The writing life - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

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Author Suicides

Writers, it’s difficult, but we have to talk about this. The recent celebrity suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade have raised awareness of the general suicide problem. However, writers may be particularly at risk.

A study released in March 2017 by the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported a higher risk of suicide “among those working in artistic, literary and media occupations.” [My emphasis added.]

It didn’t take long for me to compile my own partial list of fiction authors who have committed suicide (in order of birth date):

Virginia Woolf – (1882-1941, age 59)
L.M. Montgomery – (1884-1942, age 67)
Ryunosuke Akutagawa – (1892-1927, age 35)
Yasunari Kawabata – (1899-1972, age 72)
Ernest Hemingway – (1899-1961, age 61)
Sándor Márai – (1900-1989, age 88)
Karin Boye – (1900 – 1941, age 40)
Arthur Koestler – (1905-1983, age 77)
Klaus Mann – (1906-1949, age 42)
Osamu Dazai (1909-1948, age 38)
Primo Levi – (1919-1987, age 67)
Walter M. Miller Jr.– (1923-1996, age 72)
Yukio Mishima – (1925-1970, age 45)
Sylvia Plath – (1932-1963, age 30)
Jerzy Kosinski – (1933-1991, age 57)
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984, age 49)
Hunter S. Thompson – (1937-2005, age 67)
John Kennedy Toole – (1937-1969, age 31)
Thomas Disch – (1940-2008, age 68)
David Foster Wallace – (1962-2008, age 46)
Ned Vizzini – (1981-2013, age 32)

For three of these (Kawabata, Mann, and Levi), the suicide explanation remains in doubt. I feel compelled to point out that three other authors on this list (Boye, Miller, and Disch) wrote Science Fiction, my chosen genre.

In reading articles about these authors, it’s significant how many articles mention the word “depression.”

Following any suicide, we naturally seek a reason, an explanation, an answer to “why?” Some authors left notes attempting to rationalize their choice, but often these only leave us with more questions.

It’s probably unfair to generalize about such a personal choice, an option chosen based on necessarily specific reasons. Still, it’s natural to wonder if there are aspects of writing fiction that increase suicide risk. Here are my (unscientific and unsupported) speculations on that:

Writing is solitary. Writers tend to be less social and have fewer contacts with friends who might talk them out of suicide.
Writers explore their inner feelings, and those of their characters. Such deep introspection can lead to depression and suicide.
Writers think more about death and suffering than most people do. All fiction involves conflict, and writers must put their characters through pain, and, in some cases, death.
Feedback can depress writers. Authors offer their cherished work to the entre world, and hope for a positive reaction. If the public ignores their stories or reviewers lambast them, authors often take it personally.

If you’re a writer (or anyone) contemplating suicide, please, please, please call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or go to their website.

Perhaps you know a writer (or, again, anyone) who may be at risk of suicide. There’s a Twitter hashtag devoted to this: #BeThe1To. Here are the 5 Action Steps you can take to help your friend:

Ask your friend in a caring way if they feel suicidal;
Do what you can to keep your friend safe;
Listen without judgement and be there for your friend;
Connect your friend to a network of resources and helpful people; and
Follow up with your friend, even after treatment.

Let’s have a world without suicides. That’s the dream of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 10, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Suffering for Your Writing

You’ve heard the phrase “suffering for your art,” and you know the stereotype of the writer who’s deeply disturbed and probably insane. Let’s reason this out together.

First, I’d like to define some terms. Suffering means simply to experience something undesirable, some hardship. Given that definition of suffering, it’s something no human escapes. We all have undesirable experiences. Suffering is universal and inevitable.

An insane person is one who does not exhibit normal perception, behavior, or social interaction. Imagine lining up all people in order from the most sane to the most insane. Even psychologists would have a difficult time marking the boundary separating the sane from the insane, though most would agree about those at the extreme ends of the line.

For my purposes here, let’s consider insanity a rare condition. Let’s use the term as a psychologist might, and not like the hyperbole we use when seeing someone do something remarkable: “He’s insane!”

In this post, Wency Leung cites a study showing that creative people are more likely to receive treatment for mental illnesses, and likely also are related to people with mental disorders. The study specifically found authors to have high likelihoods of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse, and to be more prone to suicide than the general population.

