Juiced On Writing

Recently on The Writer Today blog, AVR posted “Ten Reasons You Know You Are a Writer“. I’d like to counterpoint each of them with the converse side to those golden coins. Each Symptom of writer-hood has it’s own negatives, as I have found. Meant in a personal and hopefully humorous vein.

Here are AVR’s wonderful reasons, all of which I identify with.

1.Inspiration strikes at the most unexpected moments.
2.You know the terms: “Follow me to Twitter”, E-Book, Book Trailer, Feed.
3.You develop a blog and/or website.
4.Your creative muse wakes you up in the middle of the night with an idea of something to write about and you have a small notebook on your night stand for when it does.
5.You keep a small writing pad in your purse for just in case.
6.You find yourself eavesdropping and people watching more at a restaurant, coffee shop, bookstore, etc. in hopes of getting an idea for a story.
7.You observe your surroundings more and pay more attention to details.
8. You subscribe to writing magazines, buy books on the craft of writing, attend writing classes/workshops, writing conferences, join book clubs, enter writing contests.
9. You buy file folders to organize your writing with words on them such as: best seller, illustrate, fairy tale, novel, thriller.
10. You read everything and anything and you write, write, write.

1. Inspiration Strikes at the Most Unexpected Moments.

In “Unexpected Moments” read – “Highly embarrassing or frustrating moments in your life, when it’s most likely you can’t deal with the Inspiring Thought in the first place.” Because I do.

When I first began identifying and allowing my own writerly thoughts, I had an idea for the most fantastic guaranteed-bestseller in the universe. It came to me on the operating table, as I was coming out from my anesthesia, and alarm bells were ringing all around me. No, seriously. This is a true story. Obviously, I forget that brilliant idea as soon as the nurses started hovering over me, trying to turn my alarms off.

Problem 1 : I Struggle to Control my Thoughts

2. You Know the Terms : “Follow me to Twitter”, E-Book, Book Trailer, Feed

In fact, you know many more terms like that. Try – “status update”, “social marketing”, “blog book tour” and “information override”.

Unfortunately, in this virtual village and multi-media social notworking world, being a writer and not writing but spending all your time keeping to grips with the marketplace, is something which many of us encounter on a daily basis.

For instance, here I am blogging. ‘Doh’, said Homer, or ‘Ro Roh,’ said Scooby.

Problem 2 : The Business of Marketing and Keeping Up with the Latest is taking over the Business of Writing.

3. You Develop a Blog and/or website.

I was a long-term blogger before I let the writer within me loose. I’d always wanted to be a writer, but blogging gave me the outlet to finally tell myself off for procrastinating my dreams away. However, now we’re being told that all writers need to have a blog or website in order to market themselves from.

All well and good. I believe this with one reservation – it kind of helps to have a product or service to market as a writer before you set up the blog or website to market the product or service you provide as a writer. You know what I mean?

Of course, I completely broke this rule, with no service or product to speak of. I just like blogging.

Some of us can get away with this, as we love blogging so much we know what we’re doing – within reason – in blog administration and setup. Even in how to do it semi-professionally. And a few of us just wing it. You tell me which one I am – I’m too busy blogging to work that one out.

If you’re setting up a blog or website solely to simply share your writing or thoughts, then fine. It’s great writing practice. Blogging has helped me find my own voice, and desires in writing. It’s also helped me (slowly) find a community of people I enjoy reading myself, and whom I delve into for additional information and ideas.

But there are a lot of writers out there setting up blogs and websites, with little knowledge of what they’re doing, and spending a lot of time choosing blog templates or themes, tweaking back-ends, and playing with headers, graphics and design. And then running out of steam and closing down the blog or leaving it to stagnate when they find themselves disheartened by poor readership or lacking inspiration in posting.

Perhaps that creative side of those writers may be lost on the design and nurturing of a website.

Maintaining a blog is hard work. I’m sure many others like AVR and the excellent other writing blogs being published will tell you that. And if other writing work is your main intention (as mine is fiction), then blogging three posts per week (plus the three per day expected within the social media services) can often distract you from the main business and passion of your life.

And worse – blogging, for many, is not even seen as writing. Sigh. All that planning, drafting, thinking, writing, re-writing, more re-writing – and apparently you’re not actually ‘writing’.

Problem 3 : The Good Suggestions of Other Writers / Marketers Can Become Distracting
Problem 4 : Writing a Blog (Unless You’re Paid for It) is Not Conventionally Considered to Be ‘Writing’ in some circles.

4. Your Creative Muse Wakes You in the Middle of the Night and You have a Notebook Ready

If only. Now that I’ve put into force a notebook system to capture all those ideas (see A Writer’s Notebook) and I actually do have that notebook ready, I’ve never had the muse come a-calling. Not at midnight, anyway. Or perhaps that’s just because I’m struggling with tiredness lately, and sleep is too blessed to wake me from unless I happen to need the toilet.

Am I the only writer out there who has discovered her muse has a case of stage-fright when faced with minor control methods placed around him? (Note: my muse is currently male). The last laugh’s on me, then.

