It'll All Be Better With the Cardboard Drawers

A million, zillion years ago I was married, and my spouse and I did not have an easy time keeping our space clean, and, if you listened to them, the reason why was apparently because we didn't own a set of cardboard drawers. 

Yes, you read that right. Stick with me, and I'll make it make sense. And I'll even tie it back to writing. 

First of all, I have to take a beat and recognize that there were a LOT of reasons we didn't keep our space clean. We were young. We didn't prioritize nesting. We would rather play Final Fantasy 7 and try to beat Emerald Weapon. We both had executive dysfunction around domestic chores, and while I don't think it's cool to do armchair diagnosis, if they told me tomorrow they also had ADHD, let's just say I wouldn't drop my drink dramatically to the floor where the camera would watch it shatter in slow motion. The place was also tiny and could go from pristine to post-apocalyptic movie set contender in only a single wadded up ball of dirty clothes that didn't find the hamper. 

I was the housespouse (I usually am in cohabitation arrangements), and so I would do 90% of the cleaning, but I bristled at messes that were clutter simply not put away or things abandoned when they were done being used. I didn't mind the domestic chores, but just cleaning up after someone who is kind of sloven has a totally different vibe. 

Every time I would bring this up, the answer was the same. "I need cardboard drawers." Now…if you're thinking…"wait a damn second—what do cardboard drawers have to do with putting clothes in a hamper or putting things away instead of just leaving them out?", believe me when I tell you that I am RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. Other than sort of vaguely both being about places to put things, there was no real connective tissue. But they swore with their hand to God that this was the ONE thing that was going to make all the difference. 

"It's the cardboard drawers. It'll give me a place to put things. It'll all be better when we get them."

"But that doesn't—" I would sputter. "Those two things don't even have anything to do with each other. Only in the fact that one is LOOSELY related to organization are they even remotely—"

"IT'LL ALL BE BETTER WHEN WE GET CARDBOARD DRAWERS!!!"

I see a lot of writers do this. They fixate on something like their new desk or their ergonomic keyboard, their new writing program that organizes their chapters for them, and while these things are nice, they don't MAKE you write. Their absence doesn't actually prevent most people from writing. And once you have them, doing the work might be easier, but it's not going to do itself. You still have to sit down in your super ergonomic mega-comfy chair and write for a few hours a day if you want to pump out a novel in a year. 

Yes, you might be super mega comfortable doing it, but it's still a lot of work, and it's probably not really what's holding you back from just firing off the great American novel.

The affectation can be almost anything. It can be physical like a chair or a desk or a room that can be made into an office. Or it can be more cerebral like "next week when things get easier." Or "once I take time off from work." But the fact is that in almost every situation where we're sitting around and just waiting for something to improve before we can start work in earnest, if we weren't writing before the thing, we won't be writing after the thing either.

Now, it's not that none of these things matter. Some of them may even help you write better or longer. I certainly write more when I have a room and a desk to write at rather than with my back leaning against a wall with a laptop pillow while children play Enter the Dragon two feet from me. If you've been here for more than, like, an hour, you know I am constantly complaining about a better schedule that is just a week away from kicking in. But in the meantime, I'm still writing.

These things like chairs and offices and schedules are not REALLY writing, and it is the people who sit down even when they don't have a perfect schedule, a perfect chair, or a perfect writing program and DO THE WORK who end up doing better when they have one or more of those things. I talk about these things and work on improving them, but in the meantime, I write.

Unswervingly—and I mean maybe there are some exceptions in the history of the world, but we're talking really close to 100%—everyone who sits around and waits for some factor to be improved before they can even start ends up finding a new reason they can't do the work once they get what they were waiting for. The office needs a new desk. The ergonomic keyboard works, but now a desk that can go up and down is needed so that writing can be done standing up. The week off had to be used doing all the home improvement that had been procrastinated, so we need ANOTHER week off.

In an M. Night Shyamalanian mid-career plot twist (that is to say, entirely predictable by anyone with a pulse), getting cardboard drawers did not solve the problem. A few things were put away. We had a slightly better system of organization. It was easier to clean up when we cleaned up. BUT…the piles of dirty clothes did not move themselves to the laundry and the messes I cleaned up after were still there. Because the problem was never the absence of cardboard drawers. Fixating on them, and fixating on the problem as somehow insurmountable without them, just meant we kicked the can down the road for dealing with the actual problem—the clothes needed to be put in the hamper.

The same thing happens with writing. The longer there is one more thing without which writing is "simply impossible," then the real issue—that it's time to apply ass to chair and do some writing and all the ergonomic furniture in the world won't make your work write itself—is not being addressed. 

So get your super desk or your cardboard drawers or your Vorlon-inspired writing program that keeps track of your character arcs, keeps track of your adverbs, keeps track of passive voice, and keeps track of your timeline for you, but don't EVER forget that you still have to actually DO the writing. 

And you at least start THAT…without the cardboard drawers.

Constrain Me, Baby!

Guest blogger Shadow talks about how to get a little kinky with your writing and spice it up by tying it down.

[Note: there are some formatting issues in this post. Unfortunately, this could not be helped. It is a regrettable side effect of a guest blog with a LOT of formatting. Normally I "paste and match style" (which drops the article in paragraph form) and then go back and make the format look like the author intended, but with a dozen links, multiple font and format changes, and eleven sections, I had to do a regular cut and paste and some of the formatting issues stuck around.]

Are things getting boring in the bedroom (or wherever you do your writing)? Finding yourself in a writing rut? Or perhaps you are a fellow “spoonie” and the normal challenges of sitting down to write are compounded by illness and variable daily capacity. Consider adding some kink to your writing relationship with constrained writing! It’s like a little light bondage for your writing practice (or heavy bondage if you swing that way!), and it can have incredible benefits for your creativity, motivation, and skills! 

Constrained writing means writing within prescribed parameters or under specific constraints or rules. All writing is done within constraints already.  Language use, grammar, punctuation, genre conventions, and more all shape a writer’s composition. But constrained writing is the kinky, swinger cousin that takes everything a bit beyond vanilla.

You are probably already familiar with some types of constrained writing. Poetry has many constrained forms. Haiku constrains the syllable count and lines, as do sonnets. Limericks are constrained in both beats and rhyme scheme. Acrostic poems must spell a word or phrase with the first letter of each line. Diamante poetry is constrained by both the number and relative length of the lines.

But, lo, I hear you cry, you are not a poet but a writer of prose or even narrative nonfiction. Never fear! Constrained writing has benefits for writers across the genre spectrum. Constrained writing pushes writers to sharpen their creativity, break out of habitual writing patterns, and stretch their skills in new directions. 

Constrained writing can help break writer’s block. It can support you in developing a daily writing practice (especially if you struggle with blank page paralysis). It can broaden your vocabulary and power up your revision. 

Forcing yourself to practice with constraints can break you from habitual writing patterns that we all risk overusing thus falling into a writing rut. 

Practicing constrained writing is like heavy lifting to bulk up your creative writing muscles. As Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”  Kinky!

There are MANY different styles of constrained writing. (Maybe as many as there are styles of bondage!) To begin with, there are constraints that apply to letters (as in the alphabet). Let’s explore a few.

Lipogram and Reverse Lipogram

Lipogram comes from the Greek for “missing letter.” A lipogram constrains the writer by barring the use of words containing a particular letter or group of letters. A. Ross Eckler famously rewrote the nursery rhyme “Mary had a Little Lamb” as “Mary had a Lipogram” by omitting the letter E (and writing versions missing other letters and even groups of letters). Not only does this version contain no words with the letter E, Eckler amazingly also preserves the meter and rhyme scheme!

Mary had a tiny lamb,

It’s wool was pallid as snow,

And any spot that Mary did walk,

This lamb would always go.

This lamb did follow Mary to school,

Although against a law,

How boys and girls did laugh and play,

That lamb in class saw all.

Reverse lipograms require that every word contains a given letter rather than eliminating a letter. Lower the challenge by using commonly used letters like E or T, or ramp up the intensity with G, M, or P!

Both lipogram and reverse lipogram constrained writing are great ways to practice composing original works, as well as to convert already written pieces. Try rewriting nursery rhymes, Shakespeare quotes, or even sections of your own finished writing under a lipogrammatic or reverse lipogrammatic constraint. You may surprise yourself and find some good revision material in your experiments! In addition, rewriting already completed work with a lipogrammatic constraint can be a great way to get some writing practice done when creating new content feels overwhelming. (I see you depression and ADHD!)

Abecedarian

Similar to lipograms, this style of constrained writing requires each successive word, sentence, or stanza to begin with the corresponding letter of the alphabet.

