16804--Welcome to Write Club...

The first rule of WRITE CLUB is you do not talk about WRITE CLUB.  Writing is about writing, not talking about writing or finding a hundred other easier to perpetrate distractions.  You have a large and important job ahead of you and only you can get it done.  Your work will be humanity's mirror.  Your work will help humanity keep from tearing itself apart for another day, even if it only serves as a distraction during the reading.

The second rule of WRITE CLUB is  you do not talk about WRITE CLUB.  See the first rule.  You're not a talker, you're a writer.  Stop trying to impress people with what you plan to do someday.  Go do it.  Don't wait for inspiration.  You're not a waiter.  You're a writer.  A writer writes to get the writing done.  It's an active, dynamic process that produces a result because you hunted it down, clubbed it and dragged it home to be your bitch.  That's when you'll take those words and put them together with the fit of a verbal jigsaw puzzle, painting a picture that only you could've made.  You don't do Show-and-Tell.  You just show and let your writing do your talking.

The third rule of WRITE CLUB is if someone says "stop", goes limp or taps out, the writing is over.  Because you weren't a real writer, anyway.  If you were, quitting would never have been an option.  Some writers seem to spill words onto the blank page with ease.  Good for them, but there's no promise that coherency and quality are going to come together with ease.  What you've undertaken is supposed to be one of the hardest endeavors known to man.  Do it anyway.  Look into yourself, go where the pain is and poke it with a hot, dull spoon.  Take what you've found there and put it on your page.

The fourth rule of WRITE CLUB is you're alone with your writing.  There's endless inputs into your raw material, churning and filtering through the magical processor atop your neck.  There can be as many helpful hands as you like proofing and editing, but between your brain and the stringing together of words into coherent art there is only you.  No one can get your work to done better than you.

The fifth rule of WRITE CLUB is write one at a time.  Focus on your goal.  Finish whatever's on your mind before going on to something else.

The sixth rule of WRITE CLUB is shirts and shoes don't matter.  You're not a fashion model.  You're a writer.  Kick off the shoes and socks.  Write naked.  Or wrap up in a parka or a blanket.  Get comfortable and get to work.

The seventh rule of WRITE CLUB is writing will go on as long as it has to.  Give it all the time it needs, but don't rewrite forever.  At some point, you need to call it finished and show it to somebody else.

The eighth rule of WRITE CLUB is if you're going to be in WRITE CLUB, you have to write.  Writing is what writers do.  It doesn't get any simpler than that.  If you're going to write then do it.  Write or die.  You can plan all you like, but you never know what'll unfold while writing until you're writing. That's not something that comes by waiting for inspiration but by just getting on with writing.  Start it.  Then, finish it.  Not half.  Not some.  All of it.  You don't know what writer's block is because that's something whiners get, not writers.  In fact, from now on, let's just call it "whiner's block".  You write every day you breathe.  You have to.  You wouldn't feel right if you didn't.  You write, therefore you are.

16390--Flies Gotta Fly, Bees Gotta Be and Writers Gotta Write

My grandfather used to say, "The jobs that come looking for you are better than the ones you have to go find."  I suppose that means writers are among the blessed because it is certainly something which seeks us more than it is sought.  There are those who could also make an arguement that writers are among the cursed or afflicted because writing well is hard work.

Even when words come easily, if we're doing what we do properly, we're particular about the choice of each one.  We have time for reflection about those choices.  We can take the time to struggle with placement of sentences, whether to use one or two, and how everything needs to be punctuated. Then, of course, there's the issues of paragraphs and transitions.  Next thing you know, you've been using your brain for hours.  Don't let anyone tell you differently: that's work.  To compound the issue, your brain uses the lion's share of your caloric intake.  The rest of your body is just a complicated system for keeping it fed and alive.

Part of the problem, for writers, is that the definition of "good writing" not only varies depending on the target media (short stories, editorials, blogs, poems, movies, comics, etc.), but also with the opinions of each audience member.  Back in junior high school, I was told my fiction writing was very good.  In high school, no matter how much my fiction was enjoyed, our English teachers stressed that our essays had to be longer and more dense.  Those of us who wanted the best grades wrote more.  In college, though, that rule changed and the emphasis became to write less.  One of my first essays for the appropriately named Dr. Dyer (dire) was mercilessly bloodied by his red pen.  Entire paragraphs were cut and in one margin he left a madman's scrawl that asked, "Don't you ever edit?"  Well, that wasn't really something I'd been taught, but he went to work on that.  He had all the finesse of a brick going through plate glass: not charming, but effective.

