penfist

stories are the bones of everything

On Writing

The solution to writer’s block

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Stop believing in it. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist.

If you sit down and stare at a blank canvas, something will happen.  If that thing isn’t writing, it is because you are either (in order of likelihood):

  1. Scared
  2. Unmotivated
  3. Suffering from cognitive impairment

I will address these conditions in reverse order and share the solution to each of them.

Impaired

If you suffer from cognitive impairment, seek medical advice. This takes precedence over “writer’s block” under any circumstances. Once your team of medical professionals deals with the impairment, sit back down and move on to:

Unmotivated

If you find yourself unmotivated, write down the three things you are most passionate about in this world. If you aren’t writing about one of them, start. If you write those three things down and don’t have a single idea of what you should be writing about, you aren’t living in the same world all the rest of us inhabit. Go back to step one. Otherwise consider that you are simply:

Scared

If can’t write because you are scared, hello. I’ve been you. Exchange the word can’t for the word won’t. Examine what you are afraid of and tell it to fuck off. Please feel free to replace the invective with something that appeals to you. But realize you’re wasting time. Meanwhile, telling whatever you’re scared of to go blow is the only way to move past the word can’t and realize fear of failure isn’t an excuse. True passion always trumps fear. Cowards are what they are because of choices they have made.

Writer’s block is an excuse to fail. If you heart beats for the stories you to tell, stare at the canvas until your hands start moving and your brain starts pouring words. If it doesn’t happen, you’re not a storyteller.

I wrote this to myself, but I hope it helps you, unknown reader who wants to be reborn a writer.

2062

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I wake up sometimes when I am not supposed to. At the wrong time. Filled with restless energy. Sometimes epiphanies come. This morning I was filled with them. And one of them was this: I will die in the year 2062. Statistically speaking. Barring accidents, incidents, rage filled bar fights in a state of loutish drunkenness. If I do not challenge anyone to a duel that I lose between now and then and I manage not to anger god I have 17,224 days left on the planet.

We can all relate to the timespan of one day. And I find myself sitting here pondering. What will I do with today? Am I using it as wisely as I possibly can? Am I seizing each moment? Carpe diem. Seize the day.  I have been alive for 16,013 days. Most of them have not been used wisely. We all juggle priorities. Live between conflicting forces. We struggle with agendas, priorities, desires. You probably have some goals in life.

I do.

Do you wake up each morning asking yourself whether those goals are the correct ones for you to find maximal meaning? Do you breathe deeply and center yourself? Review how you lived yesterday? Ask yourself what you can do to make today more of what you’d like it to be?

I do.

I have a personal goal that overrides everything else in my life. One that I want to achieve each and every day for the remaining time I have. Write 1,000 words a day. Some days I write 10,000. Some days I don’t hit the mark. But it’s nice to think that if I live to my expected timeline I have the potential to write 17 million words down. That’s a lot of stories. Maybe I won’t live that long. Perhaps I’ll live longer. I find it important to mark the time, reflect on it, understand what is passing as I move through the time stream. I find it important to capture the moments and learn from them.

Do you?

You only need three to five important goals to achieve a sense of great satisfaction from your life. Take the time to make sure they are the best goals for you. They may change over time. As you deep breathe each morning your own epiphanies may arrive. I hope they do.

I will die in 2062. Perhaps. I will have written 17 million words by then. One hopes. I will have loved, lost, fallen down, stood back up. Tomorrow the countdown timer will be 17,223 and the word count will be 1,000 closer to the 17 million mark. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less. But I’ve crunched the numbers. Whatever the actual outcomes I have marked a path. I know where I want to go. I know that I will be surprised at how different things look from what I expected when I get there. All of that is perfectly fine.

It’s malleable. This condition of being human. In 2062 I’ll have written 17 million words. I’ll have told the stories I have inside me. What will you have done with your time?

Isolation and the craft

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[su_pullquote]“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” ― Charles Bukowski, Factotum[/su_pullquote]

There is no doubt in my mind that a writer can achieve some measure of success writing for others. You can write in order to please an audience. Or you can write in order to please a publisher. You can write to please your significant other or your imaginary friend. Your best writing though, will not emerge until you write to please your demon. The spirit that lives inside you. The one that will help you channel everything you are into only one thing: compelling storytelling.

Whatever your story happens to be. You might not even consciously remember writing it. But it will be fucking amazing. The writers that are true to their demons are the writers who can make a career out of it. A career that plays out on the writer’s terms and on the relationship between her demon and the words. You’ve got to be a little possessed to write powerfully. To do it in a way that will make your audience gasp and keep coming back for more.

Do you want to know the secret to becoming a storytelling legend? It’s amazingly simple. Become a story. Live a few dozen adventures. Have some close calls. Take some ill advised risks. Get high. Break a few laws. Hang out with people you would never have considered hanging out with before you decided to be a storyteller. Talk to your demon in the middle of the night or just before the sun rises or just after it sets. Touch, taste, feel, smell, see. A little bit of crazy for each of your senses. That’s the recipe that’s needed.

Then, after, isolate yourself. Like the madman in Stephen King’s The Shining. Get away to a place where all you can hear is the voice of your storytelling demon. Let that creature fill you up and take over your being. That’s when the story will be born. When it’s just you and the demon alone in a cabin. When all you care about is pouring out the thing that needs to be born. When your fucking cell phone is shut off and you forget to eat. You might piss your pants before the flow stops flowing. It won’t matter. The story comes first. The fingers don’t stop dancing with the keyboard until the story gets told. You don’t leave the cabin until the characters have come to life and been killed off. You go from one end of the arc to the other in a frenzy and you don’t let anything or anyone get in the way.

