The Mystical Land of Pardes

By 'creative community' I mean something like what we used to have here on LJ - a group of friends all writing about the same thing (Fire Emblem, Suikoden, whatever) and talking about the source material, inspiration, blah blah. Fandom was my writing community for twelve years. Without it, I find I write less often, with less devotion, and in general have a harder time finding motivation for anything.

I thought when I left that I didn't need fandom to drive my work. I've always written my originals alone, usually without showing them to anybody, so why would I need other people to egg me on? It's worth noting, at this point, that even when I was still involved in fandom, all it inspired me to write was fan fiction; original work didn't benefit by that sense of community at all. Measuring and I tried to jump start our original writing with the gauntlet challenge, but at the time I think we both pretty much ignored the orig-fic prompts (or at least didn't talk about what we were working on in response), and focused on the fanfic lists. It's what I wanted to write; it's what I felt inspired for. It's all I thought about.

Part of my motivation problem is obvious: I don't spend as much time thinking about my own stories as I did about the games I wrote fic for. The epic Summer Chronicle lasted as long as it did because the story was almost all I thought about. My pairing obsessions lasted as long as they did for the same reasons. When I walked to the bus stop, I thought about the Chronicle plot. When I stared out the train window, on the way to school, I thought about new ways to make a pairing work. When I sat around in the doctor's office waiting for my appointments (and there were a lot of those), I wondered what Tellius steampunk would look like and immediately tried to convert the game plot to the new universe.

I don't do that with original work, so it's no wonder I'm not burning to finish stories or write new scenes. No mystery here.

But: would I have thought so much about Fire Emblem and my related fics if I hadn't talked about them every night on AIM? Maybe for a while. Four years, though? Would I have pursued Summer Chronicle for years, tried to make it work even when I knew I had made a wrong turn at chapter fifteen-- all if I hadn't had someone to bounce ideas off of and encourage me? Considering the fate of my Elrond fic (not dead, but unlikely to move), I think the answer is 'no.'

Communication keeps me interested in my own stories. Or, at least, it helps me over the difficult areas of the process, where I might otherwise be tempted to abandon the project, or put it off. Talking to someone about what I'm working on keeps me thinking and moving. And you'd think this wouldn't be a big deal, that everybody knows this, that I should have known this... but it's difficult for me to trust people with my work, so for a long time I haven't bothered. This post isn't about "realizing" that I need a community; that has been clear to me for some time. Writing is a lonely process without one. You do need other eyes to examine your work and help you see what you missed. I even knew, without really thinking about it, that it was always easier to write with other people. The problem that needs solving isn't just finding that company; it's being able to trust them.

Yes, I do have that cliche fear that someone will rip off my work. I'm not the only one. I frankly don't care how realistic it is; fear isn't reasonable. But I have such a hard time trusting people at all. Take away the possibility of being ripped off and I still won't trust you! There are so many ways you can cause damage once you have the story: you can be the sort of reader/critic that tries to change everything based on what you like, instead of what the story needs; you might be the type to give only praise (which is no help, since I want so badly to believe you), or go the other way and cut everything down, under the erroneous assumption that the only useful feedback is the sort that finds problems without trying to solve them. You could be that poisonous friend who seems like she's rooting for you on the surface, but who actually harbors some negative feelings for you, and often only gives feedback that supplies unfavorable comparisons to herself; i.e. "Well, I made it, so you should be able to if you work hard! Do let me know if you need my advice, because I'm so far ahead of you I should know how to answer all of your beginner questions..." The only kind of praise I get from my family is backhanded, when I get it at all, so I'm pretty good at detecting that bullshit.

Don't even get me started on how people deliver their critiques. Or on the very important things people always seem to miss-- that stuff I actually need to know, since I think I've got the typos covered, thanks.

In short: I don't trust you. And if I don't trust you, how do I build - or find - a community?

My trust issues are epic, and in horrible need of therapy. Believe me, I know. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem, since, in order to get those taken care of, I need to start out with a bit of trust for the person who's going to do the fixing...

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I'm really sorry I've missed replying to so many comments. I always intend to, and then time passes, and it seems too late. :/

You go to meet your friend for lunch, sit down at the table, look at the menu. You're looking forward to talking about this or that, about trying that new sandwich, hearing about your friend's life. But she doesn't show up. It turns out she's just really late - and she never has been punctual as far as you know, but punctuality isn't everything! - and in the meantime you get tired of sitting around. Your mind moves to other things - things to write, things you could be doing. You're bored. You order lunch and start eating, and you're mostly done by the time your friend gets there. When she does, it all goes mostly as planned.

When I try to write a story, the characters do not tell me what they're going to do, as I've seen other writers describe. They don't "talk" to me. Those are metaphors, yes, but what they are metaphors for - that doesn't happen. I start a story, waiting to go along for the ride and watch what these strange people will do, and-- they do nothing. Sometimes they're not even really there until much later, after I've abandoned the story - because nothing was happening, and it bored me - and have left it to sit for years.

There's obviously an element of one's own creativity that has to drive this phase of development, something that happens beneath your awareness and inspires you to type "and then he pulled the trigger" or whatever, even if you're not consciously planning for that to happen. There's something you want to write about, maybe, or something you want to examine. For a long time I thought I lacked that. I still do a bit, because the things I want to examine, as it turns out, are a little too lofty for fiction, probably more suited to... you know, I don't think there's a genre for it, even in non-fiction. It's closest to the creative essay, I suppose. And maybe I'm in denial, and that's really what I want to write anyway, since I seem to enjoy posting here far more than I enjoy working on new stories.

