The Pause Before The Calm

Or

That Moment Before I Write

I have recognized a familiar pattern in my writing habits. It's called hesitation. It happens at a very specific point in the process. I've finished my outline, or, I'm deep enough into my outline that I'm chomping at the bit to get at the actual storytelling. And yet, even in my eagerness, I pause. And I wonder, why do I pause?

It's probably clear to others, but the light only came on a few days ago. I pause because of doubt. In my mind, often so soft I barely hear its poisonous words, doubt asks me, who are you to dare to write a story? What gives you the right? Are you sure you want to fail at this, too? How audacious of you. How foolish of you. How stupid.

In a way, the pause is the storm. The calm comes later, at a certain point.

In the 1980s I went to Marine Corp Bootcamp, MCRD San Diego. In the second month - if I recall correctly - we went to Pendleton for marksmanship and basic squad infantry training. One of the things we did was to practice throwing a grenade. The Marine corps is filled with efforts to brainwash the troops. With hand grenade practice, they take you down to pit #1 which is pockmarked with missing concrete chips. The drill instructor told us that some boot had dropped their grenade and couldn't kick it into the little sump (a drain in the middle of the forward wall and the floor) so the drill instructor threw the recruit out, sacrificing himself for this pathetic worm.

They hyped the experience up so that when it was my turn I was sweaty and nervous. Then, I pulled the pin as instructed, and all the nervousness was gone and I was calm. There wasn't some newly born confidence.Simply, I'd realized at that moment it was too late to worry about the grenade and what it would do. I was committed to the action. There was no turning back, no putting the pin back into the grenade.

Time to throw.

When I do write, the moment I start that first sentence of that first paragraph of that first chapter, I'm at peace with my decision to write. I'm committed to the act of telling that story. Yes, later I'll have my doubts as so many writers seem to have and then quickly recover. But at that moment of first commitment, I am at peace with my decision to be audacious, to dare, to risk failure.

Time to tell a story.

The loneliest part of writing: submitting.

I supposed it's a bit overstated. But, today, I started to look for agencies and agents to submit a query to. It occurred to me that unlike developing an idea, writing the story, revising the story, this is something done alone. Writing the query? You can get feedback from other writers. Same thing for the synopsis. After all that, it's just me that has to click the send button. Alone in the room, a dog barking in the distance, clicking sending.

There are people who give themselves goals. "I will submit to two agents a day." Or, "I will send out three stories a week." And yet, when it comes down to that moment, it's just them, at a computer, clicking send/submit. All alone.

Even if I or they went out to a coffee shop, crowded with pour-over hipsters, all that cheeriness has nothing to do with my mission, any author's mission. Click the send button. And I'm really the only one that knows that I did it.

Maybe we need an "I submitted a query" sticker. Kind of like the "I voted" sticker. But who'd give it to me? The agent/editor? Be serious.

Oh, what if I threw a submission party. Not to celebrate my submitting something. Rather, a bunch of writers sitting around, chatting together, drinking something mind numbing, and cheering every time one of us click the send button. Would that be encouraging? Would it really be a group thing? Or is the act of clicking send on a query/submission always an isolated action?

Click. Send. Click. Send.

Hook line and stinker

'Cause sometimes a hook line stinks. Not so much because it's poorly written, at least there was an effort made. No, what bugs me is the slight of hand.

"I have something to tell you about A, but first I'll tell you a bunch of stuff I really wanted to talk about but didn't think I could make interesting enough."

Sometimes it just doesn't live up to the promise. It's like an eagerly awaited blind date that arrives so late that all the excitement is gone. (That and they look nothing like their picture.)

Do I have a specific book in mind? Yes. And no. The post is because of a specific book in mind, but it's not the only nor will it ever be the last. And as I don't want to disparage any individual writer I'll have to sort of make it up a similar situation.

The opening paragraph is a single line.

That was the day I saw the man in the polka dot suit for the first time.