You can apply this constraint at a sentence level, or as Walter Abish did in his 1974 Abecedarian novel, Alphabetical Africa, each chapter allowed an additional letter. Ie. Chapter 1 - every word began with A, Chapter 2 - every word began with A or B until Chapter 27 which was written without restraint. The following chapters each removed one letter of the alphabet in reverse order, so Chapter 28 was written without any words starting with Z and so on until the end of the book was back to only A again. Another example is Chaucer’s medieval composition “An ABC (The Prayer of our Lady)” where each stanza begins with the next letter of the alphabet.

Like lipograms and reverse lipograms, abecedarian writing can really push your vocabulary and broaden your lexical comfort zone! And like any constraint, you can apply it in so many different ways! Do what works best for you!

Rhopalism

Rhopalism is the constraint that in a given sentence, each word is successively a single letter longer than the previous word. For example: I do not know which animal savaged elephant scientist Strawberry Washington. 

In 1965 the linguist and author, Dmitri Borgmann, composed this magnificent example: “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.” Wow! Wasn’t he quite the cunning linguist?

Pilish (or Piems)

Similar to rhopalism, pilish (or piems - a portmanteau of pi and poems) constrains the writer to compose a text with succeeding words having the same number of letters as the digits of the number pi. Math kink anyone?

The letter count of each word in the mnemonic, “How I wish I could calculate pi,” matches pi to seven places (3.141592…). And yes, zero is accounted for, too! In pilish, the digit 0 is represented with a ten-letter word. 

In 1996, Mike Keith wrote a short story called “Cadaeic Cadenza” using the first 3,834 digits of pi. In 2010, he published Not a Wake, a 10,000 word book written entirely in pilish.

Since you should always play with a safeword, the website YouGoWords.com will find and list words by letter count, beginning or ending letter, syllables, and more! (I may have had to tap out and use their help more than once in my own constrained writing practice!)

If constraining letters is too constricting for you, there are many ways to constrain at the word level! The genre of flash fiction includes a number of word-count restricted styles within which an author must convey a complete story arc.

Dribbles/Mini-Sagas/Microfiction - exactly 50 words (+15 for the title)

Fifty-Word Stories

Drabbles - exactly 100 words

100-Word Stories

Twiction (Twitter Fiction) - exactly 140 characters (I know! But it fits here!)

You asked me to edit your memoir. It was much more satisfying after I replaced her name with mine.

-C.A. Chancellor, Nanoism Magazine, May 8, 2013

6-Word Memoirs  - exactly, well, six words

6-Word Memoirs

Flash fiction can present a writing challenge to compose incredibly tight and well structured writing to fit the length constraints. This is amazing practice, especially for writers like myself who tend to get carried away with their words. It also, ironically, can feel more accessible because it is such a contained task (you aren’t trying to plot an entire novel). 

Flash fiction isn’t the only way to constrain at the word level. If length restrictions aren’t your jam, consider restricting the types of words you can use!

Mandated Vocabulary

Mandated vocabulary encompasses a broad range of constraints about the number or type of words that can be used in a piece of writing. Perhaps the most well-known example of a mandated writing constraint is Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham which was written after Seuss’ publisher made a bet that Seuss couldn’t write an entire book using no more than 50 different words.

Paul Griffiths’ 2008 novel, let me tell you, was written using only the words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (483 different words). The 2004 novel, Never Again by Doug Nufer, did not use any word more than once. 

English-Prime, or E-Prime is a type of mandated vocabulary in which a writer cannot use any form of the verb “to be”. This is a fantastic constraint to practice revising sections of work, particularly if you are trying to do more showing and less telling. For example, the sentence, “He was old,” might become, “Time had etched deep lines onto his face.” 

You can choose any kind of word to constrain and push yourself out of your comfort zone. If you find yourself overusing adverbs, force yourself to rewrite a section without any. Try writing without adjectives. Even writing without nouns or verbs can spark creative and divergent thinking and use of language which you can carry over into your regular writing.

Mandated vocabulary can be a fantastic writing exercise, but if you are really struggling to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) you can even work your creative writing brain without actually writing a word.

Erasure

Erasure is blacking out all of the words on a printed text except the ones which tell a story or poem. This is a fantastic creative writing process for days when writing is too daunting a task. If you are inclined toward the visual arts, you can even make images or designs of the blacked out areas.

Aleatory

If you appreciate social interaction, this type of constraint may be for you. It’s kinky group writing! Aleatory is writing using words or phrases that are provided by the reader (think Mad Libs). 

Though originally applied to music in which random dice throws determined the music played, you can have friends generate words from which you will compose a piece of prose or poetry. 

You may constrain your friends (wink wink) by asking for words from particular parts of speech or particular character length or starting letter, or you may go big and take any words they offer. You may choose to use only their words like a kind of magnetic poetry challenge, or you may choose to fill in your own words around those provided to you. You may even choose to write the frame of a story without certain words and let your readers fill in the blanks themselves as they read - providing an interactive and unique experience each time your piece is read!

Exquisite Corpse

Similar to aleatory, Exquisite Corpse is truly a group-composed piece. Members of the group may write words or phases on pieces of paper which are put into a hat then drawn at random to compose a text (think those magnetic poetry kits again). Alternatively, you may have one person write a line, then the next person write another line that fits, and so on through the group. 

This can even be done on Facebook! To increase the constraint, post your prompt and set a limit on the number of responses you will take (ie. only the first ten) to ramp up the competition.

You can modify this in many ways. You may even like to have a group write a shared piece where only the last three words of the piece before it are shown to the next person in line. They must then use those words as their first three and so on. 

Exquisite Corpse and other group-writing activities can be a fun way to break out of the isolation of the writing process and get some friends to inspire and motivate you to keep writing!

There are so many flavors of constrained writing, you can truly choose your own kinky writing adventure! You may find that just adapting an already written piece to fit a constraint inspires you to work on that other piece of writing you started that’s been gathering dust. 

You may find that on those really difficult writing days, having a constraint to write to ironically feels more freeing than the uncontained potential of a blank page. 

You may do many pieces of constrained writing that live forever in your private journal, or you may find that bits and pieces of your constrained practice find themselves worked into your work-in-progress! 

You can try an established style or get extra kinky and create your own. Whatever you write and however you choose to use it, constrained writing can be an amazing lever to keep handy in your writer’s toolbox.

[Note from Chris: I have a writing prompt that follows the basic idea of constraining your writing here.]

Shadow

Shadow is a writer and blogger at https://sanctumia.com/.  She maintains a “vanilla” blog as well which must remain nameless for purposes of mystery and intrigue and because discrimination is still a thing. She has been writing fiction for 38 years and discovered the power of narrative nonfiction writing 13 years ago. She writes in the intersections between mental illness, power exchange relationships, and social justice. 

If you would like to write a thinly veiled promo for your own work guest blog for Writing About Writing we would love to have an excuse to take a day off a wonderful diaspora of voices. Take a look at our guest post guidelines, and drop me a line at chris.brecheen@gmail.com.

Ikea Furniture Assembly, Writing, and You

"I should just go become a bestselling author,
then hire someone to do this."
Image description: A guy looking confused and
holding a hammer and instructions in front of
a couple of boards. A thought bubble has
a question mark in it.

Like college kids and divorced men, I headed to Ikea after I wound up on my own after a major break up. We’d grabbed the occasional thing there when I still lived with my family, but when I suddenly needed shelves and drawers and desks and bedside tables (and could no longer stomach looking at those configurable wire-mesh-space-saver things from Costco that I’d thought were so dang nifty in my early twenties), but definitely couldn’t go buy a Baxter bedroom set or anything with hand-carved English oak, Ikea was the next step up.

And let me tell you, my experience with Ikea furniture was almost always exactly the same. I would open the box, look at the collection of a few little screws and a few long ones, some slats of wood of various sizes, and an instruction manual of some 87 steps and I would immediately become overwhelmed. How in the motherforking shirtballs was this ever going to become a bookshelf/chest of drawers.

I would sit there, completely overwhelmed, questioning my life choices. It was too much––entirely too much to try to turn these slats and this-time-I’m-sure-they-messed-up-and-didn’t-give-us-enough number of screws into a functioning piece of furniture.

And I would let myself feel that overwhelmed feeling for a minute.

But only for a minute.

Then I would stop flipping through the impossible-looking steps in the mid-seventies or low-eighties, and stop looking from the raw materials to the picture of the finished product, take a deep breath (and maybe a small leap of faith), and I would open up to the first page. Just that first piece of wood, that first screw, and a little tiny allen wrench they included. And I would tell myself I wasn’t building a desk or a set of cubby hole bookshelves. I was just doing that ONE STEP. And then the next step. And then the next one. And not only did I manage to build a functioning piece of furniture, but at some point in the process (usually well before the mid-seventies) I could SEE how it was all going to come together.

