Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 48

The Weeknd on His Weekend Off

SATURDAY

10:37 — wakes, orders breakfast from room service: crab and blue cheese omelette with side of pears

11:06 — coffee and the Reader’s Digest

11: 43 — showers, dresses in camo

12:03 — record shopping

1:32 — light lunch in café (whichever one isn’t playing a Weeknd song): crepes and espresso

2:02 — window shopping

2:11 — ignores phone, more window shopping

3:23 — enters bookstore, browses poetry

3:57 — smashes phone

4:03 — back to hotel, late afternoon nap

4:34 — sets curtain on fire

4:52 — leisurely stroll to a far-off restaurant, hobby photography

6:17 — dinner alone: tuna steak and asparagus

7:23 — dessert at a different restaurant: plain apple pie

7:47 — buys new phone

8:36 — back to hotel, rents movie: Weekend at Bernie’s

9:12 — misses hair

10:37 — retires to bed early

SUNDAY

10:37 — wakes, does the exact same things as the previous day, at the exact same times

10:37 — dies inside

8-Ball Interview with Keith Cadieux

Keith Cadieux is the co-editor of the weird fiction anthology The Shadow Over Portage & Main, published by Enfield & Wizenty and recently shortlisted for a Manitoba Book Award. During the day-job hours, he is the administrative coordinator for the Winnipeg International Writers Festival. 

I met Keith Cadieux through the Manitoba Writers’ Guild mentorship program, where he excelled under my tutelage (possibly because he didn’t need my help).

Keith kindly included “Waiting Room,” a short story by my pseudonym Richard Crow, in  The Shadow Over Portage & Main.

1. What do you want to talk about, but nobody ever asks?

I haven’t done many interviews so I’m not sure how I can offer much here. One thing I have noticed in quite a few interviews with authors is that there usually isn’t much discussion of the work itself. There are always questions about the writing process, something I value as a writer, and occasionally some talk of inspiration, but that’s usually it. There isn’t much talk of thematic fixations or intention versus the final outcome. I suppose I would like someone to ask me what are some themes I’m trying to work through with my writing. That’s something I don’t think anyone has asked me, in my limited experience. 

2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take writing seriously?

Probably not to take every piece of advice you’ll receive. I’ve that found picking and choosing advice, tips, criticism that particularly resonate is far more effective than having to accept something in its entirety. This is true for everything in life, really, but particularly true of writing advice. A writing manual, for instance, may offer some great thoughts, but it’s unlikely that one author will be able to take every single item in that manual and apply it effectively to their writing. Much like writing itself, you need to be a bit of a scavenger and only hold on to the bits that are pertinent or helpful to you at that moment or for that specific project.

3. What are your regular habits as a writer?

These tend to change depending on the writing project. When I first started trying to write seriously, I did so almost exclusively at night. I would put on a pot of coffee, re-read what I had written so far, making adjustments and corrections along the way, and then blast forward with new material once I’d gone through all of the older stuff. Eventually, what I had written got to be so long that this became a serious problem and I wouldn’t get to the point of writing new material. More recently, I’ve taken a tip from Stephen King’s On Writing and set a daily word count for myself. I also tend to do a lot of pacing and wandering around when I write, so I usually try to do it when I have the house to myself.

4. What is your editing process?

Usually, I write my first draft by hand. The first revision comes when I type it up, making corrections and line changes along the way. After that, my stories usually need some kind of overhaul, like new scenes or removing scenes, changes to characters, voice, narration, verb tense. So I write it out by hand again, making these substantive changes. Then, when I type it up again, it’s usually pretty lean so the only revision still needed is typographical.

5. What is your greatest difficulty as a writer?

Definitely discipline. You may have noticed that a lot of the “habits” are things that can quite easily be interfered with or thrown off track. Sometimes, having an empty house simply isn’t an option so I need to just sit down, be a little hard on myself, and get the work done.

6. How do you decide which book to read next?

This is pretty random. As I assume is the case with most writers, my to-be-read pile is a chaotic and unruly beast. It’s simply not humanly possible to read everything that I would like to in one human life span. I’m usually reading more than one book at a time and I make an effort for them to be different types of books, say a novel and a story collection, or nonfiction. Sometimes poetry but pretty rarely. I also tend to alternate between moods. I usually read mostly horror but eventually I need a break so I’ll lean into things that are more lighthearted. 

7. What is your greatest single ambition?

I suppose it would be to write something that earns some real money. Like a five-figure payday from one book. In Canadian publishing, I think that’s about as ambitious as it gets. 

