Autumnal Activity

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Autumn, Chess, Creativity, Horror, Novels, procrastination, Rejection, Short Stories, speculative fiction, The Lempkin Variation, Writing

Time to cap the month off with a rambling post about writing. Yes, this is a writing blog, even if I have diverged into film reviews of late (and attracted more blog traffic than ever…).

I’ve mentioned before how Autumn’s fruitful attributes often translate into writing accomplishments for me. It’s something to do with that sensation of winter encroaching, of harvesting and stocking up food – making casseroles and soups in abundance. The weather is always dramatic one way or the other. The east coast USA is currently in the jaws of Hurricane Sandy. Leaves are abandoning their branches lemming-style and I feel like I’m watching the whole thing in sped-up time-lapse photography with a suitably apocalyptic Philip Glass soundtrack layering the scene with building menace.

I find my dreams are even more fecund and bizarre at this time of the year. That may be partly due to my body battling off the annual assault of cold viruses and infections. This is also due to my writing output increasing back to old levels. I’m relatively pleased with the amount of new stories I’ve written in the last six months. And the ongoing project of completing the various first drafts and aborted attempts littering my hard drive is progressing apace. I’m still no closer to starting any of the novel ideas, although I regularly add to the growing files of notes on all of them. There are four ideas all competing for attention in the category of novel-waiting-to-be-written. Only one of them fills me with confidence that it’s a good idea, but it’s the one that will be the most research-heavy and although I’ve begun that research, I still need to read a lot more history before I can attempt it.

As a way to prepare for the sort of effort required to revise a longer piece, I hope to attempt a revision on my long-forgotten novella about chess and demonic possession, The Lempkin Variation. Hence the chess-related image above. It’s a story that’s entirely worth the effort of revision. It always has been, but I am a lazy, work-shy ne’er-do-well and have a magical bottomless bag of excuses for not doing what I should be doing. As a writer friend of mine said to me the other day in an email. –

Start finishing your stuff. I’d put money on the fact that you’re probably sitting on a  pile of gems.

Best news of all, although this isn’t an official announcement yet (I’ll do that once it’s, well… official), I sold a story this morning to a really great magazine. It’s a story I only wrote in July and had only sent it one other place where it received a swift rejection. It’s a story of drug addiction, nostalgia and transcendence. I’ll have more news to follow and it will get its day in the spotlight. Bring it on, Winter.

The Easy Excuse (The Myth of Writer’s Block: Part 2)

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Adversity, Edinburgh, Edinburgh flooding, Jay Lake, procrastination, Short Stories, The Myth of Writer's Block, Writing

This post coming to you from the depths of a nasty chest infection/cold and during the worst summer on record around here causing flooding on our street and in the area. Not the part 2 I’d originally intended, but thought it was worth getting this out as I am deep inside the territory of this subject.

As I’ve already said, I believe creative blockage is a complicated recipe affecting everyone differently with differing personal reasons behind every instance. I wanted to look at some of those individual reasons in more detail. Not because I want to try and give advice or expound any self-professed wisdom. No, this is as much for myself as anyone reading this (of whom I’m sure the audience is vast…). Apart from the pleasing irony of writing about writers block, it’s a good way to confess my sins of avoidance and procrastination. And at least I can feel like I’m doing this from a slightly more privileged position with a short story in progress to the tune of 3000 words(one I’m calling ‘Love as Deep as Bones’), and another already begun.

The easy excuse. Best example I can give is the situation I’m currently in. Several days laid out with a nasty virus. Coughing so hard I’ve pulled muscles in my back and chest etc… moan, complain… and there you go, what a handy excuse to not write. It’s hard to concentrate with a fever and you can’t settle. The real test is how you deal with that. I’ve lost count of the amount of stories that have run aground on the rocks of such an easy excuse. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not really the being ill that’s causing the problem, it’s my own brain.

All it amounts to is laziness. If the task ahead seems tough then, if (like me) you’re predisposed to taking the easy way out and avoiding the hard work, latching onto an excuse of being ill is the perfect justification. You can trick yourself into thinking that it’s okay. It’s not your fault. You can’t help being ill right?

WRONG.

This is Jay Lake – http://www.jlake.com/ No doubt familiar to anyone with a toe dipped into the world of SF. He has published several novels, hundreds of short stories and edited anthologies, winning various awards. He is intricately involved in SF and writing at all levels. He has also been battling cancer for the last four years. And writing about it, along with continuing his writing career to the fullest. You can read the personal blogging he’s done about cancer here – http://jlake.com/cancer_index.html

I use this example as a source of inspiration for the sort of punishment we can take yet carry on with the things we love. So much of it comes down to the individual and how they react to situations. I’m not saying you should be ashamed for not being strong and continuing in the face of adversity – we all have our own individual battles and subjective difficulties which can seem mountainous. No, it’s more that Jay Lake’s example can show you that is IS possible to carry on and if you feel compelled to write then nothing should really stop you.

