It aint easy, this whole writing-a-novel malarkey.
It's not supposed to be easy, obviously, otherwise everyone and Pavlov's dog would be doing it and MyFace and TwitterBook would be a whole lot emptier. Writing a novel that you hope someday will get published is definitely not an endeavour for softies or quitters, because with every novel you attempt to write you get a free gift. You didn't ask for it, and once you know you have it you certainly don't want it, but there's no shop to take it back to so you're stuck with it. I'm talking, of course, about your Writing Grinch.
You know that nagging voice in your head that tells you your writing sucks? That no-one's ever going to read your crappy novel anyway, even if you actually finish it, which you probably won't because it sucks so much? That's your Writing Grinch. Stephen King and many other writers talk about having your Writing Muse show up if you spend enough time putting in the graft - well, the bad news is your Writing Grinch does a pretty good impression of your Muse, and it can be hard to tell them apart sometimes (because even your Muse can be hard on you.) Tricksy little so-and-so, that Grinch. So what we need to do is arm ourselves against him; know his battle tactics and be ready to kick his butt like Buckaroo when he comes a-calling. (Note: I'm using 'he' throughout this because my Grinch happens to be a he. Yours might be a 'she' or even an 'it.' Adjust as necessary.)
My Grinch has been something of a regular companion during my draft two process ('bless' his little steel-capped bovver-boots.) So, because I'm the kind of person who cries at charity appeal adverts on the telly, I feel a need to encourage anyone out there who's thinking of abandoning their novel along with their writing dreams. I'm not quitting on mine, so I can't let you quit on yours without a fight!
So, without further ado, let's run down through the Grinch's most common mantras...
1 - "This novel is unpublishable. No agent/publisher is ever going to want it, because it's not what anyone would want to read."
...And so, what's the point of even finishing it, right? Give up, and start on something that has got a chance of seeing the light of published day. Except... didn't your Grinch say that about the last one you didn't finish as well - and the one before that, and the one before..? I think there's a pattern emerging here. Thing is... he might well be right. This novel you're currently slogging your guts out might not ever get published - in fact, if it's your first, the odds are pretty high that it won't. But the only way to even have a hope of ever getting the medal is to finish the race. Keeping your eye on the prize is a fantastic way to motivate yourself to keep on running towards that finish line, but if that's all you're in it for... well, it won't sustain you when that Grinch starts whispering in your ear and sapping your confidence. After all, nobody knocks themselves out to get a prize they no longer believe they'll win.
So at least for now, forget the prize. It's experiencing the whole journey, from the very beginning right to its end, that matters. Just keep putting one word in front of the other, sentence by sentence, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. Map out the journey and learn from each stage of it, so that you can take your experiences with you for the next one. And the next and the next. Because the best way to get to the Holy Grail of being published is to teach yourself to stay on the journey towards it - time after time after time...
2 - "You know, everybody laughs at you behind your back - you and your crazy dreams about getting your novel published. They all think you're wasting your time."
It's lovely when you have loyal friends, family and spouse around you, encouraging you and being totally supportive of your writing endeavours. Lots of writers have them in their lives - and, unfortunately, lots don't. If you're in the second category... well, there's not a lot you can do to remedy that situation, I'm afraid. Actually, finally get your work published? That'll hush their sniggering, disapproving mouths, right? Pfffft, no. Unless you can morph into the literary love-child of J.K. Rowling and Stephen King overnight (and flash the resultant wads of banknotes in the faces of your naysayers as proof) you can merely expect comments along the lines of "well, I think I might write a book as well then, if it's that easy to get published..." Seriously, I wish I was joking - but I'm not. Been there, heard it, and - trust me, it's like a knife in the heart every time.
So you can't write for those people. You can't write to win them over, prove a point to them or to finally show them - finally - that you're not just a feckless dreamer who'll never amount to anything worth talking about. Harsh as it sounds, your best strategy is to teach yourself to not give a flying eff-word about what they think. Ever. You are a writer, and you don't need their approval - or anyone else's, for that matter - to do what you do. And if there's any part of you that's doing that, even if it's because you think it'll make even the tiniest difference in the long term, stop it. Stop that shizzle right now.
The only people that will ever matter when it comes to your writing is the people who want to read your writing. You won't know most of them - you'll probably never even meet most of them. But they're the people you write for. Not the unbelievers in your life. Screw them.
3 - "Okay, so you finish this novel - and then what? What if this is the only novel you have in you? What if, after this one, all your inspiration dries up and you can never write another one ever again?"
Because creativity, after all, is like a beautiful snowflake - unique and special and, once it's had its moment of glory melts away into nothing and disappears forever...
Mmmm... no, not really. You're not necessarily destined to 'use up' all the currency in your Bank of Imagination on just one novel, any more than you would eat the most delicious meal in the best restaurant in the world and then immediately say "Well that's it - nothing will ever come close to this experience and so from this moment on there is no point in eating anything else ever again. I can only hope it doesn't take too long to die of starvation." As long as you've got senses to engage and a brain to interpret them, your creativity is more like a well that fills up whenever you allow the rain to pour in (and let's face it, the only way for that not to happen is if you take steps to stop it getting in.)
Still not convinced? Okay then, let's imagine for a moment that you are one of those rarities that truly only does have one novel 'in you' and nothing more. Is that such a terrible thing? You'd certainly be in good company. Among other famous authors who only ever published one novel are; Harper Lee, with To Kill A Mockingbird, (although the world is currently aflame with rumours about a second one about to be published, some fifty-five years later) Emily Bronte with Wuthering Heights, Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray, Margaret Mitchell with Gone With The Wind, Boris Pasternak with Dr Zhivago, Anna Sewell with Black Beauty...
Would the literary world have been better off if they'd not bothered to finish those novels, just because they didn't go on to write any more after that?
4 - "It's taking too long! You're not writing fast enough for long enough! Your word count is pitiful! You'll be a-hundred-and-ninety-three before you ever finish this novel - hell, you'll probably die before you finish it!"
