Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 18

The curse of the plot bunnies

When it rains, it pours, I’m telling you. And not in the bad way, either. Ever heard the phrase “plot bunnies”? It’s a story idea that refuses to go away until it’s written.

Here’s what I mean:

I’m working on revising the sequel to The Unwanted. (No, it still doesn’t have a title. I’m hoping that by the time I reach the end, I’ll have thought of one, otherwise I may just put a bunch of random words in a hat and start drawing them out.) At the moment it’s eighteen chapters long, and I’m just about finished editing the sixth chapter. This doesn’t exactly mean that I’m a third of the way through the novel; there are broad narrative stretches in later chapters where I’ve scattered random bracketed notes that say helpful things like [MORE HERE] and [FIX THIS]. I think by the time I reach chapter thirteen, I’ll be pulling out my hair. (And since I’m growing it long again to donate, pulling it out’ll be so much easier! But anyway.)

I’m also going through the novel I wrote in grad school and discovering some problems with it. Mainly, it’s got a muddled middle. It needs a dramatic kick in the pants, plotwise. So I’ve been reverse engineering the outline.

I’m sure that the combination of these two priorities is why every other day it seems like I get a new idea for a short story.

Now, I love short stories. I love reading them and I love writing them. The Hugo Awards (big science fiction awards ceremony, in case you’re not familiar) were this weekend, and the list of winners made me add several short stories to my to-read list. And they’ll probably inspire me to think up more story ideas. Short stories are tough to write, but by nature of their shorter length, oftentimes they don’t take as long to write as novels. (That’s not always true, though. One short story I finished this year took me almost three years to write.) Every time I sit down to work on the novel, there’s a voice in the back of my head that says, “You know, if you worked on (insert title of appropriate story), you could finish it and submit it to that magazine this month.”

That’s the other nice thing about short stories: the potential for more immediate gratification by publication. (Although that’s by no means a sure thing, either. Some stories I wrote ten years ago still haven’t been published.)

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m actively working on something that has my brain hitting on all cylinders as far as plot goes, so I’m coming up with more ideas than I can work on at once. The ideas are multiplying like rabbits. Hence, plot bunnies.

This proliferation of ideas is great and all, but it doesn’t much help for maintaining focus. And focus is difficult for me at the best of times. I’m easily distracted by the next bright, shiny idea; the novelty of a new story is much more enticing than the hard work of going back to the story that’s already written (and rewritten maybe ten times already) and figuring out why it’s not quite working yet.

All good writing is rewriting, really.

I know if I change course and work on one of them for a while, though, I’m going to lose the thread of what I’m working on. So, for the moment, they get written down as a sentence in my notebook, and they’ll have to wait until later. Because the novel won’t stand for being ignored. And there’s a lot [MORE] that I need to [FIX].

(Psst. I have an e-mail newsletter. You should totally sign up for it. I might surprise you with stuff you don’t get to see here, or anywhere, for that matter.)

Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.

If you ask anyone who knows me (especially my partner, the poor guy), you’ll know that when someone starts to tell me a story I’ve already heard, I start nodding, sometimes in a bit of annoyance (I’m an awful person) and will quickly rattle off the end of the story they’re telling me. Of course, this gives them ample opportunity (not to mention justification) to say to me, “Oh yeah? Well, you repeat yourself all the time!” And they’re probably right.

Okay, they’re totally right.

I worry about repeating myself. Like, a lot. Any time I sit down to write something like this blog post, I’ll get to a point where I pause and ask, “Wait, have I written about this already?” This leads to an extended period of scrolling through old blog entries, journal files, and whatnot to see if whatever topic I’m writing about has come up before. This is its own form of procrastination, I suppose.

And yet, I love to rewatch old movies more times than is either necessary or productive. (Thankfully, iTunes does not keep track of the number of times I’ve watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.) I’ve reread stories countless times as well (“Wants” by Grace Paley is high up there, not just because I often use it as an example in my classes). So why am I so irked when others repeat stories, and why does it worry me when I do it myself?

One of the things my high school art teacher said has stuck with me over more years than I care to count. I was getting into watercolors and spent a lot of time working in that medium, and she encouraged my progress. “Once you’ve done a hundred or so,” she said, “you start to get it.”

A hundred? I wondered. How long was that going to take me?

