Writer's block
There have been those of you, well...mainly Jason, who have wondered why I haven't blogged since last Monday. Good question.
Was it because I have thought of nothing to say? Well, no. I actually started writing a blog about the twelve year old girl in Texas who shot and killed her mother for grounding her and how we assume that such delinquints are normally a result of abusive households, though obviously this girl was not beaten, and that I suspect the problem was that she hadn't received any kind of discipline whatsoever and how that might be actually worse than an abusive household. I realize that that's not a very popular thing to say, but it wasn't that my opinion might not be in line with everyone else's that really made me not write that blog. I just didn't write it. And every day that I didn't write it, the topic seemed less...well, topical.
Then there was the blog about cancer research and the new findings about MYC genes that basically have allowed researchers to turn on and off cancer's ability to grow. I thought it was a pretty big story being that I smoke and all, and though I heard about this new breakthrough on the radio, I haven't seen hide nor hair of the story since. That really bothered me. A possible cure for cancer, and no news coverage. The most recent thing I could find on the story was way back in July. What the hell?
And I was going to go into this diatribe about how even if they were to cure cancer, cigarette prices would not go down. The justification for those taxes would be eliminated but the cigarette smoker would still be the scape goat buy out man for the government, and that if the threat of cancer was necessary to get $700-1,000 in taxes from every smoker in Amerca per year, then the medicine wouldn't make it past the FDA and cancer patiants would have to move to Canada or Mexico to get treatment. I thought that would be a pretty good blog as well.
The reason that I didn't write either of these blogs is because essentially life is taking its toll on me. Maybe its a Ph.D. thing, but I always feel like I'm not taking action up to my potential. Case in point, there's a scholarship that I really should apply to, a travel grant that I could really use, a conference that I should submit to, and another conference that I need to find out about. Meanwhile, most of my fellow grad students now know each other, except for me, and yes, I'm feeling a little out of the loop just about now. Meanwhile, I have two massive papers to write. I have to go to other departments to find out what courses they will be offering in the Spring that qualify as American Studies classes (since this information isn't listed anywhere). Dinner. Laundry. And note, I haven't even gotten to my house yet. Which needs work and purchases, and is for all intents and purposes, slow going.
Basically, if there's one thing that I can control in my life right now, it's how much I read. And so that's basically what I've been trying to control. I figure, if I do all the reading that is required of me then I am, at this point, aces, and so far, I've managed fairly well in that category.
But some things have indeed suffered. For those of you who don't know, I'm writing a novel. I used to call it a longer work, so as to not jinx the novel-esque nature of my project, but now there's no denying it: it's a novel. Well, it about four hundred double spaced pages, so I think that's a bit longer than a longer piece. Hell, that's beyond novella, and I'd be awfully proud of Shock Tea if it were done. But it is not.
But why not, you may ask? Writer's block. There's really no two ways about it. I have writer's block. But what is writer's block?
I think the idea of writer's block has been misconstrued. There is the notion that when you have writer's block you don't know what is going to happen next in the story you're working on. But that's not true at all, I always know what is going to happen next. In fact, quite often, I am confronted with a myriad of possabilities as to what is going to happen next. And just as often, they are not mutually exclusive. That is to say, that if I have four options for the next scene, I know that it is a question of how to order them and not which to use and which to throw out.
And this is not because I am one of those writers who carefully plans out the plot of the novel before even writing it. I may know what's going to happen next, but up until this point, I haven't really been solid on what will happen after that. But next? Next is easy. Next is, more often than not, completely obvious.
So, then, why don't I just keep writing Next scenes until the story is done? Well, that's the tactic I'm working off of, but that brings us to the next point in the common understanding of Writer's Block: Writer's Block as an ability to express what one wants to say. I will say that this is the more common version of writer's block that I feel, but I don't exactly think it comes about for the reasons that people might otherwise believe. A novel is supposed to have continuity. The problem is that it's hard to keep that continuity when you've been writing the damn thing for four or five years. You essentially forget the mode of thinking you were in when you wrote your earlier scenes, and in many cases, you believe that these scenes were really good. If there is continuity, you want the continuity of that quality, but as it's later, you know longer remember how to create that quality. You may have the ability to create a different quality, which maybe even be just as good, but different is different, and difference is not continuity.
The main reason that I've had writer's block has nothing to do with either of these assumed meanings of said block, but for a much more pragmatic reason. You see, I'm writing a monster of a work, both in size and scope. I'm basically taking on Milton's task in explaining the ways of God to man, except that Milton did this through the begining, with the Garden of Eden, and I'm doing it with the end, through the Armaggedon. No small task. And I feel that I am up to this task. Call that hubris if you will, but I really do feel as though I can pull this thing off.
But what then?
Because the romantic notion of a writer is that they do their work either in seclusion or in some colony get away and that the hard part is producing the work. But that's not true. Not even slightly true. If you have a story, and you have some skill, chances are that, with enough dilligence, you can produce the work. But after the work is produced, it still must be published, and that's not so easy.
Witness my forays into the publishing endeavor thus far. I have asked published writers how they did it, and their answer is always the same: keep sending it to places. Great!!! So, just keep plugging away and hopefully somebody, at some point, will think of your stuff as worthy of taking a risk. Keep in mind just how complicated that very step is. You're work could be too long, too high brow, too hard to get into. You could be peddling the wrong work at the wrong time: "What you've written a post-modern novel, but nobodies writing post-modern novels now. It's all memoir." I mean there are a million good reasons for someone not to want to take a chance on your 300 page book even enough to read it for quality, much less publish it for money. And there is only two reasons that you think that they should take this chance: 1--you think it's good, and 2--it may actually be good, but it's a book--they have to read it to find out whether it's any good or not.
But that's only half the problem, the other half is that those people who tell you to send your work out are never very specific. Send it where? That they cannot tell you, and there is nowhere really to turn. Short stories, there's a market, but even then, it's hard to find the right market. What, are you going to read every lit mag in the world to find the one that seems to be printing stuff similar to the stuff you write? That's hard enough, but novels. It isn't like you can just send off your manuscript to Harcourt Brace and hope that they pick it up. You have to have agents. You have to get an agent, however you do that. And none of this is any guarantee that when all is said and done that anyone will even read your book.
So that's writer's block people. It is this question over and over again: "why should I waste my time writing a four hundred page book that no one is ever going to read?" And really why should I?
But let's end this thing on a high note. Recently, I was given an answer to why. My friend Jason has found someone who would like to edit his stuff and find places, FOR HIM, to send his stuff. There is a very real possability that Jason will be published before me, and in that way, will have justified himself as a writer before me. I've spent four years writing my novel. I can not let that happen.
People tell you that to get over writer's block, you should just keep writing. That's a lie. Under those circumstances you write in spite of writer's block, rather than to cure it, and in doing so, you cure nothing. But I have found another means by which to cure this dreaded curse of wordsmiths the world over. The cure for writer's block is competition, envy, and the feeling that world will silently forget about you and will reward those who've managed the one thing that you cannot: they stopped whining.
I realize that these seem rather ignoble reasons to finish a project meant to be an enlightening enterprise of self expression, but beggars cannot be choosers. Besides, have you read my excerpts from Shock Tea? I don't think it such a bad idea that it be inspired by some of the less talked about of the human drives.
So, lastly to you Jason, oh writer of 59 word stories, I am at your heels with angels dancing on the head of my pen. Viddie well me droogie, viddie well.
Was it because I have thought of nothing to say? Well, no. I actually started writing a blog about the twelve year old girl in Texas who shot and killed her mother for grounding her and how we assume that such delinquints are normally a result of abusive households, though obviously this girl was not beaten, and that I suspect the problem was that she hadn't received any kind of discipline whatsoever and how that might be actually worse than an abusive household. I realize that that's not a very popular thing to say, but it wasn't that my opinion might not be in line with everyone else's that really made me not write that blog. I just didn't write it. And every day that I didn't write it, the topic seemed less...well, topical.
Then there was the blog about cancer research and the new findings about MYC genes that basically have allowed researchers to turn on and off cancer's ability to grow. I thought it was a pretty big story being that I smoke and all, and though I heard about this new breakthrough on the radio, I haven't seen hide nor hair of the story since. That really bothered me. A possible cure for cancer, and no news coverage. The most recent thing I could find on the story was way back in July. What the hell?
And I was going to go into this diatribe about how even if they were to cure cancer, cigarette prices would not go down. The justification for those taxes would be eliminated but the cigarette smoker would still be the scape goat buy out man for the government, and that if the threat of cancer was necessary to get $700-1,000 in taxes from every smoker in Amerca per year, then the medicine wouldn't make it past the FDA and cancer patiants would have to move to Canada or Mexico to get treatment. I thought that would be a pretty good blog as well.
The reason that I didn't write either of these blogs is because essentially life is taking its toll on me. Maybe its a Ph.D. thing, but I always feel like I'm not taking action up to my potential. Case in point, there's a scholarship that I really should apply to, a travel grant that I could really use, a conference that I should submit to, and another conference that I need to find out about. Meanwhile, most of my fellow grad students now know each other, except for me, and yes, I'm feeling a little out of the loop just about now. Meanwhile, I have two massive papers to write. I have to go to other departments to find out what courses they will be offering in the Spring that qualify as American Studies classes (since this information isn't listed anywhere). Dinner. Laundry. And note, I haven't even gotten to my house yet. Which needs work and purchases, and is for all intents and purposes, slow going.
Basically, if there's one thing that I can control in my life right now, it's how much I read. And so that's basically what I've been trying to control. I figure, if I do all the reading that is required of me then I am, at this point, aces, and so far, I've managed fairly well in that category.
But some things have indeed suffered. For those of you who don't know, I'm writing a novel. I used to call it a longer work, so as to not jinx the novel-esque nature of my project, but now there's no denying it: it's a novel. Well, it about four hundred double spaced pages, so I think that's a bit longer than a longer piece. Hell, that's beyond novella, and I'd be awfully proud of Shock Tea if it were done. But it is not.
But why not, you may ask? Writer's block. There's really no two ways about it. I have writer's block. But what is writer's block?
I think the idea of writer's block has been misconstrued. There is the notion that when you have writer's block you don't know what is going to happen next in the story you're working on. But that's not true at all, I always know what is going to happen next. In fact, quite often, I am confronted with a myriad of possabilities as to what is going to happen next. And just as often, they are not mutually exclusive. That is to say, that if I have four options for the next scene, I know that it is a question of how to order them and not which to use and which to throw out.
And this is not because I am one of those writers who carefully plans out the plot of the novel before even writing it. I may know what's going to happen next, but up until this point, I haven't really been solid on what will happen after that. But next? Next is easy. Next is, more often than not, completely obvious.
So, then, why don't I just keep writing Next scenes until the story is done? Well, that's the tactic I'm working off of, but that brings us to the next point in the common understanding of Writer's Block: Writer's Block as an ability to express what one wants to say. I will say that this is the more common version of writer's block that I feel, but I don't exactly think it comes about for the reasons that people might otherwise believe. A novel is supposed to have continuity. The problem is that it's hard to keep that continuity when you've been writing the damn thing for four or five years. You essentially forget the mode of thinking you were in when you wrote your earlier scenes, and in many cases, you believe that these scenes were really good. If there is continuity, you want the continuity of that quality, but as it's later, you know longer remember how to create that quality. You may have the ability to create a different quality, which maybe even be just as good, but different is different, and difference is not continuity.
The main reason that I've had writer's block has nothing to do with either of these assumed meanings of said block, but for a much more pragmatic reason. You see, I'm writing a monster of a work, both in size and scope. I'm basically taking on Milton's task in explaining the ways of God to man, except that Milton did this through the begining, with the Garden of Eden, and I'm doing it with the end, through the Armaggedon. No small task. And I feel that I am up to this task. Call that hubris if you will, but I really do feel as though I can pull this thing off.
But what then?
Because the romantic notion of a writer is that they do their work either in seclusion or in some colony get away and that the hard part is producing the work. But that's not true. Not even slightly true. If you have a story, and you have some skill, chances are that, with enough dilligence, you can produce the work. But after the work is produced, it still must be published, and that's not so easy.
Witness my forays into the publishing endeavor thus far. I have asked published writers how they did it, and their answer is always the same: keep sending it to places. Great!!! So, just keep plugging away and hopefully somebody, at some point, will think of your stuff as worthy of taking a risk. Keep in mind just how complicated that very step is. You're work could be too long, too high brow, too hard to get into. You could be peddling the wrong work at the wrong time: "What you've written a post-modern novel, but nobodies writing post-modern novels now. It's all memoir." I mean there are a million good reasons for someone not to want to take a chance on your 300 page book even enough to read it for quality, much less publish it for money. And there is only two reasons that you think that they should take this chance: 1--you think it's good, and 2--it may actually be good, but it's a book--they have to read it to find out whether it's any good or not.
But that's only half the problem, the other half is that those people who tell you to send your work out are never very specific. Send it where? That they cannot tell you, and there is nowhere really to turn. Short stories, there's a market, but even then, it's hard to find the right market. What, are you going to read every lit mag in the world to find the one that seems to be printing stuff similar to the stuff you write? That's hard enough, but novels. It isn't like you can just send off your manuscript to Harcourt Brace and hope that they pick it up. You have to have agents. You have to get an agent, however you do that. And none of this is any guarantee that when all is said and done that anyone will even read your book.
So that's writer's block people. It is this question over and over again: "why should I waste my time writing a four hundred page book that no one is ever going to read?" And really why should I?
But let's end this thing on a high note. Recently, I was given an answer to why. My friend Jason has found someone who would like to edit his stuff and find places, FOR HIM, to send his stuff. There is a very real possability that Jason will be published before me, and in that way, will have justified himself as a writer before me. I've spent four years writing my novel. I can not let that happen.
People tell you that to get over writer's block, you should just keep writing. That's a lie. Under those circumstances you write in spite of writer's block, rather than to cure it, and in doing so, you cure nothing. But I have found another means by which to cure this dreaded curse of wordsmiths the world over. The cure for writer's block is competition, envy, and the feeling that world will silently forget about you and will reward those who've managed the one thing that you cannot: they stopped whining.
I realize that these seem rather ignoble reasons to finish a project meant to be an enlightening enterprise of self expression, but beggars cannot be choosers. Besides, have you read my excerpts from Shock Tea? I don't think it such a bad idea that it be inspired by some of the less talked about of the human drives.
So, lastly to you Jason, oh writer of 59 word stories, I am at your heels with angels dancing on the head of my pen. Viddie well me droogie, viddie well.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
12:24 PM
2 Comments:
First off, my good friend, I believe that you've blown my friend's offer out of proportion. Someone simply said to me, "hey, that's interesting stuff. I'd like to help you edit it for publication." Does this mean that my snippets of life-writing will actually be published? No. Does this mean that I'm even one bit closer to publishing? No.
I understand the problem of your writer's block, and want to help. I realize that you need some competition to propel you toward the completion of your novel, but I'm simply not a worthy writing adversary. This shouldn't in any way obviate your completing the novel out of pure spite for me. Rather, complete the novel to spite my vast wealth, my superior manners, my great store of learning, my wonderful family, and my sense of mental well-being. Those should be your true objects of envy, not someone's passing comment on reading my work.
Bull Hockey. Jason is a phenomenal writer and we will all take great delight in using you as an excuse to keep working. Don't delude yourself. You kick butt, Mostro kicks butt, Motormouth kicks butt, and occassionally I get a swift kick in as well. United, we are ensuring one very unhappy butt. Or all our butts are getting it in the end. Whichever, we ensure we are all progressing.
Keep asking yourself if you are farther along than you were a year ago. Yes? Then you are where you need to be. Have you progressed from last week? Read more books, watched more movies, written a sentance that wasn't there before, gone out to drinks or dinner with someone in the department, had a conversation in the hall, or just moved to the other side to air out the bedsores? Celebrate that.
Competition is as good a self-starter as any. Use it. Some may also call it inspiration. I'm inspired to kick your butt. Hey if it works . . .
Like anything, completing a novel is as problematic as completing a PhD. You need times when you are forced to do what it is that you really need to do. There are times when the mind rebels and you just shut down until you recharge. Sometimes that means sacking out on the couch or going to the park or not doing anything for a whole summer. Accept that you need that time. Accept that you have PhD or Writer's or whatever block. And accept that sometimes you can self start, and sometimes you need a significant other to get you going again, or the support of friends, or even the spectre that your friends are doing better than you.
Take your accomplishments on a daily basis. Today you might only have painted one minature. It wasn't the 12 books you have to read, or figuring out what classes are going to be offered in another department, or even making friends with the benighted other souls in your department. But that miniature looks really really cool. And it is ready for when next you actually get to play. Or you won a bid on some new minatures. Or you got the damn laundry done. It's more than I've done. There, you won the laundry competition.
And maybe you thought about what you might do with part of your novel for about 2 minutes while you were on the can. Or in the act of describing your novel for the umpeenth billion time you realized you have a better idea of where you are going than the time you last described it to someone else. Keep jotting those ideas down. It shows You did SOMETHING on your novel.
All those little bits are part of the novel's progress. Why do you think they take so long?
Bite by bite you end up swallowing the whale.
Have you heard of Melina May,
Who ate a monstrous whale?
She thought she could,
She said she would,
So she started in right at the tail.
And everyone said, "You're much too small,"
But that didn't bother Melinda at all.
She took little bites and she chewed very slow,
Just like a good girl should . . .
And in eighty nine years she ate that whale
Because she said she would!
There's always someone better ahead of you. That gives you a clear shot at their fundament. There's always someone behind you too.
Which brings me to a Ren and Stimpy reference. Ever see the Powdered Toast Man episode? Where he tells kids and the Pope riding him to cling tenatiously to his buttocks? Did you know the Pope's voice is actually Frank Zappa?
Not sure I have a point with all this. You're where you are supposed to be. Enjoy the ride.
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