You've seen those books on Amazon too, admit it - 'How to Write 2,000 Words an Hour and Pump Out a Book Every Thirty Days and be a Stinking Rich Kindle Millionaire Woohoo Bring on the Wonga!' And I'm not about to laugh in the faces of such books and say it's all a pack of lies. Some people do, in fact, write at least 2,000 words an hour and a book every thirty days (although in fairness, most of them are the authors of those types of books.) James Patterson seems to bring out a new novel roughly every two-and-half minutes, but that's because he has an entire army of ghostwriters in a magical fortress somewhere, who each take an outline he dashes off in a day or so and then beaver away at writing the books that he no doubt edits a bit before getting them published under his 'brand name.' (Harsh? Perhaps, but unless he actually went out and kidnapped those writers and keeps them manacled by their ankles to a desk, releasing them only for meals, sleep and toilet breaks I can't really diss him too much for having a factory-production-line approach to novel writing. I just hope he's paying them well for it and they genuinely don't mind not receiving much credit for their efforts... but even if that's not the case, I'm assuming they still have the choice to break away and strike out on their own.)
Some people can be full-time writers, some can only be part-time writers, and some have to squeeze in precious writing time between a gazillion other commitments. That will have some bearing on how quickly (or not) a writer can progress with their novels. Some writers are fantastically prolific: the mystery author John Creasey wrote six hundred novels in his lifetime, romance author Barbara Cartland wrote seven-hundred-and twenty-three and childrens' author Enid Blyton wrote over eight-hundred. (I'll let you have a moment for your mind to boggle.)
And then we have James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. His average wordcount was widely rumoured to be six words a day (I don't know about you, but that makes me feel like a writing machine by comparison.) George R.R. Martin has also been accused of being a slow writer (albeit mainly by fans desperate for the next instalment in his Game of Thrones series) along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Michael Crichton. All of which suggests that there's room for tortoises as well as hares in the writing world.
The point is, whether you write for eight hours a day or two hours a day (mine is the latter) you can only write what you write in that time. As long as that's what you do for at least the majority of your allotted time - as opposed to checking your emails, surfing the web or sneaking off to watch Bargain Hunt and claiming it was 'for research' - there's not much more you can do. No honestly, there really isn't. I know all those books claim everyone can write 2,000 words a day if they put their mind to it - but what those books don't tell you is that anything between 300-1800 of those words will be utter drivel that you'll end up deleting anyway. Some of us know that already, and simply don't allow the drivel to make it onto the page in the first place. That's what reduces the wordcount for us.
By all means measure your progress - I use an Excel spreadsheet to mark in how many hours a week I spent writing and my wordcount at the end of each 'session.' That's a brilliant thing to do to keep yourself on track and strengthen your commitment to finishing your novel, because it puts you in the mindset of treating your writing like a job that you 'clock in' for. It's also the best way to work out exactly how much you are capable of producing in the time you have available; a few months of tracking your wordcount-per-time-allotted will give you an average that's realistic and achievable for you. This will help you when it comes to writing towards deadlines - whether self-imposed or set by external sources - because you'll know if you're likely to meet it, and how much more time to negotiate for if you're not.
If you can improve on your wordcount over time - fantastic! But if you can't... accept it and don't use it like a measuring stick to hold up against other writers and then beat yourself over the head with. Forget about what everyone else is doing - you are you. And if you're more James Joyce than Enid Blyton... that's okay, it really is.
Well, those are my big Grinch Moans... what are yours? Are there things I've missed? I'd love to know.
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writers. Show all posts
Monday, 16 February 2015
Saturday, 31 January 2015
Unravelling the 'Strong Female Character.'
Over the last few decades there's been a change in attitude to female characters - in books, television, films... pretty much all media actually.
Back in the Dark Ages of yore we all (apparently) liked to read about hapless captive-princess-types, who were stunningly beautiful, so sweet-natured they practically farted rainbows and could transform every man in existence into a love-drunk white knight simply by aiming their impossibly lovely gaze in his general direction. Solve her own problems? Nooo! How bloody unromantic is that? Much better to have her flop around being all trembling and powerless at her horrible, perilous situation. But not - heaven forbid! - angry or grumpy, or even the teensiest bit cross about her trauma, because such behaviour is soooo not feminine, y'know? Bearing her misfortunes with resignation and infinite optimism is how the girl does it - if she wants to actually be liked for the beautiful, non-threatening quest mcguffin she truly is, of course...
Mmmm.... yeahno, actually. Most women have to solve their own problems in their real lives, so fictional female characters who rely on their magical beauty-powers to get everyone else to do it for them are not exactly helpful role models in that respect. So we all started to wise up; the Female Lead Character needed a serious makeover if she was to appeal to the modern reader. And so, if the weak, passive female character was no longer acceptable in fiction, she shall henceforth be replaced with....
The complete opposite! Ta-daaah! Ladies and gentlemen, meet... the Strong Female Character!
And the world rejoiced. Strong Female Character? That sounds gooood. It must be good, because it sounds completely unlike the one we had before and we already know we don't like her any more. So.... how to make a Strong Female Character then? Mmmmmm, lemme see....
Oooh, I know - make her do everything a man can do! But better! And in sexy clothes (but not too sexy, 'cause she's not an object of lust any more, remember? Unless of course that's entirely her choice and she's doin' it for the empowerment, gimme five, sisters!)
Oooh no, wait, I got a better one - make her intellectually superior to 98% of the men around her! In which case she'll need to be a bit of an ice queen, maybe even a ballbreaker. No man could ever be a match for her when it comes to braininess - not that she'd even be looking for a man in that way of course, because she's, like, sooo above that sort of nonsense. In this lady's world, men are the weaker sex, and if they dare to be attracted to her for reasons other than her phenomenal boffin-power they can say hello to a sharp kick in the 'nads.
And lots of people clearly went "Yeah!" to all of that, because from that moment on there were quite a lot of those types of 'Strong Female Characters' karate-kicking and equation-solving their way into fiction. All fine and dandy. But then at some point something changed.
Having 'Strong Female Characters' stopped being merely a cool thing to do and started being a mandatory default setting for every female character in every book ever. And if you're a female writer, the pressure to conform is double-strength - because if your Female Lead Characters are not Strong With a Capital S, you're letting the sisterhood down. Yeah, you - personally and wilfully, you traitor!
