Category Archives: writing

Banging on the keyboard…

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I think it’s safe to say that among anyone who writes either professional or as a hobby, there’s a general consensus that first drafts suck. They suck badly. Reading the first cut makes you want to shred everything you’ve done, start again from a blank page, and get it right this time. Then you take a deep breath and remember that then that would be your first draft and it would still suck. The only way to get past the suck is to finish the first draft, even if you know it’s full of holes, inconsistencies, and dialog that reads like English is your second language. It’s a vicious cycle, I tell ya.

The fact is I’m nowhere close to even the draftiest of first drafts. What I’ve got are eight chapters more or less vaguely connected by the slightest strand of plot. With enough time and attention that might be just enough framework to build a halfway decent story. Because I’m nowhere patient enough to wait until I have 60-70,000 well sculpted words, I’m adjusting the target in order to declare victory in small doses.

In the Victorian era, novels were published in small segments and often appeared in magazines before the entire novel was printed as a standalone volume. Using the past as a guide, my new target is to craft a story in four or five major sections and release each serially as they reach a satisfactory level of “done-ness.” With e-publishing, that seems to be a perfectly common way of doing business. And let me tell you, 15,000 coherent words are a hell of a lot easier to string together than 60,000 of even the most rambling, nonsensical words you can imagine. It doesn’t hurt that you can sell each individual part of the serial as well as the final product – $.99 per segment, $2.99 for the whole, buy the set and save 25% off the serial issue price. Yeah, I think that’s the ticket.

Some writers, it seems, are blessed with inspiration. I’m not one of those lucky few, but what I lack in inspiration, I more than make up for with sheer determination to throw words against the page until they stick in some semblance of order. Just think of me as a million monkeys randomly banging away at the keyboard. Eventually I’m almost surely going to stumble my way into Shakespeare territory… although I’d settle for Suzanne Collins or Stephanie Meyer’s neighborhood, too.

Feelings…

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Sometimes it feels like I can’t get the words down on the page fast enough. This isn’t one of those times. Every word this week has been a struggle. Somewhere between the brain and keyboard most of them seem to get lost. Most of the “how to be a better writer books” tell you that you just have to push through these times and keep doing it. I take the more pragmatic approach. If my inner muse isn’t being very helpful, I just do something else until an idea jumps out at me. That might not be the professional writer’s approach to getting the job done, but conveniently I have the excuse of not being a professional writer. It also has the benefit of letting me sneak away to do things like laundry and mowing the lawn without feeling guilty about not hitting mu daily word count. Maybe it’s not the best approach, but it seems to work for me at the moment.

On an average week, I try to write at least 7000 words with an outside goal of 10,000. The blog here usually accounts for 1500 of those words. The rest go towards different book ideas and occasional contributions to other blogs. I’ve cracked 7000 a few times, but I’ve never come close to besting 10,000 words in a week. Maybe if I got really focused, didn’t go to work, and spent a week doing nothing but having good ideas, I’d hit the target. In a world that wants me to keep doing those other things, though, I suppose I’ll just have to leave it as a goal.

What was the point of all this? Well, with only 2500 words under my belt for this week, I’m feeling a little less than productive. Maybe a nice rainy weekend will be just what I need to kick the writing bug back into gear. It’s either that or lose an entire weekend to Call of Duty. Sigh. This is one of those times when being easily distracted sucks.

A matter of motivation…

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In 1885, President Grant was dying of throat cancer but somehow found the motivation to write his two volume memoirs. By way of contrast, in 2012 I’ve got a head cold and can’t seem to find the motivation to write more than a half dozen lines at a time. Maybe it’s a generational difference in work ethic or possibly I’d have a lot more to say if my body were trying to destroy me from the inside. Either way, I don’t have nothin’ to say about nothin’ tonight. Sometimes that’s for the best.

Output…

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As a rule, I try to write 300-500 words a day. That doesn’t include anything I write for this blog or others I contribute to from time to time. It definitely doesn’t include anything I write at work – Nothing is more hostile to good writing than applying the Army writing manual. And it absolutely doesn’t include texts, emails, or other sneaky ways you can easily get into that range. As with most things that I actually enjoy doing, the biggest issue is figuring out when the hell I actually have time to sit down and focus on just one thing at a time. That’s not a complaint, just a statement of fact.