Michelle Roberts cites the same study, but her post details a similarity between the brain scans of creative people and those of schizophrenics. Both seem to have fewer mental filters, thus allowing a greater capacity for seeing connections between unlike things. Those two groups make associations and links not made by the general population.

Exploring the study’s implications for writers, Kimberley Turner warns against glamorizing mental illness, saying it can bring on depressions that are far from desirable. Given the higher incidence of mental illness with writers, she asks if writing causes the illness and its associated unhappiness, or if the mentally ill are more likely to take up writing. She concludes that depression is not a necessary condition to be a great writer, but that a writer must have endured some suffering to portray believable characters contending with conflict.

This post from Kevin T. Johns focuses on the suffering writer, without delving into whether that suffering results from, or causes, insanity. He contends writers must suffer for their art. However, they need not seek out suffering; life supplies enough suffering by itself. Writers differ from most people in that they use suffering. They don’t shy away from the hurt and pain—they write down every detail. They force characters to suffer, thus producing engaging literature.

Considering that question of whether suffering sparks people to write, or writing itself causes suffering, Mark McGuinness distinguishes between two kinds of suffering. Suffering from life, he contends, is different from suffering from your art. We all suffer the pain of living, so you must face and overcome it. Writers use it by learning from it and writing it down. However, he spares no sympathy for writers who suffer from their writing. He finds that self-pitying and unhelpful.

As for me, I agree life provides enough suffering for any writer to use. However, I recommend you not allow your writing to cause you undue suffering, let alone to drive you insane. Your readers await your next quality story, and you can’t deliver if you’re sliding into depression and madness.

Life throws bad stuff at all of us, but we get to choose how to respond. I’m in favor of remaining as optimistic as you can. That’s the best advice available from your fellow suffering writer—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 29, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

How to Write When You’re Not Writing

This post’s title sounds kind of Zen, doesn’t it? What does it mean to write when you’re not writing?

Let’s say you’d like to be a writer, or a more prolific writer. The trouble is time. There’s not enough of it in your day. The rest of life sucks up too much time. Just when you find yourself with a few free minutes to write, the words won’t flow, or you’re too exhausted.

What if you could get some writing done during the rest of the day when you’re not writing? Moreover, what if I told you that if you could write when you’re not writing, you’ll write more and better prose when you do write? Is that even possible?

It is possible. I’ve hinted about it in previous posts, but today I’ll describe what I mean. First, I’ll discuss the available time, and then I’ll go into what you can do with that time.

List the activities you do during a typical week or month that have the following properties: (1) you are either alone or don’t have to interact with others, (2) you are performing drone work that doesn’t require full concentration, or you’re waiting for something to happen.

Examples of these activities might include:

Cleaning your place;
Commuting to and from work;
Waiting in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room;
Showering or bathing;
Preparing or eating a meal alone, and cleaning up afterward;
Sitting (ahem) atop a porcelain throne in the bathroom;
Yard work or gardening;
Exercising;
Waiting to fall asleep;
Etc.

Your list would be different, but you get the idea. That represents an amount of time when you’re awake and alert, but may not need to focus all your attention on your activity. (Be careful with the commuting one, though; that works best if you ride in a vehicle someone else is driving.)

That’s the time you have available to write when you’re not writing. What kind of writing can you do during that time? Especially if you can’t actually write anything down?

Here are some examples:

Think of your next story idea;
Flesh out a character, including her specifics like strengths, weaknesses, personality, quirks, motivations, life story, etc.;
Imagine the details of a scene’s setting;
Work out a solution to a plot problem;
Do some people-watching, for appearance quirks, gestures, and speech patterns you can use for your characters;
Lay out how the next scene will go, including dialogue and action;
Etc.

This list will vary quite a bit, not just between different writers, but it will vary for you, day to day. These are the things you will think about during the times you’re not writing. Sometimes the process may be almost, or entirely, subconscious. You emerge with the problem solved in your mind even though you’d don’t recall thinking about it.