It turns out, it took me most of the rest of that year, and while I’m not sure I “got it,” I did get better. Then I started working in pastels and pretty much fell in love with those, although I don’t do any artwork these days. Still, I think her point has some bearing here, and since this week has been all about the Olympics on the news, I also recall hearing how swimmers like Michael Phelps will swim 40,000 meters in a single week of practice.

A year of watercolors, it turns out, is not really that much time. I write and revise stories, set them aside and revise them again, abandon them and then write a different story on the same theme that turns out to have more in common with that previous story than just a topic. In a workshop one of my peers said of a manuscript I submitted that it had the trifecta of love, longing, and loss, the common themes of my work. (I decided not to take this as a criticism.) Even if the characters, settings, and situations change, are they the same stories?

Repetition is practice. The stories we tell each other, on the second or third or thirtieth telling, evolve a little each time. Maybe we get closer to the truth—not of the events as they actually happened, but of their significance to us.

So if I’ve written about practice and repetition before, maybe it’s because I’m still trying to figure them out. And I’m going to work on being a little less exasperated when someone tells me the same story twice. Instead, I’ll see if I can notice how the story changes as they retell it. Maybe they’re getting closer to their truth.

All writing advice is suspect—even my own

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the writing advice I give. Specifically, I’ve been wondering, Why the hell would anyone want to listen to advice from me? I mean, what do I know?

During my social media sabbatical, I read a book of advice on revising the first five pages of your manuscript. It’s called (appropriately enough) The First Five Pages, by agent and former editor Noah Lukeman. It was written in 2000 and, if you ask me, it could do with a bit of a refresh. Still, it has some good advice in it, even if its examples of what not to do are a bit obvious. Because my writing group asked me to lead a workshop critiquing the first five pages of their manuscripts, though, I figured it behooved me to read this. Anyway, my point (yes, I have one) is not to offer a critique of Lukeman’s book—hey, it’s a bestseller, so what do I know, right?

Ah yeah, there’s my point. What do I know? And why would anyone think they should listen to me?

Since then, I’ve been reading a couple other books on writing: Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit by Steven Pressfield and On Writing by Stephen King, and I like two of the main messages in these. The first one gets it across in its title, and King gets it across in his introduction when he says most books on writing are filled with bullshit.

I have no doubt there’s a certain amount of—um, fertilizer in the advice I give, but here’s the thing: all the advice anyone gives is mainly what’s worked for them, or what they’ve seen work for others. Especially when it comes to writing, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. For every problem you might have with character or setting, there is a multiverse of possible solutions. If one person’s advice doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean your problem is insurmountable. You just might not have found the right advice yet.

For me, advice books work best when they remind me of things I already know, or when they articulate something I’ve been trying to put my finger on but haven’t quite found the words for. When I have that “a-ha” moment.

(Hang on. Wrong A-ha.)

Anyway, maybe I do know a little something. But chances are you do as well, and hopefully if I offer advice, I’ll just remind you of what you already know.

A month off social media showed me I need to focus

Hello.

It’s me.

Happy to see me?

*sigh*

You know, if I were in any way organized, I would have planned better for my return to social media after taking a month off.

Did I take that time to assemble a backlog of blog posts full of the thrilling insights—no, wait—full of the Thrilling! Insights! that I accumulated while basking in hours of focused concentration unimpeded by the constant distraction of the internet?

Right. As if.

So what did I do while I was away from the Facebook and the Twitter and the Instagram and the Tumblr? (Okay, so I don’t spend all that much time on the Tumblr anyway.)

Well, I went and saw Star Trek Beyond, starring John Cho.

Oh hai John Cho is that drink for me?

Twice. It was really good.

But anyway, what I haven’t been doing much is working on revising my novel. I know, I know. That was the whole point of this sabbatical. But it turns out that sometimes your point is not what you think it is. Instead, I wrote three stories. Two of them were brand new. One of them was a story that’s been hanging around waiting for me to finish it for, oh, years I think. You might not be surprised to find out how many of those I have. There’s another one that’s literally about hanging around—the characters are figures in paintings on opposite walls of a museum, and they’ve fallen in love with each other as they’ve stared across the gap and conversed when the museum’s closed. One of them finally embarks on the journey to reach the other, which involves passing through all the other paintings in between them. One of these days, I hope, I’ll finish that one, too.

