Can I sound off about my latest resolution for a sec? (Lo-o-o-o-o-o-ng!)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, here is the big project. It seems that I’m always trying to impose some discipline upon myself, because I always feel like I’m falling short, using my time unwisely, squandering talent and time and resources at an unconscionable rate. I’ve been doing this for years, for one purpose or another.

I started getting myself in shape. I quit smoking. I started eating right (OK, so that one’s an ongoing struggle. Sometimes it’s awfully hard to deny myself a beef tenderloin with blue cheese, if the opportunity presents itself. How can I look at all that bloody, pink goodness and say, “I’ll have a chicken breast and peas. Plain. No salt, please.”) I hardly ever drink any more. Frankly, this last one worries me a bit.

This is my latest, inspired, I sincerely hope, by a wish to exercise my mind the same way I do my body. I want to see my ideas on paper (or CRT, in this case.) I think they’re good ideas. I want to develop ideas and write stories and books and poetry and all sorts of wonderful things. Most of all, and most immediately of all, I want to GET THE WRITING BUG BACK. I want the disease. The acute inflammation of ideas that forces me to take to my word processor or my pen and paper and just let it flow. This is not, by any means, to say that I want to write meaningless drivel, stream of consciousness crapola that wouldn’t be of interest to anyone except myself.

For now, though, it’s enough to force myself into the habit of writing something, anything down. I’ll happen upon themes, ideas, and characters eventually, and they will lead themselves to connections, and those connections will transform into plots, and before you know it, I’ll be getting rejection notices from publishers, and I’ll be as good as any author out there.

See, I think I know how this kind of thing works, and I mean the mental exercise of writing, not of being rejected by publishers. I used to have the bug real hard (to borrow a line from “Raising Arizona.”) I used to feel compelled to sit down and write for a certain period of time before bed every night. I used to force myself to write down ideas on whatever was handy at the time. Most of these ideas are now gracing a landfill, I’m sure.

Anyway, I was happily living my life, becoming used to not putting my ideas down any more, when I went to a Christmas party. An acquaintance of mine, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly 10 years, showed up and we greeted each other. The first thing he asked me was if was still writing. “Heh heh.” Collar tug. Sweat. “On and off.” That’s right. I lied. I told him I was still writing, because I felt guilty. I knew I should still be doing it. OK. That was bad enough. This was worse: he proceeded to quote for me the first few lines of a story I had written in high school and submitted for publication. This was a story that was ten years old, at least. I’d forgotten that the damn thing existed. He quoted the first 5 or 6 lines perfectly, then further guilt-tripped me by saying that he’d always remembered them and that he was always very jealous of my abilities. Guess what he’s doing now. That’s right. He WRITES. He works for the Atlanta Constitution, and he writes freelance on the side.

This got me thinking. Not very swiftly, admittedly, since here it is nearly 8 months later, and I’m just now deciding to ease myself back into the pool. But here I am.

Discipline. Gotta be hard. Gotta keep going, no matter the pain, the pathos, or the power. OK, fuck that. I really need to teach myself to have fun while doing this. If it’s a chore, I’ll never continue, and this needs to be something that lasts the rest of my life.

Hearken thus, folks, to the tale of My Phases of Writing.

First off, I was always fascinated by fantasy and science fiction. It was the first genre I tried, and I tried to emulate Anthony, Tolkien, Asimov, Herbert, etc. All the usual suspects. This honed some fairly important skills, most notable of which is an appreciation and an ability to express setting. Setting is Very, Very Important, and I dutifully learned how to create a pretty nice scene.

Trouble is, I populated it with Bilbo Bagginses and Podkaynes and Paul Atreideses, and even worse, myself. No feel for character at all. I’m not convinced that I’ve gotten that one down yet. Every time I try to create a character, it looks just like me. A serious failing.