8. Why don’t you quit?

I doubt I could, even if I wanted to. It’s definitely a compulsion. Sometimes I’m more into it, more productive, more passionate. But even during periods of low productivity or when I’m feeling disheartened, the drive to write never completely goes away. It might dulled. Usually, it comes roaring back if I’ve seen something that really gets to me, that connects to the core of me as a person somehow, and I feel a drive to write something that good, to contribute something of equal substance. Or, sometimes I encounter something so bad that I can’t shake the feeling that I could write something better and that rage drives me to actually get back to work.

The War with the Dead

A Short Story on Halloween

In celebration of Halloween, here is a short story for you. Thanks to Poetry Is Dead for publishing an early version of this story

THE WAR WITH THE DEAD
Its History

Early in the history of the war with the dead, the living invented their gods. Soon these gods were dead. Some rose again in doomed defiance, but at best were brittle zombies. Those the living had imagined as their heroes, the names they thought would secure immortality, soon joined the ranks of the dead.

This is the history of the war with the dead. Every weapon the living invent turns upon them. Yet they keep inventing new gods, new heroes, new weapons. Each new thing arising in response to the death of the old. Yet for the dead, there is no newness, no age. Only death, a gift held aloft, which the living first refuse and then reach for.

Which will one day be given. Where all gods one day go. In which all heroes, all weapons, are enfolded. To which all is destined from birth.

Its Battleground

Yet the living resist. They drag their resistance into the future, where they die, and join the ranks of the dead. They turn on one another in their fury, when they do not willingly turn traitor, marching into the past in defeat.

The great battleground in the war with the dead is time. The dead now hold the past. The living hold the present, though the dead maintain their territories. The future is the realm still in dispute. As the future draws into the present, it is colonized by the living, and then ceded to the dead.

Each secure in their stronghold, the living and the dead both turn their faces to the future. Their weapons turn with them. What complicates the battle is that neither may enter the territory they dispute, only cast things there — their weapons, their resistance, their desire. They set events in motion, chain them forward.

The living set their explosives in the present, sending their explosions into the past. In this way, they plan to take the future. The dead, by contrast, revel in these explosions. They glory in the wakes of their ruins, create objects from the rubble. They launch these into the future, and laugh when the living drag them down into the present. In this way, the dead wage war.

Its Weapons

The dead create dead objects from once-living objects. These objects do not interest the dead. The dead do not know their names. They return them to the living, after radiating them with time. The living should resist them, should destroy them, cast them back into the past. But they do not. Instead, they treasure them and seek their forgotten names.

The living seek to revive these objects, not knowing the mistake of this, not understanding the nature of death. Unknown objects, archaeological objects, these missives from dead cultures, constitute and embody a threat. Dead objects, which are pure objects — without names, without utility for the living — are the greatest possible threat to present concepts, present order.

Testaments to a world which was once, but is no longer. The presence of these dead objects threatens the living, threatens to unravel their world. To void its uniqueness, its consistency. Kill its future. This is why the living put ancient vases in museums, rather than destroying them or putting them to use. Like all dead objects, they must be isolated and categorized, castrated. The threat they pose must be removed.

Its Art

Art, like all else, is a weapon employed by both the living and the dead. The living use art to comprehend dead objects, to imbue them with a living mystery, and in this way exorcise the demons that the dead trapped in these objects. The dead laugh. The dead use art like any other dead object. They take it from the living, draw it into the past, and cast it forward to the future, so that it ends up in the present to destroy.

Thus the art of the living becomes the objects of the dead, alien documents, incomprehensible. The dead imbue these things with death, and then return them to the living. The living, not understanding the nature of art, nor of death, make the same mistake that they make when approaching all dead objects. They attempt to enliven them, to incorporate them into the realm of the living. They interpret, analyze, over-interpret, study, proclaim the undying, universal, classical nature of the dead’s art.

All of these actions are designed to defuse this art, to dampen its disruptive power. To cut the red wire, stop the bomb. But the bomb has already gone off. Life crosses into its continuing explosion.

Its Meaning

For the living, immortality means to walk through then return from the land of the dead, so they build their art on the models they have drawn from the dead. They then cast this art into the past. The dead recreates it for the future. To destroy the future, to disrupt the present. The dead create with violence, to do violence, so craft art as they craft all things — with pleasure.

The future is filled with objects, like art, with traps the dead have laid. The art of the dead, like all of its objects, bears no message. Its presence is its message, its violence. The dead reshape the art of the living so that, after it is returned, its shapes might resist the living’s attempts to understand and defuse them.

What the living do not understand, when they look to the future, is that it may not yet belong to the dead, but it can never belong to them. The future will not be won, except by objects. Their weapons, whether skyscrapers or poems, will be the true victors of this war.

Its End

The living shall never defeat us. We shall enfold the sun in our arms. Already the stars come to us, one by one, dwindling.

We the dead shall defeat our unborn. They shall fall gentle to the earth from ancient storms.

