Laura Thomas's Blog: Self-Publishing: A Mean Old Dog (who loves to cuddle) (and might just make you rich) - Posts Tagged "writing-process"
Week 2 of Novel Writing Month: On squeezing creativity out of a depleted brain, and reading bad reviews
First, the good news! I’m up to 20,000 words (80 pages). My characters are very alive, and real, and I’m rooting for them, or despising them, just as I should. And (in my opinion) the story’s plot is by turns dynamic, and exciting, and frightening, and touching. Just wrote a chapter about some Mayan rituals that’s so shocking it doesn’t seem possible, and yet it’s based on actual ancient rituals. So, I think maybe I’m liberating something good from this block of stone.
But OMG I am scared to take a second look what I’ve written, because I think that a lot of it may have the sophistication of a middle-school essay. The problem is that work has just been cuh-RAY-zee for the last couple of weeks, and by the time I finish work, my brain is just about busted. But I’m not compromising my 1500WPD count.
So, each day before I write, I take a 30-minute walk around a duck pond (that’s as inspiring as nature gets in Chicago, unfortunately) and smile at all the pretty birdies and bunnies and turtles while I listen to creativity-firing music on my ipod. For a few days, all I listened to was soul-crushingly melancholy music that reduces me nearly to tears, because everyone knows that artists create best when they’re emotionally melted. So, during those few days, I’d put on Ani DiFranco “Grey” (about 3 times in a row), Patty Griffin “Someone Else’s Tomorrow” (also 3 times), then Vienna Teng, Damien Rice, Gillian Welch… (PLEASE please please send me more suggestions of soul-crushingly melancholy music!!). I pretty much got done with Ani DiFranco when her music started to suck bigtime in about 2002, but she is REALLY workin for me right now. Also been listening a lot to Zaz “Je Veux,” and mood music like Jack White’s “Rome” or the Civil Wars or piano music by Satie.
After my walk, I sit in the cold by the lake and write, while the fierce Chicago wind cuts me and the grey skies piss me off. It’s awesome. I don’t even know how quality this writing is, but it makes me feel alive, like I am where I am supposed to be. I think maybe this is the best part – the actual creating. I’ve always felt that way about music, too. I love performing more than almost anything on earth, but it’s marred by nervous expectations about whether people will come to a show, whether I’ll make enough money to pay the band, whether whether my fingers will freeze on the guitar or the band will forget their parts. But when I’m recording, I disappear completely into the music, and if it doesn’t come out right, I just record it again. It’s a beautiful therapeutic (and sometimes maddening) process, and I can’t wait to do it again. But for now, I’m getting that same kind of high from writing. Even when I know my writing isn’t up to my own standards, my soul is still fueled by the writing itself. Because if I’m not creating SOMETHING, I feel like I’m not living properly, and I feel like just a fraction of my self. So at least I’m being myself, even if what I’m putting on paper is 50% garbage. ☺
I said I’d also talk about reading bad reviews, but now this blog is growing too long, so I’ll save that for next week. For now I’ll just tell you that my writing almost came to a full stop this week when I started obsessing my two (out of THIRTY) BAD reviews on Amazon. More to come on how it’s impossible for a writer not to obsess over these sorts of things even though they’ll break you in pieces.
Ok, later, I loves ya, mwwwah! xo
But OMG I am scared to take a second look what I’ve written, because I think that a lot of it may have the sophistication of a middle-school essay. The problem is that work has just been cuh-RAY-zee for the last couple of weeks, and by the time I finish work, my brain is just about busted. But I’m not compromising my 1500WPD count.
So, each day before I write, I take a 30-minute walk around a duck pond (that’s as inspiring as nature gets in Chicago, unfortunately) and smile at all the pretty birdies and bunnies and turtles while I listen to creativity-firing music on my ipod. For a few days, all I listened to was soul-crushingly melancholy music that reduces me nearly to tears, because everyone knows that artists create best when they’re emotionally melted. So, during those few days, I’d put on Ani DiFranco “Grey” (about 3 times in a row), Patty Griffin “Someone Else’s Tomorrow” (also 3 times), then Vienna Teng, Damien Rice, Gillian Welch… (PLEASE please please send me more suggestions of soul-crushingly melancholy music!!). I pretty much got done with Ani DiFranco when her music started to suck bigtime in about 2002, but she is REALLY workin for me right now. Also been listening a lot to Zaz “Je Veux,” and mood music like Jack White’s “Rome” or the Civil Wars or piano music by Satie.
After my walk, I sit in the cold by the lake and write, while the fierce Chicago wind cuts me and the grey skies piss me off. It’s awesome. I don’t even know how quality this writing is, but it makes me feel alive, like I am where I am supposed to be. I think maybe this is the best part – the actual creating. I’ve always felt that way about music, too. I love performing more than almost anything on earth, but it’s marred by nervous expectations about whether people will come to a show, whether I’ll make enough money to pay the band, whether whether my fingers will freeze on the guitar or the band will forget their parts. But when I’m recording, I disappear completely into the music, and if it doesn’t come out right, I just record it again. It’s a beautiful therapeutic (and sometimes maddening) process, and I can’t wait to do it again. But for now, I’m getting that same kind of high from writing. Even when I know my writing isn’t up to my own standards, my soul is still fueled by the writing itself. Because if I’m not creating SOMETHING, I feel like I’m not living properly, and I feel like just a fraction of my self. So at least I’m being myself, even if what I’m putting on paper is 50% garbage. ☺
I said I’d also talk about reading bad reviews, but now this blog is growing too long, so I’ll save that for next week. For now I’ll just tell you that my writing almost came to a full stop this week when I started obsessing my two (out of THIRTY) BAD reviews on Amazon. More to come on how it’s impossible for a writer not to obsess over these sorts of things even though they’ll break you in pieces.
Ok, later, I loves ya, mwwwah! xo
Self-Publishing: A Mean Old Dog (who loves to cuddle) (and might just make you rich)
Self-publishing allows an author ultimate independence and total control. It also allows ultimate invisibility to mainstream media, and a total lack of support from traditional publishing resources. I
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