Loving the One You're With

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And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey

Love the one you’re with.

~Stephen Stills

Oh, I want to write all the stories. I want to write them all the time and all at once! In December, I took stock of all my open projects. I’ve blogged about how important it is to finish. I believe that it is one of the keys to improving as a writer. Good stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end – and the process of creating a story has the same components.

Yet over last twelve months I managed to accrue several unfinished* projects.

When I get stuck, or my current draft starts feeling like a slog, that’s when one of my other unfinished stories starts to look oh so much more appealing. Writing a good story isn’t just mentally difficult, it’s emotionally challenging. I believe writing a good story, one that’s at the top of my game, should scare me. It’s natural when things get tough for that little voice to start saying that maybe I should jump ship.

This is the danger of multiple projects. I’m certainly not going to say you shouldn’t have a few irons in the fire. There are solid, legitimate reasons to let a certain piece of writing marinate for a time and that time can be spent on another project. But, it’s important to examine your reasons when the going gets tough, because that’s when you’ll hear the siren call of an unfinished project. I know, that other project looks amazing! And suddenly you’ve got so many great ideas for it. That’s what your journal is for, scribble down those ideas and get back to the project at hand; because it is crucial to commit emotionally to the story you’re writing. It’s scary. As a writer you know that it will cost something, but that’s your job – to give a little piece of your heart away with every story.

The good news is that all those other stories vamping around in the unfinished pile will wait until you get to them – and when you do you will be fully present when it’s their turn.

* I have finished things! I currently have ten stories in various slush piles, just no publication announcements yet. So the grind goes. The cure is to keep writing more and better material and to keep launching it out there.

Haiku me

A little cuckoo across a hydrangea by Yosa Buson.

The time from Halloween through the first of the year is always busy and full of family commitments -- and all the joy and holiday cheer that goes along with it. 

Keeping up with the writing, say nothing of this blog, is a bit of a challenge. Lately it appears that my story-writing draft/rest/revise/finish cycle has been biting me in the ass. I find myself with a dearth of time and an excess of UNFINISHED stories. I'll be looking to that in the next weeks.

Here are some haikus about it. 

While story drafts are resting

New stories are born

Now, so much unfinished work.

Writing in bits and pieces

Sentences and scenes

Must fit in between errands

Sentence by sentence

These tales and their characters

Will be brought to “The End.”

 

Creative Development is a Progression: Finishing Things and Letting Them Go

Neil Gaiman's good advice

From Heinlein’s Rules of Writing to Gaiman’s advice (pictured above) to Chuck Wendig’s “finish your shit”; many writers agree, it’s not enough to simply write, you have to finish what you start. I also believe (like Heinlein) that after you finish a story, it is important to send it out into the world.

FINISHING THINGS

For me, writing is its own reward. This is what keeps me writing day in and day out, but once I commit to a character or set of characters and to their story, it’s important to see at least a draft of that story through to the end.

Simply writing all the way to the end – even if it’s the wrong ending and I end up replacing it – has taught me to emotionally commit to a story. Almost everything I write falls on tough times somewhere in the middle. Committing to finishing also forces me to come up with solutions that I wouldn’t have discovered if I’d given up.

After drafting it, resting it, revising it and giving it a final polish, I assess the story. I might see a soft spot in the logic, or a sentence that could maybe be tweaked one more time. But, if I feel that this is the best I can do with this story where I am today as a writer, then it’s time to let it go and move on to the next one.

LETTING THEM GO

You can only grow as a writer to a point if you never send your work out into the world. When I started writing, I would hold onto my stories working them over and over. I think I labored under the misconception that one day, in the future, my understanding of the craft would be complete. One day I would be a journeyman writer and the next day I would cross some invisible threshold to become a fully-fledged Writer. Of course in all truly creative pursuits, we are all always journeymen.

I know now that I have to put myself out there as I am with the full knowledge that tomorrow I might very well look back at today’s efforts and find them sophomoric. I’ve discovered that getting a story published is more than just a feather in my cap. It’s a kind of letting go that frees me to pursue the next level in my own development. 

PROGRESS

I am continually pursuing mastery, striving to become a better storyteller, and I can see now that any productive artist comes to understand their creative development as a progression.

Painters don’t slave over one canvas for years, sculptors don’t carve only one figure. Artists keep producing until they have enough photographs or drawings or sculptures to fill a coffee shop or gallery. Musicians don’t work on one song or album endlessly; they make song after song, album after album. They go on tour then it’s back to the studio to record the next set of songs. What filmmakers (that you’ve heard of) only made one “perfect” film?

People working in creative arts may focus intensely on a particular work for a discrete amount of time, but they know that they’re playing a long game. Look at any artist’s body of work, whether its pop songs, etchings, or television shows, and you can see them try out new ideas, you can trace their beliefs as they become solidified or change direction. You can watch them explore new techniques, master them, and find their idiom. Each piece or song or novel is a record of his or her creative progression as a human being.

I feel vulnerable putting work out there when I know that I’ll be a better writer tomorrow. I want the world to see a perfect artist, but I’ve found it’s better to let people see me as I am today. There’s no such thing as a perfect artist just as there is no perfect work of art. Each story, painting or album is simply another link in the chain of an artist’s creative life. It’s the autobiography we all write without knowing the ending.

I don’t know who I will become, but if I keep on writing, finishing things, and sending them out into the world, one day ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, future me will be able to look back and see the steps I took to arrive at that day.

Jackson Pollock, image by Joe Fig

How to Finish Things

Does anyone else think it's odd that in Michelangelo's version, David is the giant?

After chipping away at a block of marble for months, when exactly, did Michelangelo know that David was finished? We might see perfection, but did Michelangelo? Or, could he still see little rough spots, spurs of stone? Did he feel like he could have kept going? At some point Michelangelo had to decide to put his hammer and chisel down.