Anyway, I went through many phases of writing. I tried to take my fantasy background and work it into real-life situations. Bad idea. The results were horrific. They read like bad 1950’s “twist-ending” comics, like Tales From the Crypt. While that may not have been an inherently bad thing, it wasn’t right for me.

I still wanted to hang on to the fantasy thing, so my next attempts were inspired by a different sort of fantasy author, H.P. Lovecraft. For some reason, my mind always seemed to turn to the blacker aspects of our existence, so I truly fell in love with Lovecraft’s ideas. I still think there’s a lot of atavistic (there’s a Lovecraftian word for you! Ha!) terror to be had from his stories, but in most cases, they were so highly situational and lived so thoroughly in their own time that it’s difficult to view them with anything but nostalgia and fondness. “Aw, there’s dread Cthulhu! And look, it’s a spoiled, unhealthy, pomaded New England fop as a protagonist. How cute. Pass the Beer Nuts.”

But I sure as hell tried to grasp the darker aspects of his stories and craft some of my own. I failed utterly. Those abortions have long since been relegated to the lining of kitty litter boxes. Horrible stuff.

I was still all dark, mind you. I positively seethed with post-adolescent fury and indecision. I told myself that I was alcoholic and suicidal. I started smoking. I started doing some drugs. I wore dark clothes and didn’t associate myself with people very much. I had several friends that were going through very serious problems, and I somehow managed to transfer their workload of angst over to my shoulders. I became Hard.

I read a lot of existentialists. I decided to love anarchy and chaos. I liked black. I got all into the Bleakness of Existence, man, and how we’re all worthless and animalistic and stupid.

OK. So that hasn’t changed. I still think we’re all stupid.

I tried to write to dull my Pain, man, because I was all hard and dark and oppressed. Here’s some free advice: if you had a good childhood and have no real reason to be unhappy, don’t try to write as if you do. It comes off arrogant, snide, mean, and small. I’m seriously not proud of a lot of the steaming piles of mental poop I produced during those times.

It was probably valuable, though. It taught me to be a little cynical and to be able to look at the world through a slightly jaundiced eye. That can’t be all bad. After all, Bukowski (one of my heroes) could be cynical, brutal, and as gritty as a car accident, but he could also be as pure and transcendent as an angel.

Somehow, I never broke through to the sunny side, though. Sometimes I think I depressed myself into not writing. Dumb, very dumb.

Now things are different (I guess.) Funny how everything and absolutely nothing changes. I still want to be sarcastic, cynical, and funny, but I want to be able to see the beautiful things, too, the minor things. I want to write about them and have people read it and say, “That was good.”

2

Scylla, what’s your secret?

I know, I know.

"You have to be interesting.

3

with a closing ".

Damn.

4

Have no clue if it could help you as I have not actually looked at it. (But I love Orson Scott Card and will take any opportunity to push his work.)

BUT My most beloved author has a ‘workshop’ or some such on his website (which is a cool place to go for short stories anyway) http://www.hatrack.com.

Check it out. Read Homeless in Hell. Write that well.

5

Thank you, Medea’s Child, for the suggestion, and pardon me for the self-pity. I was not asking how Scylla manages to write well (although it would be a valid question.) I was having a petulant self-pity moment.

You know, one of those “I worked hard on the OP,” and it’s dying a quick, ignominious death" things.

6

Screw Scylla , don’t write for the fame, write for the shy bookish type that’ll never send you a fan letter or go to any book signings, that’s your audience, lying in bed on a cold evening and going willingly where you take them. You have to write from the heart (how’s that for a cliché?), give of yourself and forget what others think. Characters will come from experience, get out there and live! Not Bukowski’s life or Balzac’s or Gogol’s, yours!

“Pure and transcendent as an angel” and no spelling errors that I can see. You’re already better than most.

Remember this poem I wrote from a list of the nine most frequently used words in English:

have
of
the
will
to
be
it,
and
you!

And good luck, it should feel good, like all masturbation should.