But anyway, characters. Stories. Revelations! They're few and far between, and not for lack of freewriting. I start a story; nothing happens. I get bored waiting for my characters to really show up, so to speak, and start thinking about other things which look more interesting. By the time an idea comes to me, I'm not willing to follow it; I jot it down and then ditch the story, because I don't feel it can work. It has no soul, or event, or conflict, or whatever you want to call the element that gives it life. It barely has a mouthpiece. More like a stick figure.

I asked myself why this happens, and there are two potential answers that have merit. Both are probably right to some extent.

First, I'm not willing to wait. Patience is not one of my virtues. When I'm confronted with this situation - say, my character is sitting at a table waiting for her friend - and there's an opportunity for her to do something, I sometimes take it... and sometimes don't. This might be the perfect time to... see, I don't know what I'd do if I were sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for someone to show up. I'd write, I guess. (Hilarious.) I wouldn't strike up a conversation with anyone or do anything interesting. I think staging a sudden robbery would be kind of stupid, and I'm not really interested in that kind of event in a story, sooooo... lack of things to do. But--

Secondly, I guess I have a harder time moving outside of myself than I thought. It's not that I always think only of what I would do (which is incredibly limited), but that when I try to imagine what someone like my mom would do, I still draw a blank. She'd talk to the barista, I guess, or to another customer. What else? Just now I thought maybe a certain kind of character would try to steal something, slip a granola bar in her purse when she's distracting the employees with an amusing story... but it took this entire entry for me to think of that, which takes me back to the first point: patience.

You know what's nice about fan fiction? You know what the characters will and will not do. If you take Sanaki to a coffee shop, you know (or can guess) what will happen, and who she would go with. You take a new character in, whom you've never met before, and... suddenly you have to sit there for an hour and figure it out.

This is just one of the ways fan fiction has spoiled me, I guess. But it isn't true across the board that you'll know; this post was inspired by sitting here and wondering what an existing character might do in a situation I set him in, and I actually don't know; I know nothing about his past to this point, and I still have to make all of that up. Patience.

It turns out that being anti-social most of my life is now a bit of a problem. I don't know what real people do. I need to overcome that hurdle (hopefully that won't involve talking to anyone), but sitting down and thinking long enough will probably help a lot. But I've had bad experiences in social contexts. There's some fear in the idea of talking to and getting to know strangers, but there's also a barrier created by years of having to look inward for understanding or even entertainment. When I meet someone, and do not immediately see something we have in common, something I would want to talk about for more than five minutes, I dismiss the entire idea of getting to know them. It won't be worth it, I think; what would we talk about? And why would we do it?

It's funny; while I'm not dismissing people as worthless - just as individuals I probably have nothing in common with - the fact that I do that mental turning-away probably does give the impression that I think they're not worth knowing. And sometimes, even if I think a person is worth knowing, I'm just not able or willing to overcome whatever hurdles there are between us. If you think I'm going to hobble around San Francisco on crutches, with no idea which bus line goes where, just for a study session with someone I barely know? You expect too much from me.

That situation is in the past, but I remember it well.

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I do like non-fiction now that I've tried it seriously a few times. Maybe it's because I have this erroneous idea that my opinion on something matters, or is at least interesting. My life is boring now, but things happened in my childhood, and in my recent history, that are perhaps worth talking about. In addition, things like bullying/being bullied are incredibly relevant right now, and I have always felt strongly about issues like school violence for that reason. I try to avoid these topics because I feel like I'd just be wallowing in old angst, but maybe feeling my experiences aren't valid is a hurdle I have to overcome as well, for both fiction and non-fiction. Certainly, there are topics I don't think I can write reasonably about in a fictional world, because I find it so easy to slip into angsty, inactive characters. While it might be worth the exercise to resist that urge, I also think the creative essay medium might be more appropriate for some of them.

So... what would you do while waiting in a coffee shop for someone to show up? Besides getting a drink-- though that could be an adventure too, I guess? Or an opportunity for a monologue on the quality of coffee beans and roasting techniques.

It's funny how, once I started to write by hand in spiral-bound notebooks, I realized that typing stories directly into Notepad felt like working on a final draft. For years now I've written with the assumption that what I type will be my final product because I believed I shouldn't need more than one draft to get something right. This was helped along by my relative success with posting first drafts, but for years I seriously believed (and still feel) that if I need to write more than one draft of a story, it isn't good enough and neither am I.

(I do know better, or at least pretend I do. Feelings and logic are not always friends.)

Another contributing factor is probably HTML. Since I do my own formatting and just cut-paste everything into the LJ/DW editors for posting, I type everything with tags as I go. Something about that feels final - like I'm doing my last run through a piece and adding all the fancy stuff to an otherwise finished story. And since that's all done the moment I stop typing, it IS very easy to slap the story online without any further thought and get that wonderful feeling of instant gratification.

Writing on paper introduces a mandatory drafting process if I want to put anything online. It gives me a chance to think a little more. That doesn't always help with stress (which usually starts with doubt, and doubt always starts with thinking), but it does hold the worst back long enough for some writing to happen first. Instant gratification is absent from this new formula, but this is balanced by how much less pressure I put on myself to get everything done perfectly the first time.