I think we tend to get Ikea-finished-product overwhelmed when we think about our writing as a finished product and look at what we’ve got to work with. How are we possibly going to take our middling ability and this half-baked idea, and turn it into something that another human being neither related to us, our good friend, nor who wants to sleep with us would take time out of their day to read (to say NOTHING of spend money on if that’s the goal). 

There’s so much to do in writing. So much writing. So much revision. So much editing. So much figuring out the middle part. So much rewriting. So much finding beta readers (who don’t suck). So many steps. So much to learn about the publishing industry. Query letters. Finding agents. Shopping publishers. OMFG it’s too much!

It can be overwhelming.

The trick is to only let it be for a minute.

Then you take a deep breath (and maybe a small leap of faith), and take the first step. Don’t worry about writing a great novel (yet). Just write one good sentence. 

No.

Wait.

Don’t even worry about THAT. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Just write one sentence (regardless of quality). Then do the next one. Then you have a paragraph. Then another. Then you have a page. Then a chapter. Eventually you’re done with your draft. Now you have something to revise and all the questions about HOW you revise become much easier to see and understand. Now go back and make those sentences GOOD. It doesn’t look don’t look quite so incomprehensible now. (“How could I possibly cut out an entire chapter” becomes “Oh…this chapter really isn’t doing much. If I moved this one part over here….”) So you revise. Now you have a good draft. Do another draft and make it even better. Now you can see exactly WHY the number of drafts you write depends on the quality of writing you’re going for, and why even though you make fewer and fewer changes, sometimes the difference in a single word choice makes a difference between “adequately conveyed the idea” and “POP!” Then you take the next step (the various steps of editing/peer review). Then you have a draft and you can craft a query letter. Then you go find which agents specialize in what you’re writing and are taking on new clients.

Not all at once. Not all tomorrow. One step at a time.

Starting with the first step: write a sentence. When you’re done with that, you can worry about the next step.

When you’re on step one, step 33 looks impossibly far. It looks unfathomably complicated. You may look at it and not have one damned clue how the fuck these six screws and five slats are supposed to turn into THAT. When you’re on step 32, step 33 probably looks a lot like step ONE did. Just one more “next step.”

And even if it doesn’t––even if you’re looking at step 33 and trying to figure out what in the name of Apollo’s right testicle part of the drawers you could possibly be building––you’re in the right place and time to have the best chance to figure it out with some time and attention. (Back at step one, you would have had almost no chance.) You now have the context you need to glance ahead a couple of steps and see what's coming. (Or if you really want to stretch this metaphor, give a call to customer assistance.) And even it feels like you’re spinning your wheels and you're confused as all fuck, no one can take the first 31 steps away from you. And you can always just go right on doing one more step until it makes more sense.

I think “Becoming A Bestselling Author” or even “Write, revise, and sell a novel” would probably feel like an overwhelming task to ANYONE sitting down to their first blank page. But writing a sentence is not that hard.

Then one more.

I think this is part of the reason working writers get asked so often how to find a publisher or an agent or how to write a query letter. It’s someone looking at a mid-seventies step and thinking, “How the fuck would this even work?” The truth is, by the time you get to that point, you’ll be mostly ready.

If you have your manuscript finished, fully revised and edited, writing a query letter (even if you skip the Writing About Writing primer and do your own research) will only take you a couple of hours to learn how to do, and maybe a day or two to write until you’re happy with it.  Once you’ve written a query letter, it’ll only take you a few hours of research to figure out how to query an agent and which ones are accepting new clients. (Even in the pre-Internet days, this only involved a trip to the bookstore to pick up a copy of The Writer’s Market. Now it’s even easier.) Folks get fixated on those later steps because it just seems unfathomable for the same reason when you’re looking at a bag of metal shafts and plastic wheels that you don’t know how you’re going to end up getting “soft-shut” drawers on the rollers. By the time you have mounted the runners and the wheels, that step will seem manageable. As will agents and query letters and all the stuff that seems overwhelming now.

There may be a few times you need to check the instruction manual to find out what the next couple of steps are going to be, but that’s okay. And just as you don’t randomly buy just ANYTHING from Ikea and start building it, it will REALLY help you to have a careful and exact sense of what you want to accomplish.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but if you decide that part of the process is unimportant, your finished product is likely to reflect that. I mean you wouldn't want drawers that aren't on runners, would you?

When it all feels overwhelming, take a deep breath. Remind yourself that last step always looks impossible and the 78th step never makes any fucking sense. For now though, you don’t have to worry about either of those. Just figure out what the ONE next step is.

It’s good advice for writing.

And life.

Consider Your Writer Talent Build Carefully (Revision)

No no no. That's WOW.
My blog is WAW.
Totally different.
Wow...they DO sound alike when you just say them.
That never even occurred to me.

I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft.

Well, not addicted addicted. I could quit any time, of course. I wasn't like my friends putting in the hours of a full time job to be in a raiding guild. I wasn't like those guys in their parents' basements. I was a high class addict, you see. Avoiding ten page papers that were due in less than 12 hours...absolutely, but I didn't really have a PROBLEM.

One thing I noticed about W.O.W.'s talent point mechanic was how strangely like being a writer it was.

No. Really.

Hear me out.

I should probably start with the USDA approved message to writerly folk that if you are serious about being a writer, one of the best things you could possibly do would be to take any Massively Multiplayer Online Games you happen to be subscribed to, place them into small box, and then place that box inside a bigger box filled with enriched uranium, and then take that box, put it into a rocket that is filled with explosives, and launch that rocket into the sun (or preferably another sun......one that is going supernova).

You will amaze and astound yourself with how much time you have available for writing when an afternoon's session isn't interrupted with: "Shit, I haven't done my daily fishing quests yet." (Because nothing says "fun game" like treating not-actually-fishing as a chore.)

Yeah, me neither. So keep it down to a few hours a week and keep writing, kay?

Of course, I stopped playing because Cataclysm sucked ass (and not in the way that makes someone go "Oh my god. I've never felt anything that intense!"). But let's pretend it was because I'm a disciplined writer who knew it was just going to be part of the price I had to pay, that I totally have epic mad levels of discipline, and I want to be a writer just that fucking bad. Furthermore, let's pretend I haven't started back up in the last few months.

Okay? Are you pretending? Splendid.

Anyway, this post isn't about getting rid of WOW. You can face that demon on your own....or better yet with a group...or a raid......of demon hunters.

Uh, sorry.  Where was I? Oh yeah. This is about how writing is often like WOW.

You mean you spend thirty hours a week doing it with nothing to show for it except some shiny pixels that make you think you're cool? 

Shut up evil italics voice!  No one invited you to this article. No, what I mean is that you have to decide carefully what kind of writer you're going to be.

If you've played WOW, or really any MMO, you know that your character fulfills a sort of "role" whenever you group up with others to accomplish goals. If you're an MMO vet, just bear with me through the crash course.

In most games like WOW you either take damage, deal damage, or heal. (There are games with a fourth role called "support" where characters sort of swiss army knife what's needed in a given group and drop some sick buffs, but WOW isn't one of those games.) If you take damage, you have to be a big bad tough to kill guy with lots of ways to taunt the monsters into attacking you instead of the people doing the damage or healing--this person is called the "tank."  If you deal damage you have to be able to crank out attacks that can hurt but without doing it in a way that takes the monster's attention away from the tank. If you heal...well, you heal, but again, you don't want to heal TOO well, or the monster will perceive you as the bigger threat. You keep the tank from getting killed, and everybody else if you can.

Unless everyone else is too incompetent to reign in their DPS and they end up with the monster's aggro. Then you let those fools die to teach them a lesson. Except that you'll get blamed for them dying even though they totally deserved it. Everyone always blames the healer when they die. Always. Even if they literally jumped off a cliff into a room full of snake men like in that movie Dreamscape...on purpose....into a fire...and pulled out their weapons so they would impale themselves when they hit the ground. It was still the healer's fault for letting them die.

Did I mention that I usually heal (if there's no bard class).

But really, "I can't heal through walls" needs to be about three times as big.

Off topic much?

I'm pacing myself.

In WOW, and most similar games, each time you gain a few levels, you get a point to spend on a "talent" that gives your character a little bit of customized power. Used to be there were whole trees where you had to buy somewhere between one and five talents to unlock something more powerful. (These days it's all streamlined and a little cookie cutter.) These are called talent trees–because they look like trees....that are growing upside down.....with three or four long spindly branches....and....okay, they don't look anything like trees.

Are you going to tell us this metaphor, or just tell us a bunch of things that aren't this metaphor.

Shut up.