Since I started this blog entry a few days have passed and I’m still recovering from this damned chest infection. And then we’ve had all this fun with flooding (which I’ll make a separate blog entry about, but certainly forms yet another easy excuse not to be writing).

The point is, life throws us all manner of adversities and the challenge is how we deal with them. It’s all too easy to fold in the face of personal difficulty, stop writing for a few days as a result and then call that ‘writer’s block’.

So that’s today’s thought-spaghetti unravelled. Now I have a story to finish writing.

The Myth of Writer’s Block (Part 1)

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Creativity, Inspiration, procrastination, The Myth of Writer's Block, Writing, Writing advice

A deliberately provocative title to the first in a series of rambling thought salads upon the blight affecting my creative pursuits for the last several months.

Let me say first, unequivocally, writer’s block is a myth.

And now to qualify that… There is no single catch-all affliction that infects only writers to the same extent across the board. You don’t one day wake up with a gritty throat, sneeze a couple of times and then find yourself unable to write a single word. There is always a (or many) deeper reason(s)for such a state to occur.

Being able to even write about this at the moment is some proof positive that I’m coming out the other side of a long self-imposed exile in a barren country. I’ve even begun writing a new short story (inspired in part by a useful prompt competition my writing group has been holding for a while now), but I still haven’t found that motivational balance required to stay on course. At this very moment my short story and I are circling each other around the room, maintaining a respectful distance, but all too aware that we have to tussle at some point.

So, I hear you ask, what are the reasons for this lengthy period of inactivity?

The reasons are manifold, and therein lies the problem of calling it writer’s block. It seems too easy to pass off a period of creative self-obstruction as ‘writer’s block’. And yes, it is ‘self’ imposed. There’s no masked lunatic holding a bowie knife to my trembling throat saying “write and you will die.” There’s no one other than myself sat in front of the computer with a document open. It’s my fingers that need to do the typing. And it really should be that simple. If you spend your entire waking existence thinking about writing, but aren’t doing it, then the only way to make it happen is… to write. As all of the various advice tells you, sometimes you have to allow yourself to write pages and pages of tripe so that the good stuff can emerge without you really noticing it.

For me, it’s been partly a dreadful penchant for self-critique where I might as well be whipping myself with rusty chains for not being able to make every sentence a perfect sculpture of meaning and form. Throw in several sacks of self-doubt where I compare myself to other writers and think I have nothing interesting to say or offer in the way of narrative voice. Sprinkle on some dayjob-tiredness and laziness in the face of breaking out of a routine of work/sleep/work/sleep/weekend/escape!/sleep/work etc… Finish with a propensity to avoid the hard work of writing – the edits, the rewriting, the tough decisions about when to trunk old stories, the colossal leaps involved in taking a good idea and turning it into a novel.

That’s just one recipe, and only a handful of the total ingredients in my own particular spaghetti of creative blockage. At first it’s easier to drift along and not write, stating that you need a break from it, but soon the not writing becomes harder than existing and it’s all you think about. Days, weeks, months pass and with every additional minute you aren’t writing it becomes harder and harder to start again, because like any creative pursuit you must practice and flex that muscle of craft. Go too long and watch your muscles atrophy so that the first time you do return to the writing, it might be not all that bad, but it’s like passing kidney stones and your ability to believe in it is fractured.

Becoming creatively blocked is such a personal thing and many people have their own advice for dragging yourself out of it, but it’s always down to you at the end of it all. You have to force yourself somehow to sit down, focus, and just write. I still don’t believe in writer’s block as an actual ‘thing’ that can be beaten if you only follow a particular course of treatment. It’s a war with your own impulses and identifying the source of the problem is often the main thing to accomplish, because it may be something much deeper and more all-encompassing in your own life that’s causing it. And before you know it, the feeling of being unable to complete anything, or even write a single word, is all wound up inside you like an invasive weed and you can cut it away, tug out the roots, pour weed-killer upon it, but it may be impossible to remove it all entirely.

I’ll write more upon this subject, and probably disagree with myself. Maybe even get into a bloody fistfight with my id and throw myself down a few flights of stairs. Anything except just punching some keys on a keyboard and forming the mystical hieroglyphics that make up simple words.

Downtime

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Creativity, Inspiration, Million Writers Award, procrastination, Scotland, Short Stories, Unpicking the Stitches, Writing

Lets just ignore the howling gap in time since my last post.

I’ve been pondering the whys and wherefores of writing, perched uncomfortably on metaphysical and metaphorical mountaintops. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write, but the act has escaped me for some time now.

I’ve recently been on holiday,  in the north west of Scotland under impossible May sunshine for day after day and , despite feeling the usual constriction of city living returning, I am feeling a gentle current of relaxation stream through me. It’s too easy to get into a mental rut, to only be able to see what needs to be done as a pointless and brain-melting chore, but then I have to remind myself that I used to really enjoy writing. It’s difficult to explain why writing is something I think about constantly, why ideas continually come to me unbidden like inquisitive little creatures who want to take up residence and start a life for themselves. I can’t explain it, but it happens, even in a general state of ‘non-writing’.