Oh, yeah. Remember I mentioned that writing when you aren’t writing will help you be more productive when you are writing? Here’s how that works. Since you solved some problems when you weren’t writing, you’ll sit down at the keyboard and you’ll know what to do right away. No need to ponder things. Those ideas you had will spill out.

Some ideas won’t look as good when you write them down as they did in your mind while you were showering. That’s okay; you can always modify and improve them.

By the way, this process of having your non-writing time influence your writing time—it also works the other way around, too. When you’re writing and you come across a problem, relax. You don’t have to solve it right away. Just file it away for future thought. That’s what your non-writing time is for. Simply move on. In this manner, your writing time also serves to prime the pump with problems to work on in your non-writing time.

Practice writing when not writing, my diligent apprentice, and you, too, will attain the skills of Zen Master—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 8, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

4 Strategies for Coping with a Distracted Muse

Your muse gives you a great story idea. You just started writing the story and your muse arrives again and whispers about a second, completely different, story. “But I’m not done with the first one,” you say. Actually, forget both of those,” the muse says, “I’ve got a third story for you…”

Your muse, like all of them, isn’t the most focused entity around. Easily distracted by new and shiny objects, she comes up with fresh ideas all the time.

However, she never sticks around to help write the stories. She leaves that task to you. Moreover, her rate of creating ideas is far faster than your rate of story writing. As a writer, how do you handle this backlog problem?

Before I list various coping strategies, be aware that WIP is a term writers use meaning Work in Progress, the story you’re actively working on. Here, now, are some ways to deal with the idea backlog problem. You could:

Start each story as your muse suggests it, and deal with having several WIPs at once.
Make a list of all story ideas as your muse suggests them, and come back to that list as you finish each WIP.
Ignore your muse while working on your WIP, accepting that you’ll lose some ideas.
Restrict your stories to a series about a single set of characters or a single genre, and ignore your muse’s ideas that don’t fit those restrictions.

There may be other techniques as well, and I’d love to hear you tell me about them.

Many writers opt for the first strategy of writing several WIPs at once. They shift from story to story, progressing as their enthusiasm and focus allow. This has the advantage of starting each story when the idea is fresh, but the potential disadvantages of mixing up stories or never finishing any.

Others maintain a lengthening list of story ideas, updated each time the muse whispers. They work on a single story until it’s finished, then pick the next WIP from the list. This keeps the writer focused on one WIP without losing any ideas, but the writer might return to the listed story idea and not recall the muse’s enthusiasm that made it a good idea.

Some simply ignore the muse while writing a single WIP. This is probably more common among novelists than among short story writers. Novelists must maintain total focus for the long term to finish their WIP. This allows that focus, but risks losing some good ideas.

If you can restrict your writing to one genre or setting or a set of characters, then you can disregard any ideas from your muse that don’t fit. This certainly works as long as you remain enthusiastic about your chosen niche.

Your chosen strategy will depend on your particular circumstances, including the persuasiveness and creativity of your muse, and your ability to focus or willingness to work on several WIPs at once. If one strategy doesn’t work for you, try a different one, or combine them.

Gotta go. My muse just whispered a great story idea to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 25, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

The Inspiration/Perspiration Ratio

One of inventor Thomas Edison’s most famous quotes is, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” There may be a similar ratio involved with writing fiction, too. Let’s find out what it is.

I got the idea for this post while reading a wonderful guest post by author Anthony St. Clair on Joanna Penn’s website. St. Clair takes the extreme view that a writer should forget the muse and just show up for work and produce prose.

For discussion’s sake, let’s postulate two possible aspects of writing fiction called Creativity and Productivity. Here are the attributes for each:

Creativity	Productivity
· Wait for the muse	· No waiting—get to work
· Muse whispers in your ear	· Invisible boss yells at you
· Book idea is fully formed	· Book emerges from long process
· Words flow like water	· Words extracted with pliers
· Pleasantry	· Drudgery
· 1^st draft = final draft	· 1^st draft = crap
· Mind to universe	· Nose to grindstone
· Work late at night	· Work efficiently
· Write in binges to exhaustion	· Write on schedule to completion
· Guided by insight and instinct	· Guided by plan and outline
· Lying on couch, thinking	· Sitting at desk, working
· Great ideas per lifetime	· Words per day

If fiction writing consists of some amalgamation of those two aspects, what is the ratio between the two? St. Clair’s post advocates a ratio of 0% creativity and 100% productivity.