And so we had the Buffys, the Witchblades, the Seven of Nines, the Katniss Everdeens. All fine characters in their own right, but... the gold standard for Strong Female Characters? How many women in the real world do you know who are just like them? Is being super-brainy or able to kick butt in a fight the only way a female character can be defined as 'strong' now? And if she fails that test, is the novel she's in doomed to fail along with her?
In Redemption (my current w-i-p) my main character is a female called S12, and the story is told from her POV. So... is she a kick-ass babe who can handle herself in a fight?
Errrr... no. She does have some specialised skills, and she would certainly try to defend herself physically if the situation required... but the odds of her succeeding in smacking down a would-be assailant are pretty darn small. She's learned that negotiation is a much more effective strategy for her. Yeah, I know - that much-maligned 'feminine' trait of trying to resolve things peacefully!
O-kay.... butt-kicking's not her thing then, so she must make up for it by being super-smart, yeah?
Errr... no again. She was raised in the ghetto zone of a future earth, which means that, while she has a level of street-smarts necessary for survival in such a harsh environment, she aint no college graduate. But she's savvy enough to know that sometimes playing up to her apparent 'dumbness' can make a smart person tell her things they wouldn't tell her if they thought she could understand them. Tsk tsk - pretending to be an airhead to manipulate people. How horribly anti-feminist!
Ahhh... okay, but she's still a confident, independent woman who always behaves appropriately for the situation, right?
Errrr... you already know where this is going, don't you? She tries to do the right thing... mostly. She even gets it right sometimes. But many other times, she gets it woefully wrong. This is mostly because in her previous life in the ghetto her survival depended on being subservient to men, in a big way. Now she's suddenly found herself in an unfamiliar environment where she doesn't have to play that role anymore... but it's all she instinctively knows. And since no-one in this new place seems in any hurry to state what's required of her instead, the only way she can learn is by trial and error. A lot of error.
So how does she score? In terms of the Popular Concensus for what constitutes a 'Strong Female Character,' it seems she pretty much goes against most of the ideals. But to write her any other way for the story she's in wouldn't make a lick of sense. She's who she is because of what's happened to her before the story begins - and what happens once it does and what will have happened to her by the time it ends.
In short, she's not the 'Strong Female Character' beloved of the traditional default requirements. She's a fish-out-of-water, good-intentioned-but-flawed female character who's trying to find her way in the strange and scary world she's been dropped into. Is that so bad? Is that really a handbag-slap across the face of feminism?
For a long while I was seriously worried I was the only one asking that kind of question. But this week I found out I'm not. In this guest post on Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog, the author S.L Huang discusses the idea of flawed female protagonists, and in it she also references this essay by Rose Lemberg. It seems the idea that all of them must be kickass and super-capable might finally be losing its appeal, and a new generation of readers are looking for more down-to-earth characters they can relate to instead. Because when it's not done well, isn't the kick-ass, super-capable Strong Female Character really just another version of a Mary Sue? Male characters have the freedom to be anything and everything in novels. Why are female ones only allowed to be awesome role models, simply to avoid being branded an outdated - and 'chauvinistic' - stereotype?
What do you think? Should we continue to champion the Strong Female Character as an ideal? Or should it be enough to just accept them as 'a female character' - in whatever of a million different flavours that happens to come? Y'know... kind of like females in real life?
Back in the Dark Ages of yore we all (apparently) liked to read about hapless captive-princess-types, who were stunningly beautiful, so sweet-natured they practically farted rainbows and could transform every man in existence into a love-drunk white knight simply by aiming their impossibly lovely gaze in his general direction. Solve her own problems? Nooo! How bloody unromantic is that? Much better to have her flop around being all trembling and powerless at her horrible, perilous situation. But not - heaven forbid! - angry or grumpy, or even the teensiest bit cross about her trauma, because such behaviour is soooo not feminine, y'know? Bearing her misfortunes with resignation and infinite optimism is how the girl does it - if she wants to actually be liked for the beautiful, non-threatening quest mcguffin she truly is, of course...
Mmmm.... yeahno, actually. Most women have to solve their own problems in their real lives, so fictional female characters who rely on their magical beauty-powers to get everyone else to do it for them are not exactly helpful role models in that respect. So we all started to wise up; the Female Lead Character needed a serious makeover if she was to appeal to the modern reader. And so, if the weak, passive female character was no longer acceptable in fiction, she shall henceforth be replaced with....
The complete opposite! Ta-daaah! Ladies and gentlemen, meet... the Strong Female Character!
And the world rejoiced. Strong Female Character? That sounds gooood. It must be good, because it sounds completely unlike the one we had before and we already know we don't like her any more. So.... how to make a Strong Female Character then? Mmmmmm, lemme see....
Oooh, I know - make her do everything a man can do! But better! And in sexy clothes (but not too sexy, 'cause she's not an object of lust any more, remember? Unless of course that's entirely her choice and she's doin' it for the empowerment, gimme five, sisters!)
Oooh no, wait, I got a better one - make her intellectually superior to 98% of the men around her! In which case she'll need to be a bit of an ice queen, maybe even a ballbreaker. No man could ever be a match for her when it comes to braininess - not that she'd even be looking for a man in that way of course, because she's, like, sooo above that sort of nonsense. In this lady's world, men are the weaker sex, and if they dare to be attracted to her for reasons other than her phenomenal boffin-power they can say hello to a sharp kick in the 'nads.
And lots of people clearly went "Yeah!" to all of that, because from that moment on there were quite a lot of those types of 'Strong Female Characters' karate-kicking and equation-solving their way into fiction. All fine and dandy. But then at some point something changed.
Having 'Strong Female Characters' stopped being merely a cool thing to do and started being a mandatory default setting for every female character in every book ever. And if you're a female writer, the pressure to conform is double-strength - because if your Female Lead Characters are not Strong With a Capital S, you're letting the sisterhood down. Yeah, you - personally and wilfully, you traitor!
And so we had the Buffys, the Witchblades, the Seven of Nines, the Katniss Everdeens. All fine characters in their own right, but... the gold standard for Strong Female Characters? How many women in the real world do you know who are just like them? Is being super-brainy or able to kick butt in a fight the only way a female character can be defined as 'strong' now? And if she fails that test, is the novel she's in doomed to fail along with her?
