Posted on

[Guest Post] Your Workshop Story Is Probably Shit

Today’s incendiary guest post comes from Tracy McCusker, former editor, published poet, and avowed pottymouth.

There’s a certain kind of story that can be found hanging around self-published short story collections and small-press slush piles. This kind of story has a certain whiff about it. It’s verbose. It’s stylized. It’s littered with impossibly academic sentences. It steps you through a scene without understanding how to frame it–noodly verbs and weak adjectives strewn across the page like chewed-up toys.

Oh yes. I know them well. I’ve read hundreds of these per year for four years.

It’s a workshop story.

When I was working as an editorial intern at Faultline, I read hundreds of short story first-pages. We churned 3,000 submissions. We published 30. It was easy to pick out the stories that wouldn’t make it into the second round of consideration.

There were the usual assortment that never made it in. The prison stories with no self-addressed stamped envelop to return a note to San Quentin. A paranoid city-dwelling protag ranting against the machine. Manuscripts typed out on yellowed paper (the same submission we received the year before). Novel-length stories jammed into fifty pages of tiny print.

But there was a second class of story that caught my eye as I perused the accompanying query letters: the workshop story. These were from the undergrad who’d been told by their adviser that their writing was super-ready for publication, despite numerous red flags that cried “amateur author!” Workshop stories were never rejected out of hand. They were sent dutifully on for consideration. None ever made it to round two. With thousands of submissions for an (unpaid) reading staff of five, workshop stories from aspiring writers didn’t get more than a form rejection slip.

This is not a case of gatekeeping, that’s such a drag. Many of the stories that did get published weren’t the most scintillating pieces of fiction. A certain roughness in quality is par for course for small press stories. A normalizing aesthetic can make a lot of these stories predictable and dull. And we’re talking about the published work. But many of these published stories had their charms: a good head for prose; an interesting character; an interesting voice. The small press was usually the first step on the ladder of the MFA/BFA to build up an reputation. To get in with the lowest rung on the publishing world.

I never grudged the submitters their aspirations.

But the workshop stories, man. They were usually shit.

True Tales of Horror: I was a undergrad workshopper

When I say these workshop stories were shit, I wasn’t sneering at these writers from an ivory tower of publication. I was in my second year of workshop, plugging away at my keyboard by night. Usually I was writing critiques. Once in a while, I pounded out a story. A couple nights before deadline. Or the night of. Day of? You bet.

It was college. Everything was due yesterday, and the pressure was on.

I wrote shit stories. This odoriferous patina clung to everything I did. I thought I wrote pretty sentences, and would preen over my clever turns of phrase. Poet-by-training, prose monkeys couldn’t compete with my 150+ word  sentences that drilled down into the very essence of societal manners merely from a protagonist entering a room.

But those sentences, too, were shit. No one could follow along. The beasts were eating their own tails. Communication was confused with obfuscation. I was making the strokes of art. But they were wild marks. I wasn’t in control of my craft. Not enough to make a unified work that conveyed what was in my brain.

And that was a good thing. Workshop gave me the room to experiment; my peers would pick apart these experiments and give me feedback on what worked and what didn’t. I look back fondly on my workshop stories. They were important stepping-stones in my creative development. But just as life-drawing studies aren’t meant to be published (unless you are that damn famous already), workshop stories are meant to be crammed in a tiny little desk drawer.

Here’s why.

1. Workshop stories are written in the haze of actual workshop.

You bang out a story. Maybe you have one stored up for just such an occasion. You’re writing down to the deadline. Or you smile as you pass around an object that you’ve been coaxing for weeks. If you’re a novice at craft when you make this object under duress or at your leisure, the object will always retain a hue of those novice brush-strokes.

Just like you don’t put your first still life up for sale, your first stories will always retain that youthful hue of partly-successful, partly-unsuccessful experimentation. The worst that can happen is a reader discovers you, reads your work, and forms a prematurely negative opinion about your work. Eventually, you may have an audience for these kinds of stories. The best you can do with this story is release it into the wild for free (or as a bundled freebie). But just as I keep my first drawings from art workshop under lock & key, you might not want readers to see just how bad you were when you started to get serious about craft until you’ve established a name for yourself as a writer.

2. Workshop stories are written for a specific audience.

Workshop stories are written and the around the embryotic fluid of their context: a group that meets weekly to read published authors and stories written for the workshop. This specific audience is at first foreign to you. You all speak different prose languages. If you’re new enough to writing, the stories have the tendency to read the same. Pop culture influence and pop literary influence is palpable.

Over the course of the workshop, this audience is primed by reading the same material, sharing a discussion on craft, reaching a consensus (or at least greater understanding) of the basic rules of writing. By the end of a good workshop, you know who your peers are. You’ve heard them critique you, you’ve heard them praise you. You know in a sense what this audience wants.

Good! You can now write for that audience. The problem is that audience is both super-literate (from having read a bunch of classic authors back-to-back) and familiar with each other (and understanding of particular readers’ wants/dislikes). This audience in no way reflects the reading public. That clever pun on The Death of Ivan Ilyich you made on page 5 that turned the key to the entire plot? Not such a big hit to someone who hasn’t read Tolstoy. Drag.

This can be a good thing. Workshops can be super-critical, influenced by stylistic concerns that your reading public won’t be. Did you eschew writing a first-person narrative about a young woman’s difficulty in a turbid relationship because that’s just so Sylvia Plath? Was your workshop genre-hostile, or even selectively genre hostile (science-fiction is the literary equivalent of gold, noir is hackneyed and artless)? Were the workshoppers just out of sync with your style/concerns/interests? All of these concerns can warp a starting writer’s sense of what they should be writing.  Writing workshops can be insular; the bubble of a 12 to 15 person setting doesn’t always carry through to the outside world.

The reading public isn’t privy to workshop concerns, much in the same way that arguments about counters and stem-height will make a non-typographer’s eyes glaze over. Your actual, non-workshop audience will get ticked off when it senses that you aren’t writing for them.