I can’t go quite that far. I agree it’s necessary to dispel the myth some beginning writers have about writing being all Creativity. Sadly, it’s not. If you wish to write, steel yourself to suffer through the items on the Productivity list. Most writing consists of enduring the attributes in the right column.

Most, but not all. There is, and has to be, some amount of stuff from the Creativity side of the ledger.

For me, the two aspects occur at different times and in different settings. Productivity occurs when I’m sitting at the desk typing, or when I have a pad handy and I’m writing by hand.

Creativity occurs when I’m doing some other activity that doesn’t require full brain engagement, such as yardwork, showering, or exercising. In other words, the Creativity part of writing happens when I’m not writing. Apparently, idle neurons spark best at those times. That’s when I conjure up new story ideas, work out plot problems, flesh out characters, imagine settings, etc.

The ideas ignited during those non-writing creative times remain with me and guide me when I sit down to do actual writing. They either form my plan or modify an existing plan.

To muddy things a bit, there are elements of Creativity within the Productivity sessions and vice versa. There are times, at the keyboard, when I get stuck and must summon my creative side for help. Likewise, my Creative moments often involve a measure of directed thought, not just waiting for muse whisperings.

Moreover, the Creativity/Productivity ratio changes during the development of a story. Early on, it’s nearly all Creativity. In the editing and polishing stages, the work shifts almost wholly to Productivity.

Given all that, what is my answer to the original question—the creativity/productivity ratio? In terms of importance or value to the process, I’d say it’s 50-50. Both parts are necessary. However, in the amount of time spent, I’d estimate fiction writing is one part Creativity and nine parts Productivity. At least, that’s the ratio for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 25, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Fiction Writing: Not Your Normal Day Job

If you work at a typical desk job and want to write fiction at night, be prepared. The two occupations are not at all alike. But what if your day job suddenly got altered to be more like fiction writing? Let’s find out what that would be like.

You wake up at whatever time you like; you’re now setting your own hours. There’s no commute. You telework every day. No one sees you working, or checks on your progress. There are no meetings, no boring chats by the coffee machine, and no lunches with clients. Knock off early every day if you want; nobody cares how long you work.

Sounds like a dream job, right? There’s a down side.

Sitting at your computer, you produce your first work product of the day. (What’s the product? I don’t know; we’re talking about your current day job.) You e-mail it to your boss and wait. A few hours later, your boss e-mails you back to say the product didn’t suit her needs. She says she can’t accept it.

You’re stunned. She’s rejected your work. How can she do that? You know this job well and have worked at it for years. You e-mail her back asking what sort of product she needs, and asking what’s specifically wrong with the one you sent. She answers that she’s looking for really compelling products the customer will like. Moreover, she receives too many product submissions to list the deficiencies with each one; she only has time to accept or reject.

Her e-mail concludes on a positive and unexpected note, wishing you well with the product, adding that you can submit to any other department head in the company. That’s weird, you think. It’s as if, all of a sudden, you have more than one boss.

With some trepidation, you submit the work product to another department head. An hour later, he responds, thanking you but also saying it doesn’t suit his needs. You’re disappointed, but not shocked. By now, you’re catching on to the new company procedure and you simply submit your product to a different department head.

During the next two weeks, you submit it to every department head and all of them reject your product. Some take less than an hour to respond, but others take days. While waiting on them, you’ve been able to do other stuff around the house, watch some movies, and hit the bar scene on a few nights. The rejections distress you, though; things never used to be that way.

Ah, well, at least it’s payday, finally. Checking your bank account, you’re stunned to discover there’s been no money deposited to your account. You call the Pay Department, and the representative explains you had no products accepted during the pay period, so there’s no pay. The company is no longer on a salary system; they pay you only for accepted products, and calculate the amount based on customer purchases.

Hanging up the phone, you have a “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. In this new system, you realize you’ll have to churn out products fast, keep circulating them, and hope a few get accepted and that customers like them.

E-mailing a few friendly co-workers, you discover most are in the same boat, with zero pay. Word has it that one employee tripled her monthly income, but was told that was no guarantee of future earnings.

