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Finishing the Unfinished

Edited March 14th 2023: The link that this used to go to no longer works, so I decided to simply post the full text here. I’ve left my old intro here in quotes for posterity.

Last month I actually wrote a blogpost—and posted it over on the Pandamoon Blog instead of here. I figure it’s aroundabouts time that I posted a link to it. 🙂

It’s called “Finishing the Unfinished,” and it’s about some of the failures and fears that might prevent someone from finishing their manuscript.

I hope you enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!

Finishing the Unfinished

Writing a book is a massive project to tackle, a veritable marathon of words. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that book will go unfinished. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Not all manuscripts need to be finished to accomplish what they are meant to do for their writer.

For those manuscripts that need to be finished, though, I ran across an applicable quote some years ago, though I can’t for the life of me remember where or by who. If my intensely paraphrased version rings a bell, please let me know where it’s from in the comments. 🙂

The gist of the quote was this: most of the time, a project will go unfinished for one of six reasons. Three are failures in action on the part of the writer and three are fears that prevent them from moving forward.

The failures: Going too fast. Doing too much. Lacking perseverance.
The fears: Fear of finishing. Fear of bitter work. Fear of your own ferocity.

Going too fast

You wouldn’t think this might be a failure, but consider how often a writer burns themselves out after the first several thousand words by jamming all of them into the span of a day. Or perhaps you outstrip your own creative momentum, running out of things to write because you’re not giving yourself enough thinking time.

And I certainly understand! Going too fast and needing to slow down is difficult in part because enthusiasm is a bright flame that can gutter if not fed, and inspiration comes and goes. For the massive project, understand that it will take many days, certainly weeks, often months, and sometimes years. It does not need to happen all at once. You eat an airplane one bite at a time. Settle in, find new ways to feed your enthusiasm for your project over time, and forgive yourself for not being done right this moment.

Doing too much

Over-ambition can kill a project before it’s started. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the kind of undertaking a manuscript can be, especially if you’re still grappling with plot and structure and characterization and dialogue and literary conventions and genre conventions and avoiding stereotypes and researching and knowing that someday, people are going to read your baby so it has to include everything and be perfectly executed, and and and.

Breathe and narrow your focus. You are allowed to have multiple drafts, and those drafts are allowed to focus on only one aspect you’re polishing. If you’ve ever watched a digital painter’s timelapse of their art, you’ll see them rough things out, sometimes cannibalizing old work, and then they’ll gradually refine until they’re jumping between elements for the fine details. You don’t have to know everything at the start and you’re allowed to make discoveries and learn during the process.

Also release the idea that you need to devour the entire banquet. Your novel or manuscript–especially a later one in a series–does not need to tackle everything. Not all the plot hooks. Not all the passingly-mentioned characters, elements, or research topics. Your future books in your series will thank you for all the lovely plot hooks that you left laying around as you base entire adventures on a single unexplored pathway. Plus, you honestly don’t need to digress about whales (Moby Dick) or sewers (Les Mis), and you don’t need to have us follow your new side character for three chapters. I’m sure your research and your characters are lovely, but focus, please. You will never finish your book or, if you do, it’s going to be more words than a publisher will publish.

Jamming too much into the story itself will confuse it and make it stop working. At this point, even if you have a finished manuscript, it will be nonfunctional. Large, complicated stories with a lot of moving pieces are glorious, but they’re created with a mixture of precision and serendipity, and everything on the page feeds into the story. What story are you telling? Does your reader really need everything? What mysteries can you leave within your story’s pages?

Lacking perseverance

Of the three failures, this one is the most straightforward. You can’t finish if you don’t actually try to finish. This refers to all the advice of Butt-in-Chair (BIC), write every day, sacrifice to get ‘er done, etc. and so on. Make time, do the thing, yes, of course, we’ve heard this again and again.

The thing about perseverance? It isn’t flashy. It’s quiet, consistent, and it doesn’t even need to be every day. It can be cyclical or sporadic or routine. Perseverance is, at its heart, about priorities and limitations. Is finishing important to you? Then finishing will need to come higher in your priorities and you will need to work within your own limitations. Some writers have written on their phones when they don’t have access to a computer. Some writers must find a dedicated first-reader to help encourage them before they can make any headway. And some writers have children and can only write in a gasp during the wee hours of the morning.

These writers are willing to make writing important to them, and they’re willing to acknowledge their unique circumstances might mean their writing time won’t look like anyone else’s.

Fear of finishing

Whether it’s fearing what comes after the manuscript is done, or fearing that once it’s done you’ll be adrift, or that your book is too awful to finish and will never be anything better, finishing can be terrifying. The fact that this project has been important to you somehow only makes the fear of finishing worse. It’s common to stop at a point in writing (different for everyone) and wonder if you should even try.

A finished manuscript doesn’t have to be perfect, however, and the only people who expect perfect are pedants. Yes it’s worth it, especially if it’s important to you.

Fear of bitter work

Writing can be difficult. There’s too much to keep track of, and the creative process can be messy and exhausting. At a certain point, all of that New Manuscript Enthusiasm is going to drain away and you’re going to be left with only your manuscript and all the reasons you started it to try and figure out how to move forward from there. For those that hate writing but love having written, this fear can be especially brutal, and even if the joy is in the puzzle, it’s a complicated puzzle.

Some important things are hard to do. That does not make them any less worth doing.

Fear of your own ferocity

Of all the fears, this one is probably my favorite. Your ferocity is your uniqueness—your voice, your passion, your commitment. What you desire and what you need to share. Writing true things, unique thing, requires a certain amount of risk, and putting yourself out there, revealing your thoughts and experiences and emotions, even through fiction, is absolutely terrifying. Passion is often punished, especially when we’re young and fitting in with the pack is a matter of survival. Writing is an exercise in training yourself out of shame and approval-seeking to a point where you understand that standing alone on the stage of your craft is a necessary expression in order to offer the world something new.

If you think something is important, you’re the only one who matters. Be impassioned! It is okay to love your story, to need your story told. And if you need it told, someone out there needs to read it. Your ferocity is what’s going spark the connection between you and your reader, and that connection is vital.

Before I sign off, one final comment: neither these failures nor fears are referendums upon anyone’s character. The world is complex, as are individuals, and not every manuscript needs to be finished or need to be finished with the goal of publishing. Each of these fears or failures could have a hundred reasons for being, some of them excellent.

They’re simply reasons. The ‘why.’

But if you know why something is happening, you can fix it.


Flash (fiction) from the Past

Back when we started our Writing (and Art!) group, we decided to do a writing exercise where we all entered (or at least wrote for) the NPR Three-Minute Fiction challenge (Here’s the link to the one from… 2012). 2012! I not realize that our group has been around that long.

Anywhoodle, I wrote a smattering of entries for this, and the other day I was digging through my writing drawer and unearthed a couple that I’m rather fond of. Enjoy!


The prompt: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”


Story the First

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. First, though, she needed a door.

She kept watch over her shoulder as she sought the slender wire that would trail from door to spine. Careful not to disturb the book and alert her minders of what she was about to do, she slipped the wire into its fastening.

A small spark burned her fingers and the gray, blank wall resolved into the glass door she sought. It opened with a touch and she was through, lingering only long enough to hear the alarms as she stepped into the story. They couldn’t follow her here, not while she was inside of her favorite book where the grass felt warm like shredded paper, and she filled in details to make the world her own.

The flowers jostled for her attention, and while at first she imagined it the wind, her darker worries brought forth the creature. In a smooth pirouette with the blade now in her hands, she slashed the beast down the side to rain crimson on parchment leaves. This, then, was why the garden book was her favorite. It gave her the tools she needed to defeat the darkness.

Panting, she watched the beast regather for the second of three attacks. The bulk of its body was formless shadow, too many legs and not enough, and only the face held its shape between one glance and the next.