The reality is, I might actually hit that goal once or twice during the week if I’m lucky. Weekends are a little easier to manage. Usually after letting the dogs out and getting them fed, I can settle in for an hour or two early on Saturday and SUnday mornings and punch out about 1000 words without too much trouble. Mornings seem to be best for me. I’ve gone back and reread things I’ve written in the hour before bed the next morning and let’s just say it’s not my best work. Not even close. Back when I was a history major, I wrote my best stuff after midnight. A decade’s worth of crawling out of bed to the 5AM alarm seems to have brought that to an end once and for all. I don’t really mind that so much, though, as long as some point in the day is still a good time for it.

Picking up aluminum cans on the side of the road would probably be a more lucrative use of time, but something keeps me coming back to the keyboard day after day. As soon as I figure out why that is, I’ll probably have found my best seller.

Write like the wind…

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I’ve found an interesting thing about writing. The more I do it, the more I want to do it. I’m pretty sure there some chemical reaction in the brain governing this sort of thing, but it feels damned good to see the written word fill up a piece of paper that doesn’t have anything to do with a quarterly report, status update, or policy memo. Since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, I’m finding that the problem is that there always seems like there’s more to say than there is time to say it. Let’s just say that this is leading to some good stuff, but also some bleary eyed mornings.

Someone asked me not long ago what I do for fun. This is apparently it. Some people spend their free time building models or playing kickball, baking, or candlestick making. It seems that for now, this is going to be my most time consuming hobby. It keeps me off the streets and I can do it without needing to go out and deal with large groups of people, so maybe this is exactly what I’ve been looking for after all. Some of you extroverts will scoff and say it’s not a real hobby, but remember to be nice or I’ll blog about you. And no one wants that.

Interestingly, the more I write, the more I read; which strikes me as a strange circumstance since both are inherently time consuming activities in their own right. It’s possible that this is a passing interest, but five years of active blogging, and a new found interest in e-publishing would point to something different. Maybe I will lose interest at some point, but for now I’ll write like the wind because you never know when you’ll get hit broadside by an insufferable case of writer’s block.

Work in progress…

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I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I was working on a real live book. Yes, I’m still working on it. So far I’ve managed to keep in from slipping onto the vast list of projects I’ve started and have every intention of getting back to some day. In case anyone is interested, here are the vital statistics to date: 21 pages (in MS Word format), 82 paragraphs, 11,690 words, and 53,999 non-space characters. Don’t think that’s a lot? Open a blank single spaced Word document and start writing about on any topic on which you consider yourself an authority. Then give me a call when you’ve reached your 21st page of block text… but no cheating. Make sure that’s with standard one inch margins and 12 pitch font. I won’t even make you account for the side notes, comments, or any of the extraneous reference information you end up putting together in the process. After a couple of months living with this work in progress, I’m starting to understand why Hemingway drank.

So far, I’m finding that what works best for me is to just sit down and throw up as many words on the page as possible. Even then, if I can manage a couple of hundred words a day, I’m doing pretty well. I’m trying to write blog posts, comments, and other stuff too, so I’m hoping that it’s more about quality than quantity. If I can keep up this breakneck pace, I should be finished the first rough cut in another 233 days. Sigh. That means editing in the spring and then fine tuning and polishing the final draft in the summer. It all seems perfectly plausible as long as I don’t stop to think about it for too long. Mostly, though, the plan is to just keep writing until I run out of things to say and then decide what needs to come out or what needs beefed up. It’s not elegant, but it’s at least some kind of logic.

I started writing as a catharsis. It was a means of ejecting the poisoned thoughts that I could never openly blog about onto the page and not be particularly worried about how I said it or who I said it about. It’s evolved into a slightly better rounded discussion of my observation of good and bad leadership, the philosophy of management, and the experiences I’ve had with them during a particularly problematic point in my career. Since it’s proven to be largely impossible to untangle the events from the people involved I’ve mostly stopped trying. If it ever sees the light of day, I suppose I’ll just have to accept that some people are going to be pissed off. It doesn’t don’t know if any way to write other than based on my memories of the events as they happened. Lord knows I’ve got a mountain of supporting documentation for most of it… and even what isn’t well documented can be confirmed by eye witness accounts.

The real question, I suppose, is whether I’ll have the guts to actually let anyone see it once it has gotten something in the proximity of finished, which I’m thinking should be some time 60-70,000 words from now. On a personal level, seeing something like this go to print would be a validation of time spent and misspent. If I put on my rational professional hat, well, there’s a difference between burning your bridges and setting fire to the whole damned city. As usual, the parts that will tend to cause trouble are also the most interesting. Maybe I should change the names, call it fiction, and really let the dogs out to run. This is probably one of those times when I should wish I didn’t have a mile-wide malcontent streak.