I also led a workshop for some members of my writing group, wherein we analyzed the first five pages of their novel manuscripts and tried to pinpoint areas for improvement. It was kind of exhausting but ultimately worthwhile (or so they told me, and I don’t have any reason to doubt them).

It still feels weird for me to offer up my advice in these ways. I mean, I’m just this guy, you know? But the great thing was how many people around the table offered their own insights as well, and how it got me thinking again about my own manuscript, wondering things like “how much backstory do I cram into the beginning?” and “is my main character really well-established from the outset?”

In the last couple days of July, finally, I found myself working on the novel again. I have a long way to go. But at least I’ve started.

I can’t say that I learned from my sabbatical that I’m easily distracted; I already knew that. It did reinforce that point, however. Without the urge to check Twitter or take pictures of every little thing and post it to Instagram, I’d pick up my phone and stare at the screen and think, what is this device for, again? It also drove home how ephemeral my digital connections with other people are. I e-mailed a few people I don’t get the chance to talk to in person these days (being in different countries will do that), and I met up with a couple people for lunch whom I don’t get to see that often, and I spent a lot of time at the bar at Civil Life chatting with my friend Jake the brewer. And I saw a friend for the first time in years when she came to town for a conference.

I also lined up a new freelance client and got the ball rolling on three new projects.

So, even if it wasn’t what I expected to be doing, I got a lot done. Focus is a wonderful thing.

I’m hoping that hopping back on Twitter and Instagram this week (I’m still on the fence about Facebook) won’t derail that focus completely. I still have a lot to do: three project deadlines, a novel to revise, and a trip to take (tomorrow, in fact, to Olympia, Washington; I still need to pack). Even after a month away, I know how easily I fall back into old habits—that’s probably why I’m perpetually trying to lose five pounds, because french fries are a habit I can’t kick. This October I’m scheduled to teach a workshop on using social media for writers, and I’m hoping to remind students that an online presence is necessary, but not to let it distract from their real work: writing.

It’s true, we teach best what we need to learn the most ourselves.

Wednesday links, last one ’til August

Just a gentle reminder, I’m taking the month of July off social media. I’m going to pause in my writing here so I can concentrate on writing on the page—or, actually, on the screen, but you get my point, right? Right.

Another gentle reminder, I have a mailing list you can sign up for here. Anyway!

I managed to fritter away a good portion of my morning by looking for an old friend online. I do this periodically; I don’t know why. We fell out of touch maybe ten or fifteen years ago, and what’s remarkable—and maybe a little admirable—is he seems to have no presence online, not Facebook (blergh) or Twitter or anything of the sort. For a while I wondered if he might even have, as it were, left the planet. But I found his dad’s obit from a couple years back and he’s mentioned in it, so I think he’s still out there.

There’s not really any point to my telling you that, except how many people do you know who have no trace online? I can count maybe three people, two of whom are friends I’ve lost touch with.

I sometimes think I’m a bad friend. I need to do better.

Okay, on to the links.

I think I’m going to take Kim Lao’s advice. “Why you should aim for 100 rejections a year.”

“There is no handbook for being a writer.” I sometimes wish there was.

“This has been the worst year of my life.” I don’t know how I missed this, and by that I mean both the article itself, the things that were likely going on while I was there, and the fact that I probably know some or all the complainants. I feel like I dropped the ball on all counts.

Fascinating, if morbid. CSI: Poetry. The life and death—ok just death—of poets.

In case you’ve forgotten, PRISM international (I worked for them during grad school) offers a weekly writing prompt on their website. Check out the latest.

And while we’re on the topic of Canadian literature, here’s a handy list of magazines holding contests this summer. 

Let’s stay on the Canadian theme and allow me to offer a hearty bit of thanks to my friend ’Nathan Burgoine for creating this handy little graphic on how to review a book in three easy steps. You’ll note he uses a particular book as an example. (Which you can buy here, by the way.) You can also get his newest book, Triad Blood, here. 

Yes! More of these! Queer YA stories that aren’t tragic.

Lastly, this strange and fascinating story that I’m still thinking about.

Know when to take a break

Ugh, isn’t July the worst? I know they talk about the dog days of summer being in August, but to my mind, the seventh month of the year barks a lot louder. Here in flyover country (also known as the Midwest) the air sits still, the humidity rises to the point that you could wring out the air, and the overall effect could be called “steambath.” You just want someone to keep bringing you an endless supply of iced tea so you don’t have to move.