3. Even worse, some workshop stories are written for no audience.

One of the essential skills that workshop attempts to instill in its writers is how to write stories for an audience. It does this two ways: by showing a writer how their expectations match up to audience reactions; and introducing writers to the audience-community of other writers.

A writer can be led to an audience, but you can’t etc etc. Sometimes a writer will present a first story culled from their life, diary-style, replete with self-referential quirks that make no sense outside of the author’s head. Impenetrable stories are unpleasant reads. (Heaven help us if the author decides to help us out by footnoting it.) Workshop stories–especially early ones–tend to be wrapped up in what the author thinks is meaningful. Workshop authors are novices to prose that bridge the gap between what’s in their head and what’s in the audience’s head. This kind of meaning-making can take years of craft to hone, steady readers, and steady feedback.

Sometimes a writer will self-justify any criticism of their work as being “it’s not for you, it’s for me.” I am never sure how much of this statement covers a bruised ego, and how much of it is an actual writer’s belief that their writing is for themselves. Writing is meant to say something to someone who isn’t yourself.  If a writer is adamant on this point–wonderful! Start a journal.

This phenomenon is not limited to writing workshops. Look for this excuse to crop up approximately everywhere. The impetus to make art that is for oneself is fantastic; but then why insist on exhibiting work meant solely for yourself?

4. Workshop stories lack awareness of style’s function.

The function of style is not to do something stylistic. Style ain’t like clothes, worn and discarded at whim. Style communicates to your readers something essential. If you choose to write in a style that’s outside the norms, you need to make sure it is introduced early, often, and the reader is taught how to “read” the style you’ve chosen. Then you do something awesome with that style to justify its choice.

An example: switching “person” is one of the hardest things to pull off in fiction. If you write a story in third person, we expect it to stay there. James Clavell, however, gave that advice the finger. In Shogun, he would drill down from his omniscient third-person narrator into a close third, where the character’s thoughts, fears, and perceptions would bleed into our consciousness… until in a moment of supreme vulnerability, a character would begin to speak with an I-voice. Then he’d reign in the voice and pull us away from that intimacy. The breech would feel tragic. The tale of the rise of the Tokagawa Shogunate was full of such tragic breeches. Theme and style came together to create an atmosphere of vulnerability and loss that one or the other wouldn’t have  achieved.

And that is awesome.

Workshop stories generally operate on the level of experimentation. There’s the workshop story that plays around with second person (a perennial feature), but doesn’t quite know how to pull along the reader like Maile Meloy does in “Ranch Girl”. Or the workshop story that’s trying out an unreliable narrator, but by withholding too much information, the reader is simply frustrated by the multiplicity of readings rather than reveling in the possibilities Emily Carroll presents us in her supernatural fiction.

Within workshop, dabbling is important; outside of it, you need a more developed sense of just what the hell it is you are doing, and if it’s actually doing it.

5. Workshop stories generally know jack about the camera lens effect.

The camera lens guides what we seen on screen when we’re watching a film or TV show. We’re so inundated with visual culture now that there’s nary a word that can describe the effect that I notice in novice fiction. This is a failure of knowing how to pan, zoom, cut, and focus on information that’s important to the story.

Take a gander at this as an opening paragraph:

Daniel swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was groggy from the night of bad coffee, worse sleep. He got up and moved around his bedroom. He picked up his socks that he’d cast off onto the lamp in a fit of supreme nonchalance. Banging his head into the open drawer that he’d forgotten to close last night, he grumbled. He put the socks in the drawer. He closed it, walked across the room, and trudged out into the living room to make himself some coffee.

Aside from the fact that nothing remotely interesting happened in this paragraph (we learned nothing about the narrator, nothing about his state now aside from some cliched groggy-morning blues), the paragraph shows an extreme failure of the camera lens of the narrative. What about this scene is important? The coffee? The socks? Banging his head? Something that hasn’t even happened in the narrative yet? No matter your genre, every word counts and every second you need to be selling your story to your reader.

I’ll save an extended discussion about the camera lens effect for another post. Suffice to say, the camera lens effect is not a failure of editing (editing would likely clean the sentences up, or remove some of them without addressing the underlying problem). It’s a failure of the writer to choose important details with their camera lens. Instead they’ve focused on what they see the character doing in their head with their internal camera lens. They see it spool past their mind’s eye, so they write it.

Fiction is not about the details, it’s about the story. When a story is overwhelmed with finicky details (and our narrator is not a borderline autistic who needs to put those socks away or his world will be shattered), the scene becomes a waste of time.

It’s a pity (and a pain) that some workshop pieces are montages of scenes just like this one, strung together into a “story” that tells us nothing about its characters.

6. Workshop stories are pretentious, bland, cliched, or some toxic combination of the three.

It’s true. I’ve even written a story that was all three. It was about a young girl being smuggled up to Canada by her father and step-mother with the help of an ex-Vietnam vet. The short story read like a turn-of-the-century novel of manners.

The only cure for this ill is to read more, to read extensively, and to get some damn life experience that can break you out of regurgitating pop culture.

7. Workshop stories are not revised, or barely revised.

Writers everywhere say a story needs to be “edited.” What they actually mean is “revised.” Workshop stories are often not revised before they hit the workshop. The drafts that cause published writers to vomit in their mouth a little when they think back on their first novels? We read those.

Sometimes exclusively.

If you revise it once, or even twice after workshop, most likely you are still revising without a strong idea about how to fix all of the problems with your work because workshop critique was based on a first draft, maybe even an “ideas draft”. Not a finished product. What you need to do is workshop the story again (maybe even again) to receive feedback on a story that’s finally ready to be published. Most of us don’t get the chance to have a workshop story read more than once.

8. The best thing you can do with a workshop story is to forget about it until you can cannibalize it for later work.

I had seven advisers give me feedback on my workshop story! It’s totally my thesis!  I’m a special snowflake!

Here’s the Low-down Diddly Flump about writing programs. Feedback from your advisers is always aimed at the level of writer that you currently are. Feedback will attempt to push you to the next level. But if you’re at the bottom of the rope, you can only claw your way up so fast.