That Most Terrible of Dogs

from THE POLITICS OF KNIVES

from The Politics of Knives — signed copies on sale for $10

Waiting. Waiting to catch the drift. Waiting for something empirical and wise. Waiting for the ration of rainwater to decrease and the run-off to increase, for the river’s end in silt and toil. Waiting to be impressed with all said. Waiting to know who is speaking at all times. Waiting while the pages turn. Waiting to find out it’s really great and since submitting my life has changed. Waiting in the material world. Waiting for all that exists in this cave of forms to be perfect. Waiting for the collision of two plates to produce deadly forces. Waiting for triggers and hairy delirium. Waiting for denial and magpies. Waiting to be conversant in veal. Waiting for acrimony used as a literary device. Waiting to stagger antagonistically toward an ejection. Waiting for my car to humanize and tap reserves. Waiting for less final solutions. Waiting for warlords to decide. Waiting for atrocity, the exhibition begun. Waiting to pole vault over bookmakers. Waiting for compensation. Waiting for the files. Waiting in the rain, lined pockets for waterproofing. Waiting for terroristic improvements. Waiting for a boost to become underrated. Waiting to adopt a panicky creed. Waiting for the theatre of the tabloid. Waiting for phrasing with nitrogen. Waiting to teem. Waiting to cleverly make contact with the myth. Waiting to thwart haste, to recur. Waiting to effectively use the existing infrastructure in the most efficient of possible manners. Waiting to see the real war while the public seethes national isms. Waiting to become more involved in these stories. Waiting to be whatever I want to be, but first I must be willing to work. Waiting for a skin unlike others. Waiting for the empire to mount its tenants, and soon after market my resilience. Waiting to thrive on the wiretaps. Waiting to glow and decay. Waiting for the violence of the megaton. Waiting for inspiration, surreal and corrosive. Waiting to be involved in a third-rate gallery love affair. Waiting for resistance, bleeding hunger strikes. Waiting for your sneaking blush to grey. Waiting for new moderns, in the voting booth dumb. Waiting for provisions to show me the way. Waiting until they can quantify the results. Waiting to love the aggravation and drudgery. Waiting to test my hypothesis, for the best man to become a heavenly windbreaker. Waiting to speak with the creator of society and grapefruit. Waiting for my soup, torrent pummelling the patio. Waiting to embarrass those bourbon federalists. Waiting for the adultery to haemorrhage. Waiting for the period that comes after the outboard motor. Waiting while, over yonder, a credit card gleams. Waiting with crossed thighs for a few posthumous guarantees. Waiting to fasten my principles to cynical schemes. Waiting with the impartiality of a counterfeiter. Waiting for my luck to bygone. Waiting, glorious in insomnia. Waiting for the anniversary of the fetus overcome. Waiting for a series of vicious courtships. Waiting, boastful and rectal, quoting panhandlers. Waiting for the affirmative, to tar the feathers, short circuits, deploy nausea. Waiting to resign over corruption charges, pending one emptied trust fund per day. Waiting for rheumatism, lumbago, and other slash somesuch complaints. Waiting, hands on my guns, for the plain fact that it was my heart. Waiting with my pennants for eternity. Waiting to discover the full potential of my lawn. Waiting for the delish delisting of all of these saccharin products. Waiting with the other parishioners for the generalized entity. Waiting to take the shortcut, the barrel. Waiting to pervert it all. Waiting for exoneration, alleviation, dislocation, to be rephrased. Waiting for my generation to generate. Waiting for nourishment, thus nonchalantly, as the king cheetah stripe. Waiting to increase my vocabulary with an adventure safari, in homeroom where twelve dead monkeys hang. Waiting to appeal to the working class literati. Waiting, succinct. Waiting to swelter and tire. Waiting to address the increasing gap between rich and poor, the huge international debt, and to redesign those now responsible. Waiting for actions and events happening around me to hurtle beyond my control. Waiting for what you want of this jade. Waiting in a non-violence quandary. Waiting to be misread. Waiting for the intense retail reality of the hornet shopkeeper buzzing around its pie charts. Waiting in studied irreverence. Waiting to deflect openness, deforest anarchy. Waiting to nurture the apolitical. Waiting for the athletes to seem tastier. Waiting as an enraged post-artisan. Waiting incongruous with the voyage. Waiting to steamroll over the palaeontology of ice. Waiting to condense after a series of trials. Waiting, confident in my ascetic. Waiting and indulging my inner sociopath. Waiting on the on-ramp to extinction. Waiting for the next step of this program, when the ratings push us through the screen. Waiting, shall we say, with your eyes. Waiting drunk and unsure of my spoon. Waiting in the jaws of Cerberus, that most terrible of dogs.

from The Politics of Knives — signed copies on sale for $10

It Is Easier

(a poem)

It is easier to recognize faces than recall names.