Since this is a complete 180 from what I used to feel, I thought it'd be interesting to note here and look back on it later, once I'm done with this challenge. Because sure, I did start working in notebooks to get myself away from the computer and all its distractions, but I didn't expect that to a) turn into a habit, or b) replace typing almost completely.

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Semi-related, this warm-up exercise using different notebooks for different subjects is a marginal success. I don't work in these notebooks consistently, so sometimes a month will go by in which I don't even look at them (like now, cough), but when I'm stuck, or not in the mood to work on my primary project, they gave me an easy, guiltless way to explore other ideas I have hanging around. And since they're warm ups, and not obligated to be good in the slightest, I feel okay exploring characters or scenes more than once, and stuff. I don't always want to do that in my primary notebook because I've got a lot of note-taking and other stuff interspersed between actual prose, and that makes it hard to keep track of changes.

I added a notebook for fic too, which is what spurred the above revelation re: feeling like typing = writing a final draft. Unfortunately, my original project(s) are a long way away from the typing stage; the short story I was working on needs to sit (and now is the time to do research, if that's going to happen at all), and the new story I'm working on in the meantime is still in the early stages of development. Notebooks are currently the only thing keeping me writing actual prose.

I wonder: if I keep telling myself to get to work, will it eventually happen? I'm flipping my schedule, more by accident than intent, so my odd hours are throwing everything off. It makes me curious about how we're wired to respond to cues like sunrise, sunset, and waking up to sunlight instead of darkness and streetlights. Is that social conditioning, or biological? Or a bit of both?

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There's an old meme that goes around the f-list occasionally, asking people to list the influences that shaped their writing, artwork, or whatever it is they do. The easy, cop-out answer is, of course, "everything!" When you read interviews with writers and see the inevitable question, "where do you get your ideas?" the answer is always 'everywhere,' because life provides the experiences we draw from - and we probably unintentionally store the good ideas we see in shows we watch, books we read, or in visual art. I can only assume the meme is asking for the things you come back to again and again, or the things you fell in love with at age five, which are still with you today in some way.

I never do this meme because I have a hard time nailing down what my influences are. I know they must exist, but when I sit down and think about it, there are few names or titles I can say, definitively, had a huge influence on me. All I can give you is a list of things I really liked, obsessively:

1. Sleeping Beauty (the Disney version - shut up, I was a kid and their visual style is amazing)
2. Egyptian and Greek mythology
3. Star Wars (original trilogy)
4. Wheel of Time
5. Xenogears

Which means I am doomed to write cliches. So apparently I really like Joseph Campbell's breakdown of the hero's journey (i.e. a very basic plot), and I'm partial to arguably unnecessary integration of religious symbolism, specifically Kabbalah, in my stories.

Ouch. Maybe I have nailed down my influences.

We had a discussion about this with some friends, who were talking about Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon. You can see a bit about it here. Basically, it's an expensive collection of motivational tips for artists, with an emphasis on allowing yourself to draw ideas and influences from other sources in order to grow and create your own work. I'm familiar with the concept, but how far you can take it is really up in the air as far as I'm concerned. I often find myself doing it accidentally, which drives me crazy, because the internet has placed a stigma on this practice - too much influence from another fan writer is copying. There are lines you shouldn't cross (for example, copying a scene point-for-point), and of course plagiarism, which I consider different from copying, since it involves pasting entire passages of someone else's work into your file, and 'copying' is more akin to reading a scene, and then trying to rewrite it in your own words.

But Kleon does have a point. In class, we were often told to copy classic or favorite writers to learn. You're supposed to "copy your heroes and their styles is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds" to "internalize their way of looking at the world" (36) Need to get a feel for pacing or dialogue? Copy someone else's paragraphs. Need to analyze a piece of fiction for class tomorrow? Write a fictional response to it - a sequel, you might say. In other words, write some fan fiction. I wonder sometimes why this is frowned on for writers; maybe because reading and digesting a text is more cerebral?

In any case, this caught my attention, because ages ago a friend made a post about the same thing:

Every other creative field you can name (art, theatre, music, dance) not only encourages but REQUIRES you to practice with other people’s technique and style. It’s accepted without question. No one even thinks to tell a new piano student that they can’t learn Chopsticks because they didn’t write it, or that they have to compose their own music so they can learn their craft. In art, we study other paintings and then try and replicate their style. How many beginning art students have painted from a photo? Or by using a grid over a well-known piece of art? (see the original post)

Writing is a strange art. People alternate between believing writers are magicians and thinking that it can't be that hard, because you can talk, can't you? If you can talk, surely you can write. I mean, everyone knows how to write. We do it every day. We know our own language. (Or do we.) Anyone can write a book!

And that book should be a completely new idea. You're a magician, aren't you?

YES.

The more I think about it, the more obvious Takahashi's influence is in my work - and that dovetails nicely with #2 on my list. He taught me how to draw inspiration from the mythologies I liked so much. In fact, he taught me that it was okay to look there at all, and inspired me to look at canons I had ignored until I experienced his work.

And I suppose I can blame Robert Jordan for making me think it was a good idea to have a large cast of characters and a thirteen book cycle. I drew a lot of early world-building inspiration from him when I was younger, though. Hm.

I guess I'll think about this some more. I suppose everyone else has done this multiple times, but feel free to do it again? I do like learning about what people find inspiring.

I'm done with Lord of the Rings and well into the Appendices, but I may as well finish them before posting. The sections on the line of kings and stewards are pretty relevant.