I have received amazing instruction from my writing teachers. Had dozens of them (been one of them), and most of them have been amazing. Yet I have a dim view of writing advice at the university level. I know how many students an adviser/instructor has to wrangle with. There is only so much you can do or say for each student before they’re pushed along to the next juncture. Even feedback on multiple drafts can only do/say so much.

I like to receive feedback from several different sources. A writing group outside the pay bubble. A writing partner who I exchange work with. Dan. A particular reader who I know likes the genre. Another reader who knows diddly-squat about the genre, but is game to give their feedback.

9. How do you know when a work is ready to be published?

If you don’t have reliable feedback of how good a work is (by producing work, sending it out, getting responses/sales), then you can only rely on a host of beta readers. Would they buy your work? Or at least read it without begrudging you the time they spent with it?

If you cannot judge how good your work is, then you need to put it away in a drawer until you have the clarity to evaluate it.

The best technique you can have in your toolkit is this: set aside three short stories, poems, whatever. One a classic from a respected author.  Another a piece by a favorite author written in the past ten years. One a piece you can’t believe was published (preferably also recent). After you have set aside your short story / novella / novel / epic poem for a few months (or years), take it out from that drawer. Read your piece side-by-side with these writers. Maybe your piece isn’t going to be world literature, but are you at least as good as your favorite author? Are you maybe half as good? One-tenth as good?

How about the piece you can’t believe was published? If you’re better than that–go ahead and throw your story into the great blue.

But if you’re not… stuff it back into the drawer.

Because polishing shit just gives you shiny shit.

 

Writers, what do you do with your workshop stories?

 

Posted on

Dabbler or Disciple: How Serious Are You About Writing?

Photo by laurelville_gallery on Flickr.

Today’s guest post comes from Ruth over at Bullish Ink, who delivers some stern truths about the passion and drive the writing life requires.

Do you want to be a writer or do you just want to write?

Here’s the difference. Those who want to be a writer experience the Writing Life as an unquenchable fever in their soul and those who want to write  experience it as a casual crush.

There’s no right or wrong answer. My objective here is to simply help us figure out what we want from the Writing Life. Do we want to dabble with it like a casual date or become its devoted disciple?

Truth is, the Writing Life doesn’t want to be penciled in. It wants to screw up your schedule without any resistance on your part. It demands your slavish devotion. You want to be a writer? Cancel your gym membership. Give up your favorite tv show. Beg out of dinner dates.

Committing To The Writing Life

Think of it this way – would you only spend fifteen minutes a day with your best friend or significant other? What kind of relationship would that produce?

Imagine saying to your spouse: “Well, I’d love to pick up milk on the way home, pudding-pie, but you’ve used up your allotted time today. How about I pencil it in for tomorrow – time permitting?”

If you continually tell your Writing Life that you can only afford it fifteen minutes a day, the relationship will self-destruct. It isn’t going to wait around forever for you to get your life figured out. It’s going to pack its bags and hit the road.

Once the two of you split the sheets, reconciliation is no peach. Forget about open arms, tender reunions and mind-blowing make-up sex. It isn’t that easy  to rekindle the romance.

I’m speaking from experience here. The Writing Life and I split up a few years back. Got pretty messy. Things were said. Feelings hurt. Vows made. Just about the darkest period of my history.

And trust me, reuniting was no picnic. Took a couple years to get our mojo back. I had to put in a lot of late nights and write hundreds of thousands of words of crap before we were able to effectively communicate again.

And that’s when I realized that I didn’t just want to write, I wanted to be a writer. I was smitten with the written word. The more I read, the more I wanted to read. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.

Making Time For The Writing Life

The paradox is this: we are so damn intent on figuring how to fit the Writing Life into our day-planners and warping out because there just aren’t enough hours in the day, when the simple truth is that we make time for our passion without giving it a second thought.

See, if we are passionate about writing, if our hearts pump ink and the scent of paper causes us to tremble, we will make room for writing with nary a thought to logistics.

Remember what those first few weeks of ‘being in love’ feel like? You don’t need to eat. You don’t need to sleep. You have all the time in the world to bask in the presence of your lover because you make the time.

Your calendar miraculously clears itself. Duty and obligation and busy-work fall away – unmissed, rendered unnecessary and no longer important.

That’s what it’s like to be a writer. You instantaneously and unapologetically give up activities and interests that previously defined your entire existence so that you are free to pursue your passion: the Writing Life.

Just as creative talent makes room for itself, passion makes time to pursue the lover.

The Bottom Line

So, is writing something you plug into the weekday schedule like the gym and the dentist?

Or is it something that causes you to forget to buy groceries, change your socks and flounder for your child’s name?

Are you dabbling with writing or are you its devoted disciple?

Until you move the Writing Life from your To Do List to your Can’t Wait To Do List, you won’t be able to bridge the gap between wanting to be and being.

Ruth is a forty-something administrative professional who enjoys fast-paced stories, vintage cars and southern rock. A reader by birth, paper-pusher by trade and novelist by design, storytelling is her passion. You can read more of her take on the writing life at www.bullishink.com or swing by the frugal living blog she shares with her sis at www.shoestringwithstyle.com.

Posted on

Goals, Deadlines and Dead Men

On Wednesday, I ran into the problem that plagues all public writing events: the dreaded realization that I’d bitten off more than I could choke down my already-packed writing schedule. And its sister realization: I will need to scale back my goals. By admitting it publicly. I could imagine the cheers and boos at my next check-in.

I am, of course, speaking of ROW80, A Round of Words in 80 Days.

Dan and I decided to explore new writing communities at the beginning of October. I thought that an alternative to NaNoWriMo might help me jump start my writing (because, frankly, November can fuck itself. Dan has made the case that writing can be equally difficult throughout the year, but November offers its host of unique challenges to someone who has been a professional / grad student for seven of the past ten years.) I discovered ROW80 through Chuck Wendig’s Twenty-Five Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo list. The novelty of its name drew me in. The length of the challenge (80 days) and the flexibility of its goals (completely up to the individual participant) were right for my needs.