So this is interesting. Someone in a polka dot suit the speaker will see more than once. Today was the first time. There must be significance to this. I shall read on.

I was scaling the broken exterior of the old city hall. The pigeons had their nest up here and I was always assured of finding at least a couple of eggs. Pigeon eggs are good eating when you've nothing else to eat.

And so it goes. Two pages in and I've heard nothing more about this man in the polka dotted suit. I've gotten a lot of backstory. I feel I've read my way down several tangents before being yanked back to the building and the eggs and the view. But where's the polka dot suit?
I think it's a primordial problem in writing. It is drilled into writers that they need a hook to grab the audience. Some overdo it with exaggeration. Some are very good with it by just starting the story interestingly. Megan O'Keefe's book, Steal the Sky opens thus:

It was a pretty nice burlap sack. Not the best he’d had the pleasure of inhabiting, not by a long shot, but it wasn’t bad either. The jute was smooth and woven tight, not letting in an inkling of light or location. It didn’t chafe his cheeks either, which was a small comfort.

And we continue with this character as the burlap sack is soon removed and the story moves forward. I can't imagine how big of a fail this would have been if Megan had switched to some other scene after this paragraph. Or worse, started filling in the backstory of the town or something else that she might have felt the audience wouldn't read unless she gave us a picture of her story that didn't represent the story.

How about this from Patrick Swenson's The Ultra Thin Man:

They said Dorie Senall deliberately killed herself, but I doubted the truth of that, considering she had worked for the movement.

There's a lot of interesting stuff to hook a reader. But rather than start telling me about the city or the pigeons, Patrick tells me about Dorie Senall's death and why it didn't jive with the protagonist.

My point isn't to tell anyone how to open their story or how to write a good opening line to hook a reader. I want writers to know that if you want me to read your book - I gave up on the polka dot suited man after three pages - deliver on the promise you made at the beginning.

Not so special after all.

Recently I visited my family in Oklahoma. We didn't grow up there but my brother-in-law was stationed at Fort Sill my sister set roots there, raised children there, and my mother soon followed. That's how I have family in Oklahoma.
I've been to visit a few times over the past couple of decades. Previously they took me to the Apache Prisoner's Of War cemetery where Geronimo is buried. I saw his burial marker and those related or connected to him by tribe. Families are buried next to relatives and who a person was and who they were connected to is etched into the tombstone. For example: Thomas Dah-Ke-Ya was an Apache, son of Dah-Ke-Ya and Lulu Geronimo, 1890, 1908.
Here's another example with Zi-Yeh, wife of Geronimo.

They have a connection to others. In return, they are connected.
But I also saw several lone headstones. They stood isolated, far from the neat rows of family markers where father and mother lay next to children and their spouses. Singular headstones. The one that got my attention on my first visit was Francisco's. An Apache Woman, 1847, 1901.

My immediate thought was, who is the woman? Why is she here, isolated from the other Apache and their families? Was she an outcast? Was she unknown?
I glommed onto that last idea: was she unknown. That's because I am fixated on the fact that one day I will no longer exist. People try to tell me that I'll live on in my daughter's genes, in my writing, the memories of my friends and family. That's small comfort but it does seep into my writing.
I have thought about the idea of a character's permanence being dependent on being remembered. The more they are remembered, the more substantial their "ghost" is. And as the memories fade, so do they. But if they are remembered again, they once again gain substance. An interesting premise but one that I find some comfort in. In that even though I'll be nothing, I won't be forgotten. For a while, anyway.
So, great, I'm thinking of Francisco the Apache woman and my thinking of her gives her substance. I'm the bearer of a small torch for an unknown woman.
Then I get the glorious idea to Google her. Ah, vanity, they name is Earl. There's a decent amount of information about her at Wikitree.
She doesn't need me, she's been enshrined on the world wide web. Which is a healthy reminder that none of us (I'm looking at you, mirror) are really so special after all.

There was another singular tombstone for an Apache named John Smith. I've just included him to add a little substantiation to him as well.

Are we breaking rules or just changing out parts?

