Posts Tagged ‘My Writing’

Learn to Distance Yourself From the Work

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Not that I’m able to get much real phys­i­cal dis­tance from any­thing right now.  Sometime over the week­end, my ankle decided to spon­ta­neously age 60 years.  I now limp around like some­one miss­ing a foot when I can move at all.  It’s odd—putting pres­sure on it doesn’t hurt, but when I bring my weight up off of it, it screams like it just saw one of those camo aliens in Signs.  (Shitty movie? Yes.  Did it scare the piss out of me?  Also yes.)  Anyway, if I come across as cranky to you, this is why.  My san­ity, as some­one who basi­cally spends 10 hours a day star­ing at the same four walls, hinges on my abil­ity to go for reg­u­lar walks around the park and neigh­bor­hood.  I fig­ure if my ankle doesn’t stop hurt­ing by the end of the week, I’ll be paint­ing REDRUM on the walls and chas­ing Shelley Duval with an axe.  But cop­ing with work­ing at home is a topic for another day.  Today, I’m going to talk about how impor­tant it is to learn to dis­tance your­self from your work. Emotionally.

You have got to get aloof about this shit.  You need to treat your work like a pickup artist treats women.  With mild dis­re­spect and insults.    See, if you care too much, story won’t care about you.  Story is used to being hit on a mil­lion times a day by bet­ter look­ing writ­ers than you. No, wait, that’s not what I meant at all. 

You have to not care, for real, so you can keep fail­ing.  It’s more like the Boomhauer approach to dating—get rejected and move on to the next one. You don’t invest your­self in one attempt or even one pickup line.  You’re invested in the game, not the pieces. 

Christ, how many metaphors can I throw into this mix?  Well, let’s see.

Big issue I’ve always faced is that I hate fail­ure.  Hate it like a blind man hates sub­ti­tled for­eign films.  Which is just ridicu­lous, as I’ve cov­ered on this here blog recently.  Failure is not the end; it’s the whole point.   You learn from fail­ure more than you learn from suc­cess.  Which is why so many authors who—when they start suc­ceed­ing more than they fail—have no god­damn clue what to do with them­selves.  Nothing more clue­less than a strug­gling writer who sud­denly doesn’t have to strug­gle so much.  Sophomore slump, any­one?  I expect this phe­nom­e­non on a much larger finan­cial scale is why so many Hollywood stars turn to sniff­ing moun­tains of cocaine.  Because shit, what else are you going to do with kid­die pools full of cash?   Acting school really should have a class on set­ting up your 401K is all I am saying.

If you let each rejec­tion get to you, really knock you down, even­tu­ally, you’re just going to stop get­ting up.  I’ve seen it hap­pen.  I’ve seen it hap­pen to me, sad to say.  Because I am a pathetic blob of fat and stringy ten­dons a lot of the time. Nobody ever taught me how to take a punch.  (God damn it.  Another metaphor?)

The secret is not let­ting the punch con­nect, see?  You’ve got to be stand­ing waaaay over there when it comes.  Or you have to be built like a brick shit­house so when the punch of fail­ure con­nects, you don’t even feel it.  By this, I mean you have to have mas­sively nar­cis­sis­tic lev­els of self-​​confidence.  You’re gen­er­ally born with it or not, in my expe­ri­ence.  I was not.  I’m try­ing to learn how to fake it, so that one day I might wake up and dis­cover it’s become real self-​​confidence.  I’ll let you know how that pans out.

If you’re just start­ing out in a cre­ative field with lots of rejec­tion and you’re in it to win,  you either toughen up or dis­tance your­self.  Those are your options.  If you cry every sin­gle time you get a rejec­tion let­ter?  You’re going to be either burned out or in the nut­house inside of a year, two tops.  Not that either one of those options are entirely bad.  Like some­one famous once said that I can’t be both­ered to look up,  if you can stop writ­ing, then do so imme­di­ately.  Because we’re like bad noir detec­tives in this busi­ness.  We’re get­ting our shit jumped all the time.  And very few of us saps get to make it with hot blonde dames afterward.

Writing Is Made of Failure (And That’s Okay)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

You can fail on a sen­tence, para­graph, page, scene, and story level.  You can fail a mil­lion ways in writ­ing, and most likely, you’ll fail in 999,999 of them of the course of your attempts.   So it is with many things in which we seek improve­ment.  We fail, fail, fail, and get incre­men­tally bet­ter with time and effort.

I strug­gle with accept­ing the fail­ure.  I have worked in cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments where fail­ure was not an option.  You could eas­ily be fired for  fail­ure.  Once, I was threat­ened with imme­di­ate fir­ing for allow­ing a typo to appear on a web page. (Later I was laid off).   