The more I write, the more I realize that completion isn’t so much point as a spectrum. And, it turns out, "finished" means different things to different people. Some writers are satisfied as soon as the tale is told, and nowadays there are plenty of avenues to put your work out there before the paint is dry. While this isn’t the path I walk, neither do I want to be trapped in a cycle of perpetually revising and polishing a story in a futile pursuit of ultimate perfection. Surely, if Michelangelo had pursued David to perfection the boy would have vanished into a cloud of marble dust.

So, how do you decide when something is finished?

Set some standards.

These are personal standards and can be hard to define, but it’s worth taking the time to articulate them. Spend a few journal pages thinking about what you want to achieve in your work. I want to write something saleable, and I want to write to the very best of my ability. More specifically, I want to create stories with great plots and three-dimensional characters. I want to tap into deep emotion. I want the prose to achieve a certain level of diction and style. These standards help me assess my stories through a writing process that can be varied. For example, some pieces may need only a couple tweaks while others aren’t working at all and will go through the revision wringer 10 or 12 times.

Hone the ability to honestly assess your work.

The ability to dispassionately assess your own writing is probably the most useful skill you can develop as an artist. The two best tools to do this are time; i.e. putting a piece away for a few days, and others. The important thing to remember is that anybody can show their work to a critique group or an alpha reader, but to benefit from this exercise, you have to be willing to see your work through their eyes. This is not the place to defend your writing. If you can understand how some else sees it, you will be in a position to make the most of their feedback.

You have to be able to let it go.

This is hard because you will always see flaws, little rough spots that could be reshaped. Once I’ve made a story as good as I can make it –for where my abilities are right now– it’s time to send it off and move on to something new. I believe you can only grow so much within any one given project. And I have to accept that I may look back on a piece of writing I did three years ago and cringe at my ham-handed attempt at some aspect of the craft. That’s part of letting it go.   

Mastering the ending is just another part of the process. Closing one door means that you’re free to step into the next adventure.

Michelangelo sketches an early draft

Choosing

Onion Starts

So much of life is about choosing. I’ve blogged about it before, talking about “saying yes” and “saying no.”

Down here in Central Texas, spring is nearly upon us. Now that I know I won’t have a fellowship, it’s time to plan both my garden and my writing for the rest of the year.

While I put my Michener application together and took the GRE, my novella revisions got pushed onto the back burner. Instead, I focused on shorter works and exercises. In November, I did my own personal National NovelWriting Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge, writing a new story “start” nearly every day. The whole exercise was wonderfully fun, and I ended up with 27 story starts. Of those, there are about a dozen that I think I can turn into viable stories.

In January and February, I participated in a flash fiction contest with one of my writers’ groups. A couple stories from that are already in submission and I’ll be sending a couple more out next week.

Looking over what I’ve produced over the winter and thinking about what I want to accomplish this year, I can see that I have far too many open projects.

It's time to hunker down and face the hard part. Choosing. While Heinlein famously said “finish what you start,” adhering too strictly to that rule doesn’t allow for the kind of writing exercises and noodling in my journal that are an important part of learning how to craft a story or build a character.

Still, choosing is hard! Even the most cursory writing exercises produces images that stick with me, or lines of dialogue that keep whispering in my ear. Reading them over, I can’t help but think,  with a little water and sunlight something could really grow from this start.

But time constrains us all, and I’ve come to understand that not every start has to be finished. As long as I’m being productive in terms of completed and submitted stories, then there are some things that I can set aside. In other words, as long as I continue to finish things, I don't have to finish ALL the things.

But, once I commit to a story, I have to finish it, because choosing is hard but finishing is harder.

I finished the first draft of a story yesterday, and it wasn’t pretty. I mean I just limped across the finish line. It felt like I was writing garbage. I’m reading it over and revising it today, and while the last third is a bit of a morass, it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it was when I was miserably wading through it. 

Things almost always get harder in the middle. Quitting one project to start something shiny and new is the trap to avoid. Each project comes with unanticipated demands, requiring me to stretch and learn in new ways. Choosing, and the commitment to finish, is where we grow.

Heinlein's Rule No. 2 - Finishing What You Start

While this piece of advice turns up in most how to write books, I don’t think it gets nearly enough emphasis. I have certainly managed to ignore this idea for years. Not this year. And I’m here to tell you following this one piece of advice has made the biggest difference in my writing to date. Simply committing to each story that I start has changed my whole approach.

I think about my ideas differently now, I gather them in my daily journal the same as I always have, but choosing which ones to develop, and which ones to actually launch into a story is now more of a process.

I don’t think it matters how you decide to see your idea through to the end, if you write from an outline (I do), or by the seat of your pants it’s the commitment to finish that will teach you more about writing than any class.

After the heady bon voyage and the thrilling embarkation I usually sail straight into the doldrums of the middle of the story. Navagational equiment will tell me my destination, but with no wind, I'll have to row. And it’s sweaty, hateful work.

Sometimes when I’m adrift in the open ocean I look back across what I’ve written so far and lose heart. I see that the story is not working, that something is broken. In the past this was often the point where I would abandon ship for another enticing idea and begin another story.

But not this year. I’ve come to realize that it’s my duty to save this story or go down with it. What I’ve found is that no book, class, or seminar had taught me how to manage all the elements that go into creating a ripping good yarn. The only way to really learn is to, you know, get in there an manage the elements.

There is also a reward for committing to the characters. Because I’ve made a promise to them, they are free to become more real and to contribute their own individuality to the story. It becomes a partnership, and suddenly the work is fulfilling enough to be the engine that I need to reach my destination.