Seven dark reptilian eyes.

Many rows of many teeth.

The railing of angry orderlies came through the door, but they knew better than to interrupt. Breaking her concentration, her connection, would leave her here as they pulled her body through. Perhaps that was what the beast was, former wards and patients.

She met the second lunge with a shriek and her blade bit deep, as of its own accord, following the memories of her hands and the words on the page.

The last was always the worst and when it came at her, claws extended – claws from nowhere made of nothing – she only just avoided its slash. It preyed upon her anxiety, her fear of returning to the sterile world beyond the door. She fought her own thoughts. The creature grew in strength, winning as it never had before, as she feared to go back.

She could die here fighting, or die there staring at blank walls and blank faces. The creature read her reluctance and ate her right arm.

That was not part of the story, and it was only a story so there was no pain, but it reminded her that this was a temporary place, no matter how often she longed to visit. The beast fed on what she brought to the book, and every battle fell along different lines.

Her sword sliced its head off, vorpal or near to it, and she sat up as the fog of the creature burned away. She would return to the hospital this once, her courage restored, and when she could no longer take the prognosis and the plastered smiles, she would return for another round. Maybe then she would stay.

Comforted, she stood. White light shone through the door and, after a step, she paused to feel the stump where her arm ended. Familiar. The story was growing to reflect her reality, and while even a day ago she might have cried, now the thought made her smile.

She left the sword bleeding shadow on the paper grass.


Story the Second

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. As she stood, however, her first officer entered at a stumble, and dragged the door panel shut behind him. Panting, he held it closed with his full body weight, shoulders against the metal.

“Hounds after you, Nathanial?” She settled back into her chair, projecting calm she did not feel. The entire civilian council was waiting for her and while she could justify hiding for a few stolen moments to review procedure, she could hardly delay for anything less than a hull breach. A disciplinary hearing wasn’t something she should shirk.

“Captain.” Unfocused, he tried to catch his breath. “Captain.”

No salute. Her eyebrows rose as Nathanial’s attention focused on the door behind him. The man was scrupulously polite at the most inconvenient of times, and his lack of usual courtesies had her on feet before she took her next breath. “What’s wrong?”

“Na-Nancy.” He never called her by her first name while in uniform. “First Contact.”

She didn’t remember crossing the room, but his hand grasped hers as she lifted it activate the sensor. “Out of my way, Nate.”

“It’s not what we hoped.” He still wasn’t breathing right, every word a struggle. “This sector’s-”

“Hostiles.” Not a question. She stepped back and looked him up and down, only now seeing the smear of blood on panel behind him. “Nate.” Her admonition shifted quickly to concern as he fell forward, “You shouldn’t have come here.” She caught him before he hit the ground and reached up to key in the emergency lock-down.

“All business, Captain.” He told her as she tipped him forward to see the damage. Something sharp had caught him under the ribs in front and sliced around his torso to leave a gouge near his spine. “Ask.”

She stared hard at his face, pressing a flap of his uniform into his wound to stanch the bleeding. “Don’t do something foolish. Every life aboard this ship. Including yours.”

“Ask.” He repeated.

She tightened her jaw. “Stubborn. This isn’t the time,” she said before she started to ask.“Civilians?”

“Pods.”

“Vector?”

“Level six scow dock.”

She glanced up at the silent intercom system. “Computers?”

“Long story.”

Their question and answer, call and response, continued long enough for the plan to form and his color to worsen. Seconds only, but she felt time burning to ash the longer she waited. At least the perfunctory debriefing gave her the moments to find her med kit and the excuse to tend him before her duty required her.

She asked one last question as she slapped an injection patch onto his skin. “If I leave you, will you promise not to die?”

“No promises, Captain.”

“Don’t you dare.” She dropped a kiss onto to the top of his head and then helped him roll to a less painful position. The patch was already working, if the ugly colors creeping across his exposed muscle were any indication. “If you’re not here when I get back…” She left the threat unfinished as she collected her weapons and shields. Hefting the shortsword, she looked back at where Nathaniel had slipped into drug-induced unconsciousness.

Enough of this. Jamming the button on her collar with the butt of her sword, her vacuum helmet deployed. It would do well enough in combat, especially against something that used blades, claws, or both.

“Is it too much to ask for a First Contact to go smoothly?” As the visor slipped across her vision, she stalked out the door and into chaos.


 


If it’s important…

Let’s just say that this year has been epic, stressful, and full of ridiculous, massive changes in both my personal and professional life. If you had told me in January any of the stuff in my life right now would have come to pass, I might have laughed at you in disbelief.

So. Wow.

I apologize for being a bit vague. When I decided I wanted to a recap, I sort of forgot that I am shy and also private. Still, I can tell you about all the good stuff, like being a part of Pandamoon Publishing as their editorial coordinator, a shift which took me by surprise (to say the least). I also have more energy than I did at this time last year, thanks to more judicious managing of my mental weather, and even though I’m swamped with All The Things I Want To Do, that’s… really not a bad thing. Inspiration has snuck its way back into my life, too, and I’m working on projects that I’d either set aside or was allowing to percolate, and I am forging better relationships with my family and taking more action to accomplish my goals.

The frustrating and stressful stuff I want to leave behind with 2015, and even if they follow me, they’ll — of a necessity — be different than they were and hopefully more conquerable.

Part of why I think I’m had a pretty danged good year comes down to a single moment and, like all truly life-changing moments, it was brought about by a cat.

Over Thanksgiving in 2014, I brought home a cat from Colorado. Her name is Pica, and she’s probably the cutest cat on the planet. (Not that I’m biased.) I bring her up now because when I was trying to sort out the logistics to bring her back with me, my friend told me something that sort of settled in my bones. I was upset that he’d have to go to great lengths to get her her shots on short notice, and that it would be inconvenience and effort on his part because of something I’d done that could have been avoided if I’d gotten my act together earlier.

He said: If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

I’m probably paraphrasing a little, because time and turning it over and over in my head has polished it down. Those words — if it’s important… — stuck in my brain. If it’s important, it’s worth the obstacles. If it’s important, it’s worth the pain and inconvenience and dealing with your own failures. If it’s important, it’s worth making it work despite the hard stuff. Packed into ‘if it’s important’ is a wealth of meaning, about throwing yourself forward and picking yourself back up and taking action after action after action.

If it’s important, it’s worth the inconvenience.

There’s an underlying message of compassion in that, when said from one person to another, but I think I was struck most by the acknowledgement that important things are hard and sometimes those hard things are larger than just me. And, sometimes, in being larger than just me, they will leak out onto others, but that doesn’t make them any less important. Or any less worth it. Or my friends any less willing to help me make things happen.

What really gets me is that ‘inconvenience’ is never a factor for me when I try and help others, so I have no idea why the rules were different for me. Now that I know that they were, however, I’ve been working this past year on internalizing this idea of ‘if it’s important…’

I credit this handful of words with a lot of my drive in 2015. In evaluating what I found important, it made me make changes in my life that gave priority to the stuff I wanted to focus on, and helped me decide to live a little bit more outside of my head and in the real world where I can actually make a difference.

So here I sit, at the end of 2015, doing what I love, in a place I’ve made my home, with friends I held onto despite the distance, at the end of my first full year with the most adorable cat in the entire world.

And, friends, I believe that’s important.

Pica in a Box

So very important.


Note to Self: Take Better Notes

Today, I’m pissed off at myself.

Not for anything dire, luckily, but I’m still mad enough that I think I can get a blog post out of it. *grins*

I’ve been participating in #1LineWednesday on Twitter. It’s… run? Prompted? Encouraged? By RWA’s Kiss of Death twitter (@RWAKissOfDeath), and it’s a lot of fun. I’ve found more awesome people to follow through #1LineWednesday than I have doing anything else on twitter.