Anyway, when you buy these talents, you don't just buy some from here and some from there in a mishmash of grocery-shopping-esque "I'd-probably-use-that-eventually" kinds of choices.  You are shopping with a list that has the ingredients from the recipe, and no Ben and Jerry's--not even Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough goddamn it!--is going to deter you. You consider how to get the best talents for that "role" you're playing. You want to unlock the more powerful talents because they will make you better at your role, but you also want to make sure everything fits together with what you're trying to accomplish. And sometimes there are really great, awesome, powerful talents that you don't take. Not because they aren't great, awesome, and powerful, but because they just don't fit with what you are trying to accomplish.

Like if you're a damage-dealing character, and you need to crank out damage, you might ignore a talent that gives you more armor every time you get hit by a monster. It's not that armor isn't awesome. Armor is the enthusiastic oral sex of the MMO world: you can never get enough.  It's just that every talent point you spend getting better armor is a talent point you can't spend to do more damage.

If you pick the armor talent, you might have to skip the "Rip Their Face......OFF" talent.

Now here's the problem: people who want to hedge their bets take that armor talent anyway.  Then they become less awesome at their "role" of doing damage. Sure, they can take a few more hits, but what they really WANT to be doing is more damage. They sacrificed their niche for something more jack-of-all-tradesish and now they can't do as well at their niche. The good guilds don't let them join. They get called noob. None of the sexy characters who are just-like-a-hot-human-except-blue will go back to their starting village to take a look at their etchings. And no one will cyber them.

We were promised some kind of metaphor or connective tissue with writing.  Did you forget about that?

Shut up evil italics voice.  I'm getting to it.

As a writer, you have to chose your focus wisely. You have a finite amount of time, and you probably have a finite amount of creative energy before you don't want to write anymore in a given day. You also probably have certain physical limitations like joint stiffness or eye strain. So it's important to think about the kind of writing you want to be doing and consider the "talents" you pursue.

You probably have a "role" you want to be writing in: "Fiction Author," for example or "Journalist" or "Web Content Freelancer." And sometimes it can be dangerous to think all writing is created equal and all avenues will serve you equally well.

Yes, freelance work might be useful. Sure, a journalism degree isn't a waste of time. Sure offering yourself up for no-pay gigs that get you some recognition might be useful. Fanfic might be useful. Writing web content might be useful. Blogging for free for a big blog might be useful. Any of these things would develop skill sets you don't already have and teach you a thing or two about writing. There are lots of "valuable lessons" to be learned. Experience is valuable. But they are like that awesome talent point that doesn't fit with what you're trying to do.

Just to be your-mom's-good-china-when-company's-coming clear. It is not that these things are not useful. It's not that they can't help you be a better writer. They just might be like that armor talent–that is to say they might be helpful but not necessarily helping you be the best kind of writer of the type you want to be. They take time and effort away from the one kind of writing you really may want to be doing.

While you're doing somebody else's Shakespeare homework or writing web copy for roughly 1 cent a word, are you missing other opportunities that involve the kind of writing you would rather be doing?

It's easy--all too easy--to take a job as a writer because....hey I'm a fucking WRITER! Freeze frame Flash Gordon fist-in-the-air-jump!

And then you look up one day, and it's twenty years later, and you're still on chapter six of your book because you come home at the end of every day from your "Fucking Writer!" job and the last thing in the world you want to do is write some more. You're probably a really good writer–twenty years of practice will do that–but eight hours a day is really about all you can handle. To make matters worse you might have a really specific style of writing at your "fucking writer" job that isn't helping you with the sort of writing you always dreamed of.

Oh and you're married with kids, so good luck trying to quit your "fucking writer" job to go make 8 cents an hour because you want to chase your dreams full time.

The same can be said of teaching writing. Just about every teacher I had at SFSU would rather have been writing full time. The same can be said for editing. The same can be said for publishing. Feelance. Techwriting. Whatever. A lot of writers get stuck in jobs where they thought they would learn something useful in a job that was close to writing, or "kind of creative," and they just ended up regretting how sidetracked they got.

I can't tell you how many writers I know who've told me they wished they'd just been a patent clerk or gone into construction so that they could come and not be revolted by the idea of writing for another few hours.

No one is suggesting you pass up opportunities, but the goal is to do so in a way that works you UP your skill tree, not to take every random opportunity because you might develop as a writer.  If you want to write about the robot wars on Khyron Beta Prime, joining a writers group for sci-fi writers two towns over (even though the drive is an hour each way) might be a better use of your time and effort than a paid internship at your local paper.

Disclaimer: If the kind of writing you're doing makes you happy, then you're not really stuck.  If you can make a lot of money writing, and come home and write some more, then rock, rock on! I know a tech writer who can demand some fucking serious money, and then does their fiction writing at night without missing a beat.

And guys....seriously...I can't stress this next part enough: if you got into something but then you found that it gave you a fulfillment in life that you ever could have expected, you've won the jackpot.

Really.

That's all we're really trying for in this life anyway, right?  If it turns out that raising a family brings you more happiness than writing eight hours a day in a boiler room apartment, then do that! Too many people lose sleep over some unfulfilled desire just because that was their childhood dream, but they've long since found other aspects of life more fulfilling. My mother dreamed of being a published author when she was young, but ended up writing internal policy for a bank when she discovered what really brought her joy in life was her family.

Of course now she lives vicariously through you by telling me to write BDSM erotica, and not noticing that you take a shower with steel wool every time she does so.

Please shut up, evil italics voice.  Please...

This is why I often turn down certain kinds of freelance work or advice about where to find writing gigs–even good paying ones. It's not that I'm too good for them. I certainly don't think they would be pointless or that I wouldn't grow as a writer from the experience. It's just that once I've done web content for twenty or so articles, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to have much trouble imagining how the 21st will go.  I want to write novels and mediocre blogs about the thing I love in this world.

Everyone has to balance their ambitions and hopes and dreams against the reality of their lives. If you're the breadwinner for a family of six, I'm not suggesting you quit your job to chase rainbows. But what I can tell you is that you can easily lose years because you went for that "armor."

On Holidays, Flossing, and Writing

I stumbled into a metaphor not too long ago that resonated with me and has been packed into the top tier of my writing platitudes toolbox ever since. I share it now because my article about what Dungeons and Dragons taught me about writing will have to wait until at least tomorrow. And that's because frankly I needed a damned day off. (Uh.....other than this, I guess.)

I was having my teeth cleaned after a particularly busy period of my life. (Funny how often I seem to have those.) The dentist was remarking how good my flossing was and how good my gums were looking. This is notable because it was literally my first "Looks good. See you in six months," check up since I was a child. Usually I have to sit there and listen to how my every oral hygiene routine is actually completely wrong.

"I haven't flossed in like two weeks," I admitted anyway, wanting to absolve my guilt. I couldn't live with all those sweet golden compliments built on a turpitudinous throne of lies.  "Like maybe once or twice."

Thinking back on it, that exchange kind of reveals a lot about who I am as a person.

"It doesn't matter if you do it every single day. It doesn't even matter if you skip a few days. What matters is that you usually have the habit of doing it daily."

"Oh like writing," I said.

OH!  LIKE WRITING!!!!! I thought.

Here at Writing About Writing we're pretty staunch advocates of writing every day if you're trying to make it to The Show™. (Contented hobbyists are a whole other story.) Every writer whose name we recognize probably wrote every day or close. And while legit excuses are out there, there are few so beleaguered that they can't set aside fifteen minutes or so from Facebook or Zelda: Breath of the Wild to write for fifteen to thirty minutes.

However, as the holidays loom here in the States, it's also important for writers–particularly the kind that haven't carved out a paycheck from writing and have day jobs on top of everything else the Holiday season packs on–to remember that it's the habit they're cultivating that matters rather than whether or not they missed a couple of days here and there (or had to write a couple of paragraphs and call it good) in the days around a major event.

If you find yourself saying "I don't have to do it every day," to the mirror five days a week for six months, you might need to do a brutally honest inventory about who's fooling whom. But if you've got six hours of shopping and cooking and that's before the first guest arrives, and a boss who wants you to clear out a five day week of work in three days if you want Friday off, and the verge still needs trimming....be kind to yourselves.

Remember your writing doesn't have to be grueling hours on your work in progress. Tear someone a new asshole on a political post, redirect all that rage you have about your childhood to someone who thinks Trump isn't risking an irony fissure to the time space continuum to mock Al Franken, (or, you know, maybe send an email to Nana thanking her for the cookies if that's more your speed), and call it a day. The writing will all still be there on Monday.

It's not one day that's going to hurt your chances as a writer. It's forming that habit.

Like flossing.

Talent: A +5 Sword That You Would Do Better Without

A Dungeons and Dragons/role-playing-game metaphor for why having talent might just be the worst thing that could possibly happen to you.

When I was in school a lot of people said I had talent.  I would sometimes be paraded in front of the other kids with a few congratulatory words from the teacher.  "Chris certainly has talent!" they would say.

It would have better if they hadn't.  If only they knew how much they contributed to perhaps two decades struggle to get the fuck over myself.