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At about this time last year, I read Jeff VanderMeer's Booklife (with comments here, if you care), and found it pretty helpful for thinking about the parts of being a professional writer that don't involve fiction, per se. Blogging (without being a jerk about it, which is hard!), scheduling, setting goals, managing your work and handling administrative tasks, all things I'm pretty bad at! Guidance is good, or even just the beginning of guidance. I wouldn't know where to begin, especially with the 'blog nicely' part.

Since I'm not published or in the process of, most of these have nothing to do with me, excepting as an educational look at things I will have to think about later. The one thing I can do anything about up there is making goals.

many of my colleagues have daily, weekly, or monthly “to do” lists that help keep them focused but also keep them stuck in a tactical mode, which makes it hard to engage in strategic thinking. Yes, you know what you want or need to do for the next thirty days, but what about for the year? What about for the next five years? How do your daily/weekly/monthly tasks feed into short-term goals, and how do your short-term goals feed into your long-term goals?

He asks this question, and I'm like... oh, huh. Goals. You mean like "getting published?" Yeah, that's kind of the only one on my list.

To be honest, while I would like to write novels and have people read them, I'm not sure if that's a thing I will ever accomplish. Not because I can't or won't, but because the more I learn about the process of making a book, the more I want to cower over here at my desk and just write stories for whatever reason, and who cares if anybody reads them. It's a lot of work to make people care about what you're doing. Consider some occasion you may have presented your original fiction to your fanfic friends; they like your writing already, right? And they're interested in you, and your ideas. But how many of them are interested in reading anything you do at length? Have you ever put any original fiction up on your blog and heard the crickets cheeping, because nobody gives a shit? I have! Many times! And these are people who are already invested in you to some extent. So if it's hard to make them fans, how about everyone else?

So anyway, planning my professional career from here seems silly. But I can try to plan my practice, story schedule, etc. up to the point where I might have something to send out, so that's what I did. Vandermeer talked about having several plans; keeping the monthly and weekly to-do lists, but also planning year-long, two year, and five year plans. My one year plan started in October 2011 and ended this year, today. Here's what I learned!

I really, really suck at meeting goals. It burns. Year-long is too long.

My priorities changed significantly over the course of the year, and I didn't modify them along the way like I was supposed to, because I forgot I had written it down. (One of my goals for the next year should be get all that shit off your desk and keep it off.) But my biggest mistake was probably to write my plan down like this:

a. send Youth story out to a few magazines (And I fail at this, instantly, because it's too terrifying to put in writing.)
b. write Eve--Lilith story.
c. write librarian story.
d. write steampunk dragon story.
e. write automaton story.
f. write the Meiji diplomat story.

I can write this many stories in a year if all I care about is getting them down. For a while I was writing one a month by doing only basic research and planning, and then just hacking it all out in one go. But if I'm making an effort to fully develop anything? Well then, suddenly having a plan like this dooms me to being derailed over and over, because having that many stories on my plate in one sitting means that I can't work on just one - I have to taste all of it, and I WILL, because the moment B gets hard to deal with I'll move to C, and when that gets hard... you get the idea. Also, this list is underestimating how many drafts I have to write of anything before I can leave it alone. At least three of those require significant research, which I can't do on a schedule of a story every two months.

GOOD JOB. I failed at that pretty hard. But I do finally see what a bad idea it is to allow myself to work on more than one story at a time, even if I'm only actively writing one, while only picking at details for the other.

New Goal #1: do not put specific stories in the plan unless we are already writing them. (I can win this one instantly!)
New Goal #2: you're only allowed to work on one story at a time.

But we can't just set down goals, oh no. No, we have to have high level and low-level goals, apparently-- can you tell how thrilled I am about this? I suppose polish Story A could be considered a high-level goal, which has tons of lower-level ones that feed into it, like one: outline new scenes; two: write the first new scene, etc.. I'm still not sure I like thinking about it this way. It's much easier to think of the "low-level" as a to-do list, which I have a better chance of finishing during any given week, and the "higher level" as real goals. Plan as far as a month in advance and it's touch-and-go.

So... not sure how this is working out for me, because I screwed it up the first time. But I guess it does help to have goals. Saying to myself that I have to have a draft of Novel #1 at the end of five years is infinitely easier to deal with than thinking I have to do it now - but eventually, five years in the future will be now, and it'll be terrifying again unless I can dredge up some confidence from where I left it back in 2008.

I'm starting to think it'll take me ten years to get published just because I can't keep a schedule or set of goals to save my life. I have no idea why that's so hard for me.

Went from my last place to the beginning of "Shelob's Lair," and despite Faramir being a sweetie, there's only one thing that needs to be said about this entire section of the story:

Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: ‘I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.’

J.R.R. Tolkien (2009-04-17). The Lord of the Rings (p. 652).

Like we didn't know before, right? But I wasn't expecting to see it in black and white! Hahahahaha oh Tolkien, if only you had known what twists and turns society would take after you wrote that down. Makes me wonder if, later, he regretted things like Celeborn's other name. :D

Ithilien reminds me that I need to do some studying next time I want to write a scene involving plants. I'm pretty bad - in fanfic, at least - about using the same set of plants over and over again because I like them. Also, because they're on the short list of stuff I would recognize if I saw it. I can name desert plants, at least in the desert I grew up in, but give me another environment and the result is kind of sad. The last time we were on a drive down south, maybe a year ago, my mother pointed out a bunch of oak trees along the freeway, and that was the first time I had ever seen and identified an oak in person (so to speak) that I can recall.

