Posts Tagged ‘Neuroses’
I’m on day four of Book in a Week, and my brain feels like it’s been put through a juicer. But it isn’t the writing that’s taking its toll, it’s the other stuff.
The stuff I keep telling myself I shouldn’t be doing.
Like editing.
Or avoiding.
Or fixing.
Or scrapping.
Book in a Week is all about dumping. You start typing and you DO. NOT. STOP. And at the end of the week, BOOM! A book!
(OK, so maybe it’s a little more complex than that. But you get the idea.)
In order to make my word goal (which I only managed to do on Monday so far), I’ve had to let go of a lot of stuff: timesuckers, like playing games online or watching TV reruns; friends I talk to on the phone every day; food that can’t be microwaved; books I want to read; even the cats are feeling the pinch, since they’re used to the Human Belly-Rubbing Machine being on call 24/7.
And on top of all that ‘real’ stuff, I had to get rid of some of the ‘fake’ stuff, too.
Like fear.
And insecurity.
And frustration.
And self-pity.
It wasn’t easy, but it had to be done, because after the norepinephrine wears off, you really only have enough energy left to focus on one or the other: writing or making excuses why you can’t write.
It’s your choice to make. Which would you rather be known for?
When it comes to writing, there’s one rule I try very hard not to break, and that’s the rule about the ice weasels.
What is an ice weasel, you ask? Here, I’ll tell you.
Or better yet, I’ll let Meg Cabot tell you:
“…when you ‘have the weasels’ or are ‘weaseling,’ it means you’re worrying about things like ‘Why Did I Say That Bad Word In Front of My Grandma at Brunch Last Week?’ or ‘Should I Have Held Onto the Film Rights to That Book?’”
You know how sometimes you only think about certain things because you’re trying so hard to NOT think about them? Those are ice weasels.
And they totally suck.
Which is why every time I send something out for submission, I make sure I don’t read it again until I’ve heard back, that way I’m not weaseling for however long it takes for whoever-it-is to get back to me.
Instead, I move on to something new. Something weasel-free. Something I can send out on submission and then forget about. Otherwise, I would be so worried about potentially looking stupid that I would never write more than 3 pages of anything ever again.
(Those of you who never get past page 3 because by that point you think you look stupid know I’m telling the truth.)
It’s a rule that’s served me well for many years. Until last week, when I broke it.
And now I’m weaseling like you would not believe.
Fortunately, ice weasels will usually go away if you give them something else to gnaw at.
For example, whenever I cringe at the scene where Frank uses his cell phone as a flashlight (which is admittedly lame, even though I do it a lot), all I have to do is remind myself that just because I think it’s stupid doesn’t mean everyone else will. And besides, it’s not as stupid as when I wrote the book about the girl werewolf who did not like to get wet:
“I do not mean to be ungreatful but fear I must go before the rain falls,” Mayrnagh said as she looked grimly toward the mouth of the wide open cave.
“Yes child, if you must.” said Wolfguard understandingly in his nature. “For I know you do not like to get wet.”
In my defense, I was thirteen years old when I wrote that. Unlike when I wrote this gem, after having read Ben Bova’s MARS:
Do not fear me, for I am from the planet MALIFON…
Do I even need to complete that sentence? I DID NOT THINK SO.
Here’s another doozie:
Doug was sitting at his desk, drinking expensive whiskey out of a glass made of elaborate crystal. It had come in a set of four, along with a longneck decanter and a complimentary bottle of Crown Royal. He was halfway through the bottle when Rupert knocked on his office door.
“Go away,” Doug slurred, his motor functions slowed by his recent intake of high quality alcohol.
“It’s me man,” Rupert said. “Don’t make me break the door down or I will.”
All of a sudden, using a cell phone as a flashlight doesn’t look so stupid anymore. At least, not compared to all of the OTHER stupid things I’ve written.
Because the thing is, if you embarrass yourself enough, eventually you won’t be embarrassed anymore. I learned that the hard way, when I was sixteen and lost my shirt in front of a gymnasium full of people.
And that’s a story you will NOT get to hear.
I took half of last week off and did NOTHING, and by the time Sunday rolled around, I was chomping at the bit for something to do.
I kind of like that feeling at first, but after a while it starts getting to me. Which is kind of what my cousin says about being pregnant.
Let met tell you a little bit about my cousin. She’s two years older than me, and the only one of nineteen grandchildren to inherit our grandmother’s red hair. She has three kids–all boys–whom she carried until she practically collapsed from the weight. The first time she was pregnant, she was sixteen, and three weeks after her due date she still hadn’t popped. I wanted to shoot her to put her out of her misery.
I’m pretty sure she would’ve gone along with it.
The last 20% of any writing project feels a lot like that last month of being pregnant. By that time, I’m usually sore and cranky and tired and there is absolutely no good in the world anymore, because if there were good in the world, I would just fucking GIVE BIRTH already. That’s when I look at my calendar and realize I’m a month (sometimes two) past my deadline, and I’m still at the same place I was three weeks ago. I start to question whether or not the damn thing will ever come out, and even if it does, probably there will be something really bad wrong with it, because there’s no way in hell it can stay in there THAT LONG without growing an extra appendage or two.
It’s a strange feeling when you’re pregnant with a book. I used to see it a lot when I wrote fan-fiction, all these people who obviously had no more room in their bellies for other peoples’ ideas still trying to cram them in there somewhere. They were afraid of moving on. Afraid of being forgotten. Afraid of trying and failing. Eventually, they would explode on everyone in a fit of rage. No award, nor review, was good enough anymore. None of it could make up for the fact that they were in their tenth month of being miserable, and they didn’t know what to do about it.
A few years ago, my friend Tara and I used to joke that in order to sell a book, you first had to publicly announce you were retiring from writing. That’s what it seemed like, anyway, because whenever we would troll the boards where our critique group met, there would always be someone there who had retired from writing and–whoops!–gotten a contract the very next day.
“I trashed all of my files, threw out all of my CDs, burned my rejection letters,” one woman wrote. “I took a temp job at Sears and the next day [some bigwig editor] called me up. Does anyone have a copy of [story she sold but then burnt at the stake]?”
If you pay attention, you’ll notice this isn’t an unusual story. I used to think it was because writers are a melodramatic lot, and everyone vows to quit writing after every book, anyway, so obviously it’s a skewed statistic. Now I wonder if maybe those people were just in their tenth month…four weeks, three days, nine hours, fifty-six minutes, and two seconds overdue from being where they want to be in their careers. So fucking pregnant that if that final push didn’t get that book out of them, they were going to chain a pair of tongs to a Chevy and put the pedal to the metal. And if THAT didn’t get it out of them, they were going to double back and run themselves over.
See what I mean about being a melodramatic bunch? But you so know you’ve been there. We’ve all been there.
And if you think about it, it’s not always a bad thing. It’s just your internal clock shifting gears is all. The other day, someone on Twitter asked me how I knew when a story was finished, and the answer was really quite simple:
I start reaching for the tongs…
