Writing With Abandon

If you've happened to glance at my Twitter feed over the past few days, you'll know that, so far, my NaNoWriMo is going quite well. I had a bit of a false start when I was sick on Sunday, but since Monday, I've managed a pretty solid pace, writing more than a thousand words every day. It's been very rewarding, most of all because I really feel like a writer again. That sounds a little bit weird, but prior to this project, and this blog, I wasn't doing much writing at all: over the summer, I only completed one short story.

Now, though, I have the feeling of writing every day, of taking the time to write and just really reconnecting with my craft and my identity. I know that I owe a very, very large debt to this blog assignment, because it's this blog that's taught me the discipline of writing even when I don't feel like it. There have been so many times over the past two months that I just really, really did not want to sit down in front of the computer and try to think of something to say so I could meet my requirement. But I did, and I'm glad that I did, because it's taught me a lot of how to focus and how to force myself to do the work even when I don't want to do so. I fully believe, evidenced by all the half-started projects and randomly updates blogs I've done in the past, that I wouldn't be here, in this state right now, if not for all of this.

You might say that makes me a little bit grateful. And also, oddly enough, a little bit nervous. What will happen when the semester ends and I know that I'm no longer being graded on this? Will my good habit revert back to my slothful, non-writing ways? I certainly hope not! I think, however, that I'm in a good position now, because even without the prospect of a grade, I've come to really look forward to this time spent writing and reflecting, and rambling, and trying to be funny.

Best of all, the combined projects of this blog and this NaNoWriMo thing have taught me how to keep writing through all the past fears and insecurities that would hamstring my story efforts. I can't even begin to count how many times I'd be working on a story, only to wonder "hmm, that doesn't sound as good" or "oh, I should go back and fix this one part." And then I'd never make any progress, because I'd be too busy worrying about how "good" something was, instead of how "done" it was getting.

Now, though? Now I'm just writing. I'm writing, knowing full well that there are some things I've written over the past week that are quite awful, that don't flow, or don't make sense, or repeat a word. And I don't care. Because I want to keep moving forward, I have to keep moving forward if I want to have any hope of finishing the story. It's a very exciting way to write, because it's a very gratifying way of writing. I'm not worried about being "good" or about living up to any expectations including and especially my own. I'm just exploring. I'm just doing. After so many years of writer's anxiety, it feels a lot like freedom.

I know that writers give each other all kinds of advice, and a lot of times, they give each other the same advice. And the problem with advice is that it's never as effective until you have that moment where you really grasp it on your own, the moment when you experience it and suddenly, everything clicks for you. So I know that by me telling you all to stop worrying and just write won't really amount to any real effect, because we've all been told that by the great writers who have answered when they were asked how they do it.

Even so, here's my advice: if you haven't tried it, write with abandon. Write without wearing any pants or shoes, write like crazy, write and absolutely do not care or stop or worry. Just go for it. Embrace it.

I don't know if this story will be any good. I don't even know if it will be readable. But what I do know is that I've never had this much fun in my life writing before, and that's not just something, in my opinion: it's everything.

It's Difficult to Write and Wear Pants at the Same Time

It's really difficult to write in a place or while I'm in a mood that one could describe as "uneasy."

These past few days, I've been writing from home, on my own computer, which is set in my own little lair of creative chaos and other junk. I've talked about the writing space before, which you can find in the archives if you want to look (I'm not motivated to create a link on my own, sorry.) But I don't want to talk about the writing space today, rather, I want to talk more about how writing is affected in an interesting way by my mood.

On the surface, it seems pretty obvious; if I'm upset, I write something that's dark or angry or bitterly sarcastic... although, to be honest, I seem to do the last one even when I'm in a good mood, so who knows. It gets a little more complicated when you consider the question one of "am I comfortable?"

I don't mean like my chair is comfortable or that it's too hot or too cold, or that I have a drink with me (the drink, I've found, is very, very important.) Rather, I mean it as a question of whether or not I'm feeling comfortable in my surroundings, whether or not I'm in a place and state of mind where I can afford to be unguarded for a bit, where I can be a little more honest and raw as I work.

It's tough to do in places that aren't home. Right now, for example, I'm typing this from a terminal at my job, before I clock in. And while this is my place of work, a place where I've been for almost two years, I can't entirely relax here, because this is a professional environment. I have a certain persona, a certain level of responsibility and professionalism that I need to maintain, and it's very hard to separate myself from that to create the sort of honesty that I prefer to place within my writing.