7

And for the love of Jehovah, always preview and close those loopholes and vB thingies, ya crazy druggie!

8

I thought about replying, but it seemed like you were venting, not really asking anything or seeking support. Your last message seems to imply otherwise.

Your essay also sounds familiar because I've been there before. I've been bitter and alienated, and it's taken me a long time for me to get my act together and create what I want.

Generally, this is what I had to learn:

  1. I’m a writer because I write.
    Simple as that. Membership in a club has never been so easy. If you write when you can, you’re a writer.
    Now, I may be a bad writer, but that’s another judgment entirely. I can accept that. But for the longest time, I felt very self-conscious about wanting to write, about believe that I may have something in me that, expressed on paper, someone would want to pay me money to read. (Yes, that does sound as dweeby to me as it may to you. That’s where my head was at.)

  2. You need to network to succeed.
    Everybody networks. It’s called friendships. It’s called accepting and giving help. It can be a writer’s group. It can be your friends. My brother always wanted to be a filmmaker. I can remember how he would read books about Kubrick. He took me to 2001 when it opened. I saw it twice, at his request. Did he become a filmmaker? Fraid not. His movie camera made a film (he loaned it to a friend of mine), but he never did. If we were more on the ball, could we have worked together and done something? Maybe, but I didn’t know then what I needed to know.

  3. You need to believe in yourself.
    This is called faith, and I didn’t have it for the longest time. Faith is believing in something unseen, and in the beginning, when you need it the most, is the time when most of us have it the least.
    It can be something as simple as, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going to try to get there.” But if you believe that, then you’ve taken the first step.
    But any kind of network is important. They support you when you’re down, give you ideas when you need them, keep you going some days just because you know they’re going to say, “So, how’s the writing coming?” and you don’t want to disappoint them. And they’ll get the same thing from you that you’re getting from them.

  4. Write what you’ve got to write.
    This means being true to you, and not to whatever you last read, or what you think you might want to do. See, I’ve read the existentialists. I’ve read Satre, Camus, and other wacky fun guys, like Henry Miller and Burroughs. I’ve read the great writers, the serious writers.
    You know what? No matter what, I can’t compete with them. I’m not serious. I’m not existential. When I was growling at the world and pissed off at everything, I wasn’t an artist. I was a teen-ager.
    Know what I’m writing now? A Sherlock Holmes mystery story. And after that? Completing my third novel. A romance. (“Romantic comedy” I tell myself. That’s what men can write. Men don’t write romances.)
    But you know what? I love it. I love writing this stuff, and when I start getting the guilts over writing something I love, I remember that line from “Risky Business” and, um, and say . . .

{checks Google quickly)

and say, “what the fuck.”

Anyway, keep it up, write every day no matter what, and all will be made clear. I promise.

9

Hey Ogre. I’ve got a suggestion for you, if you want it… At the risk of sounding cliche, maybe you’re just trying too hard.

You said you didn’t want to write that “stream of consciousness crapola” and I think maybe you’re missing out by not doing so. Granted, this is just my simple little opinion, but some of the best stuff ((which still sucks donkey chong, but it’s the best I can do)) I’ve written has come from that “stream of consciousness crapola”. Writing down ideas like that just to write. Then, looking at it, and taking out the best parts and and the ideas/characters/story-lines that I think others would be interested in hearing.

Again, that’s just my silly opinion, so take it as you will. I consider myself a terrible writer, but the good part is, some other people are starting to consider me a terrible writer too, and that’s a big step up.

To any extent, I wish you the best of luck. It takes a lot of dedication, but I guess you already knew that. Aw h*ll… let’s go get a beer, and maybe you’ll catch the bug from me. :slight_smile:

10

Here’s what Terry Pratchett had to say when asked “How do you write?”

He goes on to talk about application and discipline, which you seem to have under control. Maybe too much so, as Simetra suggests. Just write, Ogre. Gems will arise from the midst of the road apples.