Eventually, if you’re trying to make it as a writer, you’re going to despair.  You can’t write well enough. This story will never sell.  If you do sell it, it’ll never be popular.

This terrible feeling like you’re just wasting your time and nobody cares happens, absurdly enough, to very popular writers.  It happens to nobodys.  It happens to writers, period.  If you’re putting words down and trying to get people to read them, there will be times you’ll want to take everything you wrote, set it on fire, and then fling yourself in to burn with it.

Here is what you do when those down days come: you write more.

Took a nasty rejection straight to the sternum?  Write more.

Had a confidence-shredding bad review?  Write more.

This grand story in your head is completely beyond your ability to commit it to the page?  Write more.

This terrible book you’re reading made millions, and your better work can’t find a home?  Write more.

Feel like you’re a fraud who’s somehow lucked out when better writers languish behind you?  Write more.

Your favorite author just told you he abhorred what you wrote? Write more.

The thing about writing is that so much of it comes down to tenacity.  The most popular writers in the world can all tell you about this fellow they knew when they were starting out, a colleague who could write stories that would charm the petals from a rose… and yet these natural geniuses didn’t stick with it.  They either let life swamp them, or couldn’t stand the rejections, or didn’t feel like it.  And these magnificently talented people never became Writers, because for whatever reason they never pushed through.

It’s not that they weren’t very good.  It’s just that they stopped knocking on doors.  While the writer you’ve heard of kept ringing doorbells until she got an answer.

So pushing through is what you need to do.  Write when you’re sad.  Write when you’re busy.  Write when you’re uninspired.  Write when you’re utterly consumed with the idea that you cannot do this.  Learn to take all of that despondence and to transform it into beauty, for writing in the throes of despair will do two things: when you are writing sad scenes, you will have so many more emotions to cram into it, and when you are writing happy scenes, you will be forced to emulate joy. One will make for better writing, the other will elevate your mood.

The truth is, though I’ve written in both despair and elation, I can’t really tell which mood I was in when I go back to revise.  You must learn to write without hope.  Keep creating through those dry spells, keep sending out stories during the rejections; decouple your personal contentment from your creative muse and make that bitch dance for you.  She’ll be clumsy at first, foolish… but with time, you can make her do the most elaborate pirouettes when you’re barely able to move off the couch.

In fiction, there’s often a plot sequence: Try/fail, try/fail, try/succeed.  In real life, there may be a hundred try/fails before you get to that succeed.  But you’ll never know unless you stay in that execution loop.

Write.

Write more.

And then write more still.

(Inspired by Catherine Schaff-Stump’s Writers and Despair.)

 

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/303034.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

Just discovered: I could pretty much ruin any woman’s day when she’s about to leave the house by asking, “Oh, you’re going out like that?” and then muttering that it’s fine, it’s fine.

I just said that to Erin hypothetically, and she knows I didn’t even mean it, and she’s still itching to change her clothes.

(Cue tides of women saying that they’re above that. You may thank me for making you feel superior.)

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/302666.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.

If Your Boyfriend Tells You Your Vagina Is Repulsive, BREAK UP WITH HIM.

Thanx to Jezebel

I had my bag stolen tonight. Of course I lost my phone and this is a bitch, but what I am really, really annoyed about is the loss of my hearing aids, my British Library card, and the final four books I needed to read before I can start writing my chapter.

At the May 7th edition of Tuesday Funk, our almost monthly Poem by Bill repeated a question we've heard before, and it went a little like this...



And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, June 4th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Darwyn Jones, Heather Corallo, Lawrence Santoro, Mare Swallow, and G.P.A. (Greatest Poet Alive)!


Crossposted from Tuesday Funk

In Cuba, a member of the royal family is leading the defense of sexual minorities, and Uncle Fidel has apologized for the bad old days. Good for them!

Thanx to Feministing

I was very leery of the second Star Trek movie, simply because I felt the first one had violated the Prime Directive of Star Trek: Kirk was dumb.

