Jeremiah Tolbert

Writer | Photographer | Web Designer

On Types of Writers Block

by Jeremiah Tolbert on Jul 06, 2010 (3) Comments

When I first began writ­ing in earnest, I didn’t believe in writer’s block.  You know how it is.  When you’re com­pletely lack­ing in self-consciousness about your works, it’s much eas­ier to get things done.  Doubt hasn’t entered the pic­ture then, nor a dozen other ever-present con­cerns, experience-driven instincts, and mild pho­bias that you develop with time.  These things are internal-process bar­na­cles that form as an outer crust on the hull of your cre­ativ­ity.  They weigh you down a bit, but when the wind is right, you sail straight enough despite them.   The sail­ing is smooth and easy at first with­out them, but you prob­a­bly have no real des­ti­na­tion in mind, and the sail­ing is so smooth that it’s down­right bor­ing to any pas­sen­gers along for the ride.

Since my days of proto-writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve dis­cov­ered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a vari­ety of causes. Because writ­ing is a damned bor­ing thing to talk about lit­er­ally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encoun­tered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me rely­ing on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most com­mon block to my writ­ing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The dri­ving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind aban­don me?  Why does the wind do any­thing?  The fac­tors are too com­plex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspi­ra­tion can come from a lot of dif­fer­ent places, mostly deep inter­nal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel com­fort­able exam­in­ing too closely.  It feels like frag­ile machin­ery that would be too easy to dis­turb when it’s work­ing right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tin­ker­ing for fear of break­ing some­thing completely.

When faced with a lack of inspi­ra­tion, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySar­gasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remem­ber the god­damned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a cor­ner often, espe­cially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writ­ing for the fun of the jour­ney and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after con­ceiv­ing of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envi­sion the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a bet­ter des­ti­na­tion along the way, there was no rea­son I couldn’t change course!  My plans or out­lines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of lit­tle more than a vague idea and a half-sketched out char­ac­ter con­cept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you dis­cover your ini­tial con­cept is full of holes (made by the worm­rot of the implau­si­bil­i­tus, incon­sis­ten­tia, or been-there-done-that-allia species).  Now you find your­self sink­ing, maybe bail­ing for your life with a lit­tle hand wav­ing, but the boat’s tak­ing on the waters of dis­be­lief and some of your pas­sen­gers aren’t going to see the jour­ney to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scut­tle a lot of story boats this way delib­er­ately.  The ini­tial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail imme­di­ately with­out any plan­ning at all, buoyed by the excite­ment of the fresh­ness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I dis­cover the flaws in my half-assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve prob­a­bly aban­doned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever fin­ished.  I was a strong swim­mer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-edit while I’m work­ing on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up com­pletely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-editors, voices of self-doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempt­ing to give in and lis­ten to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voy­age, but they’re not com­pletely worth­less.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voy­age, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his sub­con­scious Bob, but I tend to call my sub­con­cious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s cre­ative and all, but he doesn’t have any con­cept of the real­i­ties of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sail­ing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to bal­ance a check­book or even earn a decent liv­ing, but the bas­tard knows how to sail bet­ter than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like lis­ten­ing to the sea­soned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters bet­ter than any­one.  When you fail to lis­ten,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion the dif­fi­culty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he orig­i­nates from some­where in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to draw­ing vague pic­tures, ges­tur­ing wildly in some ridicu­lous game of conscious/subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep sched­ules, so we have to leave mes­sages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, what­ever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amaz­ing we have ever com­pleted a voy­age together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to com­plet­ing my jour­neys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leak­ing like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wear­ing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at cre­ative block in the abstract, it’s much more intim­i­dat­ing.  Abstract con­cepts aren’t eas­ily defeated, but when I con­cretize the idea into a giant tuber wear­ing an eye-patch, it sud­denly seems so much eas­ier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

Writing is a Sail Boat, And I’m Stuck on the Reefs

A short history of my personal finance: How freelancing saved my sanity and gave me back my soul.

by Jeremiah Tolbert on Jun 28, 2010 (11) Comments

Most have heard the apho­rism that “money can’t buy you hap­pi­ness.” Strictly true, I sup­pose, but then, money can buy things that will make you happy, at least for a while. Not all the things that would make you happy, pos­si­bly, but… it’s just not true in a looser sense.