Things have been changing for the positive, though. I’ve started submitting stories again after allowing all my submissions to lapse once the rejections rolled in. I’ve even rewritten little bits of some stories to try and give them new opportunities. So there’s three of them out there at the moment and I have fresh ideas for new ones.

Encouragingly, ‘Unpicking the Stitches‘ made the lengthy ‘notable stories’ list of Story South’s Million Writers Award. There’s some pretty strong competition, but even being noticed is enough to create that warm feeling, to fuel that desire to continue. I’m sure I’ll gaze back at this period as a nasty pothole that flattened my front tyre.

Onwards!

Resolve

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Creativity, Inspiration, Novels, procrastination, Short Stories, speculative fiction, Writing

I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions. I understand the point of them – January the 1st always has a clean, raw feeling to it, like freshly shed skin and we all emerge pale and blinking from the gigantic countdown that is New Year’s Eve. It’s a time of beginnings, of resetting clocks, of making decisions and statements of intent for the coming twelve months.

I’ve neglected this blog, and my writing, for the last six weeks or so. It seems to be a cycle I’ve been getting into this last year – bursts of activity, followed by slumps of inactivity caused by all manner of self-absorbed nonsense and lazy excuses. December is a perfect month for lazy excuses, crammed full as it is with hard work, head colds and the occasional social engagement. But then I read other writer’s blogs explaining how terrible a year they’ve had and yet they carry on writing, with regularity, and don’t complain about it.

I won’t make resolutions this year, they have a singular finality about them that makes them fragile (i.e. they are easily broken). Instead I need to have resolve, in its simplest meaning of having determination in everything I do writing-wise. Determination to finish stories that I begin writing; determination to then revise those stories/novellas/novels to the best possible draft and submit them; determination to read, for fun, research, inspiration; determination to write a novel and have it published. These are not resolutions. There are no absolutes here. I just need to have the resolve to do what I need to do at the time that it needs doing, rather than putting it off, and staring at it, and worrying about it, because I have to remember one thing.

I love writing. I love reading great writing. It gives me a thrill to get lost in a story, both creating and reading it. And I know I can do it. And isn’t that half the battle?

August Update

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Chess, Creativity, Inspiration, Novellas, Playchess, procrastination, speculative fiction, Time, Writing, Writing Discipline

Facts and figures.

9 days holiday equals writing stagnation. 2 days back at work divided by motivation to the power of inspiration equals 150 new words plus a page of notes to finish this damn thing.

The novella stands at 23,945 words. Not a whelk’s chance in a supernova I’ll finish it under 25,000 words. Halfway through chapter 17 at the moment, so it could finish with a nice round 20 chapters. I had hoped it could be brought to a close before I went away, but one’s expectations are generally thwarted by ones propensity for procrastination. Distraction equals the internet multiplied by time. When using a real chess game for the novella, researching different lines to take the game down at the crunch point equals lost hours spent battling my Fritz chess program to see if I could win it from that position. Pointless. A renewed interest in playing chess equals more hours spent getting thrashed in 3 minute games by German kids on the live chess server, Playchess.

What does all this add up to now? A foothold on the final stretch to climb to the top of this beast and plant my flag. It calculates out as an equation for writing discipline, which is fine in theory, but application is another thing altogether with the random factors of TV, caffeine withdrawal and the fine art of daydreaming. The best discipline I can muster is to plant myself in front of the PC at some point every evening, open up that writing file and start bashing keys.

July Update

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Andy Murray, Black Static, Chess, Horror, Interzone, John Shirley, Liz Jensen, Novellas, procrastination, speculative fiction, The Rapture, TTA Press, Wimbledon, World Cup 2010, Writing

Distractions have proved manifold on the way into July. Yep, another monthly update, as I mark the time out of some need to calibrate my existence.

Still watching the World Cup. Still. Only two games left. Wimbledon also been a major distraction, with the travails of Andy Murray occupying my hours. Sport providing excitement, a vicarious thrill, but ultimately gorging on my time like the slavering beast of procrastination it is.

This is not to say that I haven’t been writing – up to 19,160 words on ‘The Lempkin Variation’ – and I’m still unsure about its merit as a piece of writing. Sure, some of it I’m happy with, but it’s not really a profound piece of literature. Despite devouring Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud etc… as a youth, I seem to get more of a kick out of writing about demonic possession, chess playing ghosts and murder. There’s plenty of time for profundity.

Current reading includes Black Static 17, with John Shirley’s ‘Faces in Walls’ being a standout story. Also just finished Interzone 228. Novel in progress at the moment is ‘The Rapture’ by Liz Jensen – which I am thoroughly enjoying.