In Redemption (my current w-i-p) my main character is a female called S12, and the story is told from her POV. So... is she a kick-ass babe who can handle herself in a fight?
Errrr... no. She does have some specialised skills, and she would certainly try to defend herself physically if the situation required... but the odds of her succeeding in smacking down a would-be assailant are pretty darn small. She's learned that negotiation is a much more effective strategy for her. Yeah, I know - that much-maligned 'feminine' trait of trying to resolve things peacefully!
O-kay.... butt-kicking's not her thing then, so she must make up for it by being super-smart, yeah?
Errr... no again. She was raised in the ghetto zone of a future earth, which means that, while she has a level of street-smarts necessary for survival in such a harsh environment, she aint no college graduate. But she's savvy enough to know that sometimes playing up to her apparent 'dumbness' can make a smart person tell her things they wouldn't tell her if they thought she could understand them. Tsk tsk - pretending to be an airhead to manipulate people. How horribly anti-feminist!
Ahhh... okay, but she's still a confident, independent woman who always behaves appropriately for the situation, right?
Errrr... you already know where this is going, don't you? She tries to do the right thing... mostly. She even gets it right sometimes. But many other times, she gets it woefully wrong. This is mostly because in her previous life in the ghetto her survival depended on being subservient to men, in a big way. Now she's suddenly found herself in an unfamiliar environment where she doesn't have to play that role anymore... but it's all she instinctively knows. And since no-one in this new place seems in any hurry to state what's required of her instead, the only way she can learn is by trial and error. A lot of error.
So how does she score? In terms of the Popular Concensus for what constitutes a 'Strong Female Character,' it seems she pretty much goes against most of the ideals. But to write her any other way for the story she's in wouldn't make a lick of sense. She's who she is because of what's happened to her before the story begins - and what happens once it does and what will have happened to her by the time it ends.
In short, she's not the 'Strong Female Character' beloved of the traditional default requirements. She's a fish-out-of-water, good-intentioned-but-flawed female character who's trying to find her way in the strange and scary world she's been dropped into. Is that so bad? Is that really a handbag-slap across the face of feminism?
For a long while I was seriously worried I was the only one asking that kind of question. But this week I found out I'm not. In this guest post on Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog, the author S.L Huang discusses the idea of flawed female protagonists, and in it she also references this essay by Rose Lemberg. It seems the idea that all of them must be kickass and super-capable might finally be losing its appeal, and a new generation of readers are looking for more down-to-earth characters they can relate to instead. Because when it's not done well, isn't the kick-ass, super-capable Strong Female Character really just another version of a Mary Sue? Male characters have the freedom to be anything and everything in novels. Why are female ones only allowed to be awesome role models, simply to avoid being branded an outdated - and 'chauvinistic' - stereotype?
What do you think? Should we continue to champion the Strong Female Character as an ideal? Or should it be enough to just accept them as 'a female character' - in whatever of a million different flavours that happens to come? Y'know... kind of like females in real life?
Saturday, 28 June 2014
Striving For Perfection: A Great Idea (Theoretically.)
Well, it's all over; Number One Son's eighth birthday party went swimmingly, a fab time was had by all and my stress levels have returned to normal. Normally I would recover by eating cake, but today... cake is likely to make me run for the hills, to be honest. Don't want to see cake again for a very long time. Maybe even a couple of days...
As you might recall from my previous post, I had been tasked with making a Minecraft Island birthday cake, and I was determined to do it justice. The vision in my head was a work of art. My imaginary Minecraft Island cake was a thing of such cakey awesomeness that grown men would look upon it and wish they were children again, so they could have one just like it for their birthday. Every angle was mathematically perfect, every inch of the icing was smooth and flat and coloured to perfection. That was the cake my brain wanted to make.
Unfortunately my brain was just the foreman; the actual work was left to the pair of easily-distracted and somewhat unpredictably-coordinated flappy things at the end of my arms. And they clearly either didn't get the memo, or are spectacularly bad at interpreting instructions - either way, my brain wanted to fire them both on the spot when it saw what they'd done...
It's alright - I'm not fishing for compliments. It's not bad, I know that. But it looks nothing like my brain's interpretation (which was utterly freakin' incredible) so my brain is currently having a massive sulk and screaming that it's awful, a travesty - an insult to cakedom. My son pronounced it 'awesome,' and his little friends were suitably impressed - which I keep telling myself is all that really matters - but even so, I still can't stop myself doing a Simon Cowell Face every time I look at the chuffin' thing. When it came to recreating the sculpture of loveliness in my imagination, I failed.
And I do this so many times, in so many areas of my life.
Whether it's cake-making, arts and crafts, acting, singing - and yes, writing too - I start off with a picture of perfection in my mind, and when the thing I actually produce (inevitably) fails to live up to that ideal, I feel ashamed of both it and myself for faceplanting so far short of the impossible goalposts. It's probably held me back in my writing far more than I care to admit. And as I keep on truckin' through Draft Two of The Renegades, I'm starting to realise I'm going to end up feeling the same way about that too. I'm gonna need to fix that if I want to get this baby published.
I'm far from the only writer to point my arrow at perfection every time. Many of us - even if we don't admit it out loud - have a secret ideal in our minds of who we want our work to be compared to in terms of standard; 'the next Stephen King,' 'the new J.K. Rowling,' 'the Romance Genre's answer to George R.R. Martin' (mmm, okay, maybe that last one wouldn't work so well...) Anyway, those of us who are perfectionists tend to reach for the stars - which is fine, as long as we don't keep turning back in disgust the minute we've left Earth's orbit because our rocket's making funny noises.
There's nothing wrong with striving to produce only the very best work you can do; in fact, readers expect nothing less from any author whose book they've bought and rightly so. The difficulty, if you're constantly chasing perfection, is learning to accept that your 'best work' probably isn't going to be that, because it's simply not achievable - by anyone. If your Inner Critic is a drill sergeant he'll no doubt tell you to abandon all hope - if it looks like what you've produced isn't going to be a No. 1 Bestseller then you've already failed and you should just give up now. Inner Critics have their uses - but they can be a dick sometimes too...
