The Germ of a New Story Idea

What happens when your muse taps you on the shoulder and strongly suggests the idea for your next novel while you are working on one already?  Guess muses don’t understand the concept of revision, revision, revision until it’s perfect.  This happened to my publisher/editor just recently.  She is presently working on this idea at the expense of the one she was working on.  

I’ve got an idea, to, but my idea isn’t as developed as hers is.  Her idea seemingly popped out of her head fully grown as Athena popped out of Zeus’s head.  The idea I got last night during How the Universe Works  is still just the germ of an idea.  I spun it out a bit more when I laid it out for her, but this is all I’ve got thus far.  But tonight if we do any word sprints, I can jot down a few notes.  

As I write this, my idea slowly germinates in the back of my mind.  I won’t tell you any more of what I’ve come up with because I’ll want you to read it, should it grow into a full-grown novel.  My muses are gently pushing this idea forward, while her muse is hitting her over the head with it.  My muses realized that I had to get one project at a semi-finished stage before I began another.  Since her muse was pushed by a fan,  I guess I can understand where it is coming from.  

I have a friend, another writer, who told me that if she talks her story too much, her muse considers the story done, and refuses to help her any further.  That is the real reason I won’t talk any more today about my idea.  I’m afraid they’ll believe the story is done, and won’t help me anymore with it.  Most people have just one muse; I have 5, one of whom has departed this life. One is my cat, one is my SO, one is the writer friend I mentioned earlier, and one is my publisher/editor.  She’s good because she gives me a metaphorical kick in the derriere whenever I need one.

Where do your ideas come from?  How do you treat them?  What’s your turn around time?  That is, the time scale from the time you get the idea until it emerges as a fully fledged story, ready to be revised and cleaned up to be submitted to the publisher of your choice?  Stay tuned next week for another episode in the writing life of this writer/author.

Setting New Writing Challenges for Ourselves

One of the things a novel writer can do, especially a discovery writer like me, is to set herself challenges in her writing.  One of the ways in which I’ve done this in the novel I’m now writing, is to tell the story from the antagonist’s POV for a chapter.  This am I did twice as many words as I had the day before.  The challenge would appear to be working.  But I snapped back into the mind of a sympathetic character.  What can I do to switch it back?  It appears now that this chapter will be a battle of minds for control of the chapter.  

The chapter ended with the sympathetic character, a green skinned slave being beamed aboard the ship where he had imparted intel to the ship’s officers, then they dropped a capsule which will kill the Yakutchi and plant Human-friendly life.  So it ended up not being such a big challenge, after all.  But I really recommend setting oneself a challenge and carrying it out, because you never can tell what you’ll discover about your writing and yourself.  I guess this means I am a coward.  

But those are the words which came to me.  How do your words come to you?  I have six muses, but do you suppose I could rouse any of them to help me with this challenge? Noooooo!  The only one who did answer my call last night and this morning came up with this rather squirmy squirrelly approach where my spy gets away with spying, and his old masters get destroyed by an Il’an’ai capsule.  So where does this put the Big Bad?  Your guess is as good as mine. We’ll find out tomorrow.

Set yourself a writing challenge!  Maybe your results will be better than mine.

Writing Anxiety: When Writers Fear to Tread

Does the act of writing fill you with anxiety or dread?  Do you get goose bumps, feel cold and clammy, or sweat profusely?  There are others like you who yearn to write, but it puts them in a state of great anxiety.  I think I know why.  You have high expectations out of what you write.  You believe it’s not worth doing if it isn’t publishable prose or poetry coming right out of the gate.  Many writers, successful authors, have told me their first draft is trash.  Garbage. Tripe.  But they write it anyway.  They write it because just as I do, they have the urge, the compulsion to write, to put words on paper or the screen.  They write in a fury just to get the story idea down in words so they can look at it, so they can work with it.

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know about the story I told about the CSI episode about a man who murdered his much abused wife.  She had the compulsion to write.  Grissom called the compulsion hypergraphia.  In that dreary little house with an overbearing stultifying husband she found her joy in self-expression.  When she ran out of paper, and knowing her miserly husband would not spend the money to buy her more paper, she started to write on the walls.  Perhaps this was his motive for murder, t don’t know, but she kept on writing, And Grissom’s team found what she had written, and  used it to get the prosecutor to convict him.  

I  don’t think you have the problem of having nowhere and nothing to write on.  You probably have the wherewithal to obtain paper,and or you have a computer with a sufficient hard drive to store what you write.  But you’re scared to  write.  Know what I think it is?  It’s a false belief that everything you write is written as the ancient Egyptians wrote, carved in stone for the ages to critique and comment on. Not so.  Hardly anyone carves in stone anymore.  Those people are monument makers for cemeteries or historical places.  Our words are much more ephemeral.  If I don’t like what I’m writing right now, I am free to press the delete key.  I probably won’t, because I’m egotistical enough to believe that these words are pretty good, and that you will like them too.  If you don’t like what you’re writing, you are as free as I to press the delete key or to pull your page out of the typewriter, crumple it up and try to emulate Michael Jordan.  Or if scribbling by hand,  crumple it up and try your free throw.  

What’s my secret?  What am I doing right now?  I am typing whatever comes to me.  When I am working on a story, I think about the scene playing out in my head, and either dictate it (I use a Dragon) or type it, or if I am doing a word sprint or writing whilst watching the boob tube, scribbling it down by hand with my handy pen on my clipboard with a bunch of pages of notebook paper on it.  I scribble whatever is in my head.  If I fear writer’s block, I dig out my ugly notebook and warm up, again scribbling whatever is in my head.  The ugly notebook idea came from a book titled  Outwitting  Writer’s Block,  by Jenna Glatzer.  Having scribbled whatever is in your head you have a choice; you can use it or discard it.  Or maybe store it away for your next project.  There will be a next project.  There nearly always is. 

