writing process

just a few words

I have to face it: my time is at a premium right now.

When the kids are up and about (that’s from about 8 am till 9 pm), I’m busy nursing, diapering, schooling, playing, sporadically cleaning, fetching this and carrying that, mediating sibling squabbles, admonishing, disciplining, reading aloud and once in a while, cooking. Often I’m doing two or more at the same time (before you ask, I have not, as yet, mastered doing *all* of these things simultaneously). After the baby goes down between 9-10 pm, I have some time to do uninterrupted cleaning or take care of personal needs, such as taking a shower. Even then, I’m “on call” for night feedings. Oh, and I need sleep, too.

Needless to say, my writing time is limited.

I used to be one of those people who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) write unless I could be assured of having an hour or more block of time to slip into The Zone and produce a lot of wordage. Since now the choice is between writing a little and not writing at all, I’ve started to use those 10-15 chunks of time I can steal from the rest of my day, which has netted me a daily few hundred words.

The quality of those words is not important to me right now: what I want is to create a habit of daily writing, a habit so ingrained that I feel antsy if I haven’t written all day. I’m pleased to say that tonight I did write, after having resigned myself to not doing so since I had a lot of cleaning to accomplish (I’m also pleased to report that the cleaning got done, too–go, me!). And the writing happened even though I was typing one-handed and had a sleeping baby on my shoulder.

Just a few words, but I feel darned good about them.

And tomorrow I’m taking a guilt-free evening off to hang out with my good friend and watch a movie. Writers just wanna have fun *grin*.

The Lime Pie Theory of Short Fiction

I have long agreed with James Macdonald’s assessment that writing a short story is like making a lime pie (at least, the way he describes the baking of said pie–I’ve never tried it myself). He writes:

In the same way, a short story either works or it doesn’t. Once prepared, using all your skill, you can’t go back and revise it into something that isn’t lime-flavored runny glop.

This is consistent with my experience. For every short story of mine worth submitting, there is at least one other that didn’t make the cut languishing on my hard drive. Some stories are partially written; I lost interest partway through, kind of like wandering off in the middle of baking a pie, except that eventually you have to come back to clean up the mess in the kitchen. Other stories I wrote till The End but they just feel “meh”. Many of these stories are purely experimental; short fiction is where I try out new techniques like second person POV, present tense and decidedly unlikeable protagonists. Some stories are based on a weird (in a cool kind of way) premise too slight for a novel to carry. Others revolve around some startling image that is, again, too thin for a novel. Since my time and emotional investment in a short story has always been small (compared to a novel!), I’ve always had the “Either it works, or it doesn’t” attitude towards them. Re-re-re-revising (squared) a short story is not worth it–for all that investment I could write a few new ones.

Until now.

I’m working on a short story right now: two first-person POVs, both unreliable narrators, linear narrative structure of the one POV broken up by the scattered scraps of the other POV. It’s a hard slog and the story is slowly giving up it’s secrets to me (like, one at a time, always during a shower. I may have to get very very clean if this story is going to be done any time soon). I wouldn’t call my efforts a first draft; it’s more like a zero draft, as in version 0.39. The point is, even as I’m cooking it, I know that this story needs a lot of fixing.

So, even though I know I measured some ingredients incorrrectly and that I forgot to keep an eye on that pot on the stove and now something is burning, is there any hope for this poor story? Or is it doomed to be an instructive failure?

Will my pie turn out? Stay tuned…

just show up

I came to my WIP tonight completely drained of creative energy, my well of ideas and image all dried up. As I opened up my story document, I wondered what in the world I was going to write besides [insert something clever here] and “blah, blah, blah”. After a few blank moments, I started typing and behold! there were words. Some of them were blah and I have one or two [insert secondary character’s name here] placeholders, but there were a few pretty turns of phrase and some fun images as well. And I gleaned yet another piece of information that just might make this story work.

Sometimes, you just need to show up at the pages of your work. No fancy mental tricks, aside from having just showered away the day’s stresses; no mind mapping or meditations or stream-of-conscious journaling to break through the block.

Just show up. And write.