I decided to give it a shot, fired up WordPress, and resurrected my long-dead blog.

Two weeks into the event and there are extra poems plumping up my journal pages. However, for two weeks’ worth of check-ins, I have come up short to my weekly goals. Really short. The pressure is building to reevaluate my goals and possibly change them. Because ROW80 isn’t a four week event, even blowing weekly goals for the first two weeks could result in finishing the event with my original goals well in the bag. So why bother scaling back only two weeks in? The deadline itself is so far away (December 22nd!). Isn’t that giving up?

Goals vs. Deadlines

As I wrote in Why Do You Write, Part Two, writing to deadlines can be one of the best motivation tools for a writer. You have a date that is a cut-off point for your creative exertions. The deadline gains its power by being an immutable event. Passing the deadline with work unfinished is to be marked. You are a dead man if you aren’t finished.

To combat the procrastination that arrives bundled with your deadline, the weekly (or daily) goal the tool that guides your writing output. By its nature, the goal is not as dire as the deadline. It is the template that we use to chart our uncertain progress. Goals are meant to encourage and challenge us; to escort us as smoothly as possible to the completion of any ambitious undertaking.

For those of us who write in more than a single-month sprint (where a come-from-behind win can leave you flush with success), the repeated flouting of goals can lead to a pattern of negative reactions to our work. When week after week passes with goals unmet or ignored, something has to change–the goal itself, or the writer’s attitude towards it.

It boils down to the question, would I rather feel good about surpassing an easy goal or feel kind of shitty about not living up to a strenuous goal? Which of these feelings actually motivates me?

The answer to the question is (like all things worth doing) complicated by the particulars of the event and of my attitudes towards goals.

The Event Itself

ROW80 is a writing contest that takes place over the course of 80 days. There are somewhere between 80 to 120 participants checking in each week. It’s a small circle that allows you to get to know several other bloggers well. It’s highly advised that you also have a ROW80 Buddy, who will be down in the trenches with you, checking on  your progress, supporting, cheering, and mocking along the way.

The goals are flexible. The hook for ROW80 is that people with busy schedules need to have realistic goals. You tailor the writing to a sprint or a leisurely stroll, state your goals publicly, link to them using the ROW80 Blog Hop and then check-in once or twice a week on Sundays and Wednesdays to announce to the group how you are progressing.

Some shoot to write every day, some set modest weekly word counts, others for specific number of minutes spent writing per day. Most participants have concurrent goals that are only tangentially related to writing (e.g. to read/comment on fellow participants’ blogs)–and some goals that have nothing to do with it, except perhaps to make a positive life change.

I respond to word counts, so I decided to set a word count goal. Because I write poetry, 50,000 words is unthinkable. I chose a word-count goal for ROW80–5,000 words or 100 poems in 80 days. My secondary goals were to write a blog posts twice a week, and to do something creative each week day.

What’s happening goal-wise?

To meet the goal of 100 poems in 80 days, I have to write at least 10 poems a week to hit the final goal by December 22nd. This is an incredibly ambitious goal, as I wrote one poem in seven days for week one, and eight poems in seven days for week two. The 5,000 word goal also seems to be a pipe-dream; many of my poems do not break thirty words. Writing posts has proven to be much simpler. I write a guest post for the Surly Muse each week, and a single check-in post for the Dusty Journal on Wednesdays. Doing something creative every week day has been off-and-on. Some days I have been entirely swamped by the mundane emergencies that motivate the working world. This goal is more of an intention than something measurable, and I don’t plan to drop the intention to do something creative each day (even if it doesn’t happen).

How do you evaluate Goals?

At the two-week check-in, ROW80 asked us to evaluate our goals according to the SMART rubric. Are your goals Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely?

Specific: Hone in on what you want your goal to be. “Writing every day” is not very specific if you have a particular project to work on. “Writing a blog post every day” or “working on my novel every day” are far more preferred as goals. They offer you less room to wiggle out of your goals (“I wrote a grocery list today! That’s writing, right?”)

Measurable: Something quantifiable. I think quantifiable goals are good when you have a specific project to work on. However, non-quantifiable/non-specific goals such as “doing something creative every day” makes room for non-quantifiable tinkering, daydreaming, journaling, drawing, and other creativity that I like to infuse my life. The thing is, don’t go crazy with specific/measurable goals or you lose out on the creative sparks that often start your projects that do require specific/measurable goals.

Attainable: Can you reach your goal, in the most perfect of circumstances?

Realistic: Can you reach your goal, given your schedule demands or your inability to take advantage of every free second (which would be all of us)?

Timely: Can you make these goals happen in a timely fashion? Can you meet your goals every week, every few days, or every day? What is the block of time that you need to schedule around?

According to this rubric, my goals are specific & measurable, and in some universe attainable (I have written 100 poems in 80 days–10 years ago) but not realistic according to my recent output.

If I have set a non-realistic goal for myself, what should I do?

I can either spend the next eight weeks watching myself miss goals or spend the next eight weeks meeting reduced goals. While the reasonable thing to do would seem to be jump on the “change your goals” bandwagon, there are some things that I need to consider before moving the goalpost.

Since I have participated in large-scale writing projects before, I know how I have reacted to meeting/missing goals in the past. If you haven’t noted your behavior in similar situations, trying to achieve unrealistic goals might help you discover how you react to both big and small goals. Instead, you could just imagine how you might react in such situations. It is helpful to write out possibilities.

These are the possibilities that I see happening:

Three Possible Reactions to Missing Unrealistic Goals

1. Because I miss my goals every week, I begin to tell myself that it is “okay” to miss goals. I no longer try to achieve this goal. My writing becomes unfocused and unambitious. I end the event with far fewer poems than if I had just written poems at my normal rate (which is about 1 -2 per two weeks).

2. Because I miss my goals every week, I try to make up lost ground later in the competition. This interferes with other creative goals. I sacrifice time to other projects. I am somewhat happy to meet my ROW80 goals, but I have put aside equally-important creative endeavors to achieve this success. To add insult to injury, I have forced myself to write more than I am reasonably inspired to write. I write a lot of junk poems to finish the competition.