Thirty years of life, and I had no idea what an oak tree looked like.

This is why I'm a self-professed imagery addict. Because I can totally nail that and know what I'm talking about while doing so.

(I abuse Google to find what I need, and to double check the plants I want to write in with the climates they're supposed to thrive in, and that sort of thing, but seeing a photo of a tree and being able to recognize it in real life doesn't always work out for me. The proportions are all skewed, for one, and a photo of a whole tree cannot show me the details by nature, so if I'm standing right next to one, well.

Anyway, these are all excuses. I need to be prepared to study this as a big chunk of my initial world-building stage. It's stunning, really, to realize how many details I neglect sometimes.)

Didn't get to do any reading today because of the backache from hell, which was probably caused by all the reading I did yesterday, as I was determined to get to Lorien before giving up for the night. When will I learn? It's a good thing I'm not trying to do a thorough commentary, though, because I just know that the minute Saruman comes on-screen - so to speak - all I'm going to hear is the trololol song. Certainly, all I can see sometimes are the shiny Silmarillion references (like Celebrimbor's by-line at the bottom of the Hollin Gate, the Star of Feanor*, the poem about Durin's era~ nerdnerdnerdnerd). I progressed from the Council to a scene or two before the Fellowship leaves Lothlorien, and would've gone farther if it hadn't been five in the morning.

The big question for me after Moria is,"Would Gandalf have come out of that better if he hadn't been tired?" Although actually, I also wonder why he didn't recognize a Balrog when he felt one. I suppose if there were only between three and seven of them, theoretically - since I don't know that Tolkien stuck with that number - it's possible he hasn't ever encountered one.** I guess it's also silly to assume these beings have some sort of distinctive signature. Gandalf's spells might somehow be distinctive, but it could also be that sudden spikes of power in the middle of nowhere can equal only one person, from the points of view of Sauron or Saruman, since nobody seems to care about Radagast.

I think that's incredibly unfair. He's working hard too: somebody has to save the squirrels from Sauron's black rule and Gandalf's fire spells!

For all I know Gandalf explains all that stuff up above when he comes back, and I just don't remember. He does seem to enjoy the sound of his own voice, especially when narrating his own adventures. But maybe I'm being unfair. The Council of Elrond defied brevity at every turn, no matter who was talking.

Also, couldn't help noticing that Moria appears to be one of Middle Earth's infinite examples of the evils of progress and industrialization, this time. (The one I'm used to seeing is the deforestation of Isengard.) The oft-repeated sentiment that the dwarves dug too greedily and too deep would imply it-- like a punch in the face. They mined out all their mithril (depleting a natural resource) and destroyed themselves looking for more, but even if they hadn't their wealth would've declined without it, in theory. (If by 'decline' you mean, 'oh no, we only have tons of gold and iron to trade! Nobody cares about those!') The balrog is something of a natural disaster, though, which you can't really blame on the dwarves. If s/he hadn't decided to sleep at the bottom of Khazad-dum, there wouldn't be a problem. :P

Why don't we get any female balrogs? It could've been female, you don't know! It's not like we can see any revelatory bits.

Galadriel and her ring are rather intimidating, even without her skeevy movie performance, as amielleon put it. When she says:

I say to you, Frodo, that even as I speak to you, I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But still the door is closed!’ (pp. 364-365)

...I think to myself, oh, how comforting. She sees into Sauron's mind! Glad to know I can count on you to know the enemy, Galadriel. But if the rings are the connecting factor, here, and Sauron doesn't have a ring to tap into, you freak me out. I can think of all sorts of logical ways for her to know that, of course, like her mirror, but yeah: skeevy.

Because of the way I tend to look at Galadriel, I was surprised she wove the fabric that made the cloaks gifted to the party. "You are indeed high in the favour of the Lady! For she herself and her maidens wove this stuff;" (p. 370). I have a hard time imagining her at a loom, to be honest. It's much easier to imagine her punching orcs in the face. Or balrogs. I also continue to find it hilarious that she blew off Feanor when he asked for a strand of her hair, and yet a few thousand years later she "cut off three golden hairs, and laid them in Gimli’s hand" (p.376). Burn.

Just look at Gimli turn into a puppy every time she looks at him. That's so hilarious!

Unrelated: I have to admit, I prefer sarcastic ass movie!Haldir to the original, borderline-courteous version. Maybe it's all in the intonation?

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* some of the fic I've read makes it out like Celebrimbor disowned the entire family, but his use of Feanor's emblem would indicate he was just pissed at his own father. Maybe he had a thing for Finrod, and having the hots for Galadriel later was a rebound thing. This would explain everything! :D

** this was in a note to the second section of the Annals of Aman (#50), which I'm reading because I'm a masochist. It's silly when I'm pretty sure someone has already plotted it all out on a timeline, but whatever. It stuck in my mind. Only three (to seven) balrogs.

While I hate to disappoint, this isn't going to be image porn of awesome notebooks. I figured I'd get that warning out of the way right up front. Not that a post like that wouldn't be the best thing ever and probably about as useful as anything else I write here. It's just, you know: bad lighting right now, and I need the instant gratification of hitting the 'post' button as soon as I finish, etc. etc.