In my small busi­ness, I can­not afford to fail right now, and nor can my clients afford to have me fail.   I was just lis­ten­ing to the radio about how a major soft­ware upgrade for the state went mil­lions over bud­get and was delayed an entire year.   I might never work again if that hap­pened on one of my projects.  No room for that.  One bad project, and I’m des­ti­tute.  This year more than last, I’m in a tight spot.  This means I tend to turn down projects that I am not 100% cer­tain about (not sure about tech­ni­cal require­ments, the bud­get, etc). Sometimes, this means turn­ing down thou­sands of dol­lars.  But what’s worse, to turn down the money and tighten belts, or to take the money and utterly fail the client by miss­ing dead­lines, or deliv­er­ing com­pletely buggy soft­ware?  I’d rather keep the pain of that lim­ited to myself, and not ruin some­one else’s dream in the process.

It’s this issue of fail­ure in my jobs that pay and have paid that bills that makes me so hard on myself when I fail at writ­ing.  Because I sac­ri­fice busi­ness time to do the writ­ing, and the fact that I can­not pro­duce pro­fes­sional, sal­able mate­r­ial with any­thing resem­bling con­sis­tency or reg­u­lar­ity makes that time essen­tially a waste from an income stand­point.  I love doing it, but writ­ing is very costly to me.  It costs time and lost income.   So it’s dou­bly hard to real­ize that I’ve pro­duced a failed story, or novel.  Efficiency is key when time is money.  And I’m try­ing to be effi­cient enough to jus­tify the time.

It’s all vaguely ridicu­lous, to attempt to man­age your cre­ative writ­ing work the same way you try to man­age your web devel­op­ment work. But for now, I just don’t have any other option.   Hence back­ing off of writ­ing again, at least until I know where I will be liv­ing in August.  Hopefully not in a parent’s basement.

If you can afford it, give your­self the gift of fail­ure.   You’re going to do it any­way, so you might as well learn to for­give it.  I’m try­ing to do that myself.

Why I read books on writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Someone asked me the other day why I read books on writ­ing. I’ve been doing this for 10 years or so, so I should prob­a­bly have a han­dle on it, right?  Well, ignor­ing that last ques­tion, I had to think about it.  All I can really offer is this metaphor.

Our poten­tial as writ­ers to a cer­tain degree is locked inside of a box inside our minds.  One which we don’t inher­ently have the key for.  There are a lot of boxes, actu­ally, and a lot of keys.   A book on writ­ing is a new key that we can try on the boxes.  Sometimes, it opens one up, and we gain access to some­thing new, deeper, more profound.  

I’ve unlocked a few boxes in my time, but I have this sense that my head is like the ware­house at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  There are count­less boxes wait­ing in the back.  And so I keep try­ing keys on them.  Because they’re there, and I want to know what’s inside of them.

And so maybe this post will be a lit­tle key for you, if I’m really lucky.

Knowing Yourself is Overrated

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Our cul­ture lately puts a lot of stock in “know­ing your­self.”  Knowing who you are, your strengths, your weak­nesses.  Your pas­sions.  I’ve heard it said even that before you can write, you must know who you are. 

Utter hog­wash.

Writing is as much about the act of dis­cov­ery as it is any­thing else.  The way I see it, the “me” who is aware of what he does is a small frac­tion of the entirety.  There’s this mas­sive sleep­ing giant beneath that that wakes up very rarely, but influ­ences every­thing I do—my sub­con­scious.  And my sub­con­scious is really the one earn­ing the liv­ing for us when I do cre­ative work.  It’s field­ing me the visual images, the themes… all the impor­tant stuff.  I do things like decide where to use the word “said” and where to use some­thing more col­or­ful, like “growled.”

I learn as much about myself but what mys­te­ri­ously ends up on the page as I do through any kind of seri­ous intro­spec­tion.  And it’s not all good, either.  I have some seri­ously screwed up ingrained notions about some things that I find on the page and have to cor­rect.   I hope one day I’ll cor­rect that shit enough that the cor­rec­tion will become the real­ity, because I get a lit­tle tired of my sub­con­scious being so sexist—or whatever.  

And any­way, this idea that you can know your­self even par­tially com­pletely is silly because it seems to imply that we’re fin­ished and unchang­ing.  No, we’re all works in progress.  By the time you know one thing about your­self, it’ll prob­a­bly change, like some kind of Heisenberg prin­ci­ple of self-​​actualization.

Do I think it is impor­tant to explore your own nature?  Of course!  But do I think hav­ing some kind of neigh-​​complete land­scape of your own psy­chol­ogy is a pre­req­ui­site for good writ­ing?  Absolutely not.  I pre­fer to go wan­der­ing, per­son­ally.  Another one of those “it’s about the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion” kinda things.  There sure are a lot of those crop­ping up as I get older.