Last night at FogCon 5 I at through a conversation about breaking rules in story telling. The blurb in the conference guide suggested that the talk would be about characters not following their stereotypes. That seemed like a good idea. And there were several attempts to touch on the subject. Heck, maybe there were more but I just tuned out after hearing the word "hetero-normative" one too many times.
Yes, I'm a white, middle aged, heterosexual male, but that doesn't mean I don't care about people who don't fit in the same pigeon hole with me. Because I do. But when the discussion stays fixated on the idea that writing about transgender people or "non-tragic lesbians" in the same roles as a heterosexual male would have been in, are you really breaking rules? Personally, I don't think you are. You might be leveling the playing field, but you aren't breaking new ground. Especially if all you're doing is preaching to the choir.
A good attempt at explaining the breaking of the storytelling rule was the idea of "Flowers For Algernon." However, the story has been told before in H. G. Wells's "The Invisible Man." Both are the same story of humanities distrust and fear off those who are different. What is different is the kind of character in the same situation: you're not like us, we can't determine your motivations so you are a that to use, we will isolate you. No rules broken here, please move along. And there are probably older and newer stories that are the same, just different characters.
So whether the character is Anglo Saxon hetero, or green scaled poly sexual, doesn't matter if they are the captain of the research vessel Beagle, they're still just the captain. Nothing's changed in the story, only a part has been replaced for another part. Same rules, just different characters.
I admire those who write non-traditional characters into their stories. I think it's important that we see that the role can be played by anyone and the job still gets done. I think that's called "normalizing," making things that seem untraditional traditional. Whatever you call, it the point remains the same, the song remains the same, the story hasn't changed, only the parts have been replaced.
Rules haven't been broken.
All of which doesn't mean the conversation wasn't interest or thought provoking, it probably just needed a more relevant title. Like: If Kirk had been gay, would the universe have turned out differently? That'd be an interesting conversation.

Goals. Sheesh, goals.

Well, it's been almost two weeks since I last made an entry on this lonely island of a blog.
I'm not done with the play. I've been sidetracked several times. I allowed them to slow me down. The question is probably why did I let them slow me down? I know - I'm pretty sure I know - that the main reason is that I'm unsure of some parts of the play and that the length of the first act is coming in short. I shouldn't let that bother me. I know that whatever I write will need some rewriting, if not completely rewritten. That's no longer a bad thing for me. Once it's down, I have a better idea where I really want to go, the themes of the play will have asserted themselves somewhere and now need to be incorporated through the whole play. Despite all that I am still allowing my doubts to freeze my forward motion.
Also, there is the stops and starts. I stopped to work on two short plays. I stopped to work on some book stuff for a friend's book. Then I started working on the play again. But the energy had been sapped, the way had become less clear. I've had to read everything written so far to find the thread and then continue hesitantly like Hansel and Gretel trying to find the crumbs to lead them back home.
However, I am not going to stop at the end of the month, the goal was to complete a full-length play. So even though it'll carry over into February, and I have things to be doing in February, it'll now include finishing this play.

Treading water in a current.

So, short post. I worked on Ms Tittle's today. I hadn't the past few days, partially because I'd stopped to work on two 10-minute plays that I needed to (1) turn in, and (2) bring to a playwright scene night. The problem I have found is that when I stop moving on a piece, I often never get back to it. I didn't want that to happen here, but it was. So, this morning I did manage to work on stuff. I wrote seven pages but it probably didn't increase the play page count. That's because I went back and started reworking the last third of Act I. It didn't feel good as it was and that was bugging me. I was aware that part of my stalling had to do with my not being comfortable with how that section was bending the play. I needed the play to do something else. With that in mind, I spent the morning writing lines from scratch. Now I have to go and weave it into the rest of the act and see how it blends.
So, I may have not gotten anywhere, but I was creating new material.

No dialogue to share, no picture to post. How about a joke?

Q: What did one snowman say to the other?
A: Do you smell carrots?

:D