Welcome, fellow worker, to the fiction writing biz, where success is rare, and determined in part by how well you learn your craft and whether a fickle public likes your stories. You can complain the system’s unfair or rigged, but whining probably won’t make you feel better, and sure won’t change anything.

Fortunately, day jobs aren’t set up like the writing business. Still, writing makes a highly enjoyable hobby for most authors. Among them is—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 4, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Writing with Spectators

In his book The Way the Future Was, the late science fiction author Frederik Pohl stated, “Writing is not a spectator sport.” Oh, yeah? I set out to prove him wrong.

I rented a football stadium, hired two commentators, and advertised for several thousand of my fans to watch me write. Here’s the transcript, as broadcast:

Pat: “It’s a beautiful afternoon here at the stadium and we’ve got quite a crowd for this amazing event. Wouldn’t you say so, John?”

John: “No doubt about that, Pat, weather-wise and crowd-size-wise. But this is the first time I’ve covered one of these writer athletes, and I’m not sure what to expect.”

Pat: “It’s a first for both of us. Look, the writer himself has entered the field and is making his way to the center, and the crowd’s cheering.”

John: “I like his confidence. You can see it in his walk. He’s not swaggering or strutting, just striding with confidence. I like that.”

Pat: “Tonight’s writer is Steven R. Southard. He’s been writing for several seasons already, and his career is on an upswing. He’s reached midfield now and is sitting at the desk there. The crowd is settling down. I’m guessing things will start soon.”

John: “I’m a bit confused, Pat. There’s no team with him. No opposing team out there, either. Not a single referee, and no coaches pacing the sidelines.”

Pat: “I guess that’s the way writing is, John. Must be a solitary thing. Look, Steve has turned on his computer. The stadium scoreboard is off so I don’t know if time has started or not.”

John: “I think we must have a second-rate writer, here, Pat. This guy is just staring into space. He hasn’t typed a thing. Now he’s sipping some coffee. I sorta expected more action, typing-wise.”

Pat: “Maybe fiction writing isn’t all typing. Apparently there is some amount of thinking involved, too.”

John: “If he keeps this up, he’s going to be traded in the off-season. This is just the kind of lazy work ethic that…hold on. He’s typing on the keyboard now. He’s actually typing.”

Pat: “True, John, he is. We can’t see the words from here. We’ll see if we can get a close-up view. He’s definitely pounding out some prose.”

John: “And the crowd’s getting into it, too. They can sense the energy. Still, he might want to work on his posture, because—uh, oh. He stopped. Did he call for a timeout? We’re back to that staring-into-space play that didn’t work before. How many timeouts do they allow in this sport?”

Pat: “I’m not sure, but we’re going to cut to a commercial break. Don’t change the channel, folks. There’s more exciting action coming up.”

——————————————————–

Pat: “We’re back, live at the stadium. There was some activity during the break.”

John: (odd sound, possibly yawning) “Yeah, but it was the wrong kinda action, Pat. No typing at all. Southard got up from his chair and paced around the desk a few times, gesturing and talking to himself. He’s not going to get any stories written that way.”

Pat: “He sure isn’t. A lot of fans seem to agree too, and are leaving for the parking lot. It’s hard to know if our writer is making any progress down there on the field.”

John: “Progress? He hardly moves. I can’t stand this anymore. This isn’t a sport! The boredom is killing me. I’d rather watch goalposts rust, or wait for Astroturf to grow. I’m leaving.”

Pat: “We’ve only been here fifteen minutes, John.”

John: “Then why do I feel fifteen years older, age-wise?”

The broadcast ended soon after that when both commentators and all the camera operators left. Perhaps Frederik Pohl was right after all, um, correctness-wise. From now on, writing will return to being a non-spectator event for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 14, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

An Analysis of Effortless Story Writing

“That story wrote itself,” I’ve sometimes said. But I exaggerated; it didn’t really happen that way. Still, it got me thinking. What if a story could write itself?

I decided to find out. Being rather sciency, I reckoned I’d conduct a careful and thorough experiment. I would give a story every conceivable chance, every possible opportunity, to write itself. Not because I’m lazy, you understand. This was for Science.