Getting my write on…

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I’ve toyed with wanting to write a book since I was in high school. Where in most endeavors there’s an overwhelming focus on “the team,” there’s something appealing to me in the thought of writing as an individualized pursuit; of me versus the blank page. That’s an idealized version of course, particularly when you delve into the world of publishing, but when you’re writing without giving a damn if any publisher ever sees it, it’s definitely a one-on-one experience.

If blogging instantly gratifies my narcissistic tendencies, filling page after page of blank “paper” is the ultimate expression of feeling like one against the world. There’s no room for narcissism there, because unless you essentially win the lottery, the only person you’re writing for is yourself. Writing is really heady stuff like that. Starting out with nothing more than a vague idea, struggling with how to even start writing 80,000 words when you can barely scrape together two or three hundred words on any other “good” day, finding the time between work and the other minutia of life, but eventually discovering your voice – It’s some feeling once you’ve found your own rhythm… and then it’s just you and the blank page.

It’s an ongoing project and one that I’ve given more time to in the last month than I have in the last ten years. It’s something I’ve always felt the need to do, even without really knowing why. I don’t have any delusions about writing a great American novel and the chances that I’ll serve up chicken soup for any demographic subgroup is pretty limited. For now, I’m just writing because I feel a need to write. There’s a story too good to be fiction milling around in my head and if I can manage to find the words, I think a few people might just be interested in reading it. All I need to do now is find two or three uninterrupted hours a day to keep up some kind of pace. I’ll keep you posted.

The process…

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I wish I had more time to just sit and write. There are always enough things that need to get done that writing never seems to fall at the top of the list, but there are still hundreds of ideas, even one or two big ones, that are just screaming to get out. Finding the time to massage them through from concept to notes to drafts to reality, though, has been the challenge that I haven’t been able to overcome.

One of the definitive characteristics of writers, of course, is that they write. They have a process. My process is mostly jamming 150-300 words down on a page in whatever free minutes of the evening I have available. It’s hard to work out the definitive history of anything 150 words at a time. And thinking about telling the epic tale of the rise and fall of a small government organization a paragraph at a time? Forget about it. You’ll end up with pages of notes and a couple of intro paragraphs and then lose focus completely.

For me, the process is not working. Maybe I’m not supposed to write an epic. Maybe the story is supposed to come together in 200 word segments; one blog post at a time. Maybe I need to change direction completely with my idea of what it means to write. Whatever the case, I need to find a new process – one that works better for me and one where I can start seeing the threads of the story coming together. It could be time for a change of focus around here.

Draft…

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In my line of work, the written word is pretty much our stock-in-trade. Now there are always going to be good writers and bad writers, but all I really expect from anyone is the ability to be an average writer. It’s technical documentation and policy, I don’t need James Michener or Stephen King here. 100 times out of 100, what I’m looking for is a solid draft of whatever document I asked requested. What I don’t need is someone asking every 30 seconds if this or that sentence structure was better or if “and” was preferable to “or”. You’re asking these things without giving me context… and that makes the questions seem random and chaotic rather than just annoying.

I’m trying to go easy because I fully understand that it takes a bit of time to really get how things are supposed to flow. That’s fine. But when I ask for a draft, that’s really all I need. I’ll make the editorial decisions and rearrange sentence structure on the fly. That’s why they pay me the not-as-big-bucks as I’d make in the private sector.

 

Editorial Note: This is the first in a series of previously unpublished blog’s appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Missing Muse…

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They say that writers generally have something that drives them to write. They have some kind of muse that guides the creative process. Regrettably, any kind of muse that I have ever had is eluding me at the moment. I can’t think of any new ideas, let alone any that might be marginally interesting for someone else to read. I guess this is the infamous writer’s block. It’s not like I’m trying to churn out the great American novel or even less than insightful pop history. All I really want to be able to do is sit down and pound out a few pithy words on the day that was. It would be helpful if this happened about four nights a week, but I’m willing to settle for three.

So, yeah, when it comes to blogging, I’m almost completely blocked. If anyone has any recommendations, I’m entertaining all ideas at this point. Fortunately, this block hasn’t impacted my ability to churn out page upon page of policy, recommendations, and email, so work proceeds unabated.