That’s not what I want to talk to you about today.

What I want to talk about is the per­sonal les­son that I have learned from my first year of run­ning a web design busi­ness and being per­son­ally respon­si­ble for my own income. Money might not buy hap­pi­ness, but it can buy peace of mind.

Let’s start with the olden days.

The Way Things Were

Sarah and I grad­u­ated from col­lege with an unbe­liev­ably large amount of loans, and I brought to our mar­riage a not insub­stan­tial sum of credit card debt. We made decent money out of col­lege, and when I think about the rent we were pay­ing, I cry. $400 a month for a 2 bed­room! I can’t get than for less than 3 times that now.

But we never saved, and our expenses seemed to grow to match our income every time. Slight raise, oops, need a new car. Credit card debt grow­ing out of control–let’s con­sol­i­date all that into a home equity loan and do some house repairs while we’re at it. We spent a lot of money, we bor­rowed a lot, but we never saved, and if the Wall Street Journal is right, nobody else did either.

The prob­lem with this lifestyle was that we only ever had just enough. We were the def­i­n­i­tion of liv­ing from pay­check to pay­check, even though we were doing fine. We had no way of bud­get­ing to deal with emer­gency expenses, how­ever. A bro­ken down car would nearly result in me hav­ing a ner­vous break­down. Somehow, we’d scrape up the money every time, but I’d be pro­foundly happy about the entire thing, some­times for days or even weeks.

I was ter­ri­fied of los­ing what I had. Afraid that we would end up bank­rupt and by all rights, we prob­a­bly should have. I’d seen my father weather bank­ruptcy as a kid, and in my mind it was basi­cally flunk­ing adult­hood. It kept me up at nights some­times, and I devel­oped panic attacks now and then.

I’m skip­ping over a bunch of stuff, but even­tu­ally we moved to Fort Collins from Wyoming and went back to rent­ing after being home own­ers. Selling our house cleared out a lot of our debt, but not all of it. We still weren’t sav­ing much, but we had put a few thou­sand away from the sale of our home. If felt kind of good.

CUT TO The Econopocalypse

After a cou­ple of years of work­ing in Fort Collins, con­tin­u­ing to live pay­check to pay­check, slowly grow­ing to hate the world of cubi­cles and office meet­ings, I was laid off sud­denly and unex­pect­edly. It was a curi­ous thing, being laid off. Everyone around me was in tears about it. They had poured part of their life into the com­pany. I was still the new guy. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the grin on my face. I felt bad about being happy, but I was.

Getting laid off felt great, felt like sud­denly I had been handed pos­ses­sion of my own soul again. It felt like some­one open­ing the door of a cage and lur­ing me out with a bloody flank steak (in the form of a small sev­er­ance pack­age). I took it and ran, gnaw­ing along the way.

We tried to be respon­si­ble. We made dras­tic cost-cutting mea­sures. I began look­ing for a job, and to make the time pass more eas­ily, I took on some free­lance web/design projects, mostly for peo­ple I knew. I felt… good. Because thanks to my sev­er­ance, I had a bit of a sav­ings. I had a fall­back, a safety net.

At the end of that sum­mer, I got offered a seem­ingly great job; work from home, great ben­e­fits, doing some inter­est­ing work, and so I took it, and side­lined free­lanc­ing. It seemed like free­lanc­ing with­out the risk. All the while, the econ­omy was totally tank­ing, but I wasn’t pay­ing attention.

That job turned out to be more stress­ful than every other one before it. I worked hard, worked fast, and I did what­ever I could to earn my pay and keep the job. Because now I had this fear of being let go, because I was depen­dent again upon the whims of the com­pany. I was para­noid. We started to put a lit­tle away. Just in case.

