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Writers, Don’t Forget the Love

Photo by Muffet on Flickr.

Today is Valentine’s Day, that special time of year when a person’s fancy turns to thoughts of soulless corporate megaliths co-opting our emotions so they can sell greeting cards, fancy dinners, and Russel Stover assortments. As we look to the sky and scream curses at a blind and uncaring universe that has so blighted us, we remind ourselves that love cannot be bought, at least not when some company explicitly recommends it.

Okay, let me start again.

Today I actually do want to talk about love. The love that we, as writers, can sometimes lose sight of when things get tough.

Writing advice blogs are generally full of hard-nosed advice about What It Takes to Be a Real Writer. There’s often not attention paid to the froofy bits, because in general, writers are assumed to have that pretty well locked down. All writers truly-madly-deeply want to write, so cultivating craft is far more important than cultivating passion, right?

I’m not so sure.

I know a lot of writers who struggle with their passions. The calling becomes a chore. The joy gets buried under a mountain of obligation. Yes, writing is hard work. Editing is hard work. Querying is a beat that can sap the will to live. Rejection sucks. There’s plenty not to like, ultimately. But they are necessary things.

And that’s why the writing blogs share their expertise about these necessities, because they can’t be ignored, much as we would love to ignore them.

But I think it’s equally as important not to lose sight of the reason you’re putting yourself through all this in the first place. Don’t forget the love.

Feeling nauseated yet?

I want to link to a video that’s been stuck in my head for the past few days. In this brief talk, Shawn Achor talks about how we can rewire our brains for happiness. It’s not that long, and it’s funny and informative stuff.

I included this video because I believe in the “happiness advantage” — that happiness is more productive than guilt or self-recrimination.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m generally a gold-star procrastinator. I’ve put things off to such an epic level that they’re deeply embarrassing to talk about. Writing is no exception. There are days where I would do just about anything to dodge the scary work — whether it’s busting out a draft, editing a troublesome passage, or outlining.

I want to do these things — to hear me talk about it, anyway. But they intimidate. They annoy. They inflate to unpleasant proportions. I still write, but there’s all this bullshit I go through first, and it’s exhausting.

Some people don’t struggle with this. Some people are all type-A writers who go forward without any internal struggle. I envy those people. Most of my life, I haven’t been that guy. But I’m working on re-wiring my brain.

My method isn’t complicated or large in scale, because I think complicated large-scale methods are a great way to fail. Every morning, I have some coffee. I have some breakfast. I fire up Write or Die. A half-hour to bang out a blog post. Break. Edit the blog post. Break. Another half hour to write a scene from my Big List of Scenes in whatever I’m working on at the moment. Break. Then, work on whatever I want.

So at the very least, I’ve gotten in a solid hour of writing. Often much more, but I don’t go through the day promising myself I’ll write, and then shrug and let it go, thus buying myself a ticket for the Guilt Train.

The biggest benefit of this is that it builds momentum. Every day, the writing gets easier. The words come faster. A couple of days without writing, and I feel like I’m working the rust off the gears again. But I built the habit, day after day, and soon enough it just became a part of me. I don’t dread writing, or agonize over not writing, when I stick to this plan.

This method works for me. I encourage you to find what works for you. Try new things until you discover the best way to break through your laziness, break down your block, mow over your avoidance. And no, Twitter does not count. I’m sorry.

Whatever you do, though, don’t forget the love.

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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.

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Zen in the Art of Bradbury, Or, Buck Rogers Needs Blood to Survive

Whenever someone brings up the subject of Westerns (which is pretty much never), I tell them that my favorite three Westerns are Tombstone, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven. I love them not only for their inherent awesomeness, but because collectively, they cover all the Western narrative bases. Where Tombstone is a straightforward, rollicking adventure, Unforgiven offers a bleak, raw deconstruction of our assumptions about the traditional Western hero. I find Josey Wales occupies a nice space in between, rounding out the trinity with a balance of grit, verve, and snappy quotes about rock candy.