So, warm ups. A year or two ago I stumbled across a discussion via Metafandom (and why don't I ever save those links? Whyyyy?) about how to 'warm up' to a writing session, which I thought was pretty interesting. Freewrites are what I usually associate with warming up: spend fifteen minutes writing about bug-eyed sunglasses, or something that makes you angry, or someone you saw on your commute today. These were a staple of my creative writing program. I hated them all, across the board, not least because we always had to read aloud to the class afterward. The only thing I hate as much as public speaking is its close cousin, reading out loud from whatever is in front of you.

The OP came from a different background though: music. She said that a serious musician would practice four hours a day, and spend the first hour warming up with scales, the second hour doing something I don't recall, on and on until you get to the piece you're supposed to practice for a performance. (I may be getting this slightly wrong, but I don't have a link to go back to and check, sorry.) I do recall following a similar model when I was in music, but truncated, because I was not a professional and did not have the patience for four hours a day. Couldn't that model be adapted to writing? she asked, and went on to discuss what kinds of exercises or writing projects might constitute 'warming up' as compared to whatever your real project is.

Good question. For a while I was giving myself prompts inspired by the five things meme I've posted here a few times, in which I ask for a song quote, book title, color, emotion, and animal. It yields something like this:

1. I chased while I was young / Singing sweetly and faintly / A sadness of bright green / My fairytale
2. Eye of the Heron
3. slate
4. bitterness
5. Siamese cat

I keep a text file of these, and make new ones on occasion. Sticking to a theme is a huge challenge for me. I can usually use these two or three times and come up with completely different stories. Ideally, I should work on something like this for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then, once I'm over the hurdle of starting (which can be extremely hard some days), I can get to my real work.

That never happens. I spend so much time on the warm up that it becomes my project. And this isn't a bad thing, exactly; it means I have more stories to work with, refine, squish together, and play with. It also means I never get back to what I was supposed to be doing in the first place. The project I'm supposedly working on these days is on draft six, but it's been a while since I looked at the thing because I became obsessed with a dragon story spawned during one of these warmup, and then another idea after that, and another one. So I tried going back to old assignments. That's always a winner, right? You get to practice specific skills and stuff! But that gets boring fast - or it's just time-consuming, because most of those exercises involve taking the time to read something twice before even starting to write. I have to be in the mood for that. Or desperate.

Then, magically, I was reminded of something: notebooks! Natalie Goldberg sings their praises throughout Writing Down the Bones. Most of my stories are typed, so I didn't give it much thought.

However, about two weeks ago, an old college friend stayed with us, and this topic came up. He's an artist, trained in animation and illustration in the same program my husband attended. Naturally, he had sketchbooks with him. But the interesting thing was, he'd decided to designate topics to his sketchbooks: this one is for mermaids, that one is for aliens, the green one is for animal sketches. He had a stack of them in his luggage - Moleskines, if you're interested, all clearly labeled and stacked in a crate.

For some reason, I never thought about doing this for writing warm-ups. Writing by hand takes longer and eventually makes my hand hurt, so I prefer to type instead. But wouldn't that be perfect for warming up? Writing by hand involves bending over the table (or a pillow, or the nightstand) and generally doing things bad for my back or neck. I can't work too long if I don't want something to start aching, because I'm old and decrepit. Built-in time limit, woo!

The date at the front of my current notebook is 08.11.09. I've been jotting down notes, outlines, and ideas in the same spiral-bound notebook for three years - an SF State 2-subject notebook that I probably purchased just after I graduated. That's a long time to be hanging around the same stack of paper. Maybe I should try to go through at least four between now and next September. At least. Apart from this project, I mean.

Right now I'm debating how to theme my notebooks, because I like that idea. Picking one up and realizing I can only write about mermaids today cuts down on time wasted making decisions about what to write, which is stupid to linger on when you're supposed to be warming up. You know what you want to write: Real Project #3. This freewrite nonsense is supposed to loosen you up so the white space on the page doesn't scare you, or something.

I usually don't have problems with blank pages or text files. My issues start way before that stage of the process. :P

Anyway, I don't know how I want to split it up. Genre, in the fanfic sense? (eg. action/adventure, romance, historical.) Or maybe type of inspiration - Japanese mythology, Jewish tales, Norse mythology? Or types of subjects, like our friend did: angels, elves, and all that, in my case. Or SF/ fantasy / steampunk / myth-based. I CAN'T DECIDE. I think the first set might not work very well because "genre" is too big to be encompassed in a fifteen minute scribble, but the effectiveness of the others depends on how much I want to restrict my choices when it's time to write.

I'm thinking either the mythology or sub-genre sets. Maybe I can set aside a folder for each sub-genre (SF, fantasy, steampunk, myth) and then keep the different mythological inspirations as secondary prompts? Write a steampunk ficlet with a side of Norse gods! Or something.

Well, at least I've narrowed it down.

There's this bit of advice I've been thinking about. I can't remember where I found it or heard it; could've been in a conversation with my husband, in one of the many books on writing I clamp down and read when I'm feeling rudderless-- who knows. But it goes like this:

Ask yourself what you write; not what you want to write, or what you think you should write, but what you actually put on the page when you start working. Be brutally honest. What you enjoy reading and what you enjoy writing - or what you're good at writing, if you can separate the two - might be two different things. And when you find the answer to this question, you know what kind of a writer you are.