Six months later, I was out of work again, but this time, I wasn’t grin­ning. While I wasn’t the first to be let go, and as soon as oth­ers had been, we had dras­ti­cally cut our expenses again. We got rid of every­thing we could, and nego­ti­ated pay­ment plans for some stu­dent loans for a while. And we socked away all the excess in sav­ings. The sev­er­ance was a pit­tance, espe­cially com­pared to the last. And now the news was full of ter­ri­ble things about a pos­si­ble global eco­nomic collapse.

I was scared shit­less it was all going to come down on our heads now. But that sense of free­dom had come back, and the weight of a lot of stress evap­o­rated upon its arrival. I was scared, but I felt good at the same time. But I thought I needed that safety net of a “reli­able” job.

I applied for work fran­ti­cally. Early on, I landed an inter­view with a com­pany down near boul­der. The job struck me as the kind of utterly bor­ing, soul-crushing kind of thing that had slowly dri­ven me mad in Laramie. so I had fun and played the inter­view com­pletely hon­estly. Oh man. Don’t ever do that.

I wasn’t admit­ting it to myself then, but I didn’t want another job that could be ripped out from under­neath me. I was liv­ing on a com­bi­na­tion of free­lance and unem­ploy­ment at this point. Unemployment just barely got us by, and every free­lance dol­lar I took just reduced that, so I was mostly just tread­ing water. But I was divid­ing my time between free­lance and search­ing for work.

I spent almost six months get­ting by on free­lanc­ing before it finally sunk in that I was hap­pier than I had been in a long time. I gave up the job search, even turned down some job offers around the same time. I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing this… this uncer­tain world, to not be just some place I was vis­it­ing between jobs, but a place where I would set­tle per­ma­nently, and make my own way.

Our sav­ings began to grow even faster because my atti­tude towards money had changed. Money is great to spend now, but it’s even bet­ter later should you not have a job lined up. Also, because I had to start pay­ing my own self-employment taxes and I had no idea what they would be, I started sock­ing every­thing into sav­ings that wasn’t what we needed to get through a month.

By the end of that year, we had more in sav­ings than we had ever had in our lives. I was still fright­ened, but the work was com­ing in, and if it stopped, our lives would not end. Everything would be alright.

CUT TO Today

My busi­ness is grow­ing well! I have amaz­ing clients, and new ones lin­ing up. We’re finally mov­ing into a slightly larger, slightly less slummy rental, even if it’s a bit more expen­sive. I recently had to trans­fer a bunch of money over from sav­ings to cover some of the costs of it, and I’m also fronting some money to fam­ily in hard times. It was a lot of money to move over from sav­ings to check­ing at one time.

The old fear came back. That deep, gnaw­ing fear that I almost hadn’t noticed. The voice whis­per­ing “you will be liv­ing in a card board box under a bridge inside of six months.” It doesn’t carry the same weight as it did before, but it def­i­nitely makes me uneasy and dis­turbs my peace.

This is when I real­ized, money unspent was buy­ing me peace of mind, and not only that, but I have a thresh­old level. If I have a cer­tain amount in the bank, and a cer­tain amount of work lined up, I’m not think­ing about money much at all. I have my peace.

I’ve basi­cally turned my sav­ings account into a video game, and I’m con­stantly try­ing to get it to a new high score. Running my own busi­ness, I can make as much or as lit­tle as I want. I’m not tied to some flat pay­ment sched­ule. If I want to book six projects in a month and work really hard, I can, and some­times, I do. Sometimes, the work isn’t there, and that’s okay, because I have a buffer against such things. Feast and famine is some­thing they teach new free­lancers, but hon­estly, they should have taught the con­cept to every­one who receives a so-called steady, “reli­able” pay­check too. Or maybe I just should have paid more atten­tion that that ant/grasshopper para­ble from the olden times.