               It isn't elegant, but it is simple and effective.                    
         Fatal to even the biggest-headed and thickest-skulled
of SFSU Creative Writing Majors.                           

Of course, Janusprof beat the idea of "talent" out of his students (and me) by the second class.  He jumped up on his desk wielding baseball bat with nails sticking out of it and slammed it down into the bedhead-covered melon of which ever pretentious freshmen drew the short straw.  It was done as an example to all of us.  He emphasized each word with a swing of the bat: "YOU! DO! NOT! HAVE! TALENT!!!!  YOU! ARE! NOT! A! SPECIAL! SNOWFLAKE! AND! THE! SOONER! YOU! REALIZE! IT! THE! SOONER! I! CAN! HELP! YOU!!!!"  And as the body--now perforated with grisly holes--lay in a spreading pool of vermillion, and we all stared in open-mouthed horror, he turned around to reveal his other head, which promptly began to talk.  "Because I really do want to help you get better, and that is so difficult to do if you already think you know everything.  So...I'm dreadfully sorry about that unfortunately necessary business.  Now, let's talk about characterization through significant detail and the word choices that create it...."

Let me make this clear: you never want anyone to tell you that you have talent.  Ever.  If you can jump out of a plane with nothing but an inflatable raft in order avoid someone who's trying to tell you that you have talent, do it.  If someone ever does manage to tie you down to a table and stun your vocal chords for long enough that you have to listen to them, and then they tell you that you have talent, the best thing you could ever do for yourself is to attempt experimental brain surgery to carefully remove the neurons in which that memory is stored.  You might be able to handle it when you've been writing for decades.  Before that, it's not doing you any favors.  Also, it's not just so that you if you ever have to witness Janusprof killing a random freshman, you are subjected only to the sight of a brutal murder and not the much worse trauma of being told you actually don't have talent.  That's nice, but it's not why I'm warning you.

It's not just that you need talent AND $20 bucks if you want a decent hoagie (though you do).  It goes even deeper than that. The very idea of talent is actually doing you a disservice.  But to explain why, I have to tell you the story of the first level character with the +5 sword.  Let's call him Werner of the village Satinerous, and let's call his sword Talentos.

I hope that you have enough exposure to role playing games--the pen and paper kind or the computer game kind--to follow the basic concept of a +5 sword, but if you're not let me just say that in Dungeons and Dragons +5 is the most uberific mega-fucking-awesome magical sword to exist--the only way to be better than +5 is to be +5 AND have effects like bursting into flames on command, shooting lighting bolts, or beating you at chess. Technically, without going outside of the rules as they are written, there is no such thing as a +6. +5 is as good as it gets. 

But the sword Werner has doesn't do any of that this-game-is-absolutely-overpowered shit.  It's just +5.   It increases Werner's chances of hitting someone by 25%.   If it does hit, it does almost twice as much damage as a regular sword. It makes Werner swing faster even than someone using a dagger. This fucking sword is so awesome, it practically fights for him.

Werner had Talentos from the beginning.  His uncle was also an adventurer until he took an arrow to the knee, and then he handed Talentos over to Werner in a totally sentimental moment (even made him swear to avenge the knee in question), and wished him luck.  And Werner went out in the world, Talentos in hand, to make his fortune.

Werner was in a normal adventuring scenario so he fought giant rats and kobolds and maybe some goblins for a while.  Werner didn't even have to try during these fights.  Before the kobolds could even pull out their feeble little weapons, Talentos had sliced them into two diagonally-sliced pieces of kobold.  He dismembered goblins without really even paying attention.  During these fights, he could actually keep talking to his henchmen, The Duke of Monroth, without missing a beat.  It was effortless.

Nothing in the local area was even a challenge to Werner.  Some troglodytes moved in but he dispatched them while still in his pajamas.  Some other fighters of the local area--who Werner thought of more as contemporaries than equals--found other magic swords, but none of them were as good as Talentos.  These guys took like five minutes to kill an owlbear and they would be bloodied and wounded when they finished.  Werner continued to be the best warrior in the area because of his amazing +5 sword.

But then the terrible dragon Kristianik cast it's rapacious eye upon Satinerous.

A cry went out to all the heroes of the land to help Satinerous in its hour of need.  And of course, Werner, with his awesome sword, rose to the call.  His henchman, The Duke of Monroth, offered to let Werner use his full plate armor and dragon scale shield, but Werner said those things would just slow Talentos down.  Werner's uncle tried to give him advice on dragon slaying, but Werner insisted that with Talentos in his hand, he could not but win.

The other heroes who had rallied to the banner were concocting a plan, but Werner sauntered past all of them.  He walked up to Kristianik, with Talentos at the ready.  And Kristianik--who at that moment was experiencing dreadful gas from having eaten a whole field of cows--burped a very large burp as Werner approached.  This burp had a little flame in it because Kristianik was a middle age dragon and was really not able to eat a lot of red meat anymore without having to deal with some very unpleasant indigestion.

The flame from the burp hit Werner and instantly charred him.  The people of Satinerous still insist there was a split-second, blood-curdling shriek, but my uncle said that claim is preposterous. Werner was nothing more than a smokey, blackened skeleton.  Then the skeleton fell into a pile of ash as Talentos clanged to the ground nearby.  Magic swords can't be destroyed by anything as pedestrian as dragon flame.

However, Werner had provided a pretty good distraction for the other warriors and they charged in on Kristianik's flanks.  The battle was long.  It was bloody.  For four of the warriors that fought that day, it would be known as their last stand.  (No ninth level priests around, apparently.) But in the end Kristianik was slain by a badass knight named Henry Lautrek who only had a +1 sword but knew how to find an enemy's soft spots and who climbed up the dragon's back Shadows-of-the-Colossus-style, tied himself fast with his 50 feet of rope, and shoved his sword into the weak point where head met neck.  The plus one sword didn't kill the dragon, but then one of the other warriors on the ground grabbed up Talentos, and heaved it at Henry with a mighty cry. "What a great gift!" Sir Lautrek cried.  He jammed the sword into Kristianik with a battle shout.  The dragon yanked and twitched through death throes, and even dislodged Henry (who hung suspended from his rope by his ankle).  But after a moment, Kristianik fell to the ground with a deep thud. Satinerous was safe. Kristianik was dead.

See, it turns out that while Werner was just swinging Talentos around without thinking, the other warriors were actually working on becoming more skilled.  They where learning how to duck and dodge and block and parry and riposte and not to telegraph their swings and how to tell when an enemy is about to strike and how to approach things that breathe fire from their rear and all sorts of great battle survival skills.   They were training until the callouses on their hands burst open, and then they were training more. They were actually doing the hard work of getting better while Werner just relied on Talentos.  They were letting seasoned vets train them.  They were learning to move in armor.  Talentos was an amazing boon when fighting kobolds and goblins, but it turns out that actual skill was needed to fight a dragon, and the power of Talentos wasn't enough to turn someone too good to train into a dragon slayer.

And the reason they were learning all this great shit was because no one ever gave them a +5 sword. They had to actually get better if they wanted to beat their enemies.  Werner's uncle--god bless his soul--basically got his little nephew killed.

Now I know this allegory is a doozy, so I'll help you decode it a little.  The world is filled with people declared at a young age to "have talent."  My teachers said it of me over and over again when my fledgling spark of interest in writing first manifested.  I was paraded about before the entire school and had many of my young writings picked as the winner for school contests and such.  But the talented cover the earth like a plague of flies.  Even if we consider only the artistic medium of writing, each school produces half a dozen truly "talented" people each year, the 2010 census says there are about a hundred thousand schools in the U.S.  That's half a million or so talented people EVERY year.  99.99% of people take their artistic talent and go manage restaurants or sell real estate.

But it's worse than that.  Those who do try to cultivate their art have been damaged by being told this myth about talent.  They assume that means they are too good for advice, too good for others' input, too good to work with a group of other writers reviewing each others' work.  They think they are too good to need their ten thousand hours.  They mistake "talent" for unmitigated genius.

It's not.

It's really, really not.

And here's the real sphincter muscle of the whole thing–even some unmitigated ubergenius wunderkinder of writing divinity who causes their teachers paroxysms of ecstasy as a child will be outstripped by someone with less talent and zero genius who is willing to work hard in only a few years.  Talent isn't just meaningless in the face of hard work–it can be dangerous to acknowledge when it makes you think you don't have to try.  Best to forget about it.  Best to proceed as if you suck rocks–not even rocks....hardened chips of cow dung.  Then you will never meet the advice that is too good for you or the opportunity to practice that you will think you don't need.