Yesterday’s theme (for the 21st) was ‘Last Lines of Chapters’, which – okay fair enough. The only problem is that recently I’ve been writing short stories, so I didn’t have a lot of ‘last lines’ to choose from. So I went spelunking into my dropbox where I keep my projects and skimmed through a few of my oldest novels. Good news: some of them aren’t awful and could probably stand to be reworked and finished! Bad news: none of them are finished, and some of them need a great deal of work.

Of particular note is that I found one of my old NaNoWriMo novels and started to skim it to find chapter ending lines. Cue me being a little floored, but it’s actually good? About halfway through skimming, I just straight-up started reading (and editing in my head, but mostly reading). I mean, there are some parts that straight-up suck, especially because I had no idea how to manipulate the tension I was building, and the prose is way too dense and heavily overwritten, and I’ve improved by leaps and bounds since I wrote it, but – ??? ??? ???

The reason I never finished it is because I’m more of a slow-and-steady writer, so that NaNoWriMo’s mad scramble for for 50k-in-a-month is just a little on the ’causes intense project burnout’ side of things. Also, I think I was mid-other-project and doing nano that year to figure out if I could write villains that didn’t suck so ‘finished project’ was a priority. But! For whatever reason, I tidied up my 50k, dropped the project in a metaphorical drawer, and never looked back.

The thing really cheeses me is that I stopped at the end of the ‘second act’ and wrote a paragraphless wall of words to explain the ending. It’s one page long, uses some sort of shorthand that I don’t provide the key for, and that’s it.

What was I thinking?!

How on earth did past me expect future me to sort out this block of unmitigated nonsense?!

I went to bed angry last night because why, why did I do this to myself. I knew for a fact that it was the most ‘solid’ book I’d written up to that point. Why. Whyyyyy.

It’s worse than just ‘I don’t know how to finish my book’, though.

Friends.

Friends.

This is a Time Travelling Serial Killer novel. A woman tries to rescue her brother from the killer’s clutches while time deteriorates and the past and future become unstable. There are at least four timelines and because of the ‘type’ of time travel I picked, my MC experiences linear personal time while the alternative timelines are created and destroyed around her. It’s very important for me to know what happens, when, on which day, in which timeline, and how the main character (who is also travelling in time, because, you know, why make it easy) experiences each event and in what order.

I need like 10x more notes than I have. What the heck am I supposed to do with lines like, ‘Dragons don’t have pockets!’ and ‘Remove the shark-jumping bits!’?

I’m so mad.

Friends. Take better notes than I do.

Especially when you’re writing about time travelling serial killers and stop (whyyyyyyyyy) just before you get to the good part.


Oversell in Fiction

So. Oversell.

What is it, you ask, and why might I want to avoid it?

After a bit of judicious prodding, the internet spat back a few relevant definitions for oversell such as: “to be too eager or insistent in attempting to sell something” and “to make excessive claims”. For the most part, the word oversell is used in sales to describe ridiculous nonsense being claimed to try and sell a thing or the act of being super pushy and used-car-salesman-y. Or it’s used to warn interviewees away from making themselves sound too good to be true so that the interviewer’s bullshit meter starts to flash, or the new hire fails miserably because they promised all sorts of stuff they couldn’t do. I have no idea why, but for some reason, I yoinked the concept of oversell and applied it to writing fiction. (And if you find oversell by another name elsewhere with respect to writing, I’d love a link. :))

Oversell, how I use the term, is when you’re writing along (or editing along) and come across a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that pushes the idea you’re trying to convey to the point where it’s noticeable that you’re pushing. To use a movie analogy, oversell is the moment takes the movie past decently executed with purposeful cinematography and into the realm of obnoxious 3D fish flying from the screen to make you duck. Or that moment in Gravity where you go, “Oh, it’s a space womb,” or in the latter Matrix movies where you go, “Wow, crucifixion imagery and Messiah parallels. Thanks for that. Never would have caught that. Really.”

Oversell in fiction is similar. It’s explaining the joke, or stating outright the theme of your story as if your audience wouldn’t pick up on it otherwise. It’s that ‘extra’ little bit that makes the audience go ‘Alright already! We get it! Move on!’

Why you might want to avoid oversell:

There is no reason why you need to hand your audience/readers the answer. A sub-function of show-not-tell is the 2+2 principle.

The 2+2 principle is where you offer your readers all the pieces and let them put it together. The reader is the one who ultimately figures out that 2+2=4, and you never actually tell them that 4 is what you were aiming for.

This serves two purposes.

One, you’re not just handing them the conclusions you want them to reach. Not only are you exercising a narrative ‘tell’ by providing the conclusion, which leads to a flat narrative, your conclusion might not be the conclusions your reader would reach on their own, so then they feel like they’re being preached to. If you’ve ever read a review that called a book (or other piece of media) ‘preachy’, they’re talking, in part, about oversell.

The second purpose behind 2+2 is that, by handing them pieces and requiring your reader to reach a conclusion, your reader now must invest some small amount of effort and brainpower into their reading experience. As a result, you’ve set your reader up to get that tiny rush of satisfaction in the ‘click’ moment. Terry Pratchett’s books are absolutely boss at utilizing the 2+2 principle. Any book with a really brilliant ‘oh shit’ or ‘oh my god’ or reveal moment has succeeded in giving you all the pieces and then providing you with the opportunity to put them all together.

Oversell overrides 2+2. While you still may be showing the answer (in a show-not-tell sense), you’re also showing the answer, which is the opposite of what you want.

In a more practical sense, oversell is also just pointless extra words. You’ve already made your point, you don’t need to make it again. Half of presenting an idea or an argument or a piece of creative work is knowing when to cut and run.

Last – er – maybe it’s just me, but oversell (in the most egregious examples) is super annoying. I have a gut ‘don’t tell me what to do’ reaction. There is a sense, like I said above, of ‘I get it already! Just keep going! We don’t need to dwell!’ combined with a ‘well, I was on board before, but now you ruined it.’

I don’t get annoyed by small bits of oversell, though. Partially, that’s because I’m super guilty of oversell in my own work, and I mostly catch it during the editing phase. The part of it is that I see it all the time in published works. It’s where an author just goes notion too far before moving on. It’s common and, to be honest, most of the time it’s not glaringly obvious. When I’m being a Reader (rather than an Editor), oversell is one of those things that becomes a nuance. It disappears into the work, for the most part, same as weird names or other small decisions that don’t impact the story so much as the telling of it. A good story can make up for a multitude of tiny imperfections.

Plus! Sometimes oversell can be a trick in and of itself, like when explaining the joke is the joke (Link is Dr. Horrible. Slightly nsfw, heh.), but most of the time you’re undermining your own piece by not letting it stand on its own merits.

Last thing: don’t let a worry that you’re overselling stop you from writing. Oversell is an editing-level concern. Even if you’re a one-pass gut-level writer who never changes a single word you write (except typos), oversell is very easy to fix. 99% of the time you can simply cut out the line or the paragraph entirely and the work is not just unchanged, it’s stronger. Sometimes, too, you can’t tell where you’re trying too hard until you read the whole thing through after you’re done.

Above all, though, don’t be afraid to let your work stand on its own. Trust your words will lead the reader to the conclusion you want, and you’ll avoid a lot of oversell.


The Dulcet Tones of Genre Convention

I’ve been squirreling away blogpost seeds for ages, and it occurred to me that there’s no point in hoarding them if I never use them.

So! Today was prompted by an io9 article from, oh, July 15th, 2013. Ahem.