But AVR is right – I know I’m a writer just because I have that notebook a-ready, even if my muse doesn’t acknowledge the fact.

Problem 5 : Trying to Control or Be Prepared for Your Muse Sometimes Kills the Muse – or at least they take a long holiday.

5. You keep a small notebook in your purse just in case.

Actually, I don’t carry a purse / handbag. But I do carry around an iPhone with notetaking capabilities – just in case.

Ideas aren’t my problem – or lack of them anyway. Now that I have ways to capture them, I find I have too many of them. There’s only so many I can write over the course of my lifetime, and providing so many ways to capture such ideas seems to now provide me with the reverse problem of having too many to capture.

I need to now develop a quality radar or internal equaliser. Something that stops me falling foul of the Garbage In – Garbage Out proverb recognised by any I.T. worker. Because the more ideas I capture, the more difficult it becomes in locating that non-rubbish idea from the rest of the ‘possibly okays’. This must also be exponential as I gather and fill more and more notes, I would suggest.

Problem 6 : Too Many Rubbish Ideas Infiltrate Your Life, making it difficult to recognise the good from the okay.

6. You Find Yourself Eavesdropping or People-watching

I always have done this. Right from early childhood. I was one of those kids who sat slightly unattached from the rest of the world, as children rushed around me, a spectator not an active do-er.

People – even some children- thought me a little odd for doing that. My first real physical fight came about in the school playground when one girl took offense at my distant stare (I wasn’t even staring directly at her, I recall) and fronted up to me with the often-heard, “What you staring at?!”. The whole thing ended up in me slapping her across the face for saying something dreadful about my elderly mother at the time. It was the first and last time I’ve ever struck another human being (or animal for that matter) and I was as shocked at my actions as she was. But I had to make her stop opening her wonderful mouth and not making any sense at me.

All for people-watching.

The ubiquitous, “What you staring at?” has been fired at me on trains, the underground, small town carnivals and major airports. I tend now to have learnt my lesson, and make my own people-watching a little less obvious, but occasionally still get found out. It’s okay – even cute – for small children to stare, but not for adults.

As for listening into conversations – this has become more difficult with the mobile phone society that we live in. Where every person around us has a phone attached to their ear, or is busy texting, and eavesdropping becomes downright difficult.

What I can not understand is the group of fifteen year old school girls who gather together on pathways or playgrounds around my village, only to not talk to each other because they’re busy texting a missing friend each – about the fact they are gathered together not talking with each other, I guess.

Then you have the problem with so much people-watching – the obsession with comparing your own reactions and thoughts to those you witness in others. What’s their motivation, you wonder, in having that tantrum? What’s the story? Hang on, didn’t I throw a paddy only yesterday over something equally small? How was I feeling then? Hmmmm… am I abnormal or normal? Did I over-react or was it called for?

Meanwhile, the tantrum I am witnessing has walked away down the aisle, probably tugged along by an impatient parent, and I’m still standing there thinking about myself.

Problem 7 : People Watching and Eavesdropping can be an Offensive or Dangerous Past-Time
Problem 8 : Due to the inwards nature required, writers can be a little self-obsessed.

7. You Observe Your Surroundings More, And Pay Attention to Details

This is utterly true, and utterly annoying outside of the writing world. When I worked in the corporate world I had a reputation for going into meetings and remaining quiet for most of the session. Let’s face it – there’s always going to be one or two people in that meeting who like to ‘hold fort’ and many others who fight to get a word in edgewise. I let them do that.

Six months later, I could quote back anything those people had agreed to, or said, often in a time when they were trying to reverse their way out of their promises, and hoped no one had really taken note of them.

I’m also the person who normally will notice changes about a person – new hair styles, a new deodorant perhaps. But I’m rubbish at retaining names. I recognise and know my way roughly through a distant town I’ve only traveled through once before, but can suddenly lose focus of where I am when driving down a country road I’ve driven twice daily along, for over three years. I sometimes arrive at a cupboard or the kitchen sink and realise I have no idea what I was meaning to do there.

Names and everyday processes are apparently disposable to me. My brain temporarily chooses to lose the synopses which fire for those everyday things, in order to make way for the detailed analysis and retention of the things and places I can make use of at a later date.

In being a writer, I find myself operating more and more like the stereotypical bumbling nutty professor.

Problem 9 : Bumbling nutty professor-type tendancies – forgetting the everyday, and concentrating on what many people might consider as being – ‘far too much detail’.

8.  You Subscribe, Join, Compete, and Locate Anything and Everything on Writing

Agreed. Writing is a craft, and an art form. But writers need to learn – and practice their craft in order to develop it, just like any artist. In order to learn, magazines and books, groups and communities can provide a lot of value.

You should anti-up the cost, though. Both in monetary and time terms.

I already own a large floor to ceiling set of bookcases which hold all the novels and books collected in my family over the years. It pains me to get rid of any of them, so generally I don’t. We have more books in this family than any other in this village. More than our little volunteer village library even holds between its four walls.