Being honest is hard. Not only can it suck to realize you don't live up to your own ideals, but being truthful and not cutting yourself down can also be hard if you're doing this exercise in a state of mind that's, ah, less than confident. It can be really easy to say, "I suck so much - I'm only good at (insert least-favorite genre here)" instead of looking objectively and solving the puzzle.

My puzzle was hard for me. I have varying taste in what I read, and I happen to be interested in some very academic topics which, when I consider them, seem impossible to write about. But I want to write the things I love, so I'm left with a dilemma you can measure by the space between the literary genre ("respectable") and the kind of fiction these interests lend themselves to ("not respectable"). And this is a dilemma because it seems the best way to honor these topics, so to speak, is to write something respectable. I'm coming to realize that is... not impossible, but extremely difficult. I went through my writing program grinding my teeth and refusing to bow down to the literary standard. (I question this literary standard, but oh wow, that's a long entry's worth of axe-grinding.) The assumption that genre work was inherently worth less irritated me, from close-range, for two years. Still, I internalized this notion that my work has to "mean something" and "be respectable," and have never asked myself what I want.

I like meaningful stories. I like fancy metaphors. I like commentary if it's on a topic I'm interested in.

I like to read these things. But do I like to write them?

No.

I like reading super-complicated political fantasy epics. Can I write them? ... I am actually not sure, but I think I would enjoy it.

I like a good romance as long as it isn't about a damsel-in-distress, or, god forbid, a highlander. (No offense, just... I do not find that attractive. At all.) Can I write a good romance? Well now... I would have to ask someone else about the "good" part of the equation, but I certainly did end up writing a lot of romance, and I even enjoyed doing it. In fact, I seem to be unable to write or even conceive of a story that doesn't involve some kind of romance.

I like reading historical fiction because it examines the character of the people who moved the world in their time and place. Not sure if I can write that, because I haven't tried. This genre takes a lot of research, obviously. But it sounds like something I would like to do because it gives me the excuse to study something interesting and, if I love it, write about it!

I like mythology. I like rewriting myths, or basing stories on them, or writing sequels to them. The ultimate form of fan fiction, maybe.

Most of my stories, but not all, fall into the last three categories-- sort of. For example, the story about two angels who go down to earth to hunt down fragments of the Book of Raziel (as it appears in myths, that is) before their human opponents can find them and cause some damage; I started that story three times, and eventually ditched it each time because it's... what? Sort of an adventure, sort of paranormal, based on mythology nobody has ever heard of. It's silly fantasy fiction. And in my head, each time I try to write it, is this insistent desire to write something meaningful, to make it a good representation of the legend and the beliefs that inspired it. I'm not sure I can do that if I follow the opposite urge, which would be to explore the potential I see in these two angels that makes them seem more human. And, well, angels experimenting with human vice has precedent in legends too! And also in stories like Angel Sanctuary, which I kind of hate. Probably a series like Supernatural too, if I had to guess.

I don't want to write Angel Sanctuary, but I'm damned if my brain isn't determined to do it anyway. And if I'm brutally honest with myself, it would probably be fun if I could get over this kneejerk disgust at myself for not "taking the topic seriously." What that really means, I think, is that I have a loathing of not taking myself seriously and making myself look smart.

I've been told before I should just embrace this story and write it, and maybe I should. But I'm not in a place where I can appreciate the experience, because I still feel like I should be writing the next great literary novel. I have to cut that expectation out of my life. It's not what I want. Nothing - no fiction - I have written to date indicates a desire to be one of the literary greats, no matter what I say on my journal. But how do you get rid of that? How do you shut that voice up and square with the idea that you do not, in fact, want that, and it's okay? If it were as easy as "just don't listen to that voice anymore!" then I'd be done. The so-called inner editor might be a form of resistance, but it's an unconscious one; resisting your own resistance is hard.

So is writing what I want to write. I thought I was doing that already, but as it turns out, I wasn't.

.

This isn't to say I won't take my topic seriously in the sense of trying to represent it correctly. If I try to write a story set in ancient Japan, I will do my best to research thoroughly and write characters who are Japanese, with Japanese values, not white people with Japanese names. If I can find Japanese beta readers I will try to listen and correct myself when I get it wrong.

The angel story is a little harder. History has blurred the lines between the legends which were sourced in Jewish writings like Midrash or Talmud, and what was appropriated for use by the Catholic Church. I'm not really educated on that topic. The stories I'm using are Jewish sources, and I frankly have no idea how to represent that correctly while my storyline blatantly contradicts a few basic values. Have the characters maintain the traditions I can, maybe, in a good light.

I guess that's an entry in itself.

.

A long time ago, I thought about majoring in history. The programs available to me focused entirely on European topics, so I gave up on the idea and decided to take offerings for other parts of the world, as they appeared. San Francisco State had enough classes to allow people to fulfill their Segment 3 requirements, which offered sections like Islamic Societies and Cultures, Women of Color in the U.S., and other options for other cultures; the semester before I left they finally created a minor for Southeast Asian Studies, but there was no such thing as a major for that field. I would've had to spend my time studying places mostly irrelevant to the cultures I was actually interested in if I decided to take the major anyway.

For a while, there, I thought I could be a researcher anyway, that there had to be a way. Maybe I could have figured it out. But I think I have to leave that idea behind too, because I'm no historian. Once I've done that it might be easier to leave behind the idea of writing something of literary merit - so to speak - and just try to write good stories instead.