In this io9 article entitled ‘What does it mean when people say your story’s “tone” is wrong?’, there’s a fairly good breakdown of what tone even is. The definition it settles on is something along the lines of the mix of emotion, atmosphere, genre convention, authorial voice and style that creates the experiential landscape of the prose. More or less. The author, Anders, relates the idea of tone to music (logically enough), and how the whole of a musical piece and the resultant emotional impact is dependent on the sum of its mechanical parts. That’s a fairly good definition of tone, as far as trying to define something so subjective as to how a particular piece of art might feel to an audience.

To put it even more simply: Tone is the gestalt of how a writer conveys events and experiences.

Tone is also a tool, which is what I think the io9 article touches on but doesn’t necessarily drive home. It’s not something that just sort of happens as a result of style/voice/etc. and it’s something you can manipulate. In conveying ideas while aiming for a specific tone, a writer can influence a reader towards emotion, towards expectation, and play with different kinds of tension, among other things. Most writer’s tools are also fractal-like, where each component part is made up of different, other tools, which are made up of others, which are made up of others and so on from deciding who your main character has to be to tell the story you want all the way down to the actual, physical arrangement of words on a page. Even just coloring text or blacking out a page can have an effect on the tone, like in House of Leaves or the Series of Unfortunate events, respectively. Tone is no exception, and I consider it one of the more abstract tools a writer can utilize, which means there’s an infinite fractal contained inside.

So. If tone is a megatool and each subtool consists of a set of choices in how to present ideas, then ultimately tone becomes a matter of tiny choices. And following the idea of choice, even a short list off possible choices reads like the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch, where every iteration has a new item to consider. For example, amongst our weaponry (with respect to tone), there’s the choice of diction and the choice of structure and the choice what to describe (out of all the possibilities) and the choice of whose opinion the narrative is reinforcing and the choice of when to reveal twists and the choice of when to increase tension and the choice of how long or short sentences are and and and…

If ‘possible choices that impact the tone of a story’ were turtles, it’s turtles all the way down.

So, sometimes a writer just hasn’t considered enough turtles, simply through lack of practical experience, and the tone of a work will reflect that. The tone could be ‘wrong’, as in the io9 article above, or it could simply be bland. A just-the-facts-ma’am mechanical tone that is otherwise absolutely correct with respect to the basic choices of grammar, syntax, and idea conveyance can make an otherwise exciting story very boring. Boring is the kiss of death. It’s this complete lack of tone, rather than a work having the wrong tone, that I consider the reason why most people’s work ends up being passed over, be it fanfiction or a self-published work trying to stand out from the crowd or a manuscript angling to be traditionally published out on query.

And, even better, sometimes in trying to tackle a change in tone a writer (like me) will discover that there are way, way too many turtles. I actually consider ‘too many turtles’ a type of writer’s block that, when confronted with the sheer gonzo number of choices to be made when working with tone, where literally every word can be deliberately placed to provide a certain effect, a writer can get blocked by something between ‘analysis paralysis’, ‘choice overload’, and ‘tyranny of small decisions’, where there are simply too many decisions to make, too many options for each decision, and each of decision influences the whole on a chaos theory level where even a tiny change might propagate to fundamentally alter the entire final product. Yikes.

Insert genre.

The io9 article linked above points out that genres all have their own distinct tone, whether it’s dark or light or sexy or suspenseful or epic or something else entirely, and that reading in your preferred genre is the best way to absorb the tone. I agree, and in spades, because what a writer learns from absorbing the tone of a particular genre is all the myriad different genre conventions that form that genre. Genre convention makes certain choices in structure and how for you, which feeds into tone. With that, genre becomes a powerful tool in a writer’s toolbox, because its conventions break your turtles into manageable hordes.

For the most basic of basic examples, convention for a book in the romance genre is that the conflict with be romantic in nature. If the writer’s genre of choice is romance, this gives a boundary and a framework, limiting the number of turtles they have to wrangle to ‘how to write a specifically romantic conflict’. The terms are set, and it’s a narrow enough area that it gives somewhere to grip in the attempt to gain mastery over the form. The end goal is defined (these idiots fall in love), the conflict is defined (these idiots have hang-ups that prevent them from falling in love), and the rest is nuance and detail and complication that makes each romance unique. Tone, here, will end up having elements of suspense, angst, and interpersonal tension. It will feel like a romance novel.

In this particular example, genre defines tone. Tone, however, can also turn around define genre conventions. If you want something to encourage a lot of tension and have a very action-oriented sort of tone, you can put a time limit on it (race-the-clock conventions in spy thrillers), or have the story build up to a do-or-die event (sports and heist stories), or have the stakes be astronomical (superhero and most fantasy). You can make decisions about what genre you want to utilize by examining what sort of tone would be ideal for your story, reading within a genre that has that tone, and stealing the conventions–or, more precisely, the techniques that those conventions are made of. There’s nothing that says a writer can’t make use of other people’s turtles to help create something entirely their own.

Meandering aside, I just want reiterate that tone and genre (and genre’s ever-so-useful genre conventions) are all tools to tailor a reader’s experience. I know I’m repeating myself, but this cannot be stated strongly enough. I think, too often, that there can be a sense that tone (and to some extent genre) is something that simply arises from the process of bringing a bookbaby into the world. Tone is a tool! If someone tells you your tone is wrong, or it’s bland and your writing is mechanical, ask yourself: what tone am I aiming for? Hopefully that’s a question that will give you ideas of what sort of turtles you want to be looking for.

Good luck with your tones, and happy turtle hunting!


Dancing in September

The reasons for my radio silence the past month-and-some-change have been myriad and of varying levels of ‘excuse’. August, however, was slam-chocked full of travel. First weekend was a wedding in which I was maid of honor (Hi, Kimi! Congrats! I hope wedded bliss is treating you well!), the next weekend was a funeral for the boyfriend’s grandfather (15 hour round trip in the car), and then a week and a half ago I spent the week with my grandma after a thankfully brief medical scare (she’s fine, whew). I haven’t been home a lot, and when I have, I’ve been working on a novel edit. There will be announcements at some point. Eventually.

Suffice it to say that I have been obscenely busy, and when I edit I slip into tunnel-vision-mode and drop off the face of the planet. Here I am crawling back on-planet and maybe dancing a little because my month of Going Everywhere and Doing Everything is over.

Your regularly unscheduled writing-related posts will (hopefully) recommence sometime this week.


… and the Importance of Peers

So the first half of this topic was about how self-doubt will wander in when the insecurity at the core of my Writer’s Ego pounces. This second half (well, ‘half’. Part two?) talks about one of the best ways I’ve found to combat insecurity beyond hacking your brain and modifying your expectations.


When last I wrote, I said that I pestered my friends for reassurance when self-doubt rears its irrational little head, and that’s true. More specifically, rather than just bothering my friends, I actually approach my writing peers. There is no replacement that I’ve found that fills the role that a writing peer does, nor one as effective as shaking my Writer’s Ego until it calms down.

I use ‘peer’ here very deliberately.

The dictionary definition of peer is a little bit bland, I admit. Merriam-Webster only says that a peer is an equal, especially one within the same age, status, or social grouping. I’m calling up more of the current connotative definition as I understand it. A peer, for me, is someone who–more than a friend or simply someone of equal status or age–has similar experiences and can thus understand your frustrations and insecurities.

A writing peer, then, is a fellow writer who is treading their own path on a similar journey. This is to say that peers aren’t necessarily mentors–and, in fact, there is an inherent power differential in the idea of a mentor-mentee relationship that nixes a mentor from the ‘writing peer’ grouping–and they’re not necessarily friends either, though they can be. The crucial thing that makes writing peers helpful (aka the best people ever) is that they are the people who are going through the same struggles as you are, who can commiserate with you and share what works for them without coming from either a position of authority nor as a writer whose inexperience causes a disconnect.  These are the people whose opinions you trust who are also doing what you are doing. In a very individual-oriented and solitary profession, in a way, these people are a writer’s colleagues.