Which is not to say that Kirk was a sack of suet in the JJ Abrams-inspired reboot, but the fact is that the entire last act of the film involved Kirk lucking out through most of it.  And while everyone has their own take on what Star Trek is or is not, to me a large part of Star Trek is that you don't ever bet against Kirk.  He's not educated (even if times he aspires to be), but his low cunning has literally placed him up against gods on multiple occasions... and he triumphed.  So to have the new Kirk hand most of the plotting duties over to Spock was a bit disappointing... and I was afraid that it would only get worse in the sequel.

It didn't, I'm glad to say.

The main theme of this Star Trek movie is unpredictability.  In most Star Trek movies - hell, most movies - the captain has a job to do, and the course of action is pretty clear.  But in this one, you're walking with Kirk as his crew and commanders disagree with each other, and most of them seem to have pretty good points.  As the Captain, it's his job to make the calls... but it's pretty hard to second-guess Kirk's actions when you're not sure what the right call is.

And Kirk is still green; talented, but green.  (Okay, this is Star Trek, so I must clarify: not literally green.)  He makes mistakes, and then - to his credit - backtracks.  This is a Kirk who is still very much learning what it means to be a Kirk, and to see a man flip-flopping as new data comes into play warms my Democratic little heart.

But still: uncertainty.  There's a lot of sections that leave you feeling off-kilter, as in, "Are they really going to do this?" and that only gets worse if you know the old canon.

And now, I must venture not Into Darkness, but into spoilers - for like Iron Man 3, the less you know about the film the more you'll appreciate it.

( Can you believe that Scotty was a Cylon? Who saw that coming?!?!?Collapse )

In the end, this Star Trek is... not that Star Trekky.  The old Star Trek wrestled mightily with matters of theme and morality: the reason Star Trek II was so popular was because it asked, "What happens when you can't win the Kobayashi Maru?  What happens when you're old?"  This new Star Trek asks, "What happens when a violent terrorist - oh, wait, PLOT TWIST!  Oh, look at that!  Boom!  Cool!  And... hey, duty, isn't it great?"  It just moves too fast to really actually ask or answer any questions.  It is, like The Avengers, utilizing clever one-liners in lieu of actual characterization, which is witty and fun and does not lend itself to anything more than cartoon characters.

Which isn't a big ding.  I mean, it's a big-ass summer movie.  But the Star Trek concept has been watered down to fit in our popcorn, and it's satisfying enough.  This may actually be a better thing on the whole, as the failure mode of Star Trek is BLAH BLAH MORALITY, and when Star Trek fails it becomes sludgy and preachy.  This new Star Trek may fail at some point, at which point it'll basically degrade to Transformers... which, from a Hollywood perspective, is actually preferable.

(Fun Fact: Damon Lindehoff actually wanted to call it Star Trek: Transformers 4, which as he noted "Was technically available."  He was joking, but I think there's more than a little acknowledgement that this new Star Trek is intended to be a blockbuster first, Star Trek second.)

I'm not saying that Into Darkness is bad.  It's a notch below Iron Man 3, which I loved.  It's a fun movie, and I'd encourage you to go see it.  If you're a Star Trek fan, well, it's Star Trek Lite, and that's still a big hoopla, and they even throw in old references to make it work.

In short: it works. You'll probably be happy if you go see it.  Benedict Cumberbatch is very Benedict Cumberbatchy, and Chris Pine does an excellent job channeling Kirk.  And there's no need to stay through the credits, as there is no Shwarma.

This is all you need to know.  Now go buy your tickets.

There's a belief that really, really wanting something is valuable. That our desire will help. "The other team wanted it more," a losing coach might say.

But wanting something so badly you shake for it never helped anyone overcome a gap of skill.

It was in a comparative religions class that I first read about the Buddhist concept of achieving enlightenment through the removal of desire - even, in the end, the desire to achieve enlightenment. That hung with me and buzzed around my brain for months. You have to let go. Drop the wanting. You can't even get what you're looking for if you really really want it.