It's hard to give up on things you have emotional attachment to. I haven't been harboring a secret hope that I'd magically get to start writing history papers, but it was there in the back of my mind, poking at me. It's more respectable to be a scholar than to be a writer. Too bad I'm not.

Funny, to look back and see how indecisive I was in college, even though I knew deep down what I wanted to do.

Reading led to writing, for me. After reading stories I wanted to write my own. The most obvious consequence of this was fan fiction; whenever I like something enough, I want to write about it, and if what I like happens to be someone else's story, that's my (mis)fortune. I mentioned in the last entry that I used to write blatant ripoffs when I was twelve or so, and that was the first form this habit took - things I thought were original, but of course were not. After that came the age of cliches, so to speak: I copied all the genre cliches I was familiar with (in this case fantasy and space opera), because what ultimately rendered me able to write in the first place was reading. What I know of grammar, I absorbed through reading. What I know about plot or character, or what makes a good fantasy story, I absorbed from reading.

Reading was difficult for me for a variety of reasons when I was young. It costs money if you want to buy your books (we were poor), or takes a good library if you want to borrow them (Cathedral City Public Library sucked horribly for the first ten years or so of my life in that area), and I had neither. I thought I was rich if I got $2 for my allowance until I met friends in middle school who got as much as $20. (Twenty bucks? When you're ten? :/) But my mother believed in reading and getting kids to read, so when we had extra, she took me to the bookstore and I grabbed books: The Baby-Sitter's Club, Nancy Drew, and sometimes Sweet Valley High when I was younger, maybe third or fifth grade; modern fantasy when I was in middle school, because by then our little Waldenbooks had run out of young adult fiction and I had to move on to adult books. I started with the Xanth series, never got into Sword of Shannara, and started in on the David Eddings books. The bookstore became my favorite place. I used to haunt Waldenbooks for the next Robert Jordan book (I had to wait for those to come out in paperback too, ugh), and when we finally got a Barnes&Noble - a tiny one not much bigger than the Waldenbooks in the mall - I wanted to go there practically every day to either buy a book or just look at them, and be around them.

Without books, I'm not sure I would've learned to write fiction. I don't think I'm one of those writers with the mysterious "spark" Ursula K. LeGuin spoke of, or the kind of person who has a lot to say and absolutely must say it; my urge to write always comes out of the desire to go, "hey, look at this awesome thing I love, don't you love it too?" Or, "look at this new idea I had about how to interpret the book," and I think I might've been better suited to the English major, to just reading and not writing. I came up with stories when I was a kid, just like everyone, but deciding to pick up this skill and try to use it to make my own? I'm not sure why I did that. I can't say it would've happened anyway, without so much exposure to books, because I'm not sure what made me do it to begin with.

When our Borders closed its doors, I was pretty down about it. My hangout place of choice is always a bookstore. I love browsing, reading, finding new books. I love talking about them, speculating about them. I like holding them in my hands. The store had a nice open floorplan, too, and nice chairs, and I liked the staff at the cafe. Why wouldn't I go there and spend money? But they closed, and we thought, at least we've still got Barnse&Noble across the street - a big one, too.

Then Barnes&Noble closed their Fremont location a month later, and we were left with nothing but a tiny used bookstore - which is awesome, by the way, but it's not quite the same. I can't go there for new releases, or to browse what's new; nothing is new, really, unless you're lucky. I buy stuff there all the time, but having this as my only option is slightly disappointing. And Fremont's library, while nice, has two flaws: increasingly short and inaccessible hours, and it frankly has nothing on my university library anyway. I'd go there if I could, but that's a $14 round trip. I'm not poor anymore, but I still can't buy $14 train tickets like candy.

This week the used bookstore closed to move to a new building. Without a bookstore to visit within a half-hour drive or more, I realized that browsing books is a form of inspiration for me. You don't always have to read them to catch a snip of a good idea. Sometimes just knowing what's out there can give me a kickstart, and I'm not going to argue with retail therapy as a motivating factor in getting myself to work, either. I tend to scoff at people who shun ebooks because they don't have a tactile factor, but I will admit that's something special. Not necessary to make me want to read, maybe, but it's nice. And being able to pick up and fan the pages of a book, especially a book that isn't already mine and that happens to be shiny and new, that maybe has a sense of mystery to it precisely because it isn't mine, is a special sort of feeling that makes me want to create.

I miss that feeling. I want it back, but I don't think I'm going to get it.

The funny thing is, when I look back at what life was like before that Barnes&Noble moved into our city, I realize the demand to have a local bookstore (or two) is a little spoiled - maybe a little unrealistic. Most places probably can't support that many stores or books. How many people read as compulsively as I used to? Online it seems like everyone I know reads regularly, but most of the people I knew in real life didn't read at all. Even now, very few of my friends have apartments overflowing with books. (Maybe they just organize better? :D;)

I've always known that reading and writing hold hands, but until now I didn't realize how much I associated with simply holding and looking at books. I didn't know the little mystery of a book that isn't mine had such an impact on me. And I'm kinda not sure what I can do about it now than I do now. Continue to miss it, I guess.

.

Well, this settles it: my lifelong goal is clearly to have a huge private library that occasionally gets restocked when I'm not paying attention, so I can get that little thrill. We'll call this Lifelong Goal #2. And if the library is my house, or even most of my house, with a few square feet set aside to sleep on the floor, I'm okay with that.

Lifelong Goal #1 is, of course, to be my neighborhood's only crazy cat lady.