While I was studying Performing Arts I had singing lessons as part of that course. Before that point, I did not sing with the intention of anyone actually hearing it - the very thought of it terrified me. During a one-to-one session with my singing tutor, I confessed to him that this was because I actually hated my singing voice. He asked me why, and after thinking about it for a bit I told him "because when I sing something from Les Mis, I open my mouth and I want Lea Salonga to come out - but all that comes out is me." He laughed and said "Well, you're not Lea Salonga, are you? You're you. So you've got a choice. You can either wait until you magically turn into her before you ever sing a note publicly - and then you'll waste the rest of your life not doing any singing at all. Or you can accept that you're you and work on making your voice the best it can be."
I haven't done any singing in public since graduating from that Performing Arts course, so I think I shall take his words and apply the essence of them to writing instead, since that's my focus now. And to any fellow perfectionists out there: have a high-five from me. Our best is better than 'perfect.' We need to remind ourselves of that whenever we beat ourselves up.
As you might recall from my previous post, I had been tasked with making a Minecraft Island birthday cake, and I was determined to do it justice. The vision in my head was a work of art. My imaginary Minecraft Island cake was a thing of such cakey awesomeness that grown men would look upon it and wish they were children again, so they could have one just like it for their birthday. Every angle was mathematically perfect, every inch of the icing was smooth and flat and coloured to perfection. That was the cake my brain wanted to make.
Unfortunately my brain was just the foreman; the actual work was left to the pair of easily-distracted and somewhat unpredictably-coordinated flappy things at the end of my arms. And they clearly either didn't get the memo, or are spectacularly bad at interpreting instructions - either way, my brain wanted to fire them both on the spot when it saw what they'd done...
It's alright - I'm not fishing for compliments. It's not bad, I know that. But it looks nothing like my brain's interpretation (which was utterly freakin' incredible) so my brain is currently having a massive sulk and screaming that it's awful, a travesty - an insult to cakedom. My son pronounced it 'awesome,' and his little friends were suitably impressed - which I keep telling myself is all that really matters - but even so, I still can't stop myself doing a Simon Cowell Face every time I look at the chuffin' thing. When it came to recreating the sculpture of loveliness in my imagination, I failed.
And I do this so many times, in so many areas of my life.
Whether it's cake-making, arts and crafts, acting, singing - and yes, writing too - I start off with a picture of perfection in my mind, and when the thing I actually produce (inevitably) fails to live up to that ideal, I feel ashamed of both it and myself for faceplanting so far short of the impossible goalposts. It's probably held me back in my writing far more than I care to admit. And as I keep on truckin' through Draft Two of The Renegades, I'm starting to realise I'm going to end up feeling the same way about that too. I'm gonna need to fix that if I want to get this baby published.
I'm far from the only writer to point my arrow at perfection every time. Many of us - even if we don't admit it out loud - have a secret ideal in our minds of who we want our work to be compared to in terms of standard; 'the next Stephen King,' 'the new J.K. Rowling,' 'the Romance Genre's answer to George R.R. Martin' (mmm, okay, maybe that last one wouldn't work so well...) Anyway, those of us who are perfectionists tend to reach for the stars - which is fine, as long as we don't keep turning back in disgust the minute we've left Earth's orbit because our rocket's making funny noises.
There's nothing wrong with striving to produce only the very best work you can do; in fact, readers expect nothing less from any author whose book they've bought and rightly so. The difficulty, if you're constantly chasing perfection, is learning to accept that your 'best work' probably isn't going to be that, because it's simply not achievable - by anyone. If your Inner Critic is a drill sergeant he'll no doubt tell you to abandon all hope - if it looks like what you've produced isn't going to be a No. 1 Bestseller then you've already failed and you should just give up now. Inner Critics have their uses - but they can be a dick sometimes too...
While I was studying Performing Arts I had singing lessons as part of that course. Before that point, I did not sing with the intention of anyone actually hearing it - the very thought of it terrified me. During a one-to-one session with my singing tutor, I confessed to him that this was because I actually hated my singing voice. He asked me why, and after thinking about it for a bit I told him "because when I sing something from Les Mis, I open my mouth and I want Lea Salonga to come out - but all that comes out is me." He laughed and said "Well, you're not Lea Salonga, are you? You're you. So you've got a choice. You can either wait until you magically turn into her before you ever sing a note publicly - and then you'll waste the rest of your life not doing any singing at all. Or you can accept that you're you and work on making your voice the best it can be."
I haven't done any singing in public since graduating from that Performing Arts course, so I think I shall take his words and apply the essence of them to writing instead, since that's my focus now. And to any fellow perfectionists out there: have a high-five from me. Our best is better than 'perfect.' We need to remind ourselves of that whenever we beat ourselves up.
Saturday, 17 May 2014
Born to be A Misfit-Flavoured Writer.
I've heard it said that many writers have felt like the oddball at some point in their life - like they were paddling through the river of life in the opposite direction to everyone else. I am reasonably sure I was born feeling like I didn't quite fit in with the rest of the world. I felt that way throughout childhood, adolescence and the fun, crazy part of adulthood. And I still feel that way now.
I don't mean in a self-absorbed, hand-wringing 'no-one really understands me!' way. I mean more in the sense of 'Hmmm, I appear to be really rubbish at behaving like other, normal humans' kind of way. It never seemed to spoil my social life - I've had as many friends as other, non-weird people, although I suspect I was probably labelled My Weird Friend by more than a few - and I didn't attract nearly as many bullies as some poor sods with far less potential for ridicule than I possessed. But nonetheless I've always had this feeling of being a kind of imposter in this world; an alien who got accidentally dumped on the wrong planet and has since spent her whole life navigating and minimising the fallout from her cocked-up attempts to blend in with the natives.