Another of my college's English teachers returned a paper with an assessment and a warning.  "I see you've got some real flair and creativity in your writing.  We're going to crush that right out of you."  Wow.  Yeah, I took that as a warning and I took it to heart.  The self-defense part of my brain decided it would be best to engage in a different course of study where the creative bits of my scribblings would be encouraged.

I found my way there, but the thing is: writing is work.  No matter how long you do it, it's still work.  Part of the tricky thing is, there's more to it than just writing.  There's also editing and recruiting others to help you do those things.  If you're planning to cultivate a broad audience, there's marketing involved and that's something the writer needs to take an active part in because no one else knows as much about whatever's been written as the writer.

So, write write and write some more, proofread, edit, rewrite, recheck that research, rewrite some more...Practice may make you better, but it doesn't make the task easier.  The hundreth hole you dig takes just as much digging as the first and writing is always writing and laden with all manner of extra bits. 

It seems simple at first glance, but it's bigger on the inside.  That's something most of us don't find out till we're deep in it, but that's just something we have to deal with.  We're writers, after all.  It's not like we were going to be doing something else, anyway.

16316--The Power of Focus

The key to finding time to write amidst the storm of all of life's utterly distracting chaos is making yourself focus and taking time to write.  Don't delude yourself into thinking that "everything has to be just right".  Start working.  Once you turn your focus to the writing, the flow will follow.  I know, a lot of people place value in multitasking.  Don't fall into that trap.

Multitasking is a myth from the marketing department.  The human brain isn't designed to do multiple things at once at optimal efficiency.  We all know it, but don't like to admit it.  If we want our computers to simulate multitasking, performing more simultaneous functions without loss of speed, we build in additional processors.  The brain's neural network has tremendous performance capacity available and does a lot of things without owner awareness, but it still works best for us when we focus on a single task.  Many people make "To Do" lists, but how many do all the tasks simultaneously?  If you've noticed, you probably turn down the car stereo volume when you're driving along looking for an address.  Whether you've thought about it or not, you're acknowledging that split focus, even among looking and listening, yields poorer results.

We still fight it, probably due to impatience on either our own part or from someone else.  Some people try to text while driving.  Others may have an employer who insists that nine tasks have to be done before lunch and there's only one worker for the job.  Still, the advice to "Do one thing at a time" continues to be offered.  In our PC times, we still use the term "savant" but have tried to forget that it used to be tethered to "idiot" like a conjoined twin.  The people these words have been used to describe live with brains focused on specific areas of life to the near-exclusion of every other.  They can memorize and recite strings of numbers or count with lightning speed or draw accurately detailed cityscapes from memory, but while they're impressing the audience it is forgotten that they may have the social skills of a five-year-old or require a caretaker to help them perform basic tasks.  Those brains are overly focused.

"Savant" individuals still seem to be treated as performing curiosities who may help us to learn more about the intricacies of the brain.  Meanwhile, were I given a choice, as much as I might enjoy upgrading the recall capacity and processing speed of the biocomputer on top of my neck, I wouldn't consider the trade worth the sacrifice of my imagination or personality.


Focus is the dfference between your notebooks and your finished novel.

Without focus, Bruce Wayne would be an orphan with emotional issues instead of a billionaire who dresses up like a bat and stalks the shadows looking for trouble.  OK, maybe that one's a fine line, but you understand.  When you're focused, you break the board.  When you're not, you break your hand.

Focus is the vehicle that will carry you to wherever it is that your ambitions drive.

So, eye on the prize, shoulder to the wheel and nose to the grindstone.  I know it's a funny position to work in, but I've heard good things.  Maybe it had something to do with yoga...

As always, thanks for stopping by.

16313--Firing on all cylinders...

     What do you mean there are people who can recite the digits of pi out to thousands of decimal places?  Who has that kind of free time?  Worse, what about the roomful of people who sat around to observe?  They were so impressed by the feat that they felt compelled to watch?  Alright, I don't know their reasoning.

     What I'm thinking, though, is that if you're impressed by some feat of memory or calculation, innovation or creative thinking, you should strive to accomplish your own.  Those people who put on a show of remembering and reciting something they heard thirty years ago, while playing eight simultaneous chess games and solving calculus problems in their head aren't freaks.  They're simply focused and practiced at performing particular skills.