To chase the colleague metaphor very briefly, writers, artists and other freelancers don’t have the benefit of a social environment in which to do their work unless they seek one out. In Ye Olden Days, that’s how you ended up with great writers of different eras and nationalities clustered in various cafes all over the world. It’s also why there are now coworking spaces that basically mimic an office environment for people who’d otherwise just be stuck in their homes slowly starving for human interaction. Writing is one of the few professions where being an introvert is more the norm than not and holing up away from people is considered commonplace, but not everyone prefers the hermitage model. In addition to the social aspect, which really shouldn’t be knocked, discussion with writing peers can mimic the mutual forward progression that sharing ideas and strategies between colleagues fosters. You and your writing peers may not be working on the same project, but half the reason there’s any progress at all in cutting-edge disciplines is because of people bouncing ideas off of one another until pieces click together. I’d argue that writing is one such cutting-edge discipline, if only because of a reader’s thirst for new experiences.

Colleague aside, though, finding good writing peers is a little bit like joining a support group. This isn’t to say that that you need a formal group, however, mostly because a writer’s group is a different sort of animal and there are many different kinds of groups that fill different needs, and that’s very much a topic for a different time. It’s just that a support group and a loose collection of writing peers can serve the same purpose. You share stories. Triumphs and failures. The little ins and outs of your day that, really, are best understood by others who write. Not that stories of your tribulations can’t be amusing for people who are not writers, but finding people who have the spark of shared experience is a reassurance all its own.

It’s sort of like, for example, one of my pregnant friends joined a pregnancy forum that allowed her to chat with people who were in the same stage (and the same month) of pregnancy as she was. Being right down in the middle of something at the same time as someone else creates a sort of bond, because no matter how good your memory, details get lost by time, and the emotional spike of ‘that’s what I’m struggling with also!’ is a powerful thing. To be connected in some small way with people doing what you’re doing, experiencing what you’re experiencing, helps you, as a writer, keep from losing perspective. Insecurity, especially in the moment, is a force that skews perspective and (as you’ve probably seen in various author scandals) can cause a writer to sort of go off the rails a little. Having a connection with the grounding influence of peers is not just wise, it’s often necessary.

Plus, this idea of traveling with others at the same stage as you neatly segues into the concept of a cohort. Again, I’m using more of the connotative definition for cohort. Strictly by the dictionary, a cohort is a friend, or a group of people in a study that have some demographic thing in common. A cohort, in the sense I’m using it, is the general group of other writers and artists who you travel through your life milestones with. They’re the ones that started their careers around the same time you did, like a bubble of people traveling through life following roughly the same patterns. This cohort consists of all the people you get to know as you go to events and get involved.

The idea of your writerly cohort is actually how you get the fun-and-interesting phenomena of having all the famous writers of an era somehow know each other. You see this with Tolkien and Lewis being friends and swapping mentions in their books, and you see it in how Gaiman and Pratchett co-wrote Good Omens. Your cohort is going to be the people you collaborate with, the people you have professional relationships with, the people you meet at conventions and readings and random writers groups and retreats as you pursue your career. Additionally, a cohort is all of the people you know right now that– if you’re just starting–are also just starting. None of you are fabulous and famous yet, but your cohort are the people who will become fabulous and famous right along with you as you all improve and get your names out there. They’re your fellow travelers on the rocky road toward having people read what you’ve written.

Your writing peers come out of this cohort.

Peers, however, aren’t your therapists, or even necessarily your friends (especially if you met them in a professional capacity), so you don’t necessarily whine to them about how everything sucks when self-doubt hits and your Writer’s Ego starts chewing the mental furniture. Your peers can relate to you, though. Their experiences can inform you on how to get through a nasty spate of self-doubt, and even if there’s no advice to be had, sometimes a peer can give you feedback on the success or failure of a work and put some of your insecurities to bed that way. The idea of feedback elaborates on the idea from a few paragraphs ago that a peer can help you put everything in perspective. Writing peers don’t just help mitigate your anxiety responses when dealing with the uncertainties of audience, but they are also valuable for a reality check on the work itself.

As I’ve been singing the praises of cultivating writing peers, I should probably make it pretty clear that it is an excellent idea NOT to alienate your peers, but cherish them. I recently read an article (and if I could FIND it, I’d link you, because it was fascinating. My googlefu fails me),  wherein the writer had gotten a book deal and her writer’s group/critique group went cold on her. Whether it was jealousy or some other cause for the relationship to sour, it did so and the woman who wrote the article was by turns baffled and ‘good-riddance’ about her former group. This article got brought up in my writer’s group recently, and we universally decided it was bullshit of the highest order. First, because we enjoy each other’s company and work and only want what’s best for one another, and second because (and I might not have mentioned this one out loud at the time), because our careers aren’t going to progress in lockstep.

A writing career moves forward in fits and starts, and your friends, your peers, aren’t likely to all get a magical publishing deal within the same week, same month, or even the same year. You’re a cohort because you travel through milestones in a general sense. Someone is going to get there first. Someone is going to get there last. There’s nothing in the timing that makes one writer inherently better than another.

In that vein, too, even if there can be a sense of rivalry (and sometimes that’s unavoidable), a writer is not in competition with her peers. Even though you’re possibly at similar stages of writing and even if you’re competing in a general sense for eyes via internet advertising, or traditional publishing slots on the yearly publishing schedule, there is no physical way you can satisfy every reader’s tastes. Hell, you can never write fast enough to satisfy even just one reader. There’s no reason to get caught in a trap of superiority/inferiority based on the whims of an audience, especially because of how very insecure a writer’s relationship with any given audience really is. It’s sort of like the time Joshua Bell played in the Metro as part of a Washington Post social experiment and only a handful of people stopped to watch. You could be a brilliant writer (or concert violinist), and the wrong audience will earn you 27$, an interesting article in the newspaper, and not much else.

Now, all of this is well and good, but writing peers don’t spontaneously generate. Luckily, there are a wide variety of place to find other people who like to write. In no particular order:

