Hard habit to break

By: Joelle Charbonneau

I’m a writer.  Which means…drum roll please….I write.  No big surprise.  Right? I admit I haven’t been at this writing thing as long as some.  I wasn’t an English or journalism major in college.  I didn’t dream of a career that involved sitting behind a computer making stuff up.  Heck, even had I dreamed of it, I would never have thought anyone would pay me to do it. 

A little under 10 years ago I decided to try my hand at writing.  For whatever reason, when I started writing, I did the bulk of my work in the afternoon or in the late parts of the evening.  I freely admit that I am not a morning person.  Or, perhaps more important, while I am able to make beds, get breakfast on the table and fish clothes that match out of my closet, I find my brain doesn’t appreciate being asked to be creative in the A.M. 

As most of you probably know, I have a toddler in the house and I consider myself lucky that at 4 years of age, the tot still enjoys taking an afternoon nap.  This has allowed me to continue the writing pattern that began long ago.  Write in the afternoon (when the tot is napping) and continue writing in the evening (when the tot is asleep). 

Yippee!  Right?

Right!  Well…sort of.  Kind of…

See, while this writing pattern has been successful for me thus far, I didn’t have the amount of work e-mails to answer nor several books a year to copy edit, proof, tweak jacket copy and the myriad of other details that go along with a book’s production.  I also didn’t need to write several manuscripts in any given year.  I do now.  And though having this work is thrilling, I am finding that my current writing habits don’t allow enough time for me to get as much done as needs to be done in any given day. 

So, I’m working on changing my habits.  Every morning the tot has swim lessons.  When we started the summer, I brought a book to the pool and read for the 40 minutes the kid splashed and kicked.  In the last week, I have packed up the laptop and fired it up poolside.  I’ve also brought the laptop to the park and sat on the porch with it while the kid does the kiddie pool routine.

The results of this experiment have been mixed.  While I am more than willing to be productive, part of my brain is determined that the routine I have used for so many years is the way I write best.  That I can’t be as sharp or funny or…whatever…during different times of day in places where there are so many distractions.

But I am determined to persevere.  Which is where you come in.  Have you ever had to change a habit and found yourself doubting whether or not it will work for you?  Do you NEED to exercise at a certain time or day?  Do you only write well when you first wake up?  Am I the only one who feels this pull to keep doing what has been successful in the past?  And if you have changed a personal habit – how long did it take before it felt natural or before you stopped doubting it was a good choice?  Trust me – with 3 more manuscripts to write by summer of next year, I really need to know!

How Do You Know If You're a Writer?

by
Scott D. Parker

Am you a writer or merely a reader?

Do you ever have doubts about your writing? I have them all the time, and those doubts hinder my process as a writer. In fact, they get to looming so large that the doubts themselves begin to overshadow the actual produced-writing output. That's where I have been for some time, unfortunately. It's gotten so bad that I missed a great opportunity, two, in fact, and am regretting it.

Writers and how-to books all pretty much say the same thing: the only way to overcome doubts on your writing is to write. No matter how small or how bad, the mere act of writing will win out. I don't know about y'all, but when I'm in this doubt valley, nothing seems to go right. To use the old analogy, even one candle can make some of the darkness disappear. And, a few years ago, when I was blogging on a near daily basis and writing prose every day, I had a virtual bonfire going. The darkness was blasted by the bright light of my constant output. But, as time wore on, as life intruded and I didn't give my writing life its due, the fire started to ebb. More and more, each day I didn't write, the fire dwindled until I was left, frankly, with only a small candle, barely keeping me from total darkness. And, in the writing world, what amounts to a little candle more often than not for me proves futile.

I've been reading a lot, so I'm never far away from books, but my writing life has suffered. I'll readily admit that the perfectionist streak in me is a huge culprit. I've had writing sessions in the past where the tale I produced in one sitting went on to publication or won awards. I say that not to boast, but to indicate where I'm coming from. If I can do that, the doubting part of my brain says to me, then all material in one sitting should be that way. Right?

Wrong.

I've been working on a collaborative story for awhile now with a fellow author. We've gone back and forth, draft after draft, honing and fine tuning. When I had delivered my last comments, I thought the story good enough. I considered the story publishable and thought it should be submitted. My co-author thought otherwise, and enlisted the help of an outside reviewer. A week or so ago, I received the marked-up draft of the story from the outside reviewer as well as the four-page list of additional comments. Four pages of additional comments, mind you, on a story I considered okay, ready to be let loose on the world.

Man, was I wrong. Again.

In reviewing the comments and suggestions, things that I took for granted were exposed. Turns of phrase that I thought pretty clever were proven to be corny and deleted. Logic flow, something I considered, um, logical, proved illogical. In short, the story that I had considered good enough (key phrase there) to be submitted was, in fact, not.

And the doubts, those black-shadowed things that ooze and creep upon you, got that much closer to extinguishing the small candle I was barely keep alight. Had the story been one where only I was the author, I might have just chalked it up to another reason why I should just stick to reading and not bother writing.