3. I make time out of my free time / relaxation time to write more poems. I strive to achieve my weekly goals each week, even though I am behind. I write more poems than I would have otherwise; my desire to “make up” for missed goals gives me a large number of poems at the end of the Round than if I hadn’t joined the competition. Most of them are not junk.

Two Reactions to Meeting Reduced Goals

4. Because I meet my goals every week, I do not try to write more poems once I have hit my quota. I am satisfied to write at a reduced rate. I finish the event with more poems than if I hadn’t participated, but I have also missed out on a chance to push my writing outside of my comfort zone.

5. Because I meet my goals every week, I am not unhappy week after week as I watch myself falling further behind my (completely arbitrary) initial goals. I finish the event with more poems than if I hadn’t participated. I feel energized by my successful participation in ROW80. Because I am writing to a realistic level, I do not have to sort through a disheartening large number of junk poems.

What do I see happening?

As a writer (and as a person), I am motivated by feeling that I need to catch up to a goal that has been set in front of me. Seemingly insurmountable goals makes my surly muse sit up and take heed. If a goal is demonstrably flexible (that is, if I change a goal mid-stream), I become less invested in it. Once I know that a goal can be bent, my mind will find ways of bending it again. I will make excuses and not achieve more than what is in front of me.

Therefore, I see option (3) being the most likely outcome of having unrealistic goals, and option (4) being the most likely outcome of realistic goals.

Based on my overall goal (to publish another book of poetry at the beginning of 2012), I want to have as many good poems as possible by the end of ROW80. To make that book a reality, I feel it is important to push outside of my comfort zone.

It has been several years since I have tried to write at my full potential; so much of my energy has been going towards professional/grad school (especially in the past two years), I no longer have a good idea of what my maximum capability is for writing. It would be in my best interest to try to achieve unrealistic goals than to settle for more realistic ones. So those unrealistic goals? I’m going to be keeping them. I’ll endure the weeks of feeling like I am not measuring up for the single week where I do.

Clearly, this conclusion is specific to my circumstances. What is your reaction to unrealistic goals? Realistic ones? Which outcomes motivate you? The desire to catch up, or the pleasure in exceeding your own expectations? Do you work best when you achieve small goals, or when you chase after sky dragons?

 

Posted on

Guest Post: Why Do You Write? Part Two

Every writer needs to know why they write. Being honest about your goals and your motivations will save you heartache in the long run. If you understand why you are embarking on a project, chances are you will have less once-promising projects gathering dust in the corner. In Part One, I made the case for why introspection is important to writers. The first two reasons for writing that were covered in Part One were “because I can” and “because I want to”.

For the majority of self-directed writers, “because I can” and “because I want to” cover most of the reasons why we embark on a particular project. We want to take pleasure in our craft, and/or we want to say something with our work. But now I want to come to grips with the final two reasons for writing. I will preface by saying that these two cases pose their own special challenges, and might suggest to you that some of your problems with your writing project come from the type or quality of writing that you are doing.

Why do you write the particular project that you are currently working on?

Because I need to. There is an important difference between want and need. Whereas want is defined by how it adds to what you already have, Need is defined by its absence. When you aren’t fulfilling a need, some part of the whole is suffering. When you are fulfilling a need, you feel normal. When you are writing from need, the writing makes us feel human again. Anything less than that is a want.

To write because you need to write is a matter of no small importance. There are a number of reasons why people need to write, and I won’t speculate too deeply about the underlying reasons (because they are usually of a personal nature). The first reason is for cognitive or social aid. The second reason is for relief & closure. The third (and least distressing) reason is habit. I have written for all three reasons, so I’ll do my best to explain what these three things mean to me.

The “cognitive or social aid” is like Leonard Shelby tattooing crucial names, dates, words on his body in Memento, but not because you can’t remember things. This is the kind of writing that you do to put your life in order. Using writing to make to-do lists or work schedules is fairly common; but need can be more advanced than that.

For ten years I carried a journal with me at all times. When I felt overwhelmed (in a “I am going to vomit all over this Turkish rug” kind of way), I would find an empty chair and open my journal. I would jot down words, phrases, people’s names, descriptions of the ceiling, the walls, the decor, the food–sketching out the scene before me like I was writing novelisitic exposition. All of the things my brain could not process–as I wrote them, bit by bit, reality would reassert its hold. The panic would subside and I could get on doing what I was doing. Without the journal, it was all but impossible for me to function in a social world. The upside was that I had lots of scraps of well-sketched places, of emotion crystallized in its heightened state. Being a frugal writer, I never want to throw out anything I do. So I incorporated these descriptions into short stories or poems; I used these passages to springboard into story ideas.

The “relief & closure” reason is probably the most familiar to us as writers. Who hasn’t taken up the pen (or keyboard) after a blow to the heart? I started writing daily in my late teens. The relief I was looking for–the relief from mood swings the size of a Texas prairie. I would track these moods and puzzle out wildly exaggerated reactions to mild slights. Journaling was a way to get at the cause of a low self-worth and anger.

This writing was a mental health tool.  It didn’t have an immediate project around it. I had just wanted to feel better. Over time, however, the journaling became the project that I needed to collect & polish into a novella. The crisis came to a head during my senior thesis. To graduate from my program, undergrads had to put together a long paper or a creative project. I had started and stopped a collection of short stories that were pretty objects without any real emotional heat. My love of a 3rd person objective voice didn’t help the bloodless, above-it-all-ness of these stories. All of my writing projects were falling flat. My thesis adviser finally sat me down and asked me about it. I told her it was because the story I needed to tell was suffocating my ability to feel sympathetic towards any of my other protagonists. It was scuttling all of my other stories before they were even told. Clearly, she said, that is the story you need to write. You can’t be a writer until you tell it.

The worst part of this story was that my need to tell it made it take a high toll on my relationships. It was a story of trauma, and it became difficult to continue. To continue meant to relive the pain like a blow to the body.  To alleviate some of that too-close-to-home-ness, a writer is advised to disguise the story. If the trauma you suffered was physical, then make it emotional instead. If it was sexual, make it psychological instead. Just bring the need and the pain with you to the keyboard.