  • Nanowrimo
    • Nanowrimo stands for Nation Novel Writing Month, and it’s an event that takes place in November where you write as fast as you possibly can to get as far as you possibly can toward of a goal of 50k words by the end of the month. The reason it’s a good place to meet other writers is because it sections you out by regions and encourages you to go to write-in and chat with other people in your area who also like to write. I moved to LA last year, and going to write-ins was a great way to get me out of the apartment and socializing with other locals. Plus, you’re all there for the same reason, and it’s very welcoming to new faces, whether you’re a new writer or a veteran.
  •  Meetup.com
    • Meetup.com always, always has critique groups popping up, some pretty active. Since there are often a good number of them (depending on your area), you can also shop around a little until you find a good mix of people you like.
  • Local Community Colleges/Universities
    • Now, I’m not recommending you take a class, necessarily. Though, of course, you could. If you’re in college or younger, check in and see if they have options. If you’re an adult, you could try a class if you can scrape up funds for a continuing education class. As a writer, you never stop learning, and even a grammar class as a refresher course wouldn’t hurt. What student environments like this have, however, are clubs and interest groups and other ways to connect to one another. Even if you’re just checking out the class list for the name of the teachers, oftentimes you can find a teacher has other writing-group opportunities outside of the academic structure. If a club/group is well-established, they might have ties to their alumni members and you could sound those out to find people who might be willing to link up.
  • Cowoorking Spaces
    • I mentioned coworking spaces above, where you basically pay a fee to subscribe to a workplace. It’s similar to getting a gym membership. Downside: costs money, sometimes quite a bit of it depending on the space. The good news, however, is that most coworking spaces have some sort of ‘free trial’. If you’re just looking to meet a few fresh faces and swap a few business cards, all of the coworking space owners that I’ve met have been very enthusiastic about trying to show you just how brilliant their space is.
  • Writer’s conventions
    • Writer’s conventions are one of the few event-type things I know of that really allows you-the-writer to bridge generational gaps, especially if you’re on the younger end of things. They’ve been around for years and they’re full of people Just Like You really wanting to make connections and find their peers. Plus, this is also where you can sort of take the pulse of your genre and swap knowledge. They’re fun, too, especially if you’re an extrovert or a social introvert. An important thing to remember if you go to a Writer’s Convention, is that you’re there to immerse yourself in your own industry (because publishing is an industry, no matter how artistic a writer you consider yourself to be), and while ghosting around without interacting might be nice, you’re also there to touch base with your peers. And, of course, this list is about Places To Find Peers.
  • Writer’s Organizations (join them!)
  • Libraries
    • Libraries continue to be amazing. Hunt down your local one and poke their events listing. Authors will roll through and give talks. Teachers will come in and basically hold panels. Libraries and the attendant Librarians will lure local speakers in with promises of an audience, and you’re likely to find kindred spirits in whatever room the event is held in. Plus, again, learning more is always a good thing for a writer.
    • Weirdly, some bookstores also function like libraries in this respect, and they’ll hold events for writers’ groups. If you’re looking for peers (and friends, perhaps), poking a bookshop’s event list might also be wise if you want to leave no stone unturned.
  •  Growing your own writer friends
    • I’m biased about this because I have had excellent results, but I encourage literally everyone I talk to who has even the barest inclination towards writing to set down and start. Encouraging people to write is how I ended up with my current writer’s group being so robust (it originally more focused on physical arts, if I recall correctly), and it contains some people who only barely considered writing before. I’ve encouraged my past roomates (one of whom is now published!), as well as far-flung friends and random people I’ve met at writing meetups. As a writer, and as I previously mentioned, I’m not in competition with anyone else who writes, and I absolutely love seeing the writing that people come up with.
  • Friends of friends
    • Everyone knows someone who is a writer, and sometimes pursuing those leads can end up going pretty well. That’s how I ended up with an excellent beta reader, and how I began chatting with some of my current peers. Of course, sometimes the friend of a friend thing ends up putting you in touch with someone who is a hilariously poor fit personality-wise, so use caution. Social dynamics being what they are, always use caution when pursuing this method of peer-hunting.
  • Become a Regular
    • This… is one of the more nebulous of my suggestions. The basic idea is that you show up to someplace repeatedly, and the people who also show up to that place repeatedly have a higher chance of being those sorts you’d like to interact with. Originally, this was ‘go to coffeeshops or the library’, but this can work pretty much anywhere where there’s space enough to write. Like a park, or a beach, or campus.
    • Some coffee-shops encourage a studious environment. I know when I lived in Boulder, most of the coffeeshops near CU campus were filled with students camped out with their homework. Further north, however, I started to see work-from-home types venturing out. Saying hello to faces you see again and again at the places you frequent has nabbed me a writing peer or two. Also, even if they’re not fellow writers, you might end up with a new friend.
  • Online communities
    • Last but not least, the internet has a plethora of places that you can prod to produce peers. These range from informal to organized, and even a tiny forum can be helpful if it suits your niche and is an environment where you can both contribute and get the sort of feedback that best helps you.
    • Some examples:
      • Challenges:
        • Get Your Words Out – A Writing Decathalon – GYWO has a healthy livejournal community and a presence on dreamwidth, plus a friendly group of regular chatters.
        • Camp Nanowrimo – Like Nanowrimo, but instead of being in November, it’s in April and July and they sort you into ‘cabins’ to help encourage socialization. It’s (potentially) not as stressful as November Nano, because you can choose your own word goal.
        • {insert name here} Big Bang – If you write fanfiction, and certain sorts of original fiction, you can join a Big Bang for the type of story you want to write. It’s basically a fiction festival that pairs you-the-writer with an artist, and when you post your story (either to LJ or some other media venue) you are gifted with art. I joined a Dragon Big Bang a couple of years ago, and I’ve written for fandom specific ones as well. A Big Bang is not something you join to produce something saleable, due to the nature of fandom’s gift economy, but if you’re looking to simply meet people, they’re fun challenges to join.
      • Forums:
        • The Absolute Write forums – Home of ‘Writer Beware’, the best listing of scams and shady dealers to watch out, the Absolute Write forums are a place where pros as well as the aspiring go to chat around the virtual watercooler.
        • There are also smaller-scale forums out there, though none that I’m personally on at the moment. Any further recommendation would come from my googlefu, so I suggest investigating further into your genre-of-choice if you’re going to find some sort of forum to support you. Over the years I’ve bounced through several small ones, though, like any community, they often have a lifespan of only a couple of years, even if you hang on to some of the people you met there.
      • Social Media:
        • It must be said, but you can always flail around on social media. Whether it’s twitter, tumblr, or something else, the people who might have stuff in common with you are shouting into the void waiting for some response other than an echo. If you shout back, you might find yourself with a new peer (or even a new friend). There might be a learning curve on the culture of any particular social media platform, but generally there’s a way to find other aspiring writers, whether it’s through people getting connected via advice-giving tumblog contests, or complimenting people throwing their 140 character tweet pitches at agents.

In conclusion (now that I’ve written way more than I thought I would on this particular topic):

Having writing peers when you’re a writer is a positive thing, especially for kicking self-doubt in the face. As a writer you need your peers to give you reality checks and feedback to reassure you that it’s okay to keep going, that no matter the past, success is still on the horizon. Also, sharing ideas with your peers is one of the crucial ways in which you grow as a writer, since it’s all too easy to fall into the trap where an unsuccessful piece becomes solely the fault of the audience not ‘understanding’ your vision and a solid boot to the head by a peer is can help you recalibrate. Whether to combat arrogance or insecurity, though, finding your writing peers is a necessary part of being a successful writer.


And that wraps up my two-parter on self-doubt, friends! Next time it’ll be a whole different ball game. 🙂


The Cyclical Nature of Self-Doubt…

I’ve always conceptualized all of the separate bits of my personalty that pertain directly to my writing as my ‘Writer’s Ego’. I picture it as sort of a fuzzy ball with eyes and feet, rather like Fizzgig from the Dark Crystal:

Fizzgig from the Dark Crystal aka a Writer's Ego

My Writer’s Ego (It’s so fluffy!)

So my Writer’s Ego is this little ball of fluff that needs a great deal of cuddles and brushing. If properly tended, it will bite anyone or anything that tries to stop me from writing, and will stubbornly cling to good writing ideas that I’m not quite yet sure how to write about. It’s this bulletproof, bulldog-perseverant mush of beliefs and desires that is the reason I want to write and keep writing.

It’s also this ball of hair, teeth, and ego that I blame for self-doubt.

There’s a lot of good advice out there about self-doubt from a bunch of awesome authors, and all of them sort of acknowledge how self-doubt is something most (if not all) writers suffer from and that it’ll attack no matter who you are or how good you are. It’s a thing that happens.

Of course, me being me, I hate it when things just happen. I need to know why.

To that end, I’ve found self-doubt to be almost entirely cyclical. It doesn’t just leap out from behind bushes and out of darkened hallways. It might pounce and dump its payload of ‘What the heck am I doing?! Who let me near the written word‘, but the resulting surprise (and despair) is more akin to falling out of your chair after you’ve been nodding off.  Depending on who you are, there are often warning signs and patterns and predictable triggers, and when you start to look at it from the oh-no-here-it-comes perspective, self-doubt becomes less an insurmountable barrier to writing and more one of those things you have to wait out, like an epic line at the DMV, the last few minutes of a particularly one-sided ball game, or one of those freak storms dropping golf-ball sized hail.

The actual why, though, depends on my Writer’s Ego, because the idiot ball of fluff is both arrogant and deeply, deeply insecure.

