It's All About the Final Product

When I worked in downtown Chicago, practically every day I had the privilege of passing by some part of Grant Park, just east of Michigan Avenue. Now, for those of you who don't know, Grant Park is this large stretch of property by Lake Michigan (technically by Monroe Harbor), stretching almost two miles north to south, replete with a bandshell, the Art Institute of Chicago, Buckingham Fountain, several monuments, and the Cloudgate sculpture, locally known as, "The Bean." Grant Park dates back to the 19th century (technically it got its name in 1901, but the park was there beforehand)  and has been as much a part of Chicago's identity as anything else. Underneath it is also one of the hubs of Chicago's commuter system, the trains a quiet little secret rumbling through the city. 

And this beautiful park is built atop a pile of trash.

Well, trash might be a rough word, but it's not wrong. Before 1871, Michigan Avenue ran right next to train lines then a lagoon that came in from Lake Michigan, so that was the boundary of the city. Then the Great Chicago Fire came along and changed everything. The area now known as the Loop was burned to the ground, and that entire stretch of the city had to be rebuilt. As a matter of convenience, all the wreckage from the city was just pushed across Michigan Avenue and into the lagoon, making it basically a huge gravesite for the former Chicago. This didn't help the lagoon much, so the rest was filled in as well, making it a lovely location for what became Grant Park. Under the surface - the wreckage from a terrible  tragedy. On top - a place for a picnic.

Now that I've offered this lengthy history lesson, let me follow up with this - I wasn't writing this to elaborate about Chicago's history. This is in fact about writing, and all the dirt and carnage lying beneath the polished text of the final product. Read your favorite book and you will be dragged in by the characters, the plot, the intrigue and tension - all the good stuff we enjoy with a good story. And chances are, you will not see any traces of the first draft anywhere. All those early ideas - the characters that got edited out later, the plot arcs that went nowhere, the distracting descriptions and wild plot tangents - get buried under like so much trash in the landfill. We, as writers, are allowed to do that; it's mandatory. It allows us to be imperfect, knowing that those past disasters can just be buried under, never to be seen again.

To go back to the Chicago metaphor, give yourself the option of burning a work to the very foundation and dumping the remnants into the lagoon - so to speak. Save the things that work - like the Chicago Water Tower, which survived being right in the middle of the Great Chicago Fire - and cover the rest with new words and ideas. You will know the dark little secret of all the wreckage lying beneath your final product, but nobody has to see it as long as you cover it up. Atop piles and piles of grammatical rubble, you will have your Grant Park.        

"I Write To ______"

I attended an authors' conference last week, with about a dozen panelists (myself included) talking about the various facets of being a writer - everything from writing to producing to marketing to promotion. It covered a lot of real estate, and could've easily been a much longer event. However, one part that was touched upon was the discussion about what gets you writing, and ways you can motivate yourself to get into that writing space. That alone could've covered an hour, but the agenda had to be kept so some discussion points were not covered in full. Therefore, I wanted to discuss one in particular that I think needs elaboration.

The main point I want is for people to think how they would finish the title of this piece. I deliberately said, "I write to ____" and not "I write because ____" for the simple reason that the second one is what led you to write, the first one is what you hope your writing process creates. So, without getting too wordy, what do you hope to accomplish through writing? When you create, what is the mission of that process? It can differ from project to project, and you might feel differently depending on a lot of factors, so let me share a few things about how different answers can be approached:

"I write to heal." I heard this one a lot at the conference, and it seems to work for those people. This, in a nutshell, is the process of writing through your trauma, your worst place in life, your darkest hour, in order to process it and better live with it. It can also be used as a way to help others by letting them know they are not alone, and what they feel you felt as well. It's very powerful when done right, but it can be tricky if not managed well because it brings the writer back into a very uncomfortable space. Veterans with PTSD often use this as a method of dealing with their experiences, and along with a lot of personal benefit from these soldiers, some brilliant books also came into being. 

"I write to learn." This is a weird one, as we always hear that we should write what we know. However, sometimes, when we write about things where our feelings are mixed, it becomes a path to discovering something about ourselves - how we really feel, what our other thoughts are, hidden meanings in things we didn't understand. When we write - and I recommend writing by hand because it engages the brain differently - we are processing every word, every point of structure, trying to assemble some logical order to things. As we do this, we get a new vision of how things fit together.

"I write to teach." This is similar to the one about healing, but can come from a safer place. This is where someone writes from a position of subject expert, letting their authority carry the message, along with any experiences. Not as exciting but very challenging because it requires a very persuasive voice and structure to carry the message. Ever have a really smart but really bad teacher in school? They knew everything but couldn't get it through to most of the students? Yeah - they're stuck in that pit of knowledge without voice. If you want to teach with your words, work on a very specific, identifiable voice.

"I write to relax." People who have this answer are pretty great because they are a ronin - a warrior without a master. Their writing brings them peace, and that's what counts. Bound by no rules, they write and are at peace. Good for them. Ultimately, though, I don't think I've ever met this person.

