Motivational Evolution
The wheel is moving again. I suppose it's only a matter of time now until we find out if I'm pushing it, or tied to the front of it.
Writing progress. Storyboarding, plotboarding, outlining, rummaging through Duotropes, setting up an Amazon Author Central page, showering multiple times a day because it seems to be the only place I can think sometimes, abusing the crap out of an unsuspecting Keurig one cup coffee maker(1), the signs are all there.
I even finally broke down and joined this century by asking for a laptop for Christmas. I try not to ask for seriously expensive things from my family, I'm one of the lowest maintenance holiday types you could hope for(2). But with the goals I've set for myself this year, if I don't get an occasional change of scenery, my brain is going to begin oozing out of my ears like toothpaste.
The main problem is motivation. As I've stated many times before, often to a completely empty room, I hate writing. I love the process of creating, I love seeing worlds and stories and characters come to life in my mind, and the moment they develop a firewire cable that runs from your brain stem to a USB port on your computer and allows you to mentally dictate, I am going to put Stephen King's prolific nature to shame. But until that day comes, there is a major bottleneck somewhere between my brain and my hands. I have no greater nemesis than an empty, white Word document screen(3).
I believe we learn from history, so I began analyzing my past. My most creative period, volume wise, was during my stint in New York. As far as I can tell, this could be attributed to any combination of three factors. First, I was stuck in a cubicle all day. Without exaggeration, I wrote a book on company time. Underworld University, the first volume at least, was crafted entirely from my desk. A monthly magazine's production schedule, after all, is two weeks of run-up, one week of unadulterated terror during the publishing window, and then a week of everyone eating free lunches on the company card and pretending they're working. It would have been harder for me to NOT write something, hence my LJ daily post average that was pushing 4 or 5 during some months.
The second and third factors were anger and spite, kind of intertwined and capable of being boiled down a la Carlin and the Ten Commandments to "Angst." I hit New York in a very dark place and decided to see how far down that particular rabbit hole I could go, throwing in a healthy dose of sleep deprivation to act as an emotional random number generator. I felt like I had something to prove, I felt like there were people that needed to feel sorry for discarding me, I felt like if I didn't get certain concepts out of my head via the written word, they were likely to chew their way through my sinus cavities and burst out of my eye sockets a la Aliens in the middle of a Scholastic staff meeting. Writing was survival, a necessary regulator, the safety valve on my pressure cooker.
But age and wisdom and perspective have diminished that to nothingness. Now I don't understand people who hold on to anger, wielding it with the expectation of hurting anyone but themselves in the long run. My emotional empathy has become attuned to the point that I can't even be near those people anymore for the intense discomfort the roiling in their minds provides me. And I've stuck around long enough now to realize that all the people who tried to make me cynical have done nothing but wallow in their own ineffectualness as human beings in all the intervening years. I have progressed and grown and achieved and failed and loved and lost and explored and found home. They have...um...been angry and...and yelled at people...and animals. Or themselves. Or coffee tables. Or abused themselves to the point of breaking down, then blamed their infirmity for not accomplishing anything more than they have. The ultimate retro-active self-fulfilling prophecy(4).
So it was an effective writing fuel, but it was a finite one, and one that tainted everything that came from that era with a fine, dusty layer of hateful fallout. Recently someone else read New York Minutes for the first time, someone who didn't even know I existed back when the experiences that formed that book were taking place. Their appraisal was that it was very honest, fairly brutal, definitely angry, and a portrait of someone that was really only marginally recognizable as me. Which is kind of the point here, I guess. My formative writing years were kind of the fossil fuel age for my creativity. Cheap, readily available fuels that polluted the crap out of everything, but during which all the basic principles for transportation as we know it were laid down. Just like our cars now transition to hybrids, complex fuels refining the concept to make it better for everyone involved, so too must my motivation. But how?
I wish I could tell you. I'm still figuring that part out. But what I do know is that the laptop and a good cup of coffee seem to be helping already.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 - Thanks to the name Keurig gave to their one-serving cartridges, you can now Google "K Cup" and get almost safe for work results. Almost.
2 - My father used to joke that if I didn't tell them what I wanted for Christmas, I'd end up with nothing but a box of coal, which I told him was fine, because mom kept the house unreasonably cold anyway, which got both of us in trouble. Threats have been kept to non-flammable objects since.
3 - Before any writing elitists jump on me, yes, I do most of my writing in Word, not any of the fancy designer programs floating around out there, although I do have something of a fondness for Liquid Story Binder for light work. Why am I like this, when Word is such a dubious program at best? Scan through Duotropes or the Writer's Market, pick any 10 markets at random that accept electronic submissions, and tell me what extension they're looking for. There's almost always going to be a .doc floating there. Have you ever tried converting from Word to another program, or from another program to Word, or heaven help you tried to take something in both directions? The formatting ends up looking like something you ran through Babelfish. And don't even get me started on OpenOffice. If you've ever submitted something to a market using OpenOffice's interpretation of a .doc file, my condolences.
4 - I invite you to perform this same thought exercise. Think of the five most toxic people you have known in your past, be it directly to you, or just a general area of effect malaise and cynicism that followed them around. Now find out what they're doing with themselves. I'm willing to bet at least 4 of them are exactly where you left them, no better off than if only a day had passed. People like that try to break the world down because it's easier than building themselves up, and they don't have the will or the ability to put forth the effort to do that. Or, generally, the stones.