My busi­ness is the most reli­able source of work I’ve ever had, thus far. I don’t think I want to go back to that other world ever again. They claim it’s reli­able, but they can fire you at any time. At least as a busi­ness owner myself, I know when hard times are com­ing, and I have the power to try and fix it. There was noth­ing I could have done to stop myself from being laid off and I think that’s why it hits some peo­ple so hard. It’s that feel­ing of pow­er­less­ness, know­ing that there’s noth­ing you can do. But it was that fact that I could say, “it’s not my fault” that gave me the con­fi­dence to go for­ward with my life after­ward. I won’t lie–being laid off the sec­ond time hit my self-esteem pretty hard. But it’s bounced back sure enough.

I think about time and money so dif­fer­ently now. That’s a good and bad thing, but mostly good. And I owe that change to start­ing my own com­pany and tak­ing my des­tiny com­pletely into my own hands. If you’re a free­lancer or an inde­pen­dent worker or what­ever we’re call­ing our­selves today, or even if you’re not, my advice to you is, fig­ure out your thresh­old for basic peace of mind and make that your first goal financially.

Once you have that, you can take on so much more than before. At least in my case, I felt like I got a good chunk of my brain back that was always wor­ried about money before. Always antic­i­pat­ing that next emer­gency expense. Now, I grum­ble, but they don’t cause me to go apeshit when they happen.

If noth­ing else, my wife heartily approves.

Labeling Oneself as an Artist and Why I Have Avoided It

by Jeremiah Tolbert on Mar 01, 2010 (4) Comments

I’ve strongly resisted the label of artist for a long time, because I don’t feel wor­thy of it, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to avoid the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that are entwined with the label in my back­wards, red­neck brain.

Who is an artist? (the ingrained notions)

Here’s what I grew up think­ing of artists–not actively think­ing or delib­er­ately decid­ing to believe, but just absorb­ing in Kansas/Midwestern culture.

Artists are peo­ple who do not have real jobs.  They are as likely to spend their time drink­ing absinthe, doing drugs, and sleep­ing around as they are to do any­thing hon­est and deserv­ing of com­pen­sa­tion.  Artists do not con­tribute to the growth and wel­fare of soci­ety in mean­ing­ful ways.  They are prob­a­bly not very smart, because if they were smart, they would have gone into a pro­fes­sion like engi­neer­ing or med­i­cine where they could actu­ally do some good and make real money to sup­port their fam­i­lies.  Artists, above all else, are irre­spon­si­ble, child­ish, and poor.  POOR!

Conversely, artists are tal­ented (even if that tal­ent isn’t val­ued very highly).  They can draw any­thing they can imag­ine effort­lessly.  Their imag­i­na­tions are supe­rior to almost any­one elses’s.  They speak a secret lan­guage of color and form, and really, if you want to rearrange your liv­ing room and get some new cur­tains, an artist would not be a bad per­son to ask.  They’ll prob­a­bly help for beer money.

Why I am not an Artist (the rationalizations)

I’m cre­ative, sure.  I do a bit of writ­ing, but writ­ing isn’t art, because art is visual, and writ­ing is lan­guage.   And yes, I know how to oper­ate a cam­era, but art­work should con­vey emo­tions, tell a story, and my pho­tog­ra­phy doesn’t con­vey any such thing.  Anyone can pick up a cam­era and point it at some­thing.  Anyone can take enough shots, throw­ing out the bad, to make them­selves look like a mod­er­ately decent photographer.

I’m a web designer, but design is not art.  Design is com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and it has strict rules (rules that I strug­gle every day to learn and under­stand bet­ter).   And any­way, I pri­mar­ily excel at writ­ing code and solv­ing tech­ni­cal prob­lems, less so than mak­ing things beau­ti­ful and artistic.

Despite my ingrained beliefs about artists as pro­fes­sion­als, I grew up secretly wish­ing I could be some kind of sci­ence artist, but I  wouldn’t ever really because I wanted to con­tribute and make money. And finally, for some rea­son, I can­not ever be an artist because I can­not draw any­thing that I pic­ture in my head.