There are plenty of other answers, but like most important questions, the purpose of it isn't to get an answer but to think long and hard about what you want to achieve. Whatever you want your writing to accomplish is fine, but once you make a conscious choice to pursue it, it gets even better.

So, what do you want your writing to do?     

The Writing "Noodle"

If there's one thing in writing that I both enjoy and need, it's the exercise of the writing noodle. Yes, it sounds weird and possibly very silly, but once I discovered it and how to play with it, I set aside all the pasta jokes and instead figured out when the best times would be for me to get out the noodle, if you will. This doesn't necessarily apply to any one writing genre, any particular kind of writing (though it helps with poetry in particular), or developing a personal style. It does, however, help one strengthen both their creative process and their capacity to go beyond what the rules normally allow for.

Now, surprisingly, this has no connection to "using the old noodle," referring to putting the brain to work. In some ways it's quite the opposite. This actually hearkens back to the musician practice of "noodling around" - just finding a chord and playing around with it, trying different tempos, transitions, and whatever the musician feels like, usually all done while playing non-stop, not breaking for a retry or stopping because something is "wrong." At times this will create a chaotic scramble of notes, sometimes it's just another refrain that sounds like any other. However, such noodling taps into the musician's creativity, and the experimentation lets the mind explore the world outside of what they know. Some famous noodling creations have been the famous keyboard riff on The Doors' "Light my Fire" and the lead guitar piece on The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang." That's just a modest sampling of the many songs where the artist says, "Well, I was just noodling around, and suddenly..." The rest is history.

With writing, it's fairly simple. You pick a word, preferably one that has some flex to it, such as "Chance." Chance can be a verb, a noun, a descriptor - at this point it's your choice. You then just start writing things about the word, the different meanings, the interpretations, even simple arguments against things being "chance" events will suffice. Start writing the lyrics to Johnny Mathis's "Chances Are" and rework them into your own song about chance. Offer a simple, playful riff on ABBA's "Take A Chance on Me," or talk about former Chicago Cubs player-manager Frank Chance. Find all the words you can that rhyme with chance, then write about how those words might be connected. The mission is to explore the word, massage it like bread dough, look at it from all directions, and engage with its many purposes and meanings. 

Again (and I cannot state this enough), you will likely end up with a lot of gibberish, and a bunch of sentences that mean very little or carry no real value. That's fine - that's actually the purpose here; to create as much as possible without worrying about the way it should be done. You could spend all your time noodling around and end up with tired fingers, or you might just hatch a little gem like:

Chance is knowing the
rarity of true beauty
is still possible

Was that a great haiku? Meh - to each their own. Whether you come up with something as good or better doesn't matter. What matters is exercising your creativity, and knowing you will not find those things when you don't try. Happy noodling.  

It's That Time of Year!

Some people consider the first day of autumn to be the beginning of the holiday season, while others wait until after Halloween. Everyone has their own special way to commemorate the coming of the holiday season, and writers are no exception. However, the landmark event that kicks off the holiday season for most writers is November 1st - the official beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). This event starts off November with little fanfare, similar to the All Saints Day that is also recognized by many as November 1st, and they share similar qualities: Not many people know they exist, and even fewer people participate, but for some people it's a very sacred day.

Now, the importance of this special occasion (NaNoWriMo, not All Saints Day) is to motivate writers to write the first draft of a novel in a month - specifically, November. It doesn't have to be perfect, or even publishable at this point, it just has the be written from beginning to end. It might sound daunting, and it is, but that's the whole point - the mission of typing 2,000 words onto a page every day (even on Thanksgiving), and realizing just what can be created with such concerted effort. (Side note: For those who think it's impossible, Stephen King wrote The Running Man in a week and on a typewriter, so it can be done) Incidentally, the NaNoWriMo run will also push you into certain habits I often refer to, and make them a part of your process, but that's another story. 

This year I am not participating in the NaNoWriMo marathon - I have a few manuscripts that need my attention already. However, I am offering all my readers an opportunity to take on a similar challenge, but nothing so harsh as creating a novel. Rather, my challenge is this. Write something every day. Something narrative, something creative, something more than just a shopping list. It can be a haiku, a paragraph about your feelings, a description of your cat as he throws up in the hall - anything that forces you to create through words. It's not the daunting task of making a 60,000-word manuscript, but it does get the habits going. Something as simple as that, when done for 30 days, can have a profound effect on your writing process.

So now I wish you all good luck on your NaNoWriMo writing adventure, whichever it may be. I look forward to plenty of interesting reactions to this ongoing exercise, and possibly some personal revelations about your writing, your process, or some ideas that wandered into your mind and allowed you to think about something in a new way. Just remember that it's very possible to accomplish this task; the important part is trying to do it.

And even though Stephen King wrote The Running Man in a week, take that with a grain of salt. He was not exactly clean or sober at the time, so he had a little extra energy.   

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."