"But isn't that sad," thought young-me. "What's the point of achieving anything if you don't WANT it? Where's the climax? The glory?"

We want life to be the highlight reel, but it's mostly the stuff that doesn't make it in. You lose a lot by focusing on that narcotic moment of bliss that may not even come.

What's bringing this to my mind is the Hessler Street Poetry Contest. There was a time I really, really cared about it. I really wanted to win. I'd won lots of poetry contests in High School. On the High School scale of poetics, I was awesome. But the bar for "awesome" in high school poetry is somewhere just above "this wasn't totally painful to read."

I wrote a lot of poems ABOUT Hessler Street, in the hopes that they'd get in. They didn't. I wrote some really killer stuff for my graduate poetry class - they didn't get in. And then I sort of gave up. I missed the deadline for a few years in a row and just forgot about how much I really really wanted to win that contest.

This year, I saw one of my writing workshop friends was involved in the contest, so I resolved to send something. I casually sifted through my recent poems and tossed them three. In the process I re-read some of my old poems and shook my head vigorously at myself for ever thinking they were any good. "Hell," I thought, "These new poems aren't any good, either. But they are better."

When I heard I'd made the cut for the anthology, I was somewhat surprised at my lack of emotional reaction. "Oh," I thought, "Well, that's nice."

I just didn't care anymore. I don't know why I stopped caring - maybe my opinion of my own poetry has reached a certain clarity that doesn't require outside validation? Maybe it's just that I'm a published poet now, with actual cash monies to validate me? I dunno. But I went to the reading mostly concerned over what to wear, since I had been sick in bed and I wanted a chance to dress up. I sat and listened to many anguished and confessional poems and thought, "They'll never give a prize to my silly little thing. It's so light-hearted and short. It's hardly anything."

I enjoyed standing up to read - I always do - but it wasn't the thrill it once was. I guess because I wasn't afraid at all. And when they announced I had won third prize, I was momentarily confused, having so thoroughly convinced myself I wasn't in the running. "Marie Vibbert? Why is that name so familiar?" And then, remarkably calm. The second prize winner asked me, "Why aren't you excited? I'm so excited?" And I had to say something like, "Oh, I am. I'm just not very expressive."

But really, I was quietly proud of my lack of caring. Of one more weight of worldly desire that dropped from my greedily-clutched horde, leaving me lighter.

I fricking love getting my stories read at Escape Pod – the narrators there are so good, the forums so full of awesome feedback, and there’s just something beautiful about hearing words I wrote become part of an old-time radio show.  So my singularity-as-horror tale “Dead Merchandise” is up – and the people at Escape Pod seem to be digging it, thus far.

In case you need a sample, it follows:

The ad-faeries danced around Sheryl, flickering cartoon holograms with fluoride-white smiles. They told her the gasoline that sloshed in the red plastic canister she held was high-octane, perfect for any vehicle, did she want to go for a drive?

She did not. That gasoline was for burning. Sheryl patted her pockets to make sure the matches were still there and kept moving forward, blinking away the videostreams. Her legs ached.

She squinted past a flurry of hair-coloring ads (“Sheryl, wash your gray away today!”), scanning the neon roads to find the breast-shaped marble dome of River Edge’s central collation unit. River’s Edge had been a sleepy Midwestern town when she was a girl, a place just big enough for a diner and a department store. Now River’s Edge had been given a mall-over like every other town — every wall lit up with billboards, colorful buildings topped with projectors to burn logos into the clouds. She was grateful for the dark patches that marked where garish shop-fronts had been bombed into ash-streaked metal tangles.

The smoke gave her hope. Others were trying to bring it all down — and if they were succeeding, maybe no one was left to stop her.

Anyway, you can listen to it here.  It’s about thirty-five minutes.  And another great production, but I’d expect no less from the ‘Pods.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

This entry has also been posted at http://theferrett.dreamwidth.org/302367.html. You can comment here, or comment there; makes no never-mind by me.