Why I am an Artist (the realization)

First of all, most of the bull­shit I grew up believ­ing about artists is just that–bullshit.  Artists are as intel­li­gent as any­one else, if not more so,as respon­si­ble, and they are no more likely to drink heav­ily and do drugs than any­one else.  They con­tribute to soci­ety in less quan­tifi­able ways than say, an engi­neer, but they act in a way as society’s con­science, as it’s out­let.  As a means of self-reflection.  Artists play a role, and while I don’t quite under­stand that role, I know they have one and it’s deeply impor­tant.  Being an artist is a real job, and has all the bag­gage that jobs have.  It’s also really, really hard to make a liv­ing at.

Being any good does not deter­mine whether one is an artist or not.  And art encom­passes many more skills than just draw­ing.   My pho­tog­ra­phy may be some­thing any­one can do, but every once and a while I make some­thing nobody else  but me could make.  I’m actively try­ing to sell prints of my work actively, so I guess that right there makes me an artist in the same way that actively pur­su­ing pub­li­ca­tion made me a writer.

Design may or may not be art, but I’m a work­ing cre­ative indi­vid­ual.  Sometimes, what I cre­ate is art.  Sometimes, it’s crap.  Well, more often than not.  But I share more in com­mon with work­ing illus­tra­tors and painters now than I do with my friends who spend their days slic­ing DNA in laboratories.

So, yeah.  I am an artist.  Whatever that means–I’m still learn­ing. It’s not all that I am, but I’m done not call­ing myself that just because I can’t draw and I grew up believ­ing some kind of dumb things about who writ­ers are.  My life is cen­tered around cre­ative acts of one form or another, so.  There it is.

Have any of you ever resisted label­ing your­self like that, for sim­i­lar mix­tures of rea­sons?  I’m curi­ous to know if this is dif­fi­cult just for me, or if it is for others.

PS:  I keep try­ing to fix that draw­ing thing.  I’ve been stuck in the first cou­ple of chap­ters of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” for a cou­ple of years.  Maybe this year will be the one that I finally get past the weird trac­ing stuff and start learn­ing how to stop myself from draw­ing on the left side of the brain.

Freelance Tax Annoyances

by Jeremiah Tolbert on Feb 07, 2010 (4) Comments

I’m para­noid about taxes.  I’m con­stantly afraid that I’m going to end up mag­i­cally owing twice what I think I owe to the point where I save nearly every penny in antic­i­pa­tion of the tax bill.  Freelancer taxes are really screwed up, you see.  Sure, we get to deduct a lot of things like home office space, but we end up pay­ing dou­ble the social security/medicare taxes that the employed pay, because the employer pays half of that usu­ally.    And then there’s the state income taxes, and the fed­eral income taxes, which are nor­mal, except we don’t have the lux­ury of hav­ing them with­held for us.

I was not set up this year to pay esti­mated taxes because I had not intended when I started out to be free­lanc­ing for the entire year.  I spent half the year look­ing for a job before finally giv­ing up on that and set­tling into being a full time free­lance designer.  I’ve done alright for myself in those last 6 months.  But I’m look­ing at my sav­ings and know­ing that a con­sid­er­able chunk of it is owed in taxes.  How much exactly is what I would like to know.  I don’t even begin to under­stand how the tax sys­tem truly works.

That’s all a long way of get­ting around to say­ing, I file early every year.  As soon as I have the paper­work.  I almost never fail to have my taxes done by the sec­ond week of February.  This year, I’m not sure what to do, because of a bunch of 1099 forms from my clients are slow to arrive.  Several have not even been sent yet, despite the fact that the gov­ern­ment requires that 1099s be mailed no later than January 31st.  Now, I have very detailed records of my income thanks to using fan­tas­tic invoic­ing soft­ware.   I  don’t need the 1099s to know what I made.  But I think the gov­ern­ment expects me to send them in.

Any tax experts out there know what the require­ments are regard­ing 1099s that are so damned slow in arriv­ing?  If I report the income myself, does it mat­ter if I don’t send a 1099 that didn’t come in time?

Ugh.  It’s enough to give me an ulcer.  You know, it’s not like free­lancers don’t have enough to worry about.  The com­plete lack of income secu­rity is plenty!