It is easier to smuggle ivory than drugs.

It is easier to pass through the eye of a needle,

for me to shoot up than to think.

It is easier to write when you are sad.

DOWNVERSE (Talonbooks, 2014) by Nikki Reimer

(a review)

The epigraph of Nikki Reimer’s sophomore collection reads as follows:

I hated your poem.

Your poem was so boring.

— inebriated audience member at a poetry reading

It’s easy to dismiss this quote as an ironic joke, in place of the usual weighty epigraph borrowing wisdom and glory from some other poet, in part because it is funny and it does function as a joke. However, since this is the epigraph for Downverse, it remains important to treat it as an epigraph, and take the sentiment seriously, in the way that the inebriated audience member seems to intend.

This is the brilliance of Downverse. Reimer’s poems, on one hand, seem to dismiss the criticism by presenting, variously, the unpoetic lexicon of insurance policies and monthly budgets, or uneducated Internet commentators, rather than conventional lyrical wordplay. In this way, Reimer’s Downverse responds to the inebriated audience’s desire for un-boring poetry by presenting, in a challenge to the challenge, the most boring language imaginable rather than felicitous, properly “poetic” turns of phrase.

On the other hand, Reimer’s Downverse responds to the challenge as if this expected lyricism is not what the audience wants, but what it has rejected as boring. Imagine, for a moment, that Reimer might, in this epigraph, be quoting herself. Imagine that she, or someone she identifies with, is the inebriated audience member ready to die from poetry boredom. Downverse then reads like a continuation of the epigraph, the audience’s ongoing response. The complaint of the epigraph then functions like the slogan of an Occupy Wall Street protestor: an aggressive, inarticulate articulation of frustration at how late-capitalist neo-liberalism has cornered even the bear market of poetry, emptying it of any Romantic, revolutionary potential.

In this way, Downverse reads as if Reimer has lost her faith in the power of poetry to express any emotion without commodifying it. (Isn’t poetry, after all, how we carve up and sell off our unique, snowflake selves? For the little they are worth.) Such anxiety haunts a poem like “materiality,” suggesting a strange affect in its affectlessness:

my monthly rent is 27%

of my monthly household income

my monthly phone bill is 5%

of my monthly household income

my monthly life insurance is 0.3%

of my monthly household income

The poem continues to list out expenditures (medical bills: 12%; books: 4% on average; debt repayment: 10%; etc.), and the first stanza ends with the grim news that “my total monthly household expenditures are 100.3% / of my monthly household income.” Later stanzas inform us of Vancouver’s rental affordability indicator (circa 2011) and other statistical, demographic, and economic information necessary to understanding just how “average” Reimer’s budgeting might be.

However cold such “expressions” feel, they are in fact as raw (in their way) as any properly “poetic” emotion, more indicative of the poet’s real concerns than any sentiment. A poem like this functions as counterpoint to a more “emotional” outpouring of what supposedly “matters” to the speaker, providing instead the bare economic reality of what the speaker actually does. The poem also expresses a frustration of sorts at both the raw data (however slightly, the poem’s speaker is losing ground) and the felt inability to meaningfully return to the kind of emotional lyricism that some readers might expect, now that every discourse, conscious or unconscious, has been overwritten by capitalist concerns.

Reimer’s basic technique in Downverse is to crash differing registers of discourse against one another to explore how they function as, on some level, the same register, a short-circuiting that often has comedic effects. A highlight of the book, “the big other,” reacts to the oft-rehearsed but banal complaint that so-called “experimental” writing flaunts its theoretical basis, by boldly titling itself after a concept from Lacanian theory, then humorously displaying how the related processes of self-construction and self-alienation play out in the social world.

Everyone you knew had houses and jobs

but it was okay, you still had your looks

you still got harassed

(“you’re shoo beeautiful”) at the bus stop.

That is the environment

that 95% of the OWS people live in.

Easy there, don’t force it.

You don’t want to overthink everything like last time.

That’s where the occupy wherever hippies will be

as soon as it gets cold.

Someone was supposed to talk to us about editing

and line breaks, but we missed the phone meeting —

Reimer crashes, here and throughout Downverse, the complaints of the Occupy Wall Street protesters against complaints about the Occupy Wall Street protesters, and the language of art, commerce, and frustration, to explore their interconnections and the way that they support one another even as they try to refuse, refute, or retreat from one another.

Reimer captures, collages, and excavates language with an ear for its sometimes hidden, sometimes painfully obvious, political dimensions. Downverse elegantly and often comically questions what poetry might have to do with the language that makes up our world — or might have to do now, since this language has sped past our poetry.

No results found for “I hate conceptual poetry.”

