Which Way to Go?

I have mentioned this before and thought I would give it another spin. (And no, this is not a Halloween-themed post) I have engaged a few up-and-coming writers about their next project, and they are not sure what to write. Upon diving deeper into their quandary, they are not sure if they want to write a life story - a non-fiction event - or an interesting story that would be based on their actual existence but more interesting, more exciting. This would seem to present a binary choice - truth or fiction - but actually suggests something which should move writers even more - what do they want to say?

The act of saying something in your story is simple if you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be. For example: I was in a bad car accident when I was 18. Now, if I want to tell people just what happened that night on Hamilton Road, then my task is fairly easy. I discuss the events, offer what I experienced, and how it concluded. It's clearly non-fiction, and tells everyone about that terrible experience. Now, that is writing (although it's more like reporting). Now here is where the road diverges.

In that example, such a story would say, "I was in a car accident when I was 18. Here is what happened." However, I happen to know there's a lot more to that moment than how a 1976 Pacer can end up on its roof along a country road. That story has more to say, if I let it. If what I want to say before I start writing is how I realized how freaking fragile life and the human body can be, well, I can tell the same story but make it more about feelings. Do I need to describe the spilled gasoline and coolant spilled across the street? It did happen, but it doesn't speak to what I really want to say. I can ignore that and talk about my own blood splashed about, the broken glass embedded in my skin, and the lingering shock of coming so close to being a roadside casualty. Still non-fiction, but exploring the emotions.

Now we bend into the fiction neighborhood. Let's pretend that what I want to say is the fear of walking through the night, injured, bleeding, and seeking refuge. Sure, I could stick with the car accident story and talk about walking to the nearest house not even a quarter-mile away. There's scary feelings with that...for the most part. But what if I fictionalize things a little, and that country road is longer and emptier than ever? What if my injuries are worse - a broken bone or two, an injury that won't stop bleeding? Now we really explore the fear of the moment, but at the expense of the facts. 

Now let's make the story suspenseful and put some skin in the game - like a passenger in the car too injured to move. The main character has to head out into the night, holding tight to their own injuries, desperately searching for help while not knowing if their passenger is alive or dead. We have diverged from the real story altogether, but we retain the elements that make it interesting. This becomes the story someone writes if they want to say something about being hurt, scared, and worried for someone else but pressing on in the face of adversity. And yes, it's total fiction, but the writer incorporates their experiences into the main character's feelings.

Now, this might seem like the point being made is that to make a story interesting, it has to be fictionalized. Here's the hook that ties all this together - any true-story can be made more interesting by incorporating all the feelings of what the author wants to say. Readers understand events, but connect with feelings, so by writing the story as it happened but focusing on the feelings, fears, and the nitty-gritty of the experience, true stories can still communicate what a writer wants to say. It's just a matter of knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it.           

When Did It All Begin?

Don't be alarmed - I'm not getting all philosophical. I was thinking the other day about my ongoing journey into writing and a thought bounced into my head: When did all of this start? When did I find myself drawn toward stories and storytelling, particularly of the kind we write about? It turns out, the answer to this is not as easy as one might think - at least as far as I am concerned. The more I got thinking about this, the more I realized it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to dive into. And yes, I felt I was up to the challenge.

Now, regular readers of this blog (or literally anyone who went back to read my first post, "Starting off as a writer,") know my foray into the actual art of writing started off as a severe liver infection that prompted me to start writing down all the stories bouncing around in my head. Simple, yes, but all the storytelling stuff and the writing stuff goes back well before that. I actually took a writing workshop course when I was fourteen as part of my high-school curriculum but it didn't go well, mostly because I was a very distracted fourteen and wasn't willing to dedicate the time and energy required for the study of writing. Furthermore, I definitely wasn't ready for the poetry part that would come the following semester - that would only come much later. This tells me that the interest was there even in my early teens, just not the focus.

Now, I did love to tell a good story back when I was six - at least according to my parents, who serve as biased source material. Apparently, someone asking me how my day was could trigger a long, winding yarn about everything that happened and drift into some things that clearly did not happen, but I was just loving the chance to be in that storytelling space. Looking back at some very early writing projects (like kindergarten), however, makes it readily apparent that I did not have the grammatical skills nor the patience to write all these wonderful tales down. After all, at that age I was still mastering things like not getting the letter 'e' backward and staying on the lines. Writing a sentence was challenging (and kind of boring considering how I preferred to just blurt things out), so the stories were there, just not the writing.