Once I started taking this writing ambition seriously I naturally subscribed to two national writing magazines, and started collecting ‘how-to write’ books. I don’t have the shelf space to file those on now, so they sit on a large windowsill, halfway up the window so far. And I know that many other writers have many more than I, too. I’ve seen pictures of their own book stacks in the back of those magazines I subscribe to.

Looking for people who at least have some chance of understanding me, I searched for local writing or even book reading groups. Unfortunately there are none locally, so I found myself seeking this out virtually, here on this blog and in other web places.

Of course, none of this is actually writing, though. Is it? But collecting and reading how-to-write books and seeking out knowledgeble companion writers is quite addictive, I agree. I would never give up my ‘habit’ now.

Problem 10 : The surrounding training, practice, support and communities for a writer can be distracting from the actual implementation of putting pen to paper (or pixels to monitor).

9. You Buy File Folders to Organize Your Writing and Label with Words like ‘Best-seller’ etc.

Why is it that being an anal-cataloguer and organiser is such a bad thing? I love the concept of organisation. Heck, I’ve blogged about productivity as a general category on this blog because of this love.

Although I can’t imagine that some of the historical novelists bothered with so much research, to be honest. The Bronte sisters? Did they have filing cabinets? No, didn’t think so. But they wrote in a totally different market – and nowadays there are so many more writers or want-to-be writers out there. It’s a competitive world, not just in writing, but in everything. Researching and being prepared is one of the tools necessary to compete in such a world, and organising those findings is a major task.

Naturally, I have more files or research material, idea notes and notebooks than is good for me however. Another distraction from actually writing. I could spend days organising, I could. And my favourite store, other than a book store, is that of the stationery store. I could spend an entire day browsing around a stationery warehouse, choosing files, tabs, post-it notes, notebooks and some nice pens. My family groan when I go near such stores, knowing they will have to bribe me out in some fashion, and certainly holding large plastic bags of my purchases.

New stationery makes me feel very very happy – almost in a ‘wrong’ way.

Problem 10 (again) : The surrounding training, practice, support and communities for a writer can be distracting from the actual implementation of putting pen to paper.
Problem 11: The market for writers is highly competitive and expects a lot of research and organisation of approaches to get us anywhere. Be prepared or be square.
Problem 12 : Writer’s can have quite addictive personalities.

10. You Read Anything and Everything and You Write, Write, Write

I think for someone trying to find their genre within fictional writing, I am becoming more selective in my reading material. I am now gathering books, reference material and even news items which are more conductive towards those genres I am moving into.

However, in retrospect, on deciding to move into my own writing dream, I over-extended my reading material, picking up magazines from the newsagents which had nothing to do with anything I might write – just in case.

Just in case what?

But you never know when inspiration or an idea might hit you, you know?

Or so that little voice was telling me as I spent another £5 on a copy of Dog World magazine even though I wouldn’t be writing anything about dogs.

The thirst for knowledge, stories and ideas is unquenchable in a writer. Maybe we’re born that way. How many of us were avid readers as we grew up? I literally went through every children’s book on my small town library’s shelves – some more than once, and both non-fiction and fiction.

Therefore I write. I write to practice, but I also write to share all those thoughts and knowledge. And hopefully I write to be published. I write for myself, but I also write for many others. If I didn’t do that, then I might as well just keep my thoughts to myself, and not write them out in the first place.

But that’s not what a writer is. A writer writes. And people read it. Therein lies the problem.

Some readers don’t like my writing, or knowledge.

In fact, some people don’t understand my need to write at all. Some people are very good at pretending they don’t know I’m a writer (See I Told Someone I Wrote the Other Day). Others think I’m a bit of a smart-arse. Others wonder when all that writing will actually produce anything of value for me. Still others are secretly jealous, or angry that they never wrote, or failed at writing. Or they never saw the point of reading, or story-telling, or even how-to manuals. Some think they can offer help by offering critiques when none were requested. Others ‘help’ with grammar or spelling mistakes. Some think anyone after the great JK Rowling is never going to do any good.

Go figure.

Writers have those who are non-supportive, those who are outright critics, simple dis-believers and blatantly apathetic family and community members to deal with. In reading and writing we open up ourselves to what can sometimes become a right old ego-bashing. We either develop a stiff upper lip (British) or thick skin (the rest of the world) or we let those problems eat away at us.

All for the sake of reading and writing, which when you look at it logically, is the bare basics of our educational system and something my six year old daughter isn’t being criticised for doing at all. Ever.

Go figure, again.

Problem 13: Opening Up in our reading and writing opens us to criticism and can be sometimes a little hurtful.

And then there was More

I can think of many more problems than that. Take, for example, the acute feeling of fear and rejection that I’m already a master at, despite not yet being rejected – in writing terms, that is. Ah yes, there are certainly many more than those thirteen problems I came up with in counter-pointing the notions we identify with as proving we are writers.

Still, if I can conquer even half of these, then I hope I have a chance to work toward success.

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