It has its advantages, of course. This world will never cease to amaze, horrify, delight, shock, depress, inspire and frustrate me - and the day it does is the day I will know it's because I'm actually dead. It also means I feel no pressure whatsoever to conform to anybody's ideas of how I should look or dress or what I should aspire to; I've got so used to effortlessly failing at all those things for so much of my life already that I dropped out of that competition years ago. And this in itself has the added bonus of making my life far less complicated; I don't have to keep remembering what and who I'm 'supposed' to like and not like according to which particular friend or social group I'm talking to. Even if I just agreed with everyone all the time I'd still cock it up anyway, so I may as well just say what I really think and cock it up honestly.
In terms of what I might laughingly call my 'career prospects,' however.... mmm, yeah, that didn't work out so good. I've had a plethora of jobs over my adult life, and the one that lasted the longest was a rather pitiful four years. I've only been fired from two of them, and that was due to being spectacularly rubbish at those jobs rather than any disciplinary reasons - but even in many of the ones I quit, I'm pretty certain I was a bit of a nightmare employee while I was there. This is because they were office jobs; Dilbert In His Cubicle positions, if you like. The kind of jobs where there was A Method for doing every little thing that job entailed; a Method that had been used for years, by every other person who'd ever done that job, because it was A Method That Worked and was therefore How It Must Be Done At All Times.
Putting a little secret-alien-in-residence like me into any job like that is, inevitably, a conflict waiting to happen. In every one of those types of jobs, I quickly established a reputation for myself as the corporate equivalent of the annoying little kid who constantly asks "But why..?" My colleagues just found it funny that I got so bemused and frustrated by all these Methods and Procedures, while managers' reactions ranged from mild annoyance to suspicious unease, as if they were afraid I was some kind of one-woman revolutionist with a secret agenda to Take Down The Company From Within. I tried to knuckle down and play by the rules - no matter how stupid and archaic I thought some of them were - but even when I did, I still cocked things up for myself.
For example, each time I had my annual Employee Review with my line manager, I'm sure I probably did know, on some basic level, that the correct response to the question "So, have you considered opportunities for advancing your role within this company?" was not to burst out laughing and say "What, seriously?" I'm sure I also knew, if I was honest with myself, that when I was advised to record my progress with the technical tasks of my job in a personal work journal, they probably didn't mean for it to take the form of satirical cartoons and poems. All I can say in my defence was 'it felt like the right thing to do at the time.' Which pretty much proves how utterly unsuitable I was - and probably still am - for office jobs.
Eventually I would reach the inevitable point where I just thought "I can't do this anymore and still retain my sanity." My bosses always seemed genuinely surprised when I handed in my notice, as if it was the last thing they were expecting me to do - but I'm pretty sure they must have breathed huge sighs of relief in private. At least I was finally solving their 'Oh god, what the hell do we do with this one?' conundrum.
Through it all, I always had my writing. In fact, you could argue that my writing - and the kind of mindset that comes in particular with writing fiction - was the one thing I could never entirely separate from my hamster-wheel office job existence, and that was part of my repeated downfall in that field. And now I'm a completely-unemployable-in-the-current-recession mum of a primary-school child, I can finally devote my brain and my heart to my writing without feeling that it's What Makes Me A Misfit Person in this world. Well, okay - maybe it is, ultimately, but at least I'm not giving any middle-managers headaches about it anymore.
But at the same time, I've heard of many, many other writers who've happily held down office jobs while pursuing their writing dreams. They have been able to completely separate the office worker part of themselves from the writer part as effectively as building a partition screen between them, that they can open up and close off as and when it suits them. All of which suggests that being crap at office jobs is clearly not an intrinsic part of the writer make-up - and so the added ingredient must be the misfit part. There must be a subsection of Misfit Writers within the club as a whole, right?
There's hope for them, isn't there? There's a place in this world for Misfit Writers? I mean, I know we can be a bit weird sometimes, and there's always going to be this thing where you'll never feel like you really, truly know us completely - but we're okay people underneath it all, and at least you know if we like you we really do like you, for real ('cause if we didn't, we'd be far more likely to tell you than most other people...)
Maybe there should be some sort of Misfit Writers' Society? Maybe there already is...
I don't mean in a self-absorbed, hand-wringing 'no-one really understands me!' way. I mean more in the sense of 'Hmmm, I appear to be really rubbish at behaving like other, normal humans' kind of way. It never seemed to spoil my social life - I've had as many friends as other, non-weird people, although I suspect I was probably labelled My Weird Friend by more than a few - and I didn't attract nearly as many bullies as some poor sods with far less potential for ridicule than I possessed. But nonetheless I've always had this feeling of being a kind of imposter in this world; an alien who got accidentally dumped on the wrong planet and has since spent her whole life navigating and minimising the fallout from her cocked-up attempts to blend in with the natives.
It has its advantages, of course. This world will never cease to amaze, horrify, delight, shock, depress, inspire and frustrate me - and the day it does is the day I will know it's because I'm actually dead. It also means I feel no pressure whatsoever to conform to anybody's ideas of how I should look or dress or what I should aspire to; I've got so used to effortlessly failing at all those things for so much of my life already that I dropped out of that competition years ago. And this in itself has the added bonus of making my life far less complicated; I don't have to keep remembering what and who I'm 'supposed' to like and not like according to which particular friend or social group I'm talking to. Even if I just agreed with everyone all the time I'd still cock it up anyway, so I may as well just say what I really think and cock it up honestly.
In terms of what I might laughingly call my 'career prospects,' however.... mmm, yeah, that didn't work out so good. I've had a plethora of jobs over my adult life, and the one that lasted the longest was a rather pitiful four years. I've only been fired from two of them, and that was due to being spectacularly rubbish at those jobs rather than any disciplinary reasons - but even in many of the ones I quit, I'm pretty certain I was a bit of a nightmare employee while I was there. This is because they were office jobs; Dilbert In His Cubicle positions, if you like. The kind of jobs where there was A Method for doing every little thing that job entailed; a Method that had been used for years, by every other person who'd ever done that job, because it was A Method That Worked and was therefore How It Must Be Done At All Times.