Why am I saying all this? I think it all gets down to the fact that we all have stories flowing through us, and for some of us, those stories are load-bearing entities holding us together. The writing of them, however, requires a few magical ingredients to get thrown into the pot before it all reaches critical mass and we begin our little journey. Now, these ingredients aren't going to mix themselves, and sometimes we have to add the last few touches to kick things off - inspiration, time, sentiment, something - because they need that little push.

So if you are feeling the urge to be a writer but there's something not quite there yet, start looking around for what inspired you in the past, for what moves you, for what gets you inspired, then ask yourself what's missing. Sometimes all it takes is just sitting down and typing, but other times it takes a larger step. And unless you are fortunate enough to get a severe liver infection, you will have to find that one yourself.    

The Tough Question

"So, how's your writing going?"

Every time I get asked that, I think, "Oh, kill me now." Not that I have a death wish, but open-ended questions like that hit me in two places at once. First and foremost, it reminds me that for the very moment I am being asked that question, I am not writing. I'm talking with people, at a party, or usually doing something social and the subject comes up. At that point, I've pretty much checkmated myself because I invite that very question to occur as a part of the ongoing small-talk - yet another reason I hate that question. However, I still feel this passive sense of guilt because I had a choice to either write or socialize, and I chose the latter. Now I would pay for it. However, that's not the worst part.

The real irksome part of getting hit with that question is it usually gets me to ask myself how my writing is going. I start a self-inventory process of the things I have written lately, anything I have running around my brain that I really want to write, what I am avoiding writing, and all these other writing questions. (Yes, I clearly overthink certain things.) But while I overthink everything, the question invariably comes up - how am I progressing as a writer? Am I progressing as a writer? What can I do to make more progress as a writer? (Wow, do I overthink things.)

The questions I end up asking myself may sound borne out of insecurity, but they do serve a purpose. Whenever we question ourselves as writers, the best thing to do is have a handy go-to move to put us back on track. One of my favorites is to look at old writing, just to see how far I actually have progressed. I can open up a ten-year-old document and do a quick word check on how many times I used, "that," "was," or "were," just to see where I wrote in a sloppy, passive manner. While I can't do that during whatever social event I attended that  led to getting asked that question, but it's still a good way to remedy doubts.

Of course, one of the sure-fire ways is always to just talk about the last thing you wrote, and let yourself get pulled back into your writing process. If your recent work was something as simple as a story of the last moments of a ham sandwich, remind yourself about whatever flared up in your mind and inspired you to write that story, to commit it to words instead of it just taking up a few neurons. Recreate whatever drove you to write, and express it in full. After all, you are a writer, so talk about writing.

However, the one thing that you should always keep in your back pocket is a little reminder. Even if you don't feel like much of a writer because you are going through writer's block, or caught in a plot contradiction, or getting those Act Two Blues, these are what writers go through. These happen, and will happen again as long as you continue to write. They are the unspoken moments writers go through, just like the war stories that never get told because they don't carry the drama of the exciting stories. So as long as you are writing, as long as you are living the life and working the processes you have developed and are developing, it's a pretty simple question to answer.

"It's going great, thank you."     

"When You Get Lost, You Learn"

The title of today's piece comes from an African proverb that basically says the same thing but with a few extra words. The reason I decided to lead with this is that for the past couple of weeks, I have been quite lost as a writer. It is difficult to explain, but my creative guide has been very much asleep, and I have been adrift in the sense that I haven't been able to find the route to creating anything. You know how I say it's important to have a bunch of routines to foster a creative environment? Well, those haven't been working. I have been very much in the midst of a strange land, and I didn't know the route to get me back to that place.

I have seen this with plenty of other writers, and indeed it is different than writer's block. When we are blocked, we know what we want to create but we can't grasp whatever it might take to get us from where we stand to where we want to be. This kind of lost feeling is like waking up and not having access to all those tools that allow us to create the bizarre monsters known as out writing. Nothing seems possible at that point, not as if we are back at square one, but as if we were in a maze where we no longer knew our objective. This can hit in the middle of writing an epic novel, or a poem, or anything really. But when we are stuck in this space, what do we do? How do we escape the maze when we don't even know how we got there?