See you next week for another exciting look at the writer's universe..  

Mind Maintenance

Why every writer, artist, or other creative person needs a therapist, and why there should be no stigma attached to it.  You know the trope or stereotype of the actor who is absolutely helpless without hir therapist.  I’m not suggesting you get overly dependent upon your therapist.  A therapist is not a replacement for a parent.  A therapist is simply a professional who can help you do needed mind maintenance.  The mind needs maintenance, just like your car or your computer, so I don’t understand why there is such a stigma attached  to having a therapist, when it is the mind that makes having either a car and/or a personal computer.  

There are several different directions your therapy can take.  It can be classical Freaudian psychoanalysis, which I frankly do not recommend, because it takes too long, and real time problems cannot be addressed in real time at the time they occur to you.  There is CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which addresses real problems and enables you the client to work on solving these problems through iCognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders and severe mental illness.It can also address problems such as negative thought patterns and dysfunctional thought patterns and other problems.  

What I do is between sessions is  make a list of psychological questions or immediate problems I may have, and we work on those.  If there is a person outside who can help me, she puts me in touch with that person or office.  For example, for some years, I have been wanting a memory clinic refresher to help with my failing memory.  She gave me a phone number to call to get a referral to the memory clinic.  I’ve been in therapy for decades, so we don’t delve too deeply into my mind or history.  But when you first begin it can seem rather intimidating because the therapist will want to know everything about you.  S/he also will point out any mind games you might be playing with yourself or hir in order to conceal parts of yourself you may not want to look at yourself, or may not want others to see.  In psychology, these are called defence mechanisms, and we all have them. Over time, you learn to accept yourself for who you are, warts and all.

.In the religion I follow, we look at those parts of ourselves we do not accept, or want others to see and learn to accept and even embrace those  parts.  This is called shadow work, and it can be quite intense.  But it is necessary, because otherwise the spells we do can go awry and have unforeseen consequences.  The stories you hear about someone who does a money spell, and hir grandfather dies and leaves hir a lot of money probably had not done hir shadow work.  I bring this up because in the beginning, therapy can seem like shadow work, where your soul is stripped bare, and long buried resentments towards loved ones are exposed to the light of day.  Don’t worry.  Your therapist won’t tell anybody about your longing to murder your father.  They can’t even if you did murder someone.  It’s called confidentiality.  A therapist or psychiatrist may not reveal what is said in sessions.But I wouldn’t recommend you murder someone, then tell your therapist.

Well, that’s all for this week.  Next week I hope to have some news on when my latest book is coming out.

Procrastination: Its Pros (Prose?) and Cons

Procrastination: pros and cons.  It’s all in what you’re putting off, isn’t it?  We learned the fine art of procrastination in school, didn’t we.  Our teach assigned us our term paper at the beginning of the semester or the quarter, and we put it off and put it off until it’s the last week of the semester, and we’re having to do all the research in five days, and pull an all-nighter to write the paper.  Fortunately I was always a pretty good writer, so I managed to pull it off.  It’s when No-Doz became our best friend, or maybe the chick down the hall had diet pills, which she shared.  And I went to school in the Dark Ages BI Before Internet.  I used the card catalog in our library like you use Google today.  I wonder:those of you who are going to school, either high school or college/university, does your instructor accept Wikipedia as a source?  If I were writing a paper today, I would peruse the Wikipedia entry to get some background on my topic, but wouldn’t cite Wikipedia directly.

Instead, I would note down Wikipedia’s sources, and request those books from the librarian.  Ben Franklin wisely wrote in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, “Put off not until tomorrow what you can do today,” but how many of us follow that dictum?  We always seem to think we have next week or even next month or next year.  But one day there will be no next week, or next month or next year.  One day we will run out of time and regret what we didn’t get done.  As Larry the Cable Guy famously said, “Git ‘er done!”  Whether we get too old and feeble, or we catch a deadly disease, or an asteroid crashes into our planet and creates the 7th great extinction event, our time will be up.  So hug your kids, spend time with your kids’ other parent, if you are still with hir, or your new partner if you have gone on to someone else.  Write that book.  Trace your family tree.  If Europe ever opens to us Yanks again, travel to Europe, travel to Latin America. Che Guevara did just that.  He took a motorcycle journey around South America, and everywhere he went he saw how the people Lived.  It was why he was so anti-United States. He saw firsthand how the CIA in collusion with their despotic governments enslaved the people and made them subsist in grinding poverty, all the while opposing every person whose heart was with the people, and would have them prosper in peaceful democracies.

But this blog is not about politics.  It is about our own mortality, and how we spend the time we have left to us.  I was reminded of my own mortality today, as I struggled to reach the testing site for Covid-19.  All my symptoms except one were consistent with seasonal nasal allergies.  The one that wasn’t consistent with these, and might be a danger sign was my occasional shivers.  No one took my temperature, but I doubt I have a fever.   Testing was the easy part.  3 swabs and I’m done. Then I had to be escorted back to the hospital, and take several rest stops on the way to catch my breath.  The lady “(she worked security) who escorted me there to the testing site, told me she figured we’re all going to catch the virus eventually.  

Here’s where the pros aspect procrastination comes in.  I said, “I’m going to procrastinate that as long as possible.  As a writer, I’m good at procrastination.”  She gave a little laugh and guided me to the place where I saw “Station D.”  Death is another thing I’m procrastinating.  If I’m lucky and eat right, I might be able to put it off until I’m 103.  That’s 30 years.  Olvia deHaviland of Gone with the Wind fame has managed to put it off until 104, she might make it to 105 or 106.  Put off death as long as you can, but don’t put off your dreams and worthy ambitions.