     Did you know that homo sapiens is the weakest mammal in the world?  I'm not saying you couldn't overpower your kid's gerbil.  What I mean is that we have the lowest muscle to mass ratio of the mammal world.  So how have we been able to push all the other critters around for so long?  The answer is the same as I tell my kid when he asks for a new computer.  "You've got that thing on top of your neck."

     Yeah, I'm talking to you.  You've read this far so don't try to deny it.  You have a brain and we both know it.  The biggest, baddest supercomputers still take up huge rooms and run on megawatts of power just to be able to perform at a fraction of the capacity of that thing on top of your neck.  With its 100 billion neurons and quadrillion synapses, your brain is estimated to have potential processing power equivalent to 100 petaflops (10¹⁵ floating point operations/second).  That’s a lot.  On top of that, it's portable, self-cooling and runs on about 20 watts of power.  Your body is its robot slave.

     Your brain is as big and bad as you want it to be.  With focus and application, you can do those things you always wanted to do.  If not, you're not using the equipment right.  Be creative.  Go write that book you've been putting off writing.  I'm not saying it won't be hard.  That's where the practice part comes in, because after you write you'll be rewriting.  That's OK, though.  Work is the price of excellence.  Don't get stressed chasing perfection.  That's the mirage in the distance.  Leave it out there for the next sucker.

     Instead of stringing together a bunch of numbers in repetition of an infinitely long bunch of digits that's already been figured out, you're going to use your personal organic supercomputer to arrange twenty-six letters into a unique pattern one million letters long that will be so amazing people will voluntarily read it again.  They might even go see the movie version.  No matter what Hollywood does to it, it has to be better than the movie version of pi.  What were those guys thinking?  Talk about not using the equipment right.

     Any questions?

Don't live wanting.  Don't die wondering.
Phoenix

16310--So, you wrote a story. Who cares?

     If you're going to take the time and use the energy to string words together coherently, you should have a good reason for spilling them out of your head in the first place.  I would think you're either trying to take some of the workload off your memory or communicate something to others.  When I write here or produce some bit of fiction, it's with the expectation that what I write will be read by others.  With that in mind, I make the effort to write things that will be of some interest to other people.

     When you're writing a work of fiction, it's likely going to be populated with characters who move your story along from point-to-point.  Those characters can't be mindless mules schlepping the tale on their backs.  They have to seem as real and interesting as anyone that every reader knows, with lives and purpose all their own.  Dress them up, furnish the living room and slap some paint on their walls.  When the readers are able to empathize with these characters, they will take an interest in them and care about what happens to them.  I was never turned off more quickly about feeling for a character I was reading as at the moment I saw that she didn't care about what was happening to her in her own story.  In what had been a story that was holding my interest, the protagonist was suddenly composing a to-do list while being raped.  I asked myself, "If she doesn't care what's happening to her, why should I?"  I closed the book and never went back.

     As a corollary to this, fiction writers who are building their own worlds (and we should know who we are) must build them with rules.  Sure, part of the fun of a magical or superscience world is that things can happen there that don't happen in the world we happen to live in every day.  Despite that, it still needs to have some degree of structure.  The reader will come to your work with an expectation of consistency.  To put the corollary simply, "If anything can happen, who cares what does?"

    

     On some level, my feelings about this are a bit strong.  Years ago, back when I used to read comic books, I took an afternoon to study a multitude of the industry's stock and trade characters: heroes and villains.  This resulted in my making a list of all the characters whose special abilities made sense and a list of those whose didn't.  From that point on, I had a more deeply defined respect for the well-crafted characters and wished only for the demise of the stupid ones that had been created only for convenience.  Give your characters the time and attention they deserve.  Give them their depth and flesh.  You'll end up with something you and your readers are happier with.

     Oh, if you were in the right movie theater for the right showing of "X-Men 3: The Last Stand", yes, that was me cheering when Cyclops (Scott Summers) was killed.  As a character, he's a bit dull.  He has a cool superpower, but it's a stupid mutant power.  Unleashing devastating beams of concussive force from the eyes manifesting as a mutation in a single generation is ridiculous.  He might as well have sprouted big, white bird wings when he hit puberty.  Genetically, it lacks about as much sense.  Now you know.

I'm going to go grumble to myself some more about stupid comic book characters, but I'd love to hear about any that you'd like to grumble about.

Are there any characters who push your buttons by not being all they could be?