I won’t say these are the best written books out there. They aren’t suppose to be. I had so much fun reading them every day. I love books that go day by day. It makes it seem more real that way, like I know what they’re doing every day. A lack of insight won’t stop you from enjoying the sex, action, adventure, mystery, and yes, the sex. The writer has done a wonderful job of layering guaranteeing there is something for all in this series of books. This is not my normal genre when choosing to sit down & read. However, I whipped through all three books in less than a month. The alleged “deviant sex” in these books usually rates a vanilla plus rating. People in lust do it everywhere, and people who are familiar with each other and think sex is fun experiment. It was an interesting story, but I felt it was not very realistic (except the part about Leila being crazy), and therefore could be leading women on. The whole time I’m waiting for the plot line, for something other than BDSM sex. Some great detail of sexual exploits but I really needed more. In my opinion these books were OK as a story but I was pretty turned off by the rough stuff. The books would have been better with more of a story line and less sex, sex, sex. I haven’t bought an “erotic” book before so I guess that is why all the sex. For me, this book was about a relationship between two people with issues who worked them out together. The couple was able to grow together at their own pace without opinions from their friends or family. I also liked how they compromised with each other. If something didn’t work one way, they would try it the other person’s way to see if it would work. Christian is supposed to be a sexual deviant “Dom/Alpha” and Ana his young curious/virginal “SUB in-training.” Could have been great, sorry, but No! — didn’t turn out that way. These books were awful! I can’t believe I paid so much for such trash! Half of the book was me just flipping pages through the sex acts. This is an easy read. It is not for preteens or even teens. It is a fun mind candy read to take on vacation. I hope they make a movie. I thought it was a romance novel and it went a little bit more at some things I never thought of. I read up to chapter 5 and got to the 6th and I couldn’t read any more the language I never use so I just couldn’t read any more. I am no literary critic. In fact I consider myself a bit of a literary Philistine. But this has to be the worst written book I have ever read. I give it one star because it was such a trainwreck, I was compelled to read it to the very end just to see whether anything exciting ever happens — trust me, it doesn’t. I’m so sure a billionaire, gorgeous, accomplished CEO (who happens to only be 27) is going to be insanely in love with a mousy 22 year old who doesn’t have any real world experience and the emotional maturity of a teenager. It’s like it’s a desperate fantasy book for all those mediocre people living mediocre lives and fantasize that even though they are plain and boring, they too could have the most eligible bachelor on the planet be obsessively in love with them and devote all his waking thoughts and emotions to every little expression they make. This trilogy has got to be some kind of f-ed up conspiracy. I think EL James woke up one day and decided to try an experiment. Oddly enough I’m getting in to this whole conceptual poetry thing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like my professor, and most of the stuff we read is so lifeless and dull it makes me think that I hate everything to do with conceptual poetry. But then I’ll actually do an exercise and it’ll be kinda nice.

Franklin Carmichael

It is time for a Canadian poem

For a poem that will express what it means to be Canadian

We all felt that the time was coming

And now the time has come

As you read the Canadian poem

Think of how it feels to be Canadian

How does it feel? It was hard to express

Before we had the poem

Now the poem has come to us

Now the poem has come across the prairie with its teeth

Its teeth are ready for us

To us comes the Canadian poem

[previously published in Prairie Fire and the Winnipeg Free Press]

Create an Effective Writing Routine

The cornerstone of a productive writing schedule is an effectively crafted writing routine

Serious writers keep a writing schedule — but even the most serious writer has trouble keeping a writing schedule from time to time. (If you don’t think you need a writing schedule, then read my post “Write a Lot by Writing on Schedule.”)

To help you, I’ve written a short (25-page) eBook called 5 Steps to Create and Maintain Your Writing Schedule, which is available for free if you sign up for my newsletter, wherein I reveal the secrets of life and death and time (plus some writing stuff).

Or, alternatively, you can buy it for $7. Your call …

Below, I share a section of the book — on how to establish an effective writing routine.

5 Elements of an Effective Writing Routine

Most writing schedules fail because they are not realistic and the writer becomes discouraged and quits. However, even the best schedule can fail when the routine itself remains flawed.

The most important part of a routine is its existence. The schedule, of course, is the basic element: you write at the same time every day, or the same few times every week. However, it helps to go further and approach each writing session in the same way. The more rigid a routine you have, the better.

Many writers resist establishing a routine. They feel that true creativity can only flow from unfettered process, from creative chaos. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Literally. Ask one. Dig a few questions deep. You’ll see. Either they actually have a routine, which they don’t recognize, or they only create on occasion, miraculously. Often sporadically. And usually terribly.

There are five basic elements of a strong writing routine:

(1) Triggers (2) Focus (3) Planning (4) Work (5) Organization

Let’s look at each more closely. As an example, I will walk through my writing routine. Yours will differ — but think through each of these elements to see how they might work for you.