There are a lot of parts of writing that can be taught in classes or learned from books despite the pedagogy of many MFA programs. There are a lot of other parts of writing that can be cultivated, like the discipline and the habit of creativity. But there are a few parts that are damned hard to teach like the linguistic creativity and wordplay or the empathy towards humanity that are so much a part of the ingredients for being a good creative writer. Having talent really helps in these areas.  But if you've got some sense that your talent is going to mean more than someone else's sweat, get over yourself.....like ten minutes ago.

Because there are things a lot worse than dragons waiting for you out there.   And most of them are guarding gates that you need to go through if you want to be a successful writer.  Talent won't mean a thing to those monsters if you don't have the skill to avoid the fatal pitfalls and get yourself positioned perfectly to strike.  And by the time you've done all that...you're going to find that you already have talent.  It has come to you from quarters unexpected, and NOW you are ready to wield it.

Increasing Blog Traffic--Accumulating Tributaries

[As of this writing, I'm still working on tagging all my old entries, so the tagging system won't quite do much yet  Give me a few days....]

When I was a wee lad, my grandfather took me a couple of times to the Mud Island Mississipi Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.  They have a 2000 foot scale model of the Mississippi.   It uses 2.2 million gallons of water.  When you're a little kid a scale model over a football field long filled with water on a Tennessee July day is pretty awesome.

And for fifteen bonus points,
see if you can guess the body of water in the background.      

The Mississippi is the biggest river in North America and the fourth biggest in the world, but unlike many rivers, the Mississipi doesn't have one huge water source like a melting glacier or giant mountain formation.  Lake Itasca might be considered the source (the Latin translation of its name would certainly suggest that possibility) but that lake itself is fed by dozens of streams.  Instead it has a water basin of over a million square miles, extending all the way up into Canada, and hundreds and thousands of tiny tributaries feed into it on it's languid journey south.  All those small rivers, creeks, brooks, and later rivers like Jefferson and Missouri join it in it's journey towards New Orleans.

The Mississippi is like someone who gets a high level character in a role playing game by killing hundreds of thousands of giant rats back near the starting village.

There is a lot of advice on how to increase blog traffic online, and I've even gone blind trying to read and understand some of it, but I tend to apply the LCD principle to online advice.  [The LCD principle is that I check multiple sources for advice and see what they all have in common--the "Lowest Common Denominator"--and then I focus on that.]  I'm sure there's SEO information I could be using to improve my numbers, and technical things I could be doing, if I wanted to take time from writing, reading, housekeeping, teaching, and relationship to learn them, but given limited time and resources it's better to take the LCD advice first and work the other stuff in piecemeal.  The one thing most of those pages come back to is that what will really work is providing good content.

Good content.

Aside from that much of the rest is smoke and mirrors.  SEO is useful, but Google has a thousand tech nerds working overtime to circumvent any sophist manipulation and find the good stuff so just using key words over and over again is becoming the online equivalent of Mr. Subliminal from Saturday Night Live.  Just today they rolled out some new "link disavowing" software so that you can disavow links coming into your site from spam sites.

There's a reason I know three or four people who make a living writing web contentent even if they have to take a shower with Comet and steel wool at the end of each day and weep themselves to sleep.  I've even done some of of it.  You get some totally random ass topic that you have to do some research on.  You're encouraged to use other articles about it as long as you don't steal them word for word, and you're given a list of half a dozen words you have to include--some multiple times.  When you're done, they pay you.  It isn't much per article, but if you can write quality content quickly, it adds up fast.  Plus it's WAY better than doing a blog about writing where you sometimes put up your fiction.  Trust me.

You probably aren't going to have a viral post until a lot of people are already reading you regularly.  You might.  Maybe. But it's almost impossible to know what's going to get attention online, and if you don't have a pretty large pool already when you "nail" something, it's probably not going to go as far as you'd like.  Some of the articles I've spent a lot of time on and thought were really good have never broken a hundred hits.  I really thought 6 Easy Ways to Ninja More Pageviews was going to be a hit, but it's still hobbling along at 56 views as of this writing.  On the other hand some of the tabs up at the top of my page that I think are basically just taking care of business and making disclaimers are getting hundreds of "Like" clicks on Stumbleupon and generating 20+ views a day.  I never figured my Mission Statement was all that interesting.  And I never expected 20 Ways To Sabotage Yourself as a Writer to be my most popular article.  You just can't tell.

But Ray Bradbury said quantity is quality.  This is as true of blogging as it is of fiction.  Not every article will be your best.  Not every one is brilliant.  And even if it is those things, you might have just written on something people don't care about.  Just keep throwing spaghetti at the wall because there's no way to know what's going to stick.  And there's no way to know what's going to start crawling up the wall with a life of it's own and reaching for the ceiling with it's little noodly appendages.  Perhaps some epically viral blog was the primordial birth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  RAMEN!

As I've blogged with some kind of content almost every day over the last nine months, and watched my analytics, I've seen how this works.  I have a few articles doing some heavy lifting, and I get twenty or thirty hits off of all my various social media (Facebook, G+, LJ) each time I post a new article, but most of my traffic comes from many many different articles, each pulling in a few hits a day off of google searches or Stumbleupon.  They are like the tiny trickle tributaries of the Mississipi, each adding a new trickle to the total.

There aren't any ways I know of to short cut this process.  Most social networking sites will have some kind of backlash if you overuse them, and the consequences are very much like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.   I love Stumbleupon, but every time I submit a page to them, they shut down my URL's recommendations of "stumble hits" for a few minutes.  (So if I were spamming them with no-content links, I'd quickly blacklist my own URL)  The only articles that keep getting recommended daily--instead of once in a blue moon--are the ones with multiple "likes."  The system sort of creates its own meritocracy hazing.  (So if I were just posting page after page of useless crap, SU wouldn't provide me with any real traffic.)  Any social media like Facebook or G+, you run the risk of irritating your friends if you are too self-promotional.  I haven't yet gotten an e-mail from a friend telling me to tone it down on FB or G+, but that's because my peeps are saints.  I am assured by a friend that using Reddit depends ENTIRELY on the sub-Reddit category involved.  (Someone has put a couple of my articles up on the "Writing" subreddit, and my experience has been sort of mixed-with-negative-leanings.)  Again, you aren't likely to get upvoted into viral fame there unless you already have a name for yourself and if you post too much bad content, your posts will never see the light of day.  In Reddit they use something called Karma.  Though you might be posted by someone who already has good karma--but that probably won't happen if you don't have good content that has impressed somebody.  So you are right back to writing good content.

This is a lot like writing in general.  We like stories about meteoric rises to fame like Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, making crazy amounts of money or Fitzgerald living in the French Rivera off the proceeds of his first and only novel, but those stories are attractive BECAUSE they're extraordinary.  It is much more likely we are going to have to struggle for years just to get to a point where it might be theoretically possible to quit our day job (if we're willing to stop eating out, and eat our college-roommate's famous "Potato Pasta" twice a week).  It is much more likely that we will have to splice together different writing income streams and "recognition streams" so that one day, when we really nail it--enough people recognize our name that it will actually matter.  A lot of writers' first books are REALLY good, but they don't do very well because know one knows who the writer is.

Yeah, you can get all caught up in the networking and the elbow rubbing and know five publishers and go out drinking with three editors, but that's a lot like worrying about your SEO and networking the shit out of yourself on a billion different social networking sites when you don't actually have any content.  When you come back to it the writing is always going to be the more important factor in your success.  Then again, you can't just write good content in a vacuum.  I'd likely still be struggling along at 50 hits a day if I hadn't discovered Stumbleupon.

So learn the business.  Figure out what works.  Try something new once or twice a month and see if it helps.  Don't turn up your nose to a website that suggests a few simple changes that will make a big difference, but don't get lost in that world either.  Remember, if you're not already famous, what is really going to turn your blog into a giant flow of pageviews isn't one extra use of a keyword or some layout trick.  It is good content, and a lot of it.  So instead of trying to force every article be a viral sensation, work with perseverance to build up a network of tributaries that will each trickle into your total numbers.  It works for the biggest river in North America, so obviously it is an unassailable metaphor and can work for you.

5 Ways Writing is More Like Driving Than You Think

Driving cars and writing.  Totally different things right?  Stephen King might be able to compare the process of character based writing to driving in the fog, but there's no way driving could be a ridiculously awesome extended metaphor for writing is there?

Well, buckle up.  Because yes there is.


1- You learn them in the same basic progression.

When you start out driving, you constantly have to check everything you do like six times.  You run the checklist when you sit down of checking rear view mirrors, chair and everything else.  You keep your hands exactly at 2 and 10 every moment.  You actually have to think about making turning smooth.  You check your rear view mirror every ten seconds even on a lonely highway at night. (And not just because you saw The Hitcher on USA's Up All Night, last week.)  Everything is a conscious and awkward act of will.  You think really hard about how how hard to push down on your right foot to accelerate "smoothly."  You stop too fast because you push on the brake pedal too hard.  If you're using a standard, you probably rev too hard when you're trying to let out the clutch on a hill.  You actually count out three seconds to the car in front of you.  You basically suck.