It’s time to shift the tone of this blog post to scientificalic language, lest you start to suspect I’m some kind of…not scientist.

Laboratory Setup – laptop still not writing

Ahem…the laptop was positioned in a roo—I mean—laboratory accustomed to having stories written in it, at a temperature of 24° C at normal atmospheric pressure. The laptop was turned on, plugged into a 120-volt alternating current power source, and word processing software was accessed.

The experimenter then left the laboratory and engaged in other, non-writing activities. These included cleaning other rooms, mowing the lawn, reading books, making and consuming lunch, and driving around town on various errands.

After a period of 8 hours and 24 minutes, the experimenter quietly re-entered the laboratory and discovered that a story had not been written. Even a part of a story had not been written, not a paragraph, sentence, word, letter, or punctuation mark. Neither had any new computer files been stored.

To gather more data, further opportunities were presented to the laptop on subsequent days. Longer time periods were tried, durations up to 73 hours and 53 minutes, with the same result. The experimenter engaged in a wider variety of non-writing activities, at greater distances from the laptop. Some trials were conducted with the laboratory door open, and some with it shut. Actual writing occurred in 0% of these cases.

Similar experiments were conducted with ink-filled pens and reams of blank paper. This served to eliminate the laptop and its software as the causal factor. Despite every opportunity and considerable time provided, the pens created no marks on the paper.

The experimenter tried to “spur” or “seed” the process by writing a first sentence, and allowing both laptop and pen to merely complete the story. These attempts likewise resulted in failure.

Numerous graphs were developed to document the results of these trials. They are not included here because the independent variable refused to depart from the axis; that is, the results were 0 in every case. 0 writing produced no matter what other quantity was being tested.

One common factor in all these trials was the experimenter himself. He therefore consulted several other writers and 100% of them reported the same outcomes in their “experiments,” though their trials were far less scientifical, with no white laboratory coats anywhere in evidence, and they had utterly failed to note the temperature. Mention of them here is included as anecdotal evidence only.

The experimenter is therefore forced to a surprising, though tentative, conclusion—it may be possible that stories do not, in fact, write themselves. The creation of stories appears to require the active participation of a writer. Significant participation actually, in every written story so far. At least this seems true for stories involving this single experimenter.

Further research is clearly indicated to validate or (hopefully) disprove this conclusion. Perhaps some necessary initial condition was overlooked, some nuance of temperature, pressure, time duration, or distance. Maybe positive results might occur under certain lunar phases or planetary alignments. A breakthrough may well await some future experimenter in this exciting research field.

For the advancement of Scientificness, this experimenter encourages others to conduct similar trials, particularly those authors writing in the same competitive genres as this experimenter. Feel free to send your own scientilic trial results as comments to this blog post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 18, 2017Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Steps Toward Becoming a Writer

Are there discrete steps or stages between non-writer and writer? Do all writers tread the same path?

I got thinking about that after reading Ani Chibukhchyan’s guest post on thewritepractice.com. She claimed to have passed through seven stages in becoming a writer, and guessed all writers climbed the same set of stairs.

Her stages were: Keeping your writing to yourself, Wanting to share your writing, Hiding behind a pen name, Waiting for permission, Coming out, Insecure introductions, and I am a writer.

With due respect to Ms. Chibukhchyan, the steps I went through don’t entirely match hers, though there is some overlap. Moreover, I suspect there are considerable differences in the stages among all writers. Here are the steps I took:

Step 1. My novel will be a best-seller.

I had the world’s best idea for a novel. Sure, I’d never written anything for publication before, but how hard could it be? After all, getting a killer idea was the most important and difficult part, right?

Step 2. Writing is harder than I thought.

It turned out, having a “killer” idea was not the most difficult part. Not even close. My prose was so bad, even I couldn’t stand the stench. I needed help. I went to writer’s conferences, read how-to books about writing, joined critique groups, and took writing classes. Good! Now I was on my way.

Step 3. When will this %&@!^# novel ever be done?

Novels, it seemed increasingly clear, are long. Reading a novel took some time, but nowhere close to the time it took to write one. Who knew? I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote some more. Before I knew it, twenty years had passed. That’s no typo; I meant twenty (20) years.

