On Momentum

A note from The Kerr: J.T. will still be writing for The Tao on Thursdays. So these are (not surprisingly) her words, not mine!
 

There comes a time in every book when the story begins to coalesce and gain speed. This time has (thankfully) come for my new standalone, which I’m trying to finish by the end of April so I can turn, unencumbered, to Catherine and the next Nicholas Drummond book (which, thankfully, is already knocking at my brain with a few ideas) the second week of May.

It’s the coolest feeling, this momentum. I can pinpoint the moment it started, too.

The week before last, I was doing a set of three deep-work days in a row, and something simply clicked on the last day, at around four in the afternoon. I caught a wave, and rode it all the way to the shore. I was still writing when hubby arrived home, and simply held up a finger and accepted a quick buss on the cheek. He knows me well enough not to interrupt a moment of true flow, and that’s where I was.

The book had come alive under my fingertips.

Interestingly, it was something off script that caused this wave, too. A character who wasn’t in the proposal or outline, who appeared a few weeks ago as a throwaway line, a convenience person, and has suddenly become a lynchpin.

It happens that way sometimes. It’s really the fun of writing, when the character who is the least important suddenly raises their hand and says, “HEY! Pay attention to me. I’m here for a reason, you silly writer.”

I’m a baseball fan, and I respect a streak. The thing with these kinds of flows is to not let them die. I made sure to touch the book every day whilst I was in Florida, and now I’m back and my fingers are itching to rediscover the story and see where it takes me. I’m over the halfway mark, which means I’ve got two of my “turns” in place, with two more to planned. This book seems to be twisting itself like a braid, though, so there may be more than I first thought.

And so… back to it. I will report in on how it goes.

Sea Changes, Part Two

To read Part One, click here.

Since I’m reworking many of my habits this year, I thought I’d continue on the theme of Sea Changes. 

Now that I’ve decided to start leaving my iPad downstairs, I’ve made another change, this time in how I consume my social media.

I’ve been systematically turning off straight retweets in my Twitter feed.

It didn’t feel like a major idea, but once I started, it’s become a rather big deal. 

How does this work? Whenever I see an organic retweet, meaning the person I follow has simply clicked the retweet button, I go to that person’s page and turn off retweets. If the retweet comes with a message from my friend, then I see it, but if it’s just a regular click-to-spread thought, I don’t. 

Simple. And mind-blowing. 

It’s been a really interesting exercise, and one which has given me great pleasure, because I’m seeing posts from my friends again! I purposefully keep my follow count low on Twitter so I can actually connect with people there, and this has been one of the best things I’ve done in ages.

I’ve also noticed that people have a tendency to retweet things they may believe but would NEVER say themselves. Interesting, right? I know I’m guilty of doing that, too. But from here on out, if I’m retweeting, I’ll be commenting as well, so my followers know why I want them to pay attention to the post. Intentionality. I think it will help my interactions tremendously, because Twitter stopped having a lot happy feels for me a while ