You ever have an annoying epiphany that just keeps stabbing into your thoughts, like that shower scene from the movie, Psycho, complete with the music, despite all the effort you make to shut it out?
Yeah. More coffee?
In Green
I’m wearing green today, homage to St. Patrick’s Day in America.
I don’t celebrate holidays much, and celebrate them less as I age. I don’t look forward to them much. Putting out decorations rarely occurs to me.
After thinking about it, I’ve realized that I little associate with the external world. Events are remote. I live by and enjoy the internal worlds created as I imagine and write. It’s a problem, and it’s a benefit. The problem is that my wife is exasperated because I’m not all up about holidays like other people. The benefit is that I feel like I’m successfully writing, and that makes me happy. Like most things in life, the value is on a sliding spectrum, and changes often.
I suppose I could change it, or try, since I’m now aware, but I’m not inclined to do that – for now.
My Five Writing Rules
I have simple writing rules. It’s a complicated world, so why burden myself with greater complications?
- Write every day. Writing every day helps me maintain story continuity, and making progress is tangibly reassuring. I also like the practice and discipline, but as an amendment to this rule, I stay flexible and adapt. I don’t sweat it if I can’t write every day. Okay, I confess, I sweat it, but I endure with the promise to myself, “I will write again.”
- Write like crazy. Yep, put it down, one word after another, and let it flow like lava escaping an erupting volcano. Then, edit, polish, edit, polish, revise, re-write, and edit and polish. It’s a rare sentence that is not changed in some manner between first thought and final edit. After grudgingly accepting that re-writing, polishing, and editing are necessary, I now enjoy this process. Writing like crazy is a fast and intense process, but the polishing, etc., is loving, and let me feel the novel and see how it breathes.
- Don’t overthink it and don’t write for anyone else. Man, I get angst about what I’m writing. I worry that it’s crap, and I suffer the imposter syndrome. Even as I write and enjoy what I write, I worry that others won’t like it, that it won’t measure up as professional, meaningful, entertaining, or original. I fear the moment when someone stands up, points a finger at me, and shouts, “J’accuse! You are not a writer.” However, I’m also ready to respond, “Fuck you, jack.” Of course, that won’t prevent me from brooding about it.
- Create and maintain a support structure. Like anything that you consider imperative, such as eating properly, exercising, or family time, it was critical for me to let others know that it’s writing time is important. In return, I set a schedule for it, and adhere to it, so that they know when I’ll be writing. Telling others – coming out of the writing closet, if you will – was a huge step. People respect the effort. Telling my wife, and her support of my writing efforts, were tremendous boosts to my ability to go off and write every day. Writing is already a solitary and lonely business, but her support reduces the struggle by an immeasurable chunk.
- Don’t talk to others about the novel(s) in progress. People will ask, and I do want to share. But it’s so easy to let that writing excitement overpower the moment. I end up going on and on, regaling them about the characters, concept, plot and complications, even as I understand that it’s in beta, or first draft, or whatever, and subject to change. Just answer politely in vaguely sensible terms, change the subject, and let them escape for being a good friend and inquiring.
Any rules that work for you that you want to suggest? No pressure.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Up
Rise up, I hear.
Can you rise down?
It is possible to sit up but if you’re standing, does sit down need to be specified?
(But if you omit down, and say, “Sit,” will people become offended that it sounds like you’re ordering a dog?)
And why do we give up?
Anchors
You ever think about someone who passed, and realized that although you rarely saw them, they were an anchor, someone who moored the foundations of your life, and although little has physically changed in your life with their passing, everything is different, because one of your mooring anchors is gone?
Game
You ever get the feeling that you’re playing a cosmic video game, but nobody has told you the rules, score, player, or objective?
Just wondering.
Turbidity
My writing streams rushed together. The words and ideas became turbulent, muddied and entangled, becoming too much, too much.
What had happened?
It’s always in me to be analytical and introspective, to explain and try to understand myself, in hopes that I can reach productive and lasting peace with myself. So I asked, what happened to the writing process. I was writing. The flows of words and ideas were strong and potent. I was almost keeping up. Then, overnight, it unraveled.
In the stillness of my pre-walking walks, insights arrived.
- The flows were too intense. I’d been keeping up. Now, I’d failed. I wanted to write everything at once. Chaos resulted from impatience.
- I’d seen the movie Black Panther. I enjoyed it, but it was a catalyst for new ideas. Just like I sometimes – hell, most of the time – read a book and enjoy it, I wanted to incorporate new thoughts and directions, because I liked how them in the movie. A purge of that was required.
- Doubts; I was suffering doubts about whether I was up to understanding the story, and keeping up as a writer sufficiently to present the story.
Thinking and walking it out helped walk me back from the metaphorical ledge of despair on which I found myself. Well, I’m off the ledge but I remain a little unsettled. Write through it, I tell myself, and hope to hell that works. Oddly, while walking, I thought about a dream I had, and that helped a great deal to come to a palatable understanding about my inner dynamics and anxieties.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Madeleine Said
Exactly how I often feel.
Uncertainty
You ever get involved with writing and thinking about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and observer bias in quantum mechanics, and become uncertain about what you’re thinking?
It’s almost as complicated as trying to explain everything that’s happened on Game of Thrones.
Trick Question
You ever read something that you wrote and think, “Wow, this is terrible,” and then read something else you wrote, and are astonished to discover that you wrote because it seems so amazing?
Yeah, trick question, isn’t it?
Michael Seidel, writer 