I have a similar trio of books on writing. My bookshelf fairly groans with books about writing. I love reading about craft. I love reading about how other writers work; their inspiration, their frustration, their process. Of all of these, three stand out as my personal trinity of essential works: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, for its dry and unsympathetic mechanical advice; Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, for its mix of practical craft advice and fond sentiment; and Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, for its infectious and totally unselfconscious passion.

Most writers, I suspect, have a handful of quotes or passages that sum up how they feel about their writing — something that inspires or haunts, possibly even mocks from time to time, like that obnoxious voice that wakes you up in the middle of the night after you’ve just killed twelve hours with a Two and a Half Men marathon and asks, hey, how that novel’s coming?

I have a heap of such passages, hoarded away in my consciousness like stacks of old newspapers in a shut-in’s hovel, but Bradbury’s words tend to haunt me like no other. His book opens with what I consider one of the most concise and cutting essays on a writer’s self-doubt ever written:

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it. How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth-grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?…

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers. I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed… It was like having your best all-round greatest-loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and lo! he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Outrun those sons of bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Bradbury is talking about writing, of course, as much as he is Buck Rogers. Few writers make it through life without a generous helping of friends and family who are ready to inform them that they’re wasting their time. That no one reads, that writing doesn’t pay, that writing isn’t an honest trade or even a respectable hobby. If you’re really lucky, they might smugly quote Ghostbusters at you: “Print is dead.” Surely no one can argue with Egon, the fictional mad genius who once tried to drill a hole in his head, which would have worked if no one had stopped him.

Like Bradbury, we must judge these people idiots if we are to survive — or, to be a bit more charitable, acknowledge that they might mean well, but that their well-intentioned advice must be ruthlessly discarded as the insidious toxin it is. People can be smart, brilliant, and loving, and still give you advice that will lead you down a miserable path. To Bradbury, this was literally a matter of life and death, summed up succinctly in a single, unrelenting maxim: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you… not to write, for many of us, is to die. “

There are many days when I envy Bradbury, not for his talent or his success, but for figuring this out so early in his life. Simply put, my own personal Buck Rogers lay dead for a long time; a withered corpse who would wheeze to brief life a few times a year, only to be felled by the first unkind word or gnawing self-doubt that floated my way. It took decades to gather the mojo necessary to rouse him back to vibrant life and keep him there. Some days he still teeters, like a marionette whose strings are half-cut, and I have to nurture him back to health with some quality time at the keyboard.

And that’s the thing, of course: Buck Rogers can’t make it on his own. Neglected too long, he’ll just wither away again, a harrowed revenant wandering the bleak hills until he drops dead unloved on some blasted Lovecraftian heath. When it comes to our creative selves, love is not enough. We have to keep them fed. Buck Rogers needs blood to survive.

Which brings me to the other Bradbury quote I like to keep close to my heart. It’s a short quote about the necessity of writing, frequently and regularly. Like so ideas in Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury frames it in a breathless imperative:

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

While I’m familiar with the delirium Bradbury describes here, I’ve become skilled at ignoring the madness that boils up when the writing urge goes unattended. It’s all too easy to let the insanity dwell there, like a buzzing mosquito in the back of my brain — constantly annoying, but too small to really hurt. There’s probably some sort of belabored, hoary metaphor about malaria I could make here, but I think I’ve done enough damage for one day. Fighting that laziness is vital to keeping Buck Rogers plodding along.

I’ll have a lot more to say about Zen in the Art of Writing in the future, I’m sure — his chapter on “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” is partially responsible for the name of this blog, after all — but that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I pick up Bradbury’s little white book and let his wild, unrestrained glee infect me like a joyous malady. Hard-nosed advice and stern essays on craft are all well and good, but sometimes you just need to remember why you love your shambling, undead Buck Rogers.