When you are writing for relief or closure, it is desperately important that you push through the pain and finish the project. Sometimes it means that you feel lighter when you’ve finished. Other times it means you feel pressed thin–like you’ve given some essential sliver to the page. It is impossible to tell whether writing will be felt like an unburdening or a wound, but it is crucial that you find out. Because leaving that one large project unfinished means that you can never quite close the book on the event that caused it. It will rankle. And it will spill out into every other project you tackle.

Finally, and least dire, writing can become a need through habit. Dan has highlighted Ray Bradbury‘s description of physical unease at going days without writing. Those of us who develop the taste for everyday writing begin to need it like a drug. Going off of it leads to a short-term feeling of euphoria and I’m-fines–followed immediately by decline and bottoming out. Don’t be put off by that comparison; I’ve heard the same from my cycling-addicting folks. Your body learns to reward any kind of exertion with endorphines, to make you keep doing what you do. Whether it’s 20 miles of biking or 20k of words.

Usually these writing habit grow up around a certain kind of writing. Mine was journaling. Ray Bradbury’s was writing super-awesome publishable fiction.

While it was nice to be writing daily (with a bonus smugness that comes from being able to say that you write at least 300 words per day), after I worked through most of my pressing issues in my novella, journaling wasn’t the kind of writing I wanted to be doing. How, then, could I channel my need to write every day into writing that I wanted to do? I haven’t rightly figured out how to switch that same level of dedication to the more optional “want-to” kind of writing. But I have learned that to make headway in the projects you want to do, you must finish the projects you need to do first. And then learn how to let go of that writing once it is no longer helping you meet your goals.

 

Because I have to. If you have ever had a paid (or unpaid) job where you were required to write, produce, design, draw, or create on a deadline, you know this reason all too well. Depending on how well you do with deadlines (some of us rise up to meet them, some of us procrastinate until we hit them, some of us crumble at the sight of them), this is probably the best category in terms of motivation because it will illuminate your writing persona.

If you are the type to crumble at the face of deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise), there are undoubtedly a host of organizational, motivational, and self-esteem issues lurking under the guise of not being able to meet deadlines. You will need to deal with these issues a step at a time, and to let go of your preconceived notions about what kind of writing you are doing on a day-to-day basis. You aren’t making art, you aren’t making perfection, you are just getting it done.

Grad school gave me a crash course in how bad my procrastination had become when I tried to write two quarter-long papers in the course of a day. I don’t think I have overcome that procrastination tendency with projects that are imposed on me. It is the downfall of the deadline. If you know when it must be finished and you don’t have the spark of passion for the project, the temptation to ride the line may become impossible to overcome.

However, with the “have to” impulse, at least work is produced. If your self-started projects are languishing, the deadline is the single most powerful tool to get it jump-started. Most of us are programmed to respect and/or fear the Deadline; we will produce in the face of one.

If you are writing for a self-started project, you have some flexibility in setting deadlines. In my experience, the solution to this kind of procrastination is smaller, frequent deadlines with a more open-ended date for the finished product. That way work is produced at a steady rate, and the flexible finish-by date gives you a bit of wiggle room if (when) the project takes more time in revision. In my experience, when you are turning okay okay or average prose on deadlines, it takes a bit more work to make it pop when you are shaping it into its final form.

Most of us have the necessary tools at our fingertips: blogging platforms, community writing goals, public accountability. They keep our deadlines honest. Even if you fudge yours, as I am doing for ROW80 (I’m only checking in once per week on Wednesdays), a written log of work you’ve done for your self-imposed deadlines can show you how to chip away at your project, one step at a time.

If neither privately-affirmed nor publically-stated goals have the power to motivate you to work; if you don’t feel guilty/anxious/disappointed/whatever when  you watch your deadlines blow by (or even if you do, and choose to do nothing about it)–at this point I’d suggest taking up a different craft than writing.

 

So. What does this all mean?

A few years ago, I had the good fortune to collaborate with a friend on an epically-scaled project. We were both enthusiastic fans with time to burn, so we decided to create a fan fiction alternative season for our current tv obsession (Buffy). Our fascination with Victorian England led us down a literary fiction route to old Sherlock Holmes stories and H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels.  We wanted to blend pop culture and Victorian lit, and have a good time while we were doing it.

Production schedules were created, character charts were fleshed out, character artwork was drawn. Amazingly, we had attracted a stable of four writers to write an entire season’s worth of stories.

Of the 140,000+ planned words, only 16,000 of them were ever written. Only one finished episode was produced. The stable of writers evaporated, leaving an unrealized world in shambles. While the planning itself was immensely enjoyable, and I had the pleasure of brainstorming with writers who constantly impressed me, I couldn’t get past the wasted planning.

What happened?

Quite simply, there was a crisis of motivation. All of the writers approached the project with different motivations. Some of the writers saw the project as an opportunity to write “worry-free”–it was just fan-fiction, right? But the moment when they were confronted with a word processor, a story, and some general deadlines, they discovered that writing fan fiction isn’t a magical gateway into writing motivation. You have to be already motivated to write. The writing won’t show up just because you do.

In fact, most of the project writers (myself included) chose to try fan fiction because they were having trouble with “serious” writing. Each writer had a novel that they would take off the shelf to tinker with. This shiny new fan fiction project promised deadlines, editors who cared about their work, and rigorous fore-planning. As each of the writers had crises of motivation–some caused by the amount of work they were putting into the project, some caused by the stress of writing itself–many of them asked the question, “why am I devoting so much energy to this fan project? Shouldn’t I be doing serious writing?” And honestly, I would have to answer yes, why the hell are you wasting time on my project? It wasn’t their vision after all.

My motivation was different; I wanted to see if I had the ability to self-start, finish, polish, and publish a single story. I hadn’t written a single finished story in workshop; I hadn’t written any kind of fiction in more than a year. I wanted to know if I still had the stuff. From this initial spark, my run-away enthusiasm of working with like-minded writers inflated the project well beyond the bounds that any of us intended it to (as noxious gases tend to do). The production schedules were a part of that bloat… they didn’t reflect in any way shape or form my honest motivations for starting the project.