Writing is one of those subjective things, though ultimately the axis upon which it’s judged isn’t really good vs. bad, but successful vs. unsuccessful, and a particular piece of writing’s success is really only determined by the intended audience’s opinion/reception. A piece you thought was decent but not brilliant might strike a cultural nerve and become an instant bestseller and win ten million awards. One you think is stark glorious might sell five paperbacks and mosey into obscurity never to be heard of again. Like any art, the audience’s reaction is largely out of the writer’s control, able to be manipulated only a little by various tools in a writer’s toolbox. There’s really nowhere solid for a writer to stand, view their work, and definitively say: ‘my audience will love this.’ You can guess, but you don’t know.

Well, unless of course the writer is the intended audience, which is probably one of the best ways to combat your Writer’s Ego’s insecurity I’ve ever found. If you’re the one making the final decision on whether something is a successful piece of writing, then everyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter, does it?

Insecurity, however, is a fun thing, because it only really evolves out of relationships. You can have an insecure relationship with a person, certainly, but you can also have an insecure relationship with a job, or a home, or food. Insecurity is the state of not knowing if something will be or won’t be, this Schrodinger’s Cat quantum in-between state that seems to fry the decision-making process. It’s the ‘not knowing whether the action will produce the intended consequence’ that makes gamblers into addicts or mice into button-pushing maniacs. It makes you cling harder in the fear someone/something might leave you behind, it makes you deeply anxious that you haven’t done something that needed to be done and now it’s far too late,  and it makes you burn up and burn through whatever you’re insecure about because if you don’t now then it might not exist later. It’s both a fear of change and a fear that you’ll never know for sure.

Consider the moment of maximum tension in a horror movie right before the actor turns the doorknob and the music has become this violin tremolo to prepare you for a jump-scare. Is the closet empty? Is someone about to be eaten? Insecurity is that moment stretched out over time.

The fluffy little heart of my Writer’s Ego is formed of insecurity based on the relationship that I have with my audience. It’s why I was terrified of my critique group’s opinions in the beginning, because I didn’t know if they’d be kind or get awkward or my writing wouldn’t affect them like I wanted to. I didn’t know, and the ‘not knowing’ meant I didn’t share at all. That’s why the best advice against self-doubt and failure to launch is always some flavor of ‘control what you can control and let go of the rest‘, and that’s why the Serenity Prayer is part of twelve-step programs and printed on bookmarks and wall placards.

My Writer’s Ego can be shaken up by even the smallest change, too, and I absolutely admit that. As secure as I am in most aspects of my life, my Writer’s Ego hates that it can never predict how my audience responds. It’s anxious about me sharing with my critique group. It’s anxious about me putting my words in front of people I don’t know. It’s anxious about me exploring certain themes and using certain words and putting all my subconscious biases down in writing.

Heck, my Writer’s Ego is even anxious about me getting better at writing.

I have a concept of ‘leveling up’ that I use relatively often, and I’ll probably dedicate a whole post it it eventually, but it boils down to the idea that every once and a while you make a jump writing quality. You figure something out, epiphany-style, or you read just the right advice column at just the right time, or something else – and everything clicks into place. Then you go back and read your work from a month ago, or a year ago, or five years ago, and you go: ‘this was AWFUL’ and ‘I thought this was GOOD’. So you doubt yourself and your skills and pretty much the opinion of everyone who has ever complimented you since kindergarten.

My Writer’s Ego hates leveling up because its angry, toothy core of insecurity takes it as an excuse to call into question my self-perceptions and everything is a little wobbly for a while until I find my feet again. Except–the definition of leveling up is that I’ve gotten better. I’ve gained greater skill (or at least greater self-awareness), and it’s a natural byproduct of gaining experience as a writer. Since a writer never stops learning, that also means that this leveling up process is something that’s going to happen again and again over the course of my life. My Writer’s Ego also hates the prospect that the stuff I think is good now is certainly going to be less-good than the stuff I produce later…

But, honestly, that way lies madness, and since I’d much rather improve than remain stagnant forever, my Writer’s Ego doesn’t get an opinion on this topic.

Beyond petting and coddling my Writer’s Ego and foisting it on friends to deal with when I’m 1000% done with the obnoxious little thing–and beyond the solid advice from some of the linked anti-self-doubt blogposts that people have already written–I try and remember two things: my audience isn’t likely to lie to me and my audience isn’t a monolith.

The success of a novel or a short story or a poem or anything else can only be determined by this audience in aggregate,  and on the whole, an audience is going to respond as they’re inclined to respond. Just like the audience for live theater, or live comedy, there’s a vibe you get back from your audience as a full group that’s different in character than the feedback you get from an individual. It’s a sense of engagement, of energy, a thrum that makes a ‘good’ audience very different from a ‘dead’ audience.

The writer gets this too, though audience feedback starts to come in pings on a radar that encompasses many vectors. It’ll be a cheerful email to your inbox thanking you for a pleasant evening’s reading, or a post on a book club’s forum about how awful an author you are because they are now emotionally scarred, or it’ll be a nasty Amazon review,  or it will be the fact that you never hear anything from anyone. Most of it’s indirect, though, like taking a pulse rather than asking the patient how fast their heart is beating. Eventually, though, there’s a sense of how successful your writing was, and now you have that knowledge as ammunition for next time you ‘perform’.

Overall, there are very few situations where even a smallish audience can lie to your face, and I think there’s a certain amount of stability to be gain from trusting in that, even if you later decide that the feedback wasn’t particularly useful or the reader(s) giving the feedback missed the point entirely.

Additionally, even when looking at your audience of readers as a group, there’s also something to be said for remembering that ‘readers as a group’ is going to encompass a lot of subgroups. One of those subgroups is going to be the five or six of your ‘1000 true fans‘ (you’ll note, they probably don’t actually number in the thousands). Another is going to be ‘people who review books while hating the genre and who have no concept of the conventions’. Another group is ‘people vaguely offended by your content’. Another is ‘people who will read any and everything in your genre regardless if it’s good and probably don’t remember you name or your book’s title.’ One friend even sent me a review by a person who didn’t understand protagonist’s main motivations and so panned the book because she thought it was ‘unrealistic’.

It’s understanding that not all subgroups within an audience are going to respond the same, but that they are going to respond in a way that’s authentic to them, takes away a lot of the insecurity surrounding the writer-audience relationship.

My Writer’s Ego is more enthusiastic about putting things out there now that it’s ever been, because I’ve done a lot of work to convince it that the core of its relationship with my audience is less about validation and more about ‘reading’ the audience right back. When I’m focused on determining how effective I’ve been at achieving my goal, it’s like being any artist standing in front of a group and practicing my showmanship. There’s not a lot of room for my Writer’s Ego to start wailing if my audience, my readers, are giving me what I need to improve. Even silence on my readers’ behalf is a sign that I need to change something if I want a response, even if that ‘change’ is the decision to stop chasing after someone who only responds with silence.

That dealing with self-doubt is sometimes just a matter of hugs and a kind word, of repeated reassurance, certainly, but attacking the heart of the problem is always my preferred method. Anything I can do to remove the inherent insecurity of the writer-audience relationship, and re-frame it to give me a little bit more control over what I get out of it, I will. I can’t get rid of the in-between waiting awfulness, but I can trust that if and when my reader (whether publisher, not-quite-Mother-in-Law, writer’s group, or unknown audience) finally reads my book, that whatever feedback (or lack thereof) I get is going to give me more information than I had before.

If there’s one thing my Writer’s Ego does like, it’s more information. Knowing whether that horror-movie closet is empty or not gets that decision-making processes started up again, and there’s nothing my Writer’s Ego likes more than ordering me around.

I mentioned above, a couple of times, that I will sometimes pass my Writer’s Ego off to someone else when I’m frustrated with it, but it’s a bit more complicated than simply pestering a friend for reassurance. However, that is a topic all it’s own, and I plan to explore it in my next post.