Triggers

Train your brain and body to get into “writing mode” by establishing a set of triggers. You can use any object, action, or environmental cue as a trigger to help you stick to your writing schedule and prime yourself to produce. You have to be as consistent as possible and only associate the trigger with writing.

I use three triggers. One, an alarm on my phone with a specific ringtone (Elvis Costello’s song “Every Day I Write the Book”). Two, the music of the band Agalloch (I listen to the exact same songs, in the exact same order, every time I write — and never listen to this band otherwise). Three, coffee (I only drink coffee on two occasions: when I am writing or after I have written … so it is halfway between a trigger and a reward).

I’ve heard of people putting on a hat or tie to write, or keeping a specific chair they only use to write. Anne Carson has two desks, one for her day job and scholarship and one for her creative writing.

Focus

Once my coffee is in hand, I shift my phone to “do not disturb” mode — I have it set so that only calls or texts from my wife and daughter come through. Then I move into Scrivener and shift to full-screen mode. Then I start playing Agalloch — and write.

The problem always is distracting myself. Writing on a computer is a bad idea, really, because computers have evolved into distraction-machines. But I’m not willing to go back to writing by hand, so I just have to be disciplined about this. If you find the computer is killing your will to work and leading you astray, then start writing by hand.

Other people use programs to block themselves from the Internet and so on. I try to cultivate discipline, which requires me to have temptation handy, but I might try one of those programs someday. At minimum, turn off or strip down your various automated alerts and notifications.

Planning

Hemingway used to stop writing when he knew he could continue, when he still had the next thing clear in his head (sometimes mid-sentence). I prefer to just spend a few minutes planning, but it amounts to the same thing: developing a clear sense of what you will do before you begin work, rather than flailing.

Sometimes this is just me sipping coffee and thinking, but other times I jot down a few notes by hand on a notebook I keep near the laptop. (I use the same notebook to keep from distracting myself — if I have a random thought like “I gotta email that dude!” or “driveway needs a shovelling” or “You know what would be cool? A rap song about Dostoevsky” then I just jot it down and get back on task.)

When I’m writing fiction or a film script, I spend more time planning. I review my outlines and I sketch out the scene I plan to write next — just hand-write a few story beats with some action or dialogue or random ideas in point form. Planning for a few minutes like this can save you a lot of time in the actual writing session, and boost the amount of writing you are able to get done each time you sit down.

At minimum, you want to decide what to write and maybe how much to write. Perhaps your goal is to write 300 words of your novel. Perhaps you want to edit a poem. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you actually have a plan, rather than just staring at a blank page or screen and freaking out.

I actually plan my writing month in advance, so that when I sit down to write I open up my agenda and see what I’m supposed to be writing. I trust past-me to make the decisions for present-me, because past-me was thinking about the big picture and planning ahead. Present-me gets distracted by pretty lights.

Work

Actually write something. Crazy, right?

The key here is to focus on this part of the routine even if you can’t do anything else. Right now, I’m on the bus — not at home in my office, not drinking coffee, not listening to Agalloch. I was doing all of that stuff, but then I had to go catch a bus. But I didn’t get as many words as I wanted down — I had planned to write 2000 words on this project before I left the house.

Now, I’m on the bus. Still trying to hit those 2000 words. Sometimes, I wake up late, and I don’t even get to start the routine. But I try to focus on doing the work regardless of whether or not I can do the routine.

Organization

It helps to trigger the session’s end by cleaning up. Your physical space and your mental space both benefit from organization. Sometimes I set a timer, if I have to be somewhere else or do something else after my allotted writing time. Other times I just quit when I hit whatever target I had planned to hit.

Once I quit, I clear off the space where I was writing. I clean up so that it’s ready for the next day. The last thing you need is to sit down during your writing time and find your desk cluttered with junk.

Then, suddenly, cleaning off the desk is a more attractive priority than writing. I have a second, smaller desk (more like a big stand) where I keep my printer and a pile of junk that would otherwise be sitting on my desk. When I’m rushed, at the end of my writing session I just throw all my junk off the desk and onto the printer stand.

The exception is anything you will need at your next writing session, which you want to keep at hand. When I’m working on editing proofs, for example, I keep them on my desk so they don’t get lost in my stacks.

Like your schedule, your routine is an ideal. Focus on actually writing even if all else fails.

A minimal routine is best. Actually writing (the work) is the core element.

You may need to experiment and add or subtract things as time goes on. See what works best for you. Be willing to discard elements. I can’t let “no coffee” be my reason to skip a writing session. Neither should you.

If you craft a smart routine, it will serve you well. Ritualize your writing sessions, and even on the bad days your body and mind will drag your flagging spirit through.

Don’t forget your free eBook!