Writing Progress

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Something hap­pened.  I can’t say what, because I have no idea.  Last Monday, I decided to set aside some after­noon time to write at least 1000 words.  I wrote 3000.  I decided I would try to do this every day.  I had one false start and threw out 3000 words, but by Friday, I had fin­ished a 10,000 word sci­ence fic­tion story called “Powell’s Fortress of Books.”  I think it turned out pretty well.  We’ll see what folks think of it—I have it out to some first read­ers.  If you’re inter­ested in giv­ing it a read, leave me a com­ment with an email address and I’ll send you a copy.

Saturday, I started a lit­tle rural fan­tasy called “The Ninth Door.”  I fin­ished it this after­noon at a lit­tle over 6000 words, and while the struc­ture is just a tad off, I have edits in mind to fix that I will make here in a bit before mak­ing edits on a story I have com­ing out in Fantasy later this year.  Happy to send this on to peo­ple inter­ested in read­ing it as well.

So that puts my 8 day pro­duc­tiv­ity level at about 19,000 words, for those who are count­ing.  This is more than what I was doing at my peak when I first started break­ing in, before my dad died and I went into a pro­longed fal­low period.

I don’t know what’s changed, but I sort of feel like I’m just along for the ride.  My cre­ativ­ity right now feels like a god­damn buck­ing bronco. I’m just try­ing not to get thrown.

Tomorrow, I will start another rural fan­tasy.  This one’s about Viking gun­fight­ers!  How awe­some does that sound?

More Crossovers in Web Design and Writing: Kill Your Darlings

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s often heard advice in writ­ing that you should kill your dar­lings.  I don’t take this to mean you should kill your char­ac­ters (although really, why not?).  What I think this typ­i­cally refers to is hav­ing the open­ness, the will­ing­ness, to cut pieces that you love in ser­vice of the greater story.  You may have a line or a scene that you just love, that you think shows all your bril­liance.  But in the scheme of all things story, it doesn’t work.  It slows things down, or takes the reader out of the story.  Maybe it’s too shiny, or maybe it’s just irrel­e­vant.  You need to be will­ing to swal­low your pride and kill the bit to make a bet­ter piece.

I was reminded recently that this holds true for web design.  I’d built this tabbed nav­i­ga­tional struc­ture for a web­site that I really liked.  I thought it was clever and use­ful and I spent a lot of time cod­ing it.  But come time for con­tent to be loaded into the site, it just wasn’t work­ing.  I tried chang­ing the design of it visu­ally, but that didn’t fix the prob­lem.  The prob­lem was that it was just slightly too dif­fer­ent from the usual UI pat­terns.  It was con­fus­ing.  Ultimately, we cut it down into some­thing that was more rec­og­niz­able and standard.

I’m sorry I haven’t been blog­ging lately.  Oddly, I blog less when busi­ness is slow.  All my think­ing time is devoted to how I am going to get work, get paid, and avoid des­ti­tu­tion, rather than what I can blog about.  Maslow’s hier­ar­chy in action!

I’ve spent the last two weeks devel­op­ing a new Clockpunk Studios web­site.  When I’m burned out on star­ing at that, I switch over and learn CodeIgniter for devel­op­ing apps.  My brain is full of cod­ing things right now, and not so much with the prose.  I’m hop­ing that all this time and energy trans­fers over to a broader appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge.  The more I know about pro­gram­ming, per­haps the bet­ter I can write TAKEDOWN NOTICE.   And if not, well, hope­fully I’ve expanded my skillset with new ways to pay the bills.  It’s win/​win, really.

The Diplomatic Cable Leak: A Gold Mine for Writers

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I don’t really take a strong stand on the Wikilinks issue.  Is it bad for the U.S.?  Maybe.  I lean towards think­ing that a lit­tle sun­light in gov­ern­ment is bet­ter for the world over­all, but it also seems like inter­na­tional diplo­macy is a lot of pos­tur­ing and bull­shit, and truth only mucks up the ridicu­lous process.

No mat­ter how you come out on the issue, though, I think we can agree that the sto­ries that are com­ing out of the leak are a utter gold mine of mate­r­ial for writ­ers, espe­cially writ­ers of thrillers.  Here are just a few of the sto­ries and details that we’ve seen so far, and I’m sure more are to be discovered.

BoingBoing rounds up a few inter­est­ing things here, here, and here. Among them, the story of a 75 year old man escap­ing from Iran on horse­back over a frozen moun­tain range, Putin is Batman and Medvedev is Robin, the U.S. does not like the UK gov­ern­ment in power right now, we have a net­work of spies in the German gov­ern­ment, and more.

Wild stuff.  It’s rare that on a geopo­lit­i­cal scale, some­one pulls back the cur­tains an exposes the way things work for real.  So if noth­ing else, you can think of this as a boon of poten­tial story and research material.