Putting a little secret-alien-in-residence like me into any job like that is, inevitably, a conflict waiting to happen. In every one of those types of jobs, I quickly established a reputation for myself as the corporate equivalent of the annoying little kid who constantly asks "But why..?" My colleagues just found it funny that I got so bemused and frustrated by all these Methods and Procedures, while managers' reactions ranged from mild annoyance to suspicious unease, as if they were afraid I was some kind of one-woman revolutionist with a secret agenda to Take Down The Company From Within. I tried to knuckle down and play by the rules - no matter how stupid and archaic I thought some of them were - but even when I did, I still cocked things up for myself.
For example, each time I had my annual Employee Review with my line manager, I'm sure I probably did know, on some basic level, that the correct response to the question "So, have you considered opportunities for advancing your role within this company?" was not to burst out laughing and say "What, seriously?" I'm sure I also knew, if I was honest with myself, that when I was advised to record my progress with the technical tasks of my job in a personal work journal, they probably didn't mean for it to take the form of satirical cartoons and poems. All I can say in my defence was 'it felt like the right thing to do at the time.' Which pretty much proves how utterly unsuitable I was - and probably still am - for office jobs.
Eventually I would reach the inevitable point where I just thought "I can't do this anymore and still retain my sanity." My bosses always seemed genuinely surprised when I handed in my notice, as if it was the last thing they were expecting me to do - but I'm pretty sure they must have breathed huge sighs of relief in private. At least I was finally solving their 'Oh god, what the hell do we do with this one?' conundrum.
Through it all, I always had my writing. In fact, you could argue that my writing - and the kind of mindset that comes in particular with writing fiction - was the one thing I could never entirely separate from my hamster-wheel office job existence, and that was part of my repeated downfall in that field. And now I'm a completely-unemployable-in-the-current-recession mum of a primary-school child, I can finally devote my brain and my heart to my writing without feeling that it's What Makes Me A Misfit Person in this world. Well, okay - maybe it is, ultimately, but at least I'm not giving any middle-managers headaches about it anymore.
But at the same time, I've heard of many, many other writers who've happily held down office jobs while pursuing their writing dreams. They have been able to completely separate the office worker part of themselves from the writer part as effectively as building a partition screen between them, that they can open up and close off as and when it suits them. All of which suggests that being crap at office jobs is clearly not an intrinsic part of the writer make-up - and so the added ingredient must be the misfit part. There must be a subsection of Misfit Writers within the club as a whole, right?
There's hope for them, isn't there? There's a place in this world for Misfit Writers? I mean, I know we can be a bit weird sometimes, and there's always going to be this thing where you'll never feel like you really, truly know us completely - but we're okay people underneath it all, and at least you know if we like you we really do like you, for real ('cause if we didn't, we'd be far more likely to tell you than most other people...)
Maybe there should be some sort of Misfit Writers' Society? Maybe there already is...
Friday, 11 April 2014
Questions That Boggle A Writer's Brain
If anyone has known you're a writer for more than, say, five minutes of their life, you can bet they've asked you at least one of the aforetitled (is that a word? My spellcheck says no, but my brain is saying "it is now, bucko!") You know the kind of questions I mean. The ones that any writer knows can only be answered with a blank expression and a New York shrug.
Non-writers ask them because... well, if you're not a writer they seem like the Great Mystical Secrets that writers keep from the rest of the world, lest they become common knowledge and the truth emerges that anyone and everyone can be Stephen King with the right set of tools and ingredients. Which is true, of course... but neglects to point out that Stephen King and all the other uber-famous and mega-rich writers are just naturally in possession of a more 'right' set than the majority of writers just trying to make a living. And even they still can't answer those really head-mushing questions.
Am I going to attempt to answer them? Am I heck! I'm going to join all my fellow writers in blankness and New-York-shrugginess. But while doing that, I shall be pondering and marvelling on how unanswerable they truly are. Questions like:
1 - "Where do you get all your ideas from?"
Do we have a special box hidden in the attic, marked 'Story Ideas?' Do we sit within a circle of candles, chanting "om" until inspiration strikes? Head into the woods at midnight and play Black Sabbath songs while sacrificing a chicken to Underlord of Stories?
Shrug Number One right there. I dunno - where does a person get the idea he wants a pizza with pineapple and anchovies but NO OLIVES? Part of it comes from life experience ('had that one last time and it was awesome') but other than that it was just... there, in that grey mush under the skull. Non-writers must get ideas, surely? Maybe the only difference between writers and non-writers is that when writers have ideas... they write stuff from them?
2 - "Why do you write [insert genre here]?"
Stephen King, why do you write horror novels? Why don't you write Mills&Boon romance instead? Far less people would accuse you of being weird if you did that, y'know. And you, Catherine Cookson - why didn't you ever have a crack at writing cyberpunk, you silly old thing? You could've been so much more 'down with the kids!'
It's as if they think writers hover over a great List of Genres and either: a) shut their eyes, stick a pin in it and see where it lands or b) scan the choices and think "Hmmm, which one's making the most ker-ching for authors at the moment?" Of course neither of these is true (although that's not to say it's never been tried... it's just never really worked that well as a strategy.) The simple answer is that writers tend to write in the genres they enjoy reading. But then that leads to "Well, why do you like reading those genres in particular then?" Well jeez... why does anyone? Time for another New York shrug...
3 - "How can you write a [insert opposite gender to yourself] main character when you're a [insert your own gender]?"
There seems to be a belief in some sections of the book-buying public that this is somehow impossible at an X-chromosome level. And on one level, I can... sort of see their point. After all, if you as a female have never possessed your very own love sausage, how can you really know what it feels like to carry one around in your pants every day of your life? (DON'T - way ahead of you and let's not go there, thanks...)
But consider this; do the people who ask this question of writers also ask them "How can you write a main character who's a horse when you're not a horse?" No-one considers that an arrogant thing for a writer to attempt - and yet I'd have thought imagining life as a horse would be a lot tougher than imagining life as a fellow human of the opposite gender. Especially since humans are gifted with the power of asking questions of their opposite gender if there's stuff they want to understand. Questions that couldn't be answered by horses. Or dogs. Or mice. Or pigs...
4 - "What's the best way to write something guaranteed to be a bestseller?"