You're thinking about how to drive.  And in that split second between thinking and doing things get clunky and jerky.  It's like watching a toddler chase the dog.

I'm a geek, so I think of this as "the video game factor."  When I first start playing a game I have to figure out a new set of controls.  I might run into a room filled with bad guys and in the split second I'm looking for the "Duck" button, they all open up with submachine guns on my brain pan, resulting in me watching myself die in glorious multi-cam True Color right about when I realize that "Q" is the duck button.  But after a few hours of playing the game, the controls are second nature.  I don't even think about which buttons I'm pushing anymore.  I just run in, lay some suppressive fire, toss a grenade and start taking head shots without once looking at the keyboard.  Driving is a fair bit harder, involves legs and arms and heads instead of just a few fingers, and the stakes for fucking up are higher than having to go back to the last save point, but it's the same basic idea with a longer learning curve.

Pretty soon, you don't think about how to drive.  The car becomes an extension of you in a cheesy Worf-and-his-Batleth kind of way, except hopefully with fewer severed heads. You stop thinking about how to do something, and just think about what you want the car to do.  In a couple of weeks you're eating a cheeseburger and fries, blasting Bohemian Rhapsody, and laughing with your friends while you drive the miles away without thinking about it.  And while some of that might be hubris that will eventually result in you rear-ending an old woman with an oversized Huey, Dewy, and Louie sweatshirt and a twitchy brake foot, a lot of it is just that driving is less a process and more second nature.

This amateur level of one-with-your-car is fine, as long as you don't want it to do anything too exciting or extreme.  (Like not hitting the old woman instead of plowing into her with gusto, for example.)  Anytime you start to push the limits, suddenly you become aware of that chain between your brain and the car's performance all over again.  If you take a turn too quickly, you're trying to apply pressure to the brake, but not too much, and you're thinking about how much is too much.  If you go into a skid, you have to remind yourself you want to turn into the skid and the split second of thinking is disasterous.  Suddenly you are clunky and jerky all over again.  (This is why texting is so epically stupid.  You'll be fine if nothing goes wrong, but the moment there's the slightest hiccup, you are an arm and two precious seconds behind the person who's paying attention, and you end up dead.)  It can take years, even decades, before the car is really just an extension of you, and you would have to spend hours a day behind the wheel to seamlessly move into those extreme moments.

Further if you want to learn to do something especially interesting with the car like drifting, you have to go back to the basics and be uncoordinated all over again--much like Lightning McQueen did in Cars when he spent hours and hours sliding over a cliff into cacti trying to practice the turn that Doc Hudson beat him with in their race.

Writing is the same way.  Not the physical act of writing (you probably have that pretty much mastered even if you were in special "bad handwriting" classes like me), but rather our relationship with what we're trying to get the language to do.  At first our efforts to make sentences are clunky and jerky.  We consider each word we chose carefully before committing it to ink (or pixels).  We check our adverb ratio every paragraph and worry over the appropriateness every use of passive voice.  We try to make sure we have a good ratio of compound and complex sentences with a peppering of simple.  We think carefully about each sentence's clarity.  Our sentences come out of us in fits and starts and we are very conscious of how we're using language. We are all too aware that the slightest misstep in the linguistic arena could end up with a pair of gardening shears jammed through our reproductive organs and a morbidly obese yet triumphant Ukrainian gleefully teabagging us while yodeling at the top of his lungs that he's just doing what we wrote that we wanted.

But as we get better we just think about what we want the words to do, and we go there without really thinking about how.  Ideas are conveyed without our deliberate attention to every word choice.  Whole sentences just appear before us and sometimes we are as delighted to read what our brain has come up with as anyone.  We might consider the imperfection of a particular phrase or clause, and think about how to do it better, but overall we are confident that language is an extension of us.  However, it might take years, even decades, to really get to the point where language really does exactly what we want it to.

Of course when we are stretching the limits of our writing, we will probably go back to that deliberate and conscious word choice, especially if we are pushing the boundaries of the writing we're used to into the territory of something we do less often like our first foray into fiction or trying our hand at a brand new technique like expressionism or surrealism.  Then we will stumble over every word all over again.

It can take lots of practice to make a new kind of writing second nature, but the dedicated writer is the one out there, beyond their comfort zones, practicing new techniques in their free time--not because they think they'll ever use them in a publication, but just for the love of writing--just like Lightning McQueen did on that pesky dirt road turn.  Unless you just want to write in a way that gets you from here to there, you probably need to spend some hours practicing.


2- Your relationship with the rules is VERY similar

If you've got a drivers licence, you are probably a walking codex of traffic laws.

Think about it.  You have to be in order to pass the test to be able to get that licence.  You know how to handle things when multiple people show up simultaneously at a four way stop sign...not including your innovative solution that utilizes a rocket propelled grenade launcher.  You know when you can make protected turns.  You probably know the speed limit even if there's no posted sign based on how many lanes their are, what kind of buildings are around you and whether there's a median.  You know what to do when you see certain kinds of vehicles in certain positions relative to you (like an emergency vehicle behind you, or a motorcycle next to you).  You know to slam the brake if you see a little kid run out in front of your car, even if you are in a temporal vortex and the kid is a young Harold Bloom.  A zillion rules could fall out of your head for any given moment.

You're probably not as savvy as a cop, but you know your fair share.

Writing is like this.  You probably know a gazillion rules.  Rules about grammar.  Rules about spelling. Rules about punctuation.  Rules about paragraph construction.  Rules about what makes for good fiction.  Rules about passive voice.  Rules about adverbs.  Rules about lexicon.  Rules about subjects and objects.  Rules about stative verbs.  Rules about how items in lists should not be their own sentences.

The thing is, you also know that some of these rules are really, really important, like driving the appropriate direction on the freeway, and others are pretty much bullshit, like the 35 mph speed limit on the straight away between one small town and another where no one drives less than 50.  So, while you know that using no subjects or tense markers or spelling every word like "ghoti" will make your reading incomprehensible, you also know that to sometimes start sentences with conjunctions or to split infinitives is no big deal.

Of course you can't just ignore the rules.  You have to know the rules to know which ones aren't important.  You probably won't get a ticket if you breeze through that five minute red light at four in the morning.   But if you rocket through a school zone at 150 on a Tuesday at three in the afternoon because "fuck rules," you will end up in county prison nursing your taser wounds and wishing that either the toilet was much much MUCH more private or your cellmates hadn't had cabbage the night before.

You probably can do a fine job without knowing every single rule.  You are probably a fine driver without knowing that it is illegal to jump from one vehicle to another at 65mph in Glendale, California.  You are also probably a fine writer without knowing that several style manuals state that technically any action (beyond attribution tags) that occurs between a single sentence quotation is supposed to happen inside em dashes.  Some rules might even be a little less obscure than these examples.  (You may not know that if you see an emergency vehicle with flashing lights on the side of the road, you are supposed to move a lane to the left [except in a couple of states] and you may not know why some lists of adjectives have commas between them and some don't.)  But you can probably still write pretty well without knowing every rule.

Some rules are just shit people make up like driving a car barefoot or that speculative fiction can't ever be as significant as literary fiction.  They don't even know what they're talking about, but they want the rule to be true, so they tell everyone it's totally a rule and it catches on like an urban legend.

Passing on the right:
the don't-end-a-sentence-in-a-preposition of the driving world.
No one cares.  Everyone does it.
And it drives the rule-lawyers insane!
Delightfully, beautifully, purple-faceily insane.

And you probably know someone--both a driver and a writer--who follows all the rules, and demands everyone around them do so as well.  They probably have a truly reasonable sounding explanation for why they insist on this (meaning with writing or safety with driving).  And...in BOTH cases their adherence to the rules can be so strict as to actually achieve the opposite of their intention.  A strict, inflexible, and "proper" interpretation of yesteryear grammar can actually muddle meaning with many (if not most) people, and following every traffic law in every situation can actually put you in grave danger if people around you don't know what you're doing.  Also these people are absolutely insufferable pedants in either context.


3- There is a huge gulf between doing it for a living and doing it in a way that people just sit and watch

You probably know some people who drive for a living.  Cab drivers.  Bus drivers.  Airport shuttle drivers.  Package delivery drivers.  Limo drivers.  Maybe just someone who commutes such an ungodly distance as part of their job that they are basically including driving as part of the job.  These people technically make their money driving.

Technically.

Are they stunt drivers?  No. Are they race car drivers?  No.  Are people lining up just to watch them majestically operate their machinery?  No.  Would people pay just to watch them drive?  No. Driving is the means by which they get you to what you are really paying for--your pizza or package or your transportation or some other thing that needs a driver.  These people might be consumate professionals, highly skilled, and even quite awesome drivers, but you're probably never going to drop real money just to watch them get the 20 Line from BART to Diablo Valley Community College before 4:30.  The drivers you pay to see are the ones that push the limits.  They do things with cars that you almost can't believe.