Although the failure of this project squatted in the “regret” portion of my brain, it took me awhile to recognize that I did in fact accomplish my original goals. I wrote, and I revised. I wrote “Eleven Quid” in about a month; I finished it, polished it, and published it. (After its website went defunct, I slapped it up on Fanfiction.net.) By that measure, the project was a success. Had I kept a clearer focus on my goals–on my own reasons for writing–I would either kept the enthusiasm from running away with itself (haw!) or realized that the project’s dissolution wasn’t a waste of time. I got what I came for. And based on the subsequent creative output of a few of the other project members, they too found the motivation they were looking for.

The reasons a writer writes, how they started, what their goals are, and why they choose to work on a particular project have everything to do, then, with what projects get finished and which ones get discarded.

So. Why do you write?

 

 

Posted on

Guest Post: Why Do You Write? Part One

It was balmy March afternoon in 2008 that I sat down to chat with my good friend and writing support group of one, Dan Swensen. At the time, my main energies were directed towards posting on message boards about writing. I had set aside my habit of daily journaling.  It had been years since I had written a poem, and more than 18 months since I’d even sniffed at a short story. With a tinge of sadness, and a feeling of defeat, I remember typing, “I’m not a writer. I haven’t been for a while now.”

Those words crushed me, as I had stumbled across a fundamentally true thing. A writer writes. They don’t just read books about writing, they don’t just chat about writing, they don’t just make plans about writing. A writer writes something. I wasn’t writing anything.

This epiphany ate at me.  I’d like to say that I went on a writing tear, that my entire attitude toward writing transformed. No. It took a few months. And when I started, I started small. A few poems while I was doing live-in work in Idyllwild. Then, a few articles for a creative magazine.  A few more poems. Another pause. A few more years.

It wasn’t until this January that a question reared its head and demanded my full attention. “Why the hell am I not writing?” The fuller implications of this question were, “why are you letting bad workshop experiences limit your creative output? Why are you letting your old work languish? Why are you not actively shaping your creative life?”

This second epiphany lightened the heaviness of being a failed writer that I had been carrying with me. To be a writer, all you have to do is transform motivation into writing through the alchemy of keyboard, pen, paper.

The key that I had been missing was motivation. The reason I’d been lacking it was because I had a dearth of honesty. I had not answered the very simple question that big mucky-muck writers and writers down in the trenches get asked but few answer in a comprehensive way: “why do you write?”

Why do you write?

This seemingly simple question actually has three components to it (hence the likelihood of getting an abbreviated answer when you ask your other writer friends): “what are your general goals for your writing and/or what do you hope to get from your writing,” “how did you get started writing / why do you continue to write,” and “why do you write a particular project.”

So. Why do you write?

It is vitally important to be honest here.

If your answer is full of fakery and pretensions towards art, fame or money that you don’t actually want–or are able to achieve–there will be a nagging gap between the work you are doing (or procrastinating) and your ultimate goals. The greater share of writers that I have known have been filled with anxiety over their ability to achieve either artfulness in their writing, or the ability to feed themselves with their work. Then I left workshop, and met writers unconcerned with either goal; these writers worked (one, two, three) other jobs, and tried for skillful writing, but didn’t erect A LIVEABLE WAGE or the PROGRESS OF ART as their goalposts. And they were all the more successful (according to their goals) for it.

You are courting disaster if your goals even include a seemingly more modest goal of WRITING A POPULAR NOVEL. Basing your goals on the tastes of audiences is like drying your laundry in an oncoming storm. Some novels are popular; most are not; and even if you write something popular, chances are slim that you could ever name-drop your novel at a party or a twitter feed and get hushed and reverent responses. It is a far easier goal to “write a novel that has wide appeal/large possible audience,” since that goal makes no presumption of popularity–only of its potential to be popular.

Setting goals that you can live with, and that reflect your desires is the key here. Sometimes finding a goal you can get your mind around is as simple as figuring out the proper way to get at your goal.

I write because I want to wrangle the chaotic thoughts in my head and make something meaningful to others from that. I write poetry because, frankly, I have issues with brevity. I like cultivating this habit in myself.

 

So. Why did you start writing?

It’s a common experience for writers to get started early in life, but there are hundreds of path into the craft. Perhaps you started writing because you always wanted to live the glamorous Hollywood life of an out-of-work screenwriter. You needed to find a sense of closure from traumatic events. You were dying to rail against the exponential witlessness of pop-culture commentary. A person’s history layers new motivations onto the original writing impulse, making each person’s reason for writing a story itself (and is possibly the reason why so many first novels out of workshops have protagonists figuring out how/why they want to write as a part of the main plot).

I was good at writing when I was a kid, and it snowballed from there. When I discovered that I lacked the attention span to make novels, I settled on poems–then grew to love their gem-like qualities. My attitude toward writing changed dramatically during college; some of this story can be found in past articles on writing workshops at the university level, some of it opens this article.

I keep a running tab of places where I’ve talked about my writing history, because the story changes each time. Details are dropped or remembered. Different writing influences are foregrounded. Mentors’ advice seems more or less meaningful based on current experience. How you tell this story to yourself affects how you think of yourself as a writer. If you think your story is, “I’m a failed writer who couldn’t make it in workshop,” that is the kind of writer you will be. If you change that story to, “I am a writer who was failed by workshops, and now I need to remedy that,” suddenly the possibilities open. It may seem pedantic to you to talk about writing this way–but I guarantee that if you are not aware of the stories that zip through your mind at laser speed, you will be unaware of how pervasively they affect your entire enterprise of creating.

I cannot overstate how important it is to know thyself, writer.

Sit down with a journal / word processor / blog and make a narrative about your journey with writing, and don’t pull any damn punches. I dedicate a couple page in the back of my journal to evaluating my progress each year, usually after a major turning point in my writing. Major turning points are when I decide to start a new project, finish an old one, shelve a project indefinitely, start a new blog, explore a new genre, find a new writing group.