If the police come to get you before the demon is done you’ll have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the place you are hiding. You’ll find a napkin and something sharp and you’ll keep telling the story with your own blood as the ink if that is what becomes necessary to get it into the world. If you’re going to try, as Bukowski recommended, go all the way. Nothing is more important than this. You were born for this. You’re lucky enough to be possessed by the need, the fire, the compulsion to bring something from nothing and pour it out into one of the most important things human beings possess: stories.

You can’t half-ass this thing. Punch your distractions in the face. Isolate yourself. Go crazy and write the story. For yourself. For your demon. Don’t try. Don’t do it for anyone else. If you are doing this for any reason but to quiet your writing demon why are you even bothering? You aren’t really alive. Go do something else. Go get fat and comfortable saying and being all the things somebody else thinks you should say and be. We don’t want you around. My writing demon and I have things to do and you aren’t welcome.

It was like this…

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The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.

I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.

My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.

I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.

There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.

In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.

It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.

Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.

No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.

Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.

Being true to yourself

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When you write, people like to give you free advice based on their own ideas about what it means to be a writer. I appreciate all of the advice. I’m not going to follow most of it. One of the pieces of advice I have spent time thinking about is that I choose different pen names for different genres. The idea being that if you like my BDSM erotica you might not like my self-help books. Or if you like my fantasy you might not like my horror. I hope you like all my offerings. If you don’t however, that’s OK too. Your choice. My name is Penfist. Call me Pen. I’m going to write whatever I want. That’s why I chose to do this.

I am a writer because I need to tell stories. The stories that I want to tell. You can float me an idea and it might grab me by the teeth and pull me into itself. That’s a wonderfully terrifying experience when it happens. I encourage you to engage with me that way. Send me an epiphany so large I have to write an entire novel or tome about that idea. In the meantime, understand that one person has many facets. You do. I do. We all do. I’m trying to simplify my life be exploring them all. I can’t do that as effectively if I have to wear masks. Commercial success will happen if the work I produce resonates. Entertains. Pulls you in.

I write self-help, erotica, horror, contemporary fantasy, post-apocalyptic stories and whatever else I decide contains a story that needs to be told. That’s going to make some people dismiss me as “that guy who does whatever he wants.” I’m totally comfortable with that. I want to attract people with malleable minds not brittle ones. The point of writing this out and putting it into the world is that I hope you’ll choose the same path. Be true to your own muse. Create art. Own the results. Learn from the feedback. Keep creating. It’s your story and the characters in it belong to you. Surround yourself with others who believe in that and you’ll explode with endless inspiration. Both given and received. That’s what I believe. It’s why I won’t create a bunch of different writing personas. I want to focus on being that guy who writes whatever he wants. I’m being true to myself and I think you should consider living that way too.

Now go buy a book so I can pay the web hosting fees this month.

The importance of writing rituals

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When I first started getting serious about writing, I set a goal of 1,000 words a day. Output is how you get better. I’ve long ago surpassed that target. Some days I write 7,000 words. My minimum targets now are 5,000 words a day at least five days a week. This is very achievable. I type 70 wpm, so theoretically, I could hit my mark in 71 minutes. That assumes that the story just flows automatically out of my brain like water. Unfortunately, that isn’t how stories work. Writing is art. Building a good story is just like building a good building. It’s done in a very methodical way. For anything over 1,000 words I tend to go into Scapple first and put the bones of my animal together. Scapple is a simple little software tool for Mac and PC that lets you figure out all the basics in a visual way. I tend to spend a few hours to a day working on the ideas that need to be woven together. For instance, here’s the current visual representation of Demonology, a contemporary fantasy I’m working on.

Demonology_Scapple

 

As you can see, there is more to a good story than just sitting down and letting it flow out of you. Well, for me anyhow. Stephen King might sit down and just start writing whatever is in his head. But I doubt that. I’ll bet he has a process too. Probably very different from me, because there is a generational gap and he wrote his first novel on a typewriter. Then there is Neal Stephenson, who wrote one of the most complex plots ever devised with a fountain pen. The Baroque Cycle is marketed in a silly, greedy way as three books now, but it started off as one immense tome I enjoyed mightily, as I do all of that man’s work. But I digress. The point of this post is – have a process.

If you don’t have a word goal count that you follow like the Catholic church follows the rituals of mass, you aren’t going to be a successful writer. You might write one novel, and it might even sell. But this writing thing won’t be a long-term career. You’ll need to know your tools and your process as well. You can break a million rules, but have some to break in the first place. Otherwise, you are just dreaming. The dream of being a novelist ain’t going to happen without you sitting down and pumping out prose. You’re going to need to be a word whore, and you’re going to need to be good at it.

You found this post because you either like my writing or you’re looking for writing tips. If the first, go buy a book right now and leave me a nice review so I can keep doing this. If the latter, why are you still reading. You should be writing. Go do it. But before you start, write down your word count goals. Understand your tools. And if you can’t touch type, learn that first. Unless you’re Neal Stephenson. If you are, then you should know I idolize you.

But you aren’t. So, go on. Get writing.