This is where the proverb comes in. We learn the most when we are not surrounded by the familiar, by the known. When we are in unfamiliar territory, everything might be scary and different, but it is in fact, new. It can be taken as a terrifying situation, or it can be taken as a chance to discover a new world full of strange, fascinating things. Indeed, when we are lost, we are away from the familiar, but if we let it, that can be a liberating experience. Without presumptions and rules set for us to follow, we are free to do whatever we want. We can learn all about how this new world of the lost works, and see what it has to offer.

I read somewhere that one of the secrets to keeping an active mind was trying new things periodically, and doing this in many different ways. Break routines now and then, even if it's as simple as trying a new restaurant on occasion, taking a different route home once a month, seeing a movie that you would normally have no interest in. Do these things with no guarantee that they will be new and fascinating experiences - just accept that they will be different, and opportunities for fresh, new experiences. That's all they have to be, so try them out for size.

And when it comes to writing, I learned that once I got past the feeling that I was stuck in a new, weird, maze and changed that to the opportunity to explore an entirely new, different kind of world that happened to be maze-shaped, my writing issues crumbled. I adventured, I explored, and I didn't get lost because I didn't think I had to be anywhere but in that space in that moment. Once I appreciated that space, I started writing again. And I am glad to be back.    

What's In An Albatross?

A few disclaimers about this post: First, this is not an anatomy lesson, and no harm has or will come to any birds whatsoever in the making of this piece. Secondly, this is not intended to be used in any way that would harm an albatross or any other of our fine avian friends. Lastly, just go with the whole albatross discussion, and see what it's actually about.

Sometimes, when a fellow writer feels bogged down in their writing and can't get themselves into a good space to be creative, I offer them the albatross challenge. In short, start writing about an albatross. Start describing it through the senses, but really don't be afraid to investigate and go deep into its particular smell or the feeling of its coarse, thick feathers. (Describing how it tastes is up to your imagination - please do not eat an albatross just to help your descriptive process). 

Now, this might seem like a simple task, but the challenge is to take it further. What does the voice of the albatross sound like? Not its call across the waters, but if it could talk, what would it sound like? Would it have a British accent? Would it use a lot of slang? What would it think about how people sounded with their smaller throats and beaks? Start challenging yourself to think of it as a unique entity, and how that might stand apart from what we typically think about these birds. Since there's no right or wrong to this exercise, you have the right to play around with it. Have fun with the exercise. Give your albatross a name - it should probably be Steve but that's your call. Then get to know Steve.

At this point, your mind should be travelling away from what we think about the typical albatross, which in fairness, is probably not very well known anyway. At this point, you can write down the secret world of these birds, their culture and habits, the immense efforts they take to make sure nobody ever finds out how they can speak English (and probably many other languages), and the heavy burden they carry in concealing everything about their special ways. God forbid if any human accidentally stumbled upon the secret kingdom of the albatross homeland. Would the birds rise up? Finally let the truth be told? Come out and demand a place amongst civilized society?

As you can tell, this exercise has very little to do with the fine albatross. This is merely a deep dive into committing yourself to writing about whatever circulates through your brain, and exploring it without the confines of annoying things like reality. Whenever we are hung up with our writing, it's usually because we have hit some kind of perceived boundary and do not have a good way to get through it. Usually the boundary is nothing more than some annoying obstacle that has no power over us, but we focus on it rather than the project of writing. So when these obstacles appear, your only responsibility is to find a way to break yourself from known concepts and explore the unknown spaces. And a good way to do that is with an albatross.

BTW - I chose an albatross for this example because it was alphabetically the first one I could think of. Your bird may vary.    

Screwing Up vs. Failing Up

Writing is a parade of mistakes and rewrites, and even that doesn't cover all the things that can go wrong. A three-hundred-page manuscript can fall apart with just a few bad pages at the end. Many well-intended essays can go completely sideways with a few poorly-placed words. And yes, even when all the words are the right ones, sometimes a piece can completely miss its target. This is a terrible fate for a piece of writing, but it's not a judgment of our work as much as it is an opportunity for us to do better.

Some of the more famous screw-ups have been very well-intentioned and purposeful, but they just ended up going in the wrong direction because the weight of the words were taken the wrong way. There was a very famous book written at the turn of the last century (yes, over 100 years ago) that was a scathing indictment of all the failings of capitalism while also backing the virtues of socialism. Surprisingly, this book is still standard reading in many schools, and was responsible for a lot of legislation getting passed that would change our way of living forever. Can you name it?

