12 Cures for Stir-Craziness

Stay in your homes, the experts tell us. Keep away from others. Don’t gather in bars, restaurants, or theaters. There aren’t any sports. All your club meetings are cancelled. The boss called off that business trip and made you telework. You’re bored, being at home all the time. You’ve gone stir-crazy. What to do?

Here’s my answer—write something.

That’s right. Sit at your keyboard, or grab pen and paper, and write something.

“But,” you’re saying, “I’m not a writer!”

My answer—how do you know?

Here’s my list of stir-craziness cures, staring with the easiest ideas:

  1. Why not make a list of supplies you’re going to need soon? Wow! You’re writing!
  2. Remember that personal organizer book you bought back in 2015, and never used? Dig it out. You could come up with some life goals, and plans to achieve them. Maybe even a personal mission statement. Or a bucket list. You never found time for that before, but you’ve got time now.
  3. Start a journal (or diary, or logbook—call it what you want). Write down whatever occurs to you. Write about social distancing, and how much you hate it. Write about feeling like you’re under house arrest, the isolation and loneliness. Get the emotions out. Write as if nobody will ever read it.
  4. Write emails to relatives and friends you haven’t connected to in a while. Write tweets and Facebook posts. Write old-fashioned letters, on stationery; the Post Office still delivers.
  5. Write an article, essay, or vignette. The topic should be something you know about. At first, write as if you’re not going to send it anywhere. Later, as you look back over it and fix it up, it might not seem half bad. Perhaps it’s publishable.
  6. Start a blog. You can do it. It probably won’t change the world, but it might help you, and that’s a beginning.
  7. If you’re up for fiction, start with something short. There’s the six-word story, the 280-character story (twitterature), the dribble (50 words), the drabble (100 words), sudden fiction (750 words), or flash fiction (1000 words). Editors are looking for good stories of these lengths, and readers like them too.
  8. How about poetry? Can you make words sing, or fly, or lift a heart?
  9. Create a short story, with a few characters, or even just one. Focus on a single effect or mood. Editors and readers love well-written short stories. In fact, I know two editors searching for 3000-5000-word short stories inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Read the rules here, write your story, and send it in!
  10. Write a non-fiction book. You’re an expert in something. Perhaps you can expand that essay you wrote (see #5 above) to book length. Cookbooks, history books, coffee-table books, memoirs—they get bought all the time. Ooh, how about a travel book? Few people are traveling now, but everyone longs to.
  11. Write a children’s book, or YA (young adult). You’ll need a good imagination and the experience of having been young.
  12. Write the Great American Novel. As they say, writing a novel is a one-day event (as in ‘One day, I’ll write a novel’). You’ve got time now; excuses are gone. No need to wait for November; you can have a personal Nanowrimo now.

You may be cooped up, but your imagination isn’t, your words aren’t. Set them free! There’s no charge for this prescription for stir-craziness written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

A Path Not Taken

Want to be a published author?  Curious about the best path to take?  In this post, I’m going to suggest you not do what I did, and instead I’ll offer a short cut.

which-way-29941281444641fqVCFirst let me retrace my steps for you.  In the mid-1980s, I had a great idea for a story.  Way too big for a short story, this had to be a novel.  I’d never thought of being a writer, and the notion scared me a bit, but the idea wouldn’t let go.  I studied writing—read books about writing, joined a writer’s group, went to writer’s conferences, joined a critique group.  And began writing.

I stayed enthusiastic about my novel, but only about the writing of it, the first, second and third drafts.  The more I wrote and rewrote, the more scared I got of the next phase, finding an agent and sending my novel out.

In 1999, I took a brief break and wrote a short story called “Target Practice” which I submitted, and it got accepted in the anthology Lower than the Angels by Lite Circle Books.  That should have been a clue I was on the wrong path, but I went back to working on the novel.

Around 2004 or 2005, I abandoned that first great idea novel (yes, after 20 years of work!), and started a different novel.