Keeping abreast of all of your writing activities helps with your honesty. If, like me, you bemoan the lack of writing in your life, then discover that you spend all of your time blogging, commenting, Twittering, guest posting, updating LiveJournal… clearly you are writing. Your issue may  simply be a matter of the type of writing that you are doing.

 

So. Why do you write the particular project that you are currently working on?

If there is one take-away from this post, it should be that specificity and honesty are your most important tools. While it is important to understand your impulse toward writing, it is equally important to understand why you are embarking on your specific project.

In my estimation, the reasons for working on a project boil down to four big categories: “because I can,” “because I want to,” “because I need to,” and “because I have to”.

Because I can. This category roughly covers the reasons that roughly begin with a, “why not?” or “why not me?” XX wrote the great teenage vampire-werewolf romance novel and made cash hand-over-fist, why can’t I do the same? I have a bunch of XX lying around, why don’t I collate it into a publishable book? I wrote an excellent post on XX the other day that got a lot of response from my readers, why don’t I write a book/blog/series of vignettes on that?

The “because I can” category is the weakest of all categories for sustaining a project, because the motivation dries up once the novelty wears off. Once you decide to write that novel in Reno just to watch it die, it’s important to keep the drive alive by making provisions for it in one of the other categories. That is to say, once you’ve decided on a a project (a novel, a collection, a screed) just because it’s something you can do–you need to own the project. You need to become invested in it by igniting a genuine desire to see the project through. This can often be achieved during the falling-in-love brainstorming stage, where adding more detail or researching new facets of the project bring you new sense of pleasure at your choice of project.

If the project fails to captivate you on a basic level, you should move on. A project that fails to interest you at its outset, and continues to fail to interest you as you get deeper into planning it, won’t bring you closer to any of your writing goals (unless being bored with your art/craft is one of your goals!). Readers can sniff out a writer doing it without passion (although faked passion will do in a pinch, if you have a knack for that). For writers who have gone through higher education, writing without passion is one of those habits that we have picked up, like tics in an open grassy field, and you seriously need to divest yourself of notion that a project will magically become interesting to you on page 200 if it isn’t already interesting to you by page 20.

If you insist on pursuing a project where the motivation never materializes, you need to impose deadlines on yourself as though the project were any other must-do task. I suggest treating the project like one of a client-designer relationship: set hard dates for various parts of the project, try various permutations of your subject/theme/project out until you settle on something you can live with, and make sure there is a critical eye on the other end that can evaluate your total work.

Because I want to. This category is probably the most familiar to us as writers. I write because, hell, I like the feeling of sitting down to a blank page and defacing it with words. I actively pursue that feeling by creating projects that will allow me to write, scribble, doodle to my heart’s content.

But “because I want to” is much broader category than simply wanting to write. It also includes wanting to say something, do something, or demonstrate something. And it is the category that writers, flush with the giddiness of having put something on the page, often have no clue about. Especially because, much of the time, a writer has no clue what she/he has written until someone gives feedback on the project.

Two examples will illustrate my abstract ramblings. Swensen and I have both suffered from this set-back. A couple of years ago, I was editing a fantasy piece for Dan that was eventually going to become a large world-building novel about a group of soldiers who were deep in a guerrilla war with another race. When I asked him why he had stalled, he mumbled something about having an issue with what his story was trying to say. He wanted to work on a project that expressed something beyond, “this was a cool story about soldiers. Badass.”

I was stumped by Dan’s trouble. It was pretty clear to me that he was writing a fantasy novel that was borrowing literary tropes from war novels to make a more realistic, less high-fantasy-feeling setting that ultimately decried the war and violence that other fantasy novels glamorize (or at least make highly desirable).  When I told him this–he was equally stumped. He didn’t think he was writing that at all. These newly uncovered themes rose up dauntingly on the page. Did he want to write a novel with such weighty concerns, especially since the indelicate handling of topics about soldiering and warfare could bring criticism from a pool of readers he never even considered (the war novel aficionados)? Could he possibly do justice to these tropes, which were admittedly far outside of his areas of interest?

While I felt Dan’s anxieties were unfounded, they arose because he genuinely did not know what he wanted out of his writing. The project was eventually sideburnered in favor of his current project, now in its second draft. Dan figured out what he wanted to do/say with this new project, and felt the scope of the project was manageable to him. Ultimately this novel succeeded where a more ambitious (and less desired) project did not.

My problem was a bit different from Dan’s. I didn’t have the motivation to even attempt a book, even though I was sitting on a cache of poems that were begging to be edited. I had been discouraged by writing workshops, where I had been repeatedly shown the door and told to try a different genre. My writing didn’t fit anywhere. I became convinced it, therefore, fit nowhere. I stopped pursuing poetry because I convinced myself to stop wanting that.

In the end, the anger of deferring to authority sat up and demanded to know why I convinced myself not to want this. I wanted to be a published poet. I could taste the desire (it was a bit tangy). Once ignited, that want-to impulse sustained me through a self-imposed deadline of three months from inception to completion; writing, editing, and manuscript design on the back of grad school, teaching, and deteriorating health. The want-to was born from the desire to show the amalgamation of every polite workshop rebuff that I wasn’t the nothing voice. The work amounted to about 2 hours of writing, editing, and design on the project per day. The magic simply was that I would sit down at my keyboard and get something done even on days where I was tired to the bone.

I know that many writers have buttons that activate see-this-through-anything mode. If you are honest about who you are and what you want (and take the time to reflect on these questions to find these things out), it is possible to find the fire/drive to see projects through. The tricky part comes when you need to yoke that fire to a project that might otherwise seem marginal to you.

While Dan has said that being alone while you write is one of the most fundamental truths of writing; to me, the most fundamental truth is that you must learn the alchemical transformation to generate motivation even when you are staring down into the source-water of your anxieties, goals, and desires.

That does it for part one. In part two, I’ll tackle the remaining “Because you need to” and “Because you have to” reasons, and tie everything up with some peppy words about motivation and deadlines.