The reason for this experience, I think, and maybe this only happens to me, but it feels like I'm not really able to separate myself from my thoughts and my surroundings, even though those things may not have any real connection to each other. It's like, because I'm trying to maintain my guise of being a good employee, I'm not able to really give free rein to the part of my mind that's all weird, and twisted, and thoroughly disorganized, because that part of my mind would probably get me fired if I allowed it to manifest here.

So instead I write from the more responsible persona, which I think you can see here.

It could also be that I don't like to write while I'm wearing pants and I'm always forced to wear pants at work.

No, I'm not joking about that. At the very least, I always prefer to take my shoes off before I write, which I don't think would be appreciated here either.

So maybe that's it. Disregard everything that I said above. The reason I can't write as freely as I would like is not because I have to maintain a facade of being a normal person, but because I know I can't sit here at my desk without pants or shoes.

Personal revelations are awesome.

Storyteller's Reflection

So I just finished up a great session working on my NaNoWriMo project and now I'm hopping into this blog entry. One thing I promised myself that I was not going to do was cheat and post my novel progress as a blog entry. Yes, I know that technically I could since it's writing that I'm doing, but one promise I made to myself was that I would do my very best to write consistently, on both of this tasks, and devote myself to each of them separately.

Also, because I'm writing in an extremely fast and excruciatingly loose style, the work that I have is pretty messy. So it would be a little bit embarrassing to post it without at least a cursory proof, and proofreading is the opposite of the NaNoWriMo goal. The entire point of the exercise is to learn how to write fast, loose, and messy; to not allow the inner critic, who always hampers creativity by wondering "is this any good, does this make sense?" That's not to say that self-editing is not important, just that I need to hold off on looking back on what I've done. Because if I start to worry about those things, if the anxiety is allowed to take root in my mind, it will completely kill my momentum and my ability to charge forward in my story, which is what I want at the moment.

Even though I'm not going to be posting my story, however, I would very much like to talk to you about my experiences writing for this project so far.

So, I'm on my second day with this thing (having missed a start on Sunday due to how sick I felt) and I have to say, it feels extremely good to get back to fiction. I can't help but think that some of the mental noise in my head, and a lot of the emotional crap I was feeling was some sort of manifestation in response to the fact that I'm a storyteller at heart, and, well, I hadn't written any stories in a few months.

Having poured myself into this project for the past two days, however, I can say that it doesn't just feel good... it feels right. It feels like there's a hole that's filled once again, it feels like I'm balanced again within my mind, and all of it reminds me of how much fiction writing is part of who I am. I can't replace it with anything else. Even this blog, which I'm proud of, which I look forward to most days now, is just me talking about what's on my mind. A lot of times, it feels like I'm just having a conversation with myself, a conversation that people probably don't really care that much about.

It's different when I'm writing a story. When I'm writing a story, it's not that I'm just talking and rambling on about philosophy or how I feel or what I had for lunch. When I'm writing a story, I'm creating a world.

It's an intoxicating and potent joy, and I'm very glad that I've been given this opportunity to rediscover this aspect of myself that has been dormant for the past few months.

This is just part of who I am, you know? At the end of the day, sure, I might be putting out 500+ words every day, five days a week (usually) but that's not really who I am. That's what I'm doing. It's something that I do, because I was told to do it, and because I want to do it.

The real me, though? The real me writes about gods and demons and fallen angels and dragons and space aliens and grand adventures and epic battles and insane writers and speculative immortality, and everything in between. I write about monsters and elves and blades and treasure, about heroes and villains and the monomyth, the epic destiny, the hero's story, in all of its forms.

I'm a storyteller and that's a word that I apply proudly to myself. It's not a word that describes what I do.

It's a word that describes what I am.

Passion and Rationality (Passionality?)

I exist in a continual state of flux between passion and logic.

That sounds wrong, when I say it like that, but there's something that I've noticed within myself, especially over the past few months, as I find myself thinking more and more about logic and rationality and what it means for the world, and for me.

I have a very deep fear within myself that reality is cruel, uncaring, and meaningless, a fear that every thought about souls and afterlives and gods is just humanity's attempt at wishing meaning into a world that has none. A fear that not only does the question "what is the meaning of life?" not have a satisfactory answer, but that it's foolish to even ask such a question, because life, and conscious life in particular, is an aberration, a happy accident.

It makes it very hard to feel passionate about things, when there is a sense that the idea of value and meaning exist inside my own head. Well, our own heads... humanity as a whole.