Though I have to admit, I would totally pay $100 to see the local ice cream truck catch air off a car loader set up like a ramp--straight up Crazy Taxi style!  Day after day, your home life's a wreck...

The same is true of legions of professional writers.  There are tech writers, policy writers, science writers, content writers, communications directors, legal writers, travel writers, analysts, grant and development writers, and journalists.  These people are often highly competent wordsmiths--wonderful, adept, and professional at their particular skill sets.  They are making money with writing, and the writer has provided an invaluable service with skill, but it isn't the writing itself that is the product being exchanged..  It is the news, the grant proposal, the content, the analysis or something like that.   It's a pretty big chasm between this kind of writing and the kind you drop an hour's worth of pay on at the bookstore in to read for pleasure.  Those kinds of writers push the limits.  They do things with words that you can barely imagine.

Now, I'm not pointing out this chasm this to be an asshole.  I'm not saying this to say "those people aren't 'real' writers."  They are awesome and they are real. But creative writing is an industry where people get a little weird about jealousy, about settling, and about what they think counts as writing.  Sometimes there's so much power in the words "I'm a professional writer," that they forget to consider that chasm.  But it would make about as much sense for a driver dreaming of one day being in the Indy 500 or in Nascar to let themselves settle for driving a cab their whole life because it's technically driving, or to be jealous of a limo driver because they are making money operating a vehicle.

Does that seem right to you?  (Image from comicvine)

Can other kinds of writing help someone become a novelist?  Absolutely they can.  In fact, writers of every type of writing I mentioned have taken their skills to fiction and it has informed their work.  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is so charming precisely because it was written by a travel writer who took that style into fiction, and not just because Kevin Spacey did the movie adaptation.  But a writer is not an author just because of their skill anymore than a pizza delivery driver should be doing stunt driving for Hollywood because they know a shortcut that will get that extra-large with olives and mushrooms past an accident on Main street in 29 and a half minutes.

Mmmmm.  Pizza...


4- There are different kinds and styles that are valid

There are muscle cars and turbocharged cars and each delights in thinking the other isn't legit.  There is street racing and track racing.  There is off roading and karting.  There are formula races and stock car races.  Each has its own set of conventions and regulations and many that think (openly or secretly) that they are the best and the only real kind of driving.

Some kinds of driving deal with the raw power of the machine.  Some focus on the technical skill and precision of the driver.  Some have hard cap limits on hardware.  Others allow for every innovation technology can provide.  Some do endurance runs around circular tracks.  Some take off cross country.  Others do Tokyo Drift and their "race" never really leaves an intersection sized area.  Some kinds of performance driving happen right on the street in the middle of traffic "on the streets."  Others are dazzling spectacles of paparazzi and border on show business around a handful of drivers who are quite famous.  And despite many groups trying to delegitimize the others, all have niches and fans and audiences and require skill.

Writing is shockingly similar.  Obviously there are different genres--including the "literary genre" trying its best to declare itself the best and only "real" kind of writing.  There are small presses where the writer wears the hat of publicist and sometimes has to even put their own books on consignment at local bookstores.  There are major presses where a book release might involve radio advertising spots and public transit billboards where a handful of writers are quite famous.  There are bloggers, short story writers, novelists, poets and playwrights.  Some write with an almost anachronistic eye on the past, limiting their grudging interface with technology only to submission time and only as much as a given agent demands.  Others push the limits of technology, incorporating multimedia and mixed media and publishing in a myriad of ways that weren't even available a decade ago.  There's creative non-fiction and high fantasy.  There are people heading out to readings to listen to the way the language of their words rolls off their tongue in an atmosphere filled with the beating pulse of other writers and readers.  There are people who try to limit themselves to the precision of what they can do with careful word choice and obsessive revision.  There are beat poets in your local coffee shop ranting about sex and drugs and critical race theory from something they just jotted down on a napkin in the five minutes before the mic opened up, and people whose literary manuscript won't see an agent until it's undergone twenty rewrites.

And of course, you have elitists in every group who think that they are the only kind of writing that really counts--or if they are too humble to actually word it that way, they might have no end of disparaging comments to say about all the other kinds EXCEPT theirs.  You can read between the line of I'm-not-going-to-come-out-and-straight-up-say-I'm-a-snob-ism, right?

Good writers don't limit themselves to a single type of writing, either--even if they feel most comfortable there or do most of their "published" work in that type.  Like good ol' Lightning McQueen who worked that dirt track turn over and over until he mastered it, a good writer will take on a different kind of writing just because it's writing and to have a different kind of tool in their toolbox.


5- A lot of hobbyists fancy themselves awesome and don't really get what's holding them back

You probably have a couple of friends who are quite the daredevils behind the wheel.  They catch air coming out of their fucking apartment complex.  They hit fourth gear crossing a parking lot.  If turn sign says 45mph, you know they won't take it going less than 70, and if they decelerate at all when taking an intersection corner, they must have seen a toddler trying to cross...alone.  When they let loose on the freeway, you actually see the world around you aging more quickly due to observable relativity.  They drive behind emergency vehicles and complain about "these damned slowpokes." Usually you have to have your fingernails surgically removed from the "Oh Shit" bar after a ten minute hop down to pick up dinner from the Pho place.

And the thing is, they're usually pretty good drivers.  If they weren't, they'd have gotten in about twenty gagillion accidents long ago or ended up as the "really-hammer-it-home" clip of Red Asphalt 25.  But having a lead foot and an observable hatred for the lives of pedestrians doesn't make you Ayrton Senna or Mario Andretti.  Being good, even REALLY good, still is miles from the Indy 500, and while these people might entertain pleasant dreams that they are taking corners in the Monaco GP, they would have years of training before even their level of skill was ready for any professional circuit--no matter how miraculous it is that they don't have a kill score.

You might love to drive.  You might speed down the 1 with the top down and your hair whipping around like a Viagra commercial.  You might road trip when flying is considerably faster just because you like getting out on the open road.  You might pay close attention to things like sound system and chair comfort when car shopping because you're going to be in your car way more than the next guy. But this doesn't mean that you are Lewis Hamilton.

You probably have friends who are the same way about writing.  They are fabulous at it--stringing words together almost effortlessly and reaching meaning that you felt you muddled with twice as many words.  They tear through a paragraph like they are bending the laws of time and space, and wind up getting from language to meaning in a way that makes you wish for a linguistic "Oh shit" bar.  You probably have friends who love to write.  They fire off an opus because it's Monday, write pages upon pages every day, and write with such abundance that you contemplate how to bottle their linguistic fecundity and sell it in in vials at the mega-bookstores next to the Moleskine journals.

Loving writing, being really good at writing....they don't make someone an author.  Many people are happy writing at this level, but many more are frustrated and confused when these abilities don't translate into instant success.  Writing, especially creative writing, professionally takes more than love and more than skill.  Both help, of course, and you won't go far if you don't much like writing.  But pushing yourself to take the step from hobbyist to something more takes a unswerving dedication and an unflagging effort.  It takes more than writing a lot or writing well.  It takes being willing to focus every skill you've learned like a laser on the kind of writing that isn't just for you, but will go out into the world.  It takes learning uncomfortable parts of the process like revision.  It takes actually finishing that manuscript they have a couple of chapters of tucked away.  It often takes sacrifice of a lot of other things you might also enjoy doing.  It takes being willing to learn the Biz of CW.  It takes treating writing as more than a hobby.

A lot more.

This is the only hobby that translates directly into success.
Train engineers are recruited directly from model stores.

And now we come to what is actually one of the major DIFFERENCES between driving and writing: your friend who really loves driving and has a lead foot probably isn't going to be racing on a pro-circuit next season unless they really dedicate themselves to it and make some major changes in their lives.  What's more important, your friend probably knows this.  They aren't telling themselves stories that they are a couple of half hearted decisions away from The Long Beach Grand Prix, and it would be theirs if they really wanted it.  For some reason, with writing, people who are impressive hobbyists really think they are on the cusp of being major writers without ever really giving it a buttload of work.

A hobbyist-going-suddenly-successful writer is actually about as likely as your friend driving Nascar.  Which is even less likely than the plot of Days of Thunder. Which is more likely than the plot of Herbie: Fully Loaded but far less likely than the plot of Cannonball Run.


Of course, there are several ways that driving isn't a thing like writing.  Don't even get me started on how quickly this metaphor breaks down if you start talking about how maintaining peak performance involves someone really getting under your hood regularly...uh....with some fluids....and...um.....uh...

Never mind.  Pizza's here.  Gotta go tip a driver.