Well, chances are, you can't name the book by the way I described it - a pro-socialism book - but that's what the author intended it to be. It showed through a narrative tale about how a family was destroyed by an industry that exploited both its workers and customers, and our main character eventually supports a socialist cause that sympathizes with his cause. However, its writing about commercial exploitation was quite vivid and disturbingly drawn out, while the political side was actually quite boring. See the problem? The boring part was supposed to be the big hit of the book, but it didn't get the readers' attention. What drew all the views was the graphic descriptions of the meat-processing industry in the early 1900s. Yes, the book I refer to is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It inspired the famous Meat Safety Act of 1906, and did very little to rally the socialist cause. As Sinclair said later on, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Oops.

Sinclair's folly, however, should not be a sign that he screwed up. As a staunch socialists, his motives were obvious, but his writing persuaded a different demographic to take action. The laws that followed did put controls on wildly out-of-control exploitation by businesses in the industry, but it was a far cry from what he hoped. In this regard he didn't screw up - he failed up. He didn't achieve his goal but he still wrote something that changed the world a little bit.

When we write, we need to give ourselves the liberty to fail up - to miss our target but still produce something impressive and thought-provoking. Not everyone who reads your work - be it a book like The Jungle or an essay or poem - is going to walk away with the same impression. Hopefully, you will get your message to the intended audience, but even if you miss, you still reach people. As long as you write with conviction, your words will be persuasive. Just give yourself a gut-check now and then to make sure the words you write match the statement you want to make. Be honest and observant of how you convey your message, and you won't screw up.       

And A Time to Scribble...

Maybe some people are picking this up as a trend, so I will just go with it. I have been talking about a lot of things in my past few posts that diverge from an actual writing process. They've been more like advice on how the written world is different than the real world, and how handwriting some things can affect the creative centers of the brain. So, in keeping with the spirit of things, here's another thing for you as a writer to try, just to see what it does for your process: scribbling.

Now, scribbling has many definitions, including but not limited to just wildly marking up a page with ink or with whatever you choose to write with. When a writer scribbles, it should be very similar but with words. What kind of words? Any words - anything remotely like words. Just applying ink to page, and letting the flow happen. It sounds weird, but I will explain its purpose.

First, it helps to know the rules, which are: no rules. If you get out a legal pad and just start jotting down things that pop into your head, you do not need to start at the top of the page. You do not need to obey the margins, write things left to right, top to bottom, or even in order. the blue-ruled lines across the page are irrelevant and should be ignored. Write words large, small, in cursive or print, whatever comes to mind. The magic of this is that it pushes you to see what is possible outside of all the grammatical, stylistic rules you've taught yourself. Instead of driving within the lines, you are free-wheeling across the Nevada Salt Plains, no boundaries, no restrictions, finding out what you want to do. It's actually exciting once you open yourself up to possibilities.

What should be the final outcome of this? Well, nothing amazing, and likely nothing worth keeping - that's fine. The idea is try to do this freestyle form of writing/play for ten minutes, or fifteen if you are enjoying it. Nobody has to see it, no other eyes but yours ever need explore what you write. It's strictly open season on words for words' sake and nothing else. But after that ten-to-fifteen minute period, end the session with one sentence, written at the bottom of the page, describing in whatever way you wish the experience of free-wheeling across the page and writing things without restriction. This sentence will be the takeaway from all this - the moment that you can look back upon and realize how after you broke all the rules, scribbled random nonsense all over the page or pages, and just poured things onto the page, everything afterward was fine. You created nonsense, broke the rules, and nothing bad happened. You escaped your boundaries, did something weird, wild, and new, and it all worked out. It's a feeling that's hard to describe until you try it and feel the results.

So often we do confine our creativity because something can't/shouldn't/won't be possible in our mind. This is usually because we create our own little boundaries that, if reinforced too much, trap in our creative urges. We lose the urge to explore because practicality overwhelms us. So, now and then we offer ourselves the chance to live free from the rules, throw around our words, and let the creativity flex its muscles. This is what being a creative is all about, and sometimes, it takes a little practice.

Incidentally, this is entirely different from free-verse poetry, although not at much as one might think. However, that's an article for another time.