Writing progress. Storyboarding, plotboarding, outlining, rummaging through Duotropes, setting up an Amazon Author Central page, showering multiple times a day because it seems to be the only place I can think sometimes, abusing the crap out of an unsuspecting Keurig one cup coffee maker(1), the signs are all there.
I even finally broke down and joined this century by asking for a laptop for Christmas. I try not to ask for seriously expensive things from my family, I'm one of the lowest maintenance holiday types you could hope for(2). But with the goals I've set for myself this year, if I don't get an occasional change of scenery, my brain is going to begin oozing out of my ears like toothpaste.
The main problem is motivation. As I've stated many times before, often to a completely empty room, I hate writing. I love the process of creating, I love seeing worlds and stories and characters come to life in my mind, and the moment they develop a firewire cable that runs from your brain stem to a USB port on your computer and allows you to mentally dictate, I am going to put Stephen King's prolific nature to shame. But until that day comes, there is a major bottleneck somewhere between my brain and my hands. I have no greater nemesis than an empty, white Word document screen(3).
I believe we learn from history, so I began analyzing my past. My most creative period, volume wise, was during my stint in New York. As far as I can tell, this could be attributed to any combination of three factors. First, I was stuck in a cubicle all day. Without exaggeration, I wrote a book on company time. Underworld University, the first volume at least, was crafted entirely from my desk. A monthly magazine's production schedule, after all, is two weeks of run-up, one week of unadulterated terror during the publishing window, and then a week of everyone eating free lunches on the company card and pretending they're working. It would have been harder for me to NOT write something, hence my LJ daily post average that was pushing 4 or 5 during some months.
The second and third factors were anger and spite, kind of intertwined and capable of being boiled down a la Carlin and the Ten Commandments to "Angst." I hit New York in a very dark place and decided to see how far down that particular rabbit hole I could go, throwing in a healthy dose of sleep deprivation to act as an emotional random number generator. I felt like I had something to prove, I felt like there were people that needed to feel sorry for discarding me, I felt like if I didn't get certain concepts out of my head via the written word, they were likely to chew their way through my sinus cavities and burst out of my eye sockets a la Aliens in the middle of a Scholastic staff meeting. Writing was survival, a necessary regulator, the safety valve on my pressure cooker.
But age and wisdom and perspective have diminished that to nothingness. Now I don't understand people who hold on to anger, wielding it with the expectation of hurting anyone but themselves in the long run. My emotional empathy has become attuned to the point that I can't even be near those people anymore for the intense discomfort the roiling in their minds provides me. And I've stuck around long enough now to realize that all the people who tried to make me cynical have done nothing but wallow in their own ineffectualness as human beings in all the intervening years. I have progressed and grown and achieved and failed and loved and lost and explored and found home. They have...um...been angry and...and yelled at people...and animals. Or themselves. Or coffee tables. Or abused themselves to the point of breaking down, then blamed their infirmity for not accomplishing anything more than they have. The ultimate retro-active self-fulfilling prophecy(4).
So it was an effective writing fuel, but it was a finite one, and one that tainted everything that came from that era with a fine, dusty layer of hateful fallout. Recently someone else read New York Minutes for the first time, someone who didn't even know I existed back when the experiences that formed that book were taking place. Their appraisal was that it was very honest, fairly brutal, definitely angry, and a portrait of someone that was really only marginally recognizable as me. Which is kind of the point here, I guess. My formative writing years were kind of the fossil fuel age for my creativity. Cheap, readily available fuels that polluted the crap out of everything, but during which all the basic principles for transportation as we know it were laid down. Just like our cars now transition to hybrids, complex fuels refining the concept to make it better for everyone involved, so too must my motivation. But how?
I wish I could tell you. I'm still figuring that part out. But what I do know is that the laptop and a good cup of coffee seem to be helping already.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1 - Thanks to the name Keurig gave to their one-serving cartridges, you can now Google "K Cup" and get almost safe for work results. Almost.
2 - My father used to joke that if I didn't tell them what I wanted for Christmas, I'd end up with nothing but a box of coal, which I told him was fine, because mom kept the house unreasonably cold anyway, which got both of us in trouble. Threats have been kept to non-flammable objects since.
3 - Before any writing elitists jump on me, yes, I do most of my writing in Word, not any of the fancy designer programs floating around out there, although I do have something of a fondness for Liquid Story Binder for light work. Why am I like this, when Word is such a dubious program at best? Scan through Duotropes or the Writer's Market, pick any 10 markets at random that accept electronic submissions, and tell me what extension they're looking for. There's almost always going to be a .doc floating there. Have you ever tried converting from Word to another program, or from another program to Word, or heaven help you tried to take something in both directions? The formatting ends up looking like something you ran through Babelfish. And don't even get me started on OpenOffice. If you've ever submitted something to a market using OpenOffice's interpretation of a .doc file, my condolences.
4 - I invite you to perform this same thought exercise. Think of the five most toxic people you have known in your past, be it directly to you, or just a general area of effect malaise and cynicism that followed them around. Now find out what they're doing with themselves. I'm willing to bet at least 4 of them are exactly where you left them, no better off than if only a day had passed. People like that try to break the world down because it's easier than building themselves up, and they don't have the will or the ability to put forth the effort to do that. Or, generally, the stones.