In 2006, with the second novel about one quarter finished, I resumed writing short stories.  This time I got serious about actually submitting them.  After many rejections, I started getting published.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see where I went wrong.  I should have started with short stories and worked my way up to novels.  It’s distressing to think of the time I wasted, and how much earlier I might have gotten stories in print.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the two decades of work on a now-abandoned novel was time well spent.  One could claim those years contained my 10,000 hours, the time required to develop genius-level capability.  It’s also true that my first novel might have actually gotten published had I bothered to submit it, and might have done well.

Certainly there are cases of authors getting their first novel published and seeing it become a best-seller.  But these are rare enough that I believe a better strategy for most writers is to start with short stories.  Crawling should precede walking for most people.  That method allows you to become familiar, more quickly, with the whole writing-submitting-publishing-marketing process end to end.

There you have it.  Advice, as I say at the top of my web page, straight from Mount Olympus.  Please don’t do what I did; don’t waste twenty years on a low-percentage strategy.  Don’t follow that first path trod by—

                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe

Just Short Stories? No Novels?

Should an aspiring fiction writer start with novels or short stories?  Don’t look to this blog entry for a concrete recommendation for your situation.  I can only tell you the path I took and my reasons for choosing it.  For you, success could well lie on a different path.

When phrased as an either/or choice – novels or short stories – the question itself is too limiting.  There are a variety of other avenues for the creative writer of prose, including flash fiction, novellas, podcasting, television and movie scriptwriting, and playwriting.  I’m sure I’ve left out some options and many more possibilities remain to be discovered, or forgotten ones rediscovered.  Some writer will have to be the pioneer who leads these expeditions.  Why not you?

While serving aboard a submarine many years ago, I thought of an idea for a story.  So grand was this story idea, I was certain it would make me both famous and rich.  To truly capture this story, only the novel format would do.  I was sure my tale would seize the attention of the country and even the world.  I could already see myself resigning my commission in the Navy, doing the talk show circuit, and traveling to book signings.

Though chock full of enthusiasm and energy, I was less well supplied with writing experience.  I’d heard all the arguments for starting with short stories, of course.  But such well-meaning advice could be safely ignored.  It simply didn’t apply to my case, I was sure.  Undeterred by these considerations, I set to work.

Actually writing the novel proved harder than I’d counted on, which surprised me at the time for some reason.  There was a lot to think about, with plots and subplots, characters, settings, even a theme.  How to keep it all straight?  Confident that my future fans would patiently await the great opus, I struggled on.

The struggle filled some time, like two decades or more.  At the end of that period I found I’d created a manuscript of which even my desk drawer was—and still is–ashamed.  To this day, the desk’s immune system occasionally rejects it and I have to gather up the pages, force them back in, and nail the drawer shut again.

In truth I had more to show from all the work than just an unpublishable manuscript.  Without knowing it, I’d been honing my skills in a harmless way, practicing the craft and making all my early mistakes.

Abandoning that first novel, I started another.  But doubts had set in about whether I was cut out for this.  A novel is a daunting task and a significant investment of time with very uncertain payoff, particularly for the beginning fiction writer.  It’s easy for discouragement to build up and eventually overwhelm enthusiasm.

I then read The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown, published by Carroll and Graf in 2005.  It’s a marvelous collection of short stories inspired by Jules Verne, all written by modern authors.  As a Jules Verne fan, the book inspired me.  I wrote my own short story, a work that would have fit well in that collection, or would if they decided to put out a second anthology in a similar vein.  That story, “The Steam Elephant,” appeared in Steampunk Tales issue #5.

That started me off writing more.  There are several reasons why I’ve enjoyed my switch to short stories.  I can churn out many more of them per year.  They keep my ever-fickle muse interested and focused.  It’s easier to test out different genres.  Short stories represent a good method for further growth as a writer while getting the positive feedback of more frequent acceptances.

At some point I’ll return to the novel length story.  The average non-writer doesn’t regard an author as serious until she or he has published a novel.  Certainly the pay for a published novel is greater as well.  Who knows, one of these days I may dust off the two novels I started, rewrite them, and send them out for consideration.  If you’re engaged in writing a novel equally as good, perhaps I’ll join you on the talk show circuit!  Until then, I’ll remain a short story writer, and—

Poseidon’s Scribe