Sue Perry's Blog: Required Writing, page 44

You Can Talk About Writing – Too Much

If I talk about what I am writing – or planning to write – I make the writing more difficult and put the piece at risk of getting set aside, ne’er to be finished. It doesn’t matter what the listener’s reaction is – enthusiasm or boredom, support or disdain – sharing the ideas damages my process of converting ideas to fiction.  After I talk about writing, I simply feel less urgency to get it done.

Seems like it would be fun to brainstorm with other writers or use them as sounding boards. But  I’m not sure I could even talk to the cats without jeopardy. Maybe I could talk to a mirror? Never mind about that. Creepy.

Am I the only one in this situation? That doesn’t seem possible. Other writers, which side of this fence are you on?

You Can Think About Writing – Too Much

I do a lot of planning for every novel. I have the whole thing roughly laid out before I start writing and I decide what I want to accomplish each day before I begin. And yet, I never sit down to think about my writing. All my best ideas come when I am brushing my teeth or weeding the garden. Then, when I do sit down to write, the unplanned, unanticipated bits are so often the best products of any writing session. Furthermore, if I need to solve a particular writing problem, I can’t sit down and stare at the screen or the page.  I have to take a hike instead, or do some housework, or go to sleep.

All of which makes me conclude that my un-, sub-, and super-*conscious brain is a better writer than my conscious one. And I speculate that all the planning and the structure are craft equivalents of brushing my teeth: they give my conscious brain something to do while the rest of my brain gets the real job done.

*Damn, now where did I get that phrasing from? “Un-, sub-, and supernatural forces” I think that is how the original went … something by Stoppard, I believe… Rosencrantz?

My Epitaph Collection (vol. 6)

Death comes to all of us and yet.

They told me to expect the unexpected but here I am.

My Unrequited Career as a Musician

I have had so many jobs, and quite a few careers. Writing is my calling, so that has persisted through change after change of day job. But if I could have just one job – and if I got my choice – I would be a musician. I guess I would need to be a musician who writes songs, as I’ll always need to write.  Yes, that’s a plan I could live with.

The only problem with my being a musician is that I’m no good at it. No talent. No vision. Incredibly average voice. Skill that rarely breaks past the rudimentary barrier. My best hope of being a musician was back in the early days of punk,when desire trumped ability. I don’t know why I wasn’t in a band back then, say a goof of a band like Heather once had in my novel Scar Jewelry. I suppose I lacked the right kind of cojones.

All four of my novels (three completed, one in progress) have musicians in them and two of them have music as a focus. I only just noticed this as a pattern. Sometimes the author is the last to know.

Add an -s, lose an -en?

For some reason, while correcting a typo, it occurs to me that a woman of many virtues may not be a woman of virtue and this suddenly brings back a memory from high school, where I had a friend who read old writing about knights and dragons and so forth. She was convinced that the writing had code words, and in particular, maid and maiden were not interchangeable. After a maiden got deflowered, she was a maid, per my friend. So, in our high school conversations about losing our virginity – which were incessant, for a while – we used the coded shorthand, losing our “-en”.

I am a Populist and This is My Time

I have always been a populist.

Populist: represented or connected with the ideas and opinions of ordinary people. (Cambridge)

Populist: a believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people. (Merriam-Webster)

(Actually those definitions seem distinct and different to me – and there is a separate issue about how I balance populism with curmudgeonry – but don’t let me distract myself.)

How do I know I am a populist? As a film student, I wrote my thesis on Frank Capra’s populist masterpiece Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Watching an interview, I’d rather hear from the man-on-the-street than a celebrity.  And so forth.

This is such an exciting time to be a populist – consider just these few examples of ways that populist movements are changing our world:

The Occupy kids started discussions that now infuse mainstream politics.
The Arab Spring is still toppling governments.
Self-published books have an escalating share of the publishing industry.
Open-source software expands coding in so many directions.
Popularity bred by browser clicks has become so important that people now tout their expertise with “viral marketing”.
And – sustaining all the above and more – social media give voice and influence to everybody.

I can’t wait to see what comes next.

P.S. What else should be on my list?

Fear of Blogging, the Sequel

When I started this blog, I feared it would eat into my novel-writing time. Two weeks into the experiment, all is well on that front. Creating and writing the blog turns out to be like anything else:

make it a part of daily life
don’t try to do it all at once
identify what makes it fun and don’t let that slip away.

As for how the blog impacts my new novel, if anything blogging may have helped by giving me an outlet for stray ideas.

Now I’ve got a new concern (maybe I’ve always got to have a concern). When people Like or Follow my blog, I of course check out their blogs and that has been a revelation. There are so many interesting and informative and inspiring blogs! I could spend all my time reading them.

So I find it easy to Like, but hard to Follow.  The latter feels like such a serious commitment. What’s the point of following a blog if you don’t stay engaged with every post? Still, I don’t mind letting posts flow and slip away on Facebook. What’s the difference? Maybe that blogs are writing and Fb is chatting?

Blogging for Self-Awareness

I recently started this blog with an intent to write about, well, blogging, and my novels, and the writing process. Two weeks into the blog, I have more often proposed epitaphs or waxed wise about getting older. Maybe I’ve got a preoccupation with death, previously undetected.

I hope I’m not turning into my father, who was so fixated on death that for decades he kept running tallies of how many friends and acquaintances he had lost in all the groups that mattered to him, including WWII vets, high school alumni, and fellow retirees of his aerospace corporation. Although I wouldn’t resist developing some of his late-in-life eccentricities. After years as a rigidly rational engineer, he became convinced that UFOs are among us and, given a few more healthy years, he might have become a UFO chaser.

Old Lady Status

Uh oh. I just went in my front yard wearing a nightgown. I believe that immediately qualifies me for old lady status. And by this I do no refer to the old ladies who are the special consorts on Sons of Anarchy.

 

 

Also, Rock On!

For my birthday, a friend gave me a book about the Replacements (my all-time favorite band). With the book came a card that read

Happy birthday.  Also, rock on!

Now, this has a certain poignancy, because she and I are both getting pretty frigging old by this point. But I mention it here simply because I so love the way she put it.  Also, rock on!

P.S. The book is The Replacements, All over But the shouting: an oral history by Jim Walsh.