But I wasn't the sole author of the tale. I had a co-author who needed my help to complete our joint venture. And he assigned it to me. So, like it or not, I had to make the corrections. So, I started to do so, and I made an on-the-spot decision that has, so far, proved crucial. Instead of merely accepting the changes and adding/subtracting new material, I opened a blank file and started re-typing the entire story. In this way, much like when I used to write longhand and keyed in the words to the computer, I was able to accomplish two things. One, make easier the decisions suggested by the outside reviewer. And, truth be told, I've not accepted them all, but their mere presence has given me room to think and to expand the paragraphs where the reviewer indicated. More importantly, however, for me, is the process of typing in the words. The rhythm of typing, the clickedy-clack of the keys being struck is hypnotic, and it's been too long since I've heard those sounds. Now, granted, I am learning to dictate my material, but nothing beats the sounds of a keyboard being struck. When I'm going and my fingers are flying, I can make those storytelling decisions much easier than were I merely accepting the changes. It's a little like reading a story aloud, which I do for every tale I write. By retyping the words or reading them aloud, I'm able to pick up the flow better, and the story is better as a result.

This thing I'm doing now--I'm working through the entire draft and I'm not yet finished--is working. It is reminding me of the *process* of writing that, frankly, I let slide and fall by the wayside. This comes not as a revelation to most of y'all--and I've known it all along, I've just ignored it. Not everything I write in one sitting is good enough to be put out there. Not everything I spend seven drafts on is good enough for publication. Like it or not, there's a lot of stuff I write that will only have an audience of one…and I've already read it.

But the action of this particular revision and this particular style of revision has reminded me of something. I am a writer, and not merely a reader. I am a creator of stories, be they fiction or non-fiction. I am made that way, and it's been a real pleasure to be reminded of that fact.

That sound you hear? It's the sound of a match being struck on the matchbox and the flame igniting. Now, there are two candles, and the darkness ebbed just a little bit more.

With Great Power Comes Great... oh, you know this already...

By Russel D McLean

Those of you know me, know that I’m a bit of a geek. So you can guess that this week (The Literary Critic passed on this one, surprisingly) I was off to see The Amazing Spiderman.

There’s a lot to like in the movie (and a couple of bits – yes, corny and inexplicably coincidental crane operators, I’m looking at you – that’s maybe not worth liking so much) and Garfield gets Peter Parker in a way that Tobey Maguire never really did. And for all that his motivation was paper-thin, I kinda dug Rhys Ifans as The Lizard, and really liked the way they shied away from some of the really obvious stuff (like immediately adding major villains or throwing in J Jonah Jamieson before he was really needed).

But here’s the thing – rebooting the series or not, did we really need another origin?

We all know the story of how Spiderman became Spiderman. And a lot of critics of the movie are asking why we needed to go through the whole thing again, even with some tiny twists to make things a bit different this time out (such as Pete’s dad running away due to the Very Bad People wanting to use his scientific discoveries, or Spidey not doing his wrestling schtick before Uncle Ben died).

It’s a fair question – why do we need another origin? Don’t we get it already? Couldn’t we just start with Peter all Spideyed out?

Well, we could have. After all, Tim Burton successfully managed to avoid an “origin” in his Batman movie. But then the more I thought about it the more I realised why, when reintroducing a new take on a popular character, origin stories may be necessary as much for the “reimagineers” as for anyone else.

You see Origin stories – especially superhero origin stories – provide a great template for conflict, rising action and all that good stuff that actors, directors and, yes, writers, love getting their teeth into. We get to see a protagonist go through a period of intense change. And we, as the audience, get to root for that change. We want to see Peter overcome his own nerdiness and indecision to become the hero we know and love. We want to see him come through the grief over his uncle’s death and become the guy in the red and blue suit who’s always on hand with some webbing and a quip. We want to see how he grows into his powers. And we want to be wowed when he finally realises his potential.

Of course, the story after all of that is still interesting. But its more difficult to paint in dramatic terms. When a guy’s already a hero, you have to start creating bigger and more absurd obstacles for him to face. When this happens, you quickly find yourself in a Batman and Robin or a Spiderman 3, where suddenly nothing matters anymore except the spectacle and the cheap straw men lined up against your hero. When you root for  the hero only because you know he’s the hero, its more difficult to wring drama out of the situation. Especially when you’re not writing a weekly or monthly serial and you only have the audience’s attention for two hours every three or four years.

After all there comes a point where character development gets tricky. The last go on the Spiderman franchise resulted in two somewhat interesting films about a man trying to find who he was and a third film that jumped through hoops to try and give us something our hero couldn’t handle, ending up unbelievable and more than a little daft.

My point is that I’m as irked as anyone that they just went straight back to retelling the story of Spiderman from the beginning, but from a dramatic standpoint, I understand why they did. Just look at any long-running character and you’ll realise that their most interesting moments were in the early days, when they were developing and changing. Fiction has to be about change. But there comes a point when your character cannot continue to move forward and cannot be subject to the same kind of rapid and interesting conflict that he came across in the early days.

And when that happens you have three choices:

You either keep going and let the character go a little stale knowing that you’ve already bought the audience loyalty.

You end the series.

Or you reboot.

Sometimes in subtle ways – the comics, after all, are always tinkering with origins or changing the rules through some insane narrative devices.

And sometimes, as with The Amazing Spiderman, in ways that are utterly unsubtle but perhaps, for the creative team to feel comfortable, entirely necessary.