The writers that truly know the answer to this question are the ones who own a continent, eat grapes coated in gold leaf hand-plucked for them by their own personal Oompa-loompa and walk barefoot on specially-constructed clouds, so that their precious tootsies are never sullied by that dirty old thing they call the ground (that's for mortals, losers!) Let's take a moment to count those writers up, shall we? Oh yeah, that's right...
I'm pretty sure even Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin and Stephanie Meyer would lurve to know the answer to this question. But even they don't. Getting each new idea to a completed first draft is only the first stage in a long journey - and even doing that is a Herculean milestone that every writer has to reach before they can even think about how great their final work might (or might not) be. Writing isn't like baking a cake or building an IKEA wardrobe; put all the right bits together in the right quantities and the right order and you'll get the same thing every time. It's more like alchemy.
(Not to be confused with "ALCHEMY, Khashoggi... pure ALCHEMY!" Although that would be pretty darn cool...)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is there a writer alive who could actually provide the all-seeing answers to any of these questions? Truth is, you might as well ask them what's the best way to guarantee you'll win the lottery...
(Except I have a nagging suspicion there actually might be a way to do that. Not a legal way, but a way, nonetheless... )
Writing is not for sissies, 'cause there aint no guarantees. It's years and years of slogging away, our work possibly being ignored for most of our lives - heck, maybe all of them, we don't know for sure until that magic bell rings. And even when it does, we might end up being hated for it as much as loved (I'm sure E.L. James has had to grow a skin of armadillo-esque strength since 'Fifty Shades...') That's why some of us drink and get depressed sometimes.
But that's also why we love it. We're suckers for a challenge. And just a little bit crazy.
Non-writers ask them because... well, if you're not a writer they seem like the Great Mystical Secrets that writers keep from the rest of the world, lest they become common knowledge and the truth emerges that anyone and everyone can be Stephen King with the right set of tools and ingredients. Which is true, of course... but neglects to point out that Stephen King and all the other uber-famous and mega-rich writers are just naturally in possession of a more 'right' set than the majority of writers just trying to make a living. And even they still can't answer those really head-mushing questions.
Am I going to attempt to answer them? Am I heck! I'm going to join all my fellow writers in blankness and New-York-shrugginess. But while doing that, I shall be pondering and marvelling on how unanswerable they truly are. Questions like:
1 - "Where do you get all your ideas from?"
Do we have a special box hidden in the attic, marked 'Story Ideas?' Do we sit within a circle of candles, chanting "om" until inspiration strikes? Head into the woods at midnight and play Black Sabbath songs while sacrificing a chicken to Underlord of Stories?
Shrug Number One right there. I dunno - where does a person get the idea he wants a pizza with pineapple and anchovies but NO OLIVES? Part of it comes from life experience ('had that one last time and it was awesome') but other than that it was just... there, in that grey mush under the skull. Non-writers must get ideas, surely? Maybe the only difference between writers and non-writers is that when writers have ideas... they write stuff from them?
2 - "Why do you write [insert genre here]?"
Stephen King, why do you write horror novels? Why don't you write Mills&Boon romance instead? Far less people would accuse you of being weird if you did that, y'know. And you, Catherine Cookson - why didn't you ever have a crack at writing cyberpunk, you silly old thing? You could've been so much more 'down with the kids!'
It's as if they think writers hover over a great List of Genres and either: a) shut their eyes, stick a pin in it and see where it lands or b) scan the choices and think "Hmmm, which one's making the most ker-ching for authors at the moment?" Of course neither of these is true (although that's not to say it's never been tried... it's just never really worked that well as a strategy.) The simple answer is that writers tend to write in the genres they enjoy reading. But then that leads to "Well, why do you like reading those genres in particular then?" Well jeez... why does anyone? Time for another New York shrug...
3 - "How can you write a [insert opposite gender to yourself] main character when you're a [insert your own gender]?"
There seems to be a belief in some sections of the book-buying public that this is somehow impossible at an X-chromosome level. And on one level, I can... sort of see their point. After all, if you as a female have never possessed your very own love sausage, how can you really know what it feels like to carry one around in your pants every day of your life? (DON'T - way ahead of you and let's not go there, thanks...)
But consider this; do the people who ask this question of writers also ask them "How can you write a main character who's a horse when you're not a horse?" No-one considers that an arrogant thing for a writer to attempt - and yet I'd have thought imagining life as a horse would be a lot tougher than imagining life as a fellow human of the opposite gender. Especially since humans are gifted with the power of asking questions of their opposite gender if there's stuff they want to understand. Questions that couldn't be answered by horses. Or dogs. Or mice. Or pigs...
4 - "What's the best way to write something guaranteed to be a bestseller?"
The writers that truly know the answer to this question are the ones who own a continent, eat grapes coated in gold leaf hand-plucked for them by their own personal Oompa-loompa and walk barefoot on specially-constructed clouds, so that their precious tootsies are never sullied by that dirty old thing they call the ground (that's for mortals, losers!) Let's take a moment to count those writers up, shall we? Oh yeah, that's right...
I'm pretty sure even Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin and Stephanie Meyer would lurve to know the answer to this question. But even they don't. Getting each new idea to a completed first draft is only the first stage in a long journey - and even doing that is a Herculean milestone that every writer has to reach before they can even think about how great their final work might (or might not) be. Writing isn't like baking a cake or building an IKEA wardrobe; put all the right bits together in the right quantities and the right order and you'll get the same thing every time. It's more like alchemy.
(Not to be confused with "ALCHEMY, Khashoggi... pure ALCHEMY!" Although that would be pretty darn cool...)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is there a writer alive who could actually provide the all-seeing answers to any of these questions? Truth is, you might as well ask them what's the best way to guarantee you'll win the lottery...
(Except I have a nagging suspicion there actually might be a way to do that. Not a legal way, but a way, nonetheless... )
Writing is not for sissies, 'cause there aint no guarantees. It's years and years of slogging away, our work possibly being ignored for most of our lives - heck, maybe all of them, we don't know for sure until that magic bell rings. And even when it does, we might end up being hated for it as much as loved (I'm sure E.L. James has had to grow a skin of armadillo-esque strength since 'Fifty Shades...') That's why some of us drink and get depressed sometimes.
But that's also why we love it. We're suckers for a challenge. And just a little bit crazy.
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