One last thing: check out Wikilink’s ISP.  It’s like the lair of a James Bond vil­lain.  I want to go to there.

The Cat Who Believed Himself To Be a Bathroom Rug

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I said to some­one recently—I can’t remem­ber who—that I had a corol­lary to Godwin’s Law.  Call it, I dunno, Jer’s Corollary.  It is:

As a con­ver­sa­tion among any group of writ­ers con­tin­ues, the like­li­hood of the topic turn­ing towards cats approaches 100%.

Over the past week­end, I was involved in about half a dozen pet-​​related con­ver­sa­tions, and dogs or other types were men­tioned in only one of those.  Cats do seem to hold the major­ity among the writ­ers that I know.

That said, I’m now going to relate a hope­fully funny anec­dote about one of my cats.

We have two, nearly iden­ti­cal to most view­ers, named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Roz and Gil for short.  They’re both very pecu­liar ani­mals, and absolutely huge.  Not nec­es­sar­ily fat, as Gil is a coiled spring of anx­ious mus­cle, but they’re over 15 pounds each last I checked. 

It’s Gil that has become (even more) strongly weird in the past few months.  He like—no, demands—to be dripped upon.

The minute you turn off the shower, he races into the bath­room and sits on the rug right out­side the tub.  You have no choice but to stand over him as you get out.  And inevitably you drip upon him.  All he does is lay there, fur flinch­ing a bit with each droplet.  If you move away, he moves to get beneath you again.  We’ve taken to just wring­ing out our hair and wip­ing water droplets off us onto him.  He lux­u­ri­ates in it.  There is really no ques­tion that this is exactly what he wants us to do.

He’s always had this weird fix­a­tion with the green towel rug in our bath­room.  Whenever he wants to be pet­ted, he will meow at you and lead you to this rug.  He flops down heav­ily and rolls onto his side on it, squirm­ing as if to say, “get busy, pal.”  And he purrs so loudly it echoes off the tile and linoleum. 

He will some­times jump up onto the lip of the tub while you shower and give a sharp meow, as if to say “come on, fin­ish up, I want my turn.”  He has never mus­tered up the courage to get into the shower with me, but I always have this feel­ing that he wishes he could.  Better first-​​hand water than second-​​hand drip­pings, I suspect.

Given this odd behav­ior, I can only assume that my dimwit­ted cat has con­cluded through some strange cat-​​logic that he is not a cat, but is in fact a bath­room rug.  We’re think­ing of get­ting him a rub­ber under­side for Christmas to com­plete the transformation.

On Novel Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Nanowrimo is here again.  I’ve always had mixed feel­ings about it per­son­ally.  As some­one who has never man­aged to suc­cess­fully com­plete a novel, I can under­stand the idea behind it, but the grump in me thinks that it encour­ages peo­ple to try and take short­cuts with their writ­ing, which in gen­eral is a bad idea.  Artificial dead­lines can be help­ful, but I won­der if some amaz­ing nov­el­ist who needs 3–4 years not weeks to fin­ish a book has tried nanow­rimo and failed, and given up on it entirely.

Not that his­tory isn’t already lit­tered with failed artists and writ­ers for even more capri­cious reasons.

I’ve been say­ing since about 2005 that “this is the year I will write my novel.”  Each year, I find a rea­son not to write one, most of them silly.  Ultimately, I figure—I’ll write a novel when my craft and ideas are ready.  Until then, I’ll con­tinue to build up writ­ing mus­cle tone by work­ing on the sprints or medium dis­tance work.  I’m eager to do a marathon.  One of these days.  Probably next year.

And yet… I’m sorely tempted.  Very tempted to ham­mer one out over November. Or bet­ter yet, December, just so I can be a lit­tle contrarian.

Ideas are Skeletons

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It occurred to me this morn­ing that ideas are skele­tons upon which I hang the rest of my sto­ries, like so much meat and gris­tle.  Before I can write one word, I need a cen­tral struc­tural frame­work of the idea.

I am the pale­on­tol­o­gist of my sub­con­scious.   I dig and poke in so much muck of the mind, but some­times I strike upon the out­lines of some­thing unusual, some­thing I’ve never seen before.  You see, I am not inter­ested in recon­struct­ing ideas of the same species as another I have already done, so each is exam­ined, iden­ti­fied, and if a known quan­tity, left for some­one else to excavate. 

It’s only once I have that skele­tal idea with its odd pro­tu­ber­ances, fan­ci­ful fins, and strik­ing spurs that I can begin the process of recon­struct­ing the whole of the beast, lay­er­ing on the mus­cle of plot, the skin, scales, or fur of descrip­tion, the ner­vous sys­tem of characterization.

That’s not to say that the crea­ture lives when I’m done.  More often than not, it col­lapses under its own weight, wheezes once or twice, and expires.  But we try, as they say.

So how about you?