The rest of 5 Steps to Create and Maintain Your Writing Schedule, is available for free if you sign up for my newsletter.

Natalie Zina Walschots on Slasher Films

A Conversation on Writing, Horror, and Genre Subversion

Natalie Zina Walschots is a freelance writer and bailed academic based in Toronto. She writes everything from reviews of science fiction novels and interviews with heavy metal musicians to to in-depth feminist games criticism and pieces of long-form journalism. She’s recently written about her time working as a content creator for an Internet pornography company, the years-long catfishing deception behind popular Gamergate figurehead Alison Prime, and the most misandrist metal records of 2015. She is the author of two books of poetry, and is presently finishing a novel about super villainy and henchpeople, exploring the poetic potential of the notes engine in the video game Bloodborne, and writing a collection of polyamorous fairytales. She also plays a lot of D&D, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction.

Visit Natalie online at http://www.nataliezed.ca or tweet to her at @NatalieZed.

… And buy her books! I recommend her excellent DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains!

The Conversation

(Less of an interview and more of a conversation, as you can see from my first question — I just popped Natalie an email the other day, and this a cleaned up version of what eventually unfolded.)

Hey, you like horror films, right? What are you favourite slasher films? And why do you like them?

I love horror movies. I always have. As a little kid I was fascinated by them — I read a lot of ghost stories and SpecFic and tales of the supernatural kind of stuff, and was just starting to explore some classic horror when I had a pretty intense traumatic experience: my father took me to see Se7en in the theatres when it came out, I was I think 11. He made me sit through the whole thing, a 10 p.m. showing, even though I was so scared that I entirely froze. I remember not sleeping for days and after that the prospect of frightening films was off the table for a really long time. I would still read horror novels, and read the backs of VHS tapes and DVDs longingly, but I was too freaked out to attempt much.

It was in my very early 20s that I started to really explore the genre again. It was William Neil Scott who helped me through it. I explained my problem, that I adored horror narratives but had a trauma thing that I was having a hard time getting over, and so we improvised a course of exposure therapy. Over the course of a couple of years we watched a ton of movies together, starting with classic ’70s slashers (which were more funny than scary, but still foundational) during the day, and gradually ramped up until we watched The Exorcist late at night. That was the moment I felt like I could watch everything I was interested in. Torture porn is still something I can’t handle, the Saw movies are fine but Hostel and anything like that is completely off the table. 

I have a soft spot for slashers because they were the first step in my horror recovery. I like the archetypal nature of them, the fairytale-thick symbolism. Every character is an allegory, every move symbolic. They may as well be the fucking Faerie Queene. Within the very tight bonds of the genre restrictions there’s a lot of creativity and variation, and I enjoy watching all the different ways that the steps play out. There’s both the satisfaction of having expectations met and also the novelty of it changing.

All horror is deeply cathartic for me, but it’s also an issue of relateability. No other genre more accurately reproduces my lived experience about what the world is like. Not in that there are ghosts or whatever, but that things are scary, and challenging, and sometimes straight-up want to maim or rape or kill you. It presents a model for fighting back, for winning, for emerging bloody but unbowed. Horror is also a genre that acknowledges that trauma has consequences, that it makes monsters, it leaves people harder and weirder than they were before, but victory is still possible. The stories are stranger. 

My favourite slasher film is unquestionably Behind The Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. It’s a slasher deconstruction that is super funny and brilliant. It creates a world in which slasher monsters are real, but also allows a bunch of peeks behind the curtain, taking them from supernatural to manufactured. It acknowledges and plays with the archetypes brilliantly. Leslie Vernon, the horror monster in question, is deeply likeable while also being profoundly threatening. Plus the action sequences are genuinely intense. I adore it.

How do you feel about horror films, especially slasher films, as a feminist? What works or doesn’t work for you in horror, from a critical perspective — and is it the same or different from what works for you as a fan?

My feelings about horror as a feminist and as a fan are inextricably bound together, and I don’t (usually) find it helpful to separate them. What works for me, in the context of horror, is that they represent, with an accuracy that no other genre approaches, exactly how harrowing, frightening and dangerous the world can be. It’s the only place I see the fear reinforced as real and valid rather than something to dismiss or ridicule.

In particular, the fears of women (and children) are shown to be real and valid, and those who dismiss them do so at their extreme peril. There are monsters, they are trying to get you, and ignoring that gets you dead. Only fighting back and treating those fears as real leads to survival, and the sooner you get with that program, the better your chances of living will be. Women are not only cast as believable characters and reliable narrators, but also tend to be the most resilient characters (the Final Girl trope is an excellent example of this).