Step 4. Should I try short stories instead?

At some point in those two decades, I wondered if I should try something else. Short stories might not be any easier, but they were…well, shorter. Perhaps I could get a few shorts published, establish a vast readership that way, and they’d be clamoring for me to write a novel.

Step 5. Do I dare submit this?

I was done with my first short story, and my finger hovered over the Enter key, the button that would submit the story to a market. Was it ready? Was it my best work? Should I spend a little more time editing? Had I caught all the errors?

Step 6. Drowning in rejections.

After overcoming the fear of submitting, and after embracing Robert Heinlein’s Rules, I submitted story after story to market after market. At one point, I had fourteen stories out there. Problem is, I was getting nothing but rejections. All nicely worded, but still. Dejection set in, along with the feeling that I just wasn’t cut out to be a writer. Until…

Step 7. Wow! I got accepted!

There’s nothing like that first acceptance. If only someone could bottle and sell that feeling. First comes the acceptance e-mail, then the contract, then some edits to fix, and then seeing the book come out, with your name in it! I’ve had over thirty more acceptances since then, but still get excited with each one.

Step 8. I’m a writer.

Well, I’m a short story writer, anyway. No novel yet. No movie deals. No legions of adoring fans (that I know of). Still, I’m several steps above where I started. It feels good up here.

More steps remain for me, I’m sure. I’ll update my stair-stepping journey in a future blog post. What have your steps been like? I can almost guarantee the steps for you will be different than they were for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 29, 2017Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Writer, Know Thyself

How well do you know yourself? I came across a wonderful post on this topic by Joanna Penn, guest-posting on WritetoDone. I’d like to take her basic idea in a different direction.

As Joanna said, the phrase “Know Thyself” has an ancient lineage, going back at least to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece, but possibly further back to ancient Egypt. It has various interpretations, but for today, I’ll take it to mean that wisdom begins by looking inside.

If you aim to be a writer, able to write convincing tales about characters who are unlike yourself, you must first understand the person from whom these characters will spring.

Why? It’s the filters.

Let me explain. So far in life, you’ve observed the real world and many people for several years. In your mind, you have a model of that world and those people, but it’s not a perfect model. It doesn’t match the real world exactly.

Every sensation of the world has to pass through a filter in your mind, a filter you built over time based on your experiences. It consists of your stereotypes, biases, personality, political views, gender, education, occupation, etc. The filter through which you see the world is your unique perspective based on who you really are, and it is distorting the view you see.

If you write a book, you’re writing through that filter about a world you see and characters you see. Once published, the book is out there, part of the real world for readers to enjoy. When a reader reads your book, she understands and interprets it through her own mental filter.

It’s possible that, despite all this filtering, many readers will enjoy your book and you’ll earn lots of money. If so, it will be in part because your words reached through the filters and entertained readers.

It’s wise, therefore, to take an introspective look at your own filter, to study it with as much objectivity as you can. Who is this person who wants to be a writer, who would write words describing people and who would comment on the human condition? In short, who are you?

Joanna Penn’s blog post makes some great observations about attributes that most writers have in common. But I think it’s just as important for you to understand the specific attributes unique to you.

How do you do that? You could take a few days off, get away from the world as best you can, and write down what you know about yourself. You could take a personality test, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Five Factor Model, or some other measure.

If you do this, I’m certain you’ll find many of the attributes Joanna Penn listed will be true for you (a loner seeking recognition; one who’s scared, doubtful, and creative; one who believes in finishing projects and striving to improve; one who knows the dark side of life).

You’ll find out much more than that, things that make you feel proud to be you and things you wish weren’t true. You will see facets of yourself that are average and facets that are far from the norm.

This project of learning about yourself can benefit you and your writing in several ways:

You may find things about yourself you’d like to improve;
You’ll know about those parts of you that are unusual, and realize that connecting with readers may take an extra effort;
You’ll understand that your characters have personality filters too, and by writing about the world of your story as well as the thoughts of a character, you are revealing something about that character’s filters.

Good luck! And now, excuse me, it’s time for me to get to know—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 9, 2017Poseidon's ScribePermalink