave about its functionality, so I gave it a try.

    Notebook with multi-colored writing and a blue fountain penLet me be clear.  I will never give up my fountain pens and my notebooks, both of which I collect like someone with a problem.  Whatever.  Some people collect Hummel Dolls.  Some people collect Beanie Babies.  I collect fountain pens and notebooks… and a few other things, but that’s a whole different post.  When I am feeling stuck for ideas or just creatively drained, nothing greases the hinges and swings wide the doors to my imagination like writing with a gorgeous fountain pen loaded with some of my favorite ink in one of my favorite notebooks.   So great of an advocate of this strategy for breaking up creative writing blocks am I that I regularly buy and distribute fountain pens (pre-inked with some of my favorite inks obtained via the Goulet Pen Company).  If you’re ever in Boston and you’re a pen enthusiast, by the by, you must treat yourself to a trip to the oldest pen shop in the country–The Bromfield Pen Shop.

    My obsessive love of fountain pens aside, however, I get most of my writing done on my mac, and since my 2015 NaNo win, it’s all been done using Scrivener.

    Screen shot of the Scrivener corkboard featureI love the corkboard feature for organizing my chapters.  I love its pre-generated templates for character development.  I love its split screen, its compile feature, and its project analytics.  Holy cow, do I use the words “look” and “gaze” and “glance” a lot in my first drafts.  There are hundreds of other features embedded into this program that are also super wicked lots of awesome, but the feature that caused me to fall in forever love with Scrivener is its Project Target feature.

    I can set a total word count for a project, a deadline, and tell Scrivener which days of the week to include in its daily word count calculations.  When activated, it gives me those two lovely progress bars that you can see in the featured photo at the top of this post.

    This feature won’t motivate everyone.  My husband looks at it and groans, “That would drive me nuts.”  Different strokes for different folks, buddy.  I’ve always responded well to extrinsic motivators.  Plus, my brain loves watching that bottom bar change color from fire engine red to grass green over the course of a writing session.  It fills me with a sense of accomplishment.

    Now, that might strike some folks as vacuous and stupid.  It’s quality, not quantity they could argue.  True, but if you’re not getting the quantity, what are the chances of getting any quality?  If something helps me be more consistent and more productive in my writing, then by gum I’m going to use it, and Scrivener’s Project Target features does just that.

    Do you have favorite technique or strategy for generating more words when you write? Is it a piece of writing software?  A favorite spot you like to go to write? A favorite music playlist?  Perhaps a favorite pen and notebook?  I’d love to know what other writers find motivating.