It’s a perfect time to take a break, believe me, and that’s just what I’m going to do.

Over the next few weeks, in case you’re wondering where my next blog entry is—because you totally wait with eager anticipation for these things to drop, right?—I’ve decided to take a break from blogging and social media for the month of July. Now, I won’t be doing nothing, obviously. My biggest thing is to work on the novel. I’ve also had a request for a short story from a magazine—how cool is that?—and there are two calls for submissions that I’m writing toward. One is the literary magazine that’s doing a Star Trek-themed issue I mentioned last week. Right up my alley.

So I’ll have a lot of writing to do. And since my teaching gig will be finishing up until September, I’ll have the time to focus on these things.

So go pour some iced tea and relax for July. See you in August!

Wednesday Links, or “There’s coffee in that fanfic”

You know what’s an awesome way to procrastinate? Get lost in Memory Alpha.

“Coffee. Black.”

Let me back up a bit. The literary magazine The Mondegreen is accepting submissions for “To Boldly Go: The Star Trek Issue.” To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series, they’re putting out a special issue on September 8 (the importance of that date will be obvious to fans) and are seeking, among other things, nonfiction, poetry, and—wait for it, wait for it—fan fiction.

You might have heard me squeal a little when I found out.

As anyone who’s had the misfortune of sitting near me will inevitably find out, my first geekdom has always been Star Trek. Even more than Star Wars (which I love) or Doctor Who (which I really love), the vision of a better tomorrow had me hooked well before 1977 (which is when Star Wars came out and is one of those signpost years for me as a result). I come by it genetically, I think—my parents were fans of the original series—and it would not be a lie to say that I’ve taken a stab at one or two (or more) story treatments. I even had a chance in college to interview someone, for a creativity class I was taking, who’d had a chance to pitch stories to the writing room at The Next Generation.

Envious, me? Nah.

Anyway, I’m reading up about my favorite coffee achiever and Starfleet captain, Kathryn Janeway, because I’ve got an idea that I might submit for this. Picard would say “make it so” but Janeway, not one to mince words, would just say “Do it!”

If you’re a fan, you might want to consider it yourself. Check it out.

By the way, if you’re looking for places to submit your work, NewPages classifieds is a good resource.

Okay, my list of links this week is a bit short because I’ve been working, so check out these two bits of wisdom:

“I write first thing, when I can suspend disbelief in the act of making things up.” Will Self on his writing routine at the Guardian.

“Float Free or Die” is a great article by my friend Laura Trethewey at The Walrus. Check it out.

Breakthrough

Sometimes as a writer I’m my own worst enemy.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been struggling with the second draft of my young-adult fantasy novel, the sequel to The Unwanted (which you can totally still buy, by the way!). I’ve been working on it for about three years now, but of course if you added up all the time I’ve spent actually working on it, that would total much less. In the in-between times, I was writing my thesis, starting a completely different book, and working on maybe ten or twelve different stories, both new ones and revisions of old work. I was dragging my feet, and I wasn’t sure why.

This week, I finally figured it out. I’d worried, as you know, that it was because I thought the book was bad (and it could be bad, who knows? Not me, I’m just the one writing it WHAT DO YOU EXPECT, HUH), or that I had just lost interest in it. Turns out, I think I was afraid of finishing it.

I’ve been in a weird place with it. I can’t say either of the previous novels, The Unwanted or my first one, Detours (which you can also totally still buy!), came easily to me. It took eight years to write the first one (which was actually my third one if you count the novel I never finished because it was godawful and the second one which was also godawful but which I turned into a fairly decent 7,500-word story which you can read here but ANYWAY). It took me three years to write The Unwanted, which felt lightning fast by comparison. This one is landing somewhere in between those two timewise, but in terms of effort it feels like climbing a mountain, in the dark. In flip flops.

Since it’s a sequel, I keep thinking, “This one has got to be better than the first one.” Sequels are tricky, right? You want to make it work as a standalone so that new readers will pick it up—AND also make it compelling enough for them to consider going back and getting the first one. AND I knew I needed to justify coming back to these characters again even when I thought I reached a fairly decent conclusion in the first book. AND I thought I needed to make it very different from the first book and maybe even tinker with structure and point of view in a way that set it apart from The Unwanted.