But then I wonder if it is not indicative of a bit of personal enlightenment, to recognize that a waterfall is beautiful even in the absence of a beholder. There may not be some grand story structure to our world, we may not have destinies foretold, but that does not mean that the world itself does not have meaning.

It has not escaped my notice that it depends entirely on what I'm reading, which side of this scenario I find myself in. And it's difficult for me to really reconcile, or even articulate this concern of mine, because it seems like I'm saying one is better than the other, or that both are impossible. I don't think that's true; I just wish I knew how to attain both at once.

I think that logic and rationality are great gifts, perhaps some of our very best tools for understanding ourselves and our reality. But no matter how much I'm excited by the question and by the attempts to answer the question, there is the worry that the logic is cold and uncaring. I don't know how much of that is merely media bias from too many years of watching robots and sci-fi aliens and whatever else.

People shouldn't have to choose; I don't even think it really should be a choice. But I feel like it's something that I have to choose for myself, being declaring myself a scientist (in outlook, not in profession) or a poet (outlook again, not in actuality.) I want to declare that I'm an artist, that the artistic view is the best lens to view the world, but I always feel, somewhere inside, that the scientist is right and I'm not.

It feels like choosing passion means embracing ignorance. "I might not know much, but goddamn, I'm passionate about it!" That can't be right, can it? Especially when I get so offended, so absolutely incensed by what I perceive to be ignorance all around me.

So, that's where I'm at tonight. It always feels weird to me, to wax on about these things without ever coming to some sort of resolution at the end. But part of that's the point, you know? If I knew the answers to these problems, I wouldn't have to ponder them in such a fashion.

Regardless, the portmanteau in the post title makes me smile every time I read it. So I guess there's that.

On Schedules and Being Sick

Tonight, I write not out of any expressed desire to create or compose, but because it is my solemn duty to do so, by decree of this taskmistress known as the deadline. Or maybe it's more of a quota?

It was my intention to write something yesterday as well, but by the time I was in a position to do anything of the sort, this exceedingly miserable illness had already begun to deplete my every cell and fiber. In fact, rather than spend my Halloween evening going to a costume party (or any kind of party, really) I instead sprawled out on the couch with a movie and a nagging, on-going worry to the tune of "is it hot in here, or is it just me?" Except for real, not as some attempt to self-compliment my own rugged good looks.

Well, even though I'm feeling like trash, at least my ego is healthy. Ha ha.

Hard to believe that November is here already. NaNoWriMo starts today and it's a mark of these dark times that I can barely convince myself to update this blog, which will means my month-long writing project is off to a great start. I'll have to make sure I'm extra super productive this week to compensate. Shouldn't be too hard, it's not like I have two papers due this week.

Oh wait.

I can't decide what's more annoying. The fact that Daylight Savings Time exists at all, or the fact that Arizona ignores it, so our clocks remain the same but the rest of the world changes so it's always awkward when nobody knows exactly what time other people are on. Did Daylight Savings Time even happen yet?

It's amazing how unfocused I am at the moment. Not even 300 words yet and my mind is wandering, I'm trying to scrape at the bottom of the empty barrel that is my brain at this moment, and even though there's really a list of things that I should be doing with my time (getting those papers ready to turn in, for example) all I can think about is how much I want to collapse on my bed, flip on Netflix and just zone out.

You know, I don't think writers, the ones who make this thing their full-time job, anyway, often get credit for how much hard work it really is. There's this sense, I think, that being a writer means waking up whenever you want, working in your underwear, and just generally doing whatever you please, somewhat like a wild animal. And that's just not the case, which is not to say that I'm a full-time writer yet, but this blog (and projects like NaNoWriMo) have shown me how much it absolutely sucks at times to have a schedule that you need to follow.

At other jobs, if you're not feeling your A game, you call in sick. You say "not today," and your boss says, "sure, whatever," and then you carry on with the business of not feeling well. But when you're writing, the schedule doesn't give a shit that you have a temperature. The schedule only understands that you're behind, that you were supposed to have 45 posts by now and you only have 43. The schedule only sees the fact that you have a goal of 50,000 words in 30 days and so far, you have 0 words.

Of course, one might say that the schedule is set by the man (or woman, to be fair) and so should be subject to that man's (or woman's) will. But we're perfectionists, I think, we creative folk; at the very least, we're some kind of crazy and so the idea of changing the schedule is about as appealing as changing the rules to football in the second half because your team is down. Incoherent sports metaphor aside, you just feel like one shouldn't do that.

And with that poignant thought to leave you with, I'm going to sign off for the night and crawl into bed, in the hope that tomorrow is a better and more productive day.