** This is one of the first topics I decided I wanted to write about when I started this blog and, just my luck, once I actually sat down and began it ended up being a two-parter.


Emotion and Logic

I was just about to run off to the grocery store when I was struck by a thought. Grocery shopping on hold until further notice.

The other day one of my friends said something to me that struck a chord. It was a brief comment, but it was along the lines of, “Isn’t it weird that logic holds more weight than emotion in determining whether a decision is ‘valid’ or not?”

So I’ve been stewing over that comment for the last few days, because my gut reaction was: But emotion is ridiculously important in decision-making because it abbreviates the logic!

Part of the reason why I cannot dismiss emotion entirely from the decision-making process is that it’s what governs most of my final choices.  By which I mean I don’t make impulsive, consequence-ignoring decisions (that is the usual type of decision implied by ’emotional decisions’, is it not?), but that I am put into a state of emotional dissonance when challenged for a decision. I then know when the decision is ‘correct’ for me because that dissonance evaporates when I make it. If my state of stress persists past the decision-making, then I know I need to re-evaluate the situation because my conscious mind hasn’t dealt with something my subconscious is concerned about.

My personal makeup requires a reason for pretty much everything, so all my life, I’ve made a habit of trying to parse my emotions. This has two results. The first is that it makes my mild anxiety and depression a little bit super awful since logic need not apply. The second is that I am prone to using my emotions as a bellweather for when I need to roll up my sleeves and and get to the bottom of something. In case it isn’t obvious, I journal. All my thoughts get untangled via writing, and usually when this happens, when I actually grapple with the thing my emotions are flailing about, they sort themselves out.

Because this is how I deal with life in general, I often use the metaphor that emotions are a little black box. Things go in, things come out, and sometimes you can correlate input and output, but other times weird things come out along with nasty blue smoke as the result of an input you though you’d already recorded as producing something else. They’re a complex process, maybe a bit mysterious, but something you can manipulate to a degree if you hit on the right combination of inputs.

All of this–*waves hand toward prior paragraphs*– is sort of the background to the idea that I believe that emotions are the abstract user interface for the mind.

And by abstract, I mean really, very abstract.

As an example of the kind of abstraction I mean, in the Otherland series by Tad Williams, one of the characters has a garden in cyberspace. This garden acts as an abstracting agent for news and events from all over the ‘net. It’s the feed aggregate, the dashboard or hub for every one of his concerns to make their presences known. Except, and this is why the imagery has stuck with me in the however-many years it’s been since I’ve actually read the series, all of the news is represented by physical objects that would otherwise be contained within a garden. I don’t remember what the abstract mappings were in the book, but let’s say the patch of clover represented business concerns. They could be healthy or look kind of wilted to suggest the health of the companies under this guy’s control, or a large bunny could be nibbling on the foliage to suggest the impending hostile takeover that would wreak havoc on his business’s structure. It’s a metaphoric interface, with rain and sunlight and different patches of flora representing different concepts and events. In Otherland, the abstraction of a garden represents raw information made digestible at a glance.

There’s a similar abstraction in Gun, with Occasional Music does, only the information being abstracted is the daily city news. In GWOM, and again I read it a hecka long time ago, one of the images that stuck with me was that in this dsytopic cyber-noir future, nobody is allowed to use actual words to give you the news. Instead, there’s a radio program on that plays music. It’s orchestral, if memory serves, but music nevertheless. The hardboiled detective protagonist of the books listens and waits for the tremolo of suspenseful strings, because that’s his cue that something mysterious and awful has happened and he needs to break out his magnifying glass and investigate.

Instead of ‘digestible at a glance’, the use of music as an abstract plays directly upon the idea that music conveys ideas through evoking feelings & emotions. Music, for most people, is an emotionally evocative medium. Just in classical music alone, you can have music that evokes the feeling of standing on the edge of the sea, of walking down a country path, or of riding on a train. Movies use their scoring to support and enhance the emotional impact of scenes, and so do commercials when they’re trying to evoke an emotion that will allow them to sell you things. There’s angry music and sad music and music designed to pump up your energy so you can rock out on the dance floor. Music is powerful because emotions are powerful, and using music to convey emotion is one of the most efficient ways to condense entire experiences into something that can be passed from one human being to another.

That is: emotion condenses experience.

The emotional output is the result of the little black box has chewing up and spitting out every single thing that your mind has perceived happening to you at any point in time. Emotions are your garden and your orchestra.

And sure, sometimes there is an out-of-tune piccolo player who knows where the bodies are buried that you can’t fire and every time she shows up you cringe, or you plotted your garden on a stretch of rocky ground and you keep finding stones you swore you rooted out already, but emotion is information.  Even if the rogue piccolo is stressing you out and logic isn’t going to force her to hand over the blackmail, emotion is the layer of the human user interface that takes care of the ‘at a glance’ monitoring. If you’re grouchy and grumpy, maybe you’re hangry and need a granola bar. If you’re disquiet in a relationship, there’s probably a reason. And maybe if you’re stressed it’s not just one thing and none of the causes are fixable. I mean, emotion isn’t magic. Sometimes what it’s telling you isn’t exactly super useful.

I think that emotion’s status as the abstract interface is especially powerful in writing. Just like an evocative song, an evocative scene can convey a mass of condensed information and form a connection between writer and reader. This is what’s at the heart of the advice ‘show-don’t-tell’, it’s what advice about building and sustaining tension deals with, and it’s at the very center of adventures and romances and epic quests. I have never squared off against a dragon with a too-heavy sword and a sweat running into my eyes, but I can put together the sensations of it from other condensed experiences and feel that terror for my ownself.

The fun thing about abstract interfaces, though, is that they have a relationship with the thing they’re abstracting. In emotion’s case, it’s abstracting logic. I get really cranky when people insist that there’s a strict divide between logic and emotion, because they’re two necessary parts of a single decision-making system, even if that decision is something as simple as ‘what’s your favorite ice cream flavor?’.

Logic affects emotion and emotion affects logic. There’s a give and take to the system. I can logically step through a problem and feel relief at the solution, and I can write books with a minimum of plot holes so that people buy in and that, in turn, bolsters the emotional impact of my work. On the flip-side, I can also be hit by an emotion out of the blue that signals to me that something interesting is going on inside my head that I might want to take a look at, and I can create mystery in piece of fiction by describing someone experiencing an emotion that has no apparent immediate source. There’s an inextricable relationship between the two processes, even if it sometimes goes haywire.

In computer science, abstraction is often desirable, because it, as the wiki says, ‘suppresses complexity’ for ease of use.  So, say, emotion is abstraction (and desirable) and a readily-interactable interface, then logic is where all the heavy-lifting complexity behind the scenes happens when the mind is calling upon its heuristics. The mind is complex in ways science is still discovering, and the brain does take shortcuts (good google term, btw: ‘brain shortcuts‘), but logic is an if-then-else process that marches from one end to the other. In some ways, logic becomes constrained by it’s own linearity, hence the shortcuts. It needs emotion to help find other bits and pieces inside the mind that could be unrelated to the primary logical thrust, but be equally as important. Emotion networks even unexamined thoughts into the whole in rapid gestalt.

Not that incorporating unexamined notions ever backfires. Or that it always works.

Still, the point of this whole thing is that when I encountered the concept that logic is taken as more ‘valid’ than emotion, I had an immediate, “Wait, no- that’s not what I meant to imply at all!” Emotion and logic are interrelated in a complex fashion, and unless something isn’t functioning properly, to deliberately ignore one in favor of the other is a disservice to one of the primary systems that helps us connect to each other as living, experiencing humans.

Now, I’ve spent more time than I meant to on this and I still need to scoot off and get milk.