What I struggle with, as a feminist and a fan, are places where the genre conventions are still kind of sexist and shitty — like purity myths, the equation of sexual abstinence with virtue, and the likelihood that being sexually active will get you killed off first. The characters tend to be very archetypal, which is great in some circumstances and problematic in others. I also struggle with certain kinds of violence, but I can also find it very cathartic. It’s complicated!

One thing I find interesting and perhaps progressive in modern slasher-horror is how it borrows Gothic conventions but transmutes the “woman imperilled by a male monster and saved by a male hero” into “heroic woman imperilled by a male monster.” At the same time, it’s troublesome how these final girls tend to be masculinized or de-feminized.

I go back to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as perhaps my favourite of the genre (before it really congealed as a genre) because among other things the final girl is clearly feminine and sexual, not playing into the purity myth you mention (and yet, of zero sexual interest to the male killers!), and in that film more men than women are killed. It also interests me that the male killer, Leatherface, is feminized to some degree, especially when he’s wearing his female face, although Carol Clover has pointed out that this is common.

All of this brings me to another, related question: What do you think of female monsters? When do you find them engaging and perhaps admirable versus ridiculous or offensive?

This is a great question!

I LOVE female monsters, and I think there have been some excellent ones recently. Three of the horror movies that I’ve seen recently that have scared me the most, and that I also adore, are Mama, The Babadook, and Goodnight Mommy. I find monstrous mothers especially fascinating. I think that these monsters tackle very complicated questions of love, attachment, obsession, abuse and vulnerability in very different and eloquent ways.

I don’t think female monsters are inherently more offensive somehow than male monsters, not at all. 

It seems to me like a strain of horror presents female monsters who operate to illustrate cultural fears of women that transgress social roles. I think of the Arthur Machen novella “The Great God Pan,” which was a touchstone for both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King — the monster there is a half-human woman who has a lot of social power and mobility and is seen as a corrupting force, specifically to be corrupting men, and in many ways I think it’s an anti-feminist story about these “horrible” Victorian women that don’t need men.

I feel like women don’t get to be monsters in the same way as men. They represent social fears about women more than being “simply” horrible. Like in Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is a monster but his male-ness is almost beside the point, except insofar as he relates specifically to Clarice Starling, whereas a female Lecter would be seen as illustrating something about how women move in the world.

Am I generalizing too much? Do you get this same sense that women don’t get to “be monsters” in the same way in horror, where the gender issue is always firmly and primarily in play? 

Oh I disagree — I think a lot of monsters embody “maleness” pretty profoundly. In particular, a lot of male monsters embody the worst aspects of patriarchal violence: they penetrate, destroy, do violence, annihilate agency, violate. I feel like a lot of horror movies actually succeed by putting men in situations that women face regularly: being seen as prey, stalked by a predator, in danger of being injured, raped, kidnapped, destroyed, etc.

I think men and women are transformed into monsters differently. Male monsters are often extreme versions of the violence we see in the world — serial killers transformed into something supernatural, obsessive exes turned into ghosts, etc. Female monsters tend to be vessels that pain has been poured into until they have been transformed and broken into something terrible, or monstrous incarnations of things like motherhood.

That’s an interesting and (from a writer’s perspective) useful distinction. Something I’m working on is trying to produce a novel modelled in some ways on slasher films but with a female monster that is NOT one of these “vessels of pain” — someone completely without weakness, who also doesn’t serve as a cipher for male fears of women (often both get conflated — like in Dracula where Lucy works both as an “evil mother” who is feeding on children at night as the “bloofer lady” and as representing male fears of women’s sexuality).

One of the things I am struggling with is that I wonder if my goal is possible. Will any female monster who isn’t “broken” and a victim just be coded by the reader as representing some fear of women themselves, whether I like it or not, even if I strive to avoid this? Does the culture just fear powerful women so much that the gender issue overrides anything else?

I try to just work and not think too much about things as I work but it’s always a concern in my mind, how things will be “delivered” to the reader, if you know what I mean.

Man, it’s really tough — trying not to at once feed into fears about women (bloodthirsty sirens! witches!) or transform them into monstrous victims (rape ghosts! dead mothers!). The thing is, monsters are monsters for a reason: they tap into something about our culture that scares us. And that usually means playing with stereotypes to some degree. I think the key is just to do is smartly and critically, and make is as weird and complex as possible.

On another note — are you finding yourself in a similar position with your novel-in-progress on the supervillian “hench” figure … how do you handle the weight of the existing ways the genre and gender inside the genre is already coded, and maybe coded against what you’re trying to do?

In Hench, I am embracing every part of the genre in terms of the structure, but in terms of the actual embodiment of that structure, I am blowing up as much as I can. Which means it’s all about comics, of course, but there are no women in refrigerators. On the surface it appears to be about a superhero and supervillain duking it out, but really it’s about female friendship and recovering from trauma.

Thanks for talking, Natalie. This is really helpful.