I was telling this book to do a whole lot more than tell a story that I was interested in writing and that I hoped people would be interested in reading. I was basically telling myself, this book has to be perfect.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

“The perfect is the enemy of the good” is something that the best boss I ever had told me once (actually, I think she had to tell me that several times). That was in reference to graphic design, but I think it applies here as well. “Done is better than perfect” is something else I’ve been told more recently as well, and I think it applies. Lexus might be justified in the relentless pursuit of perfection, but I’m not building a two-ton luxury automobile that needs to carry passengers at a high rate of speed to their destination safely. I’m serious about writing the best book I possibly can, but I’m even more serious about finishing the best book I possibly can.

So instead of tinkering with structure and point of view, I’m going to work on finishing this next draft as efficiently as possible so I can move on to the third and hopefully final draft before the end of the year. Here’s hoping this doesn’t stretch into a four-year project.

Because there’s still the matter of a third and final novel in the series….

Wednesday Links, the “I’m still not feeling it” edition

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not having a very productive week, for obvious reasons. Probably why this is late. So I’m just gonna put it here and try to get something done, even if I don’t feel like it.

Via Lee Wind, 6 LGBT Books That Help Spread the Love. Which we could use right about now, yeah?

I’m looking forward to reading Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Here’s an article at the CBC about how he came to write it.

How do you know if your writing is any good?

I don’t know why, but I’ve been repeating this phrase in my head all morning:

Perhaps our mantras choose us, not the other way around. Speaking of Prince, Mr. McGee had something to tell him.

The most poetic cities in the world?

Safe

I think I was nineteen or so when I set foot inside my first gay bar. (Which makes it sound like an alternative playset for Barbie, doesn’t it? Barbie’s First Gay Bar. Hopefully she won’t find Ken in there with GI Joe.) They were complicated places for me at first, gay bars, since I felt like an outsider and like I belonged at the same time. As an insecure twenty-something who still acutely remembered being an awkward, chunky adolescent, I wasn’t great at places where you were probably going to be judged by how you look.

I don’t remember how I got into that first gay bar since I was, obviously, underage. I didn’t have a fake ID. Still, that had never stopped me from getting into Shattered, the nightclub in downtown Columbia, Missouri that was where my friends and I spent Wednesday nights dancing to new wave music. It was a basement bar where the music was always way too loud, the drinks were cheap (in my memory, at least), and the dance floor could be hazardous if one of the cramped toilets backed up.

Good times.

But back to the gay bar, which seemed even more clandestine. It was a Quonset hut-style building on the outskirts of Columbia, Missouri, called Zazoo. I’m not sure I’m spelling it right, but I can only assume it was named after the Zazou subculture in France during World War II. Given the outsider connotations, I suppose it was apt. Beyond that, my memories of the place are hazy, not because of excessive alcohol consumption. (Not that night, at least.) I only went there once, with some friends, and I’m not sure why we didn’t go more often. Maybe it was because the place was in the middle of nowhere, not all of us had cars, and when we went inside, the crowd had a somewhat older vibe. Of course, looking back, I’m sure that older vibe was like late twenties/early thirties. Which seems so young now.

Partly, I’m sure, it was because I was worried. What if someone saw me coming or going? Would they think I was an easy target? What if I got jumped on the sidewalk or in the parking lot? I got used to walking quickly and carrying my keys in one hand, like a weapon. Go for the eyes, then the throat. This was preparation for a night out.

It wasn’t until I got to St. Louis, really, that I found the places where I felt like I belonged. Places like the Loading Zone where I’d watch Brad and his theater friends belt out Broadway songs on show tunes night; or Freddie’s, where Brad and I would play darts; or Attitudes, the lesbian bar that had a country night on Fridays and, honest to God, I learned to line dance with friends from the LGBT running club.

Most of those places are gone, or have changed names, or are just different places now. I’m older and I don’t go out nearly as often. I’m not going to say I’ve moved past it (I hate that), but more that it’s just a pace I can’t keep up with. There was always and still remains, though, a sense that once I was past the front door, I could exhale. I was somewhere I belonged. These were people I got, and who got me, on a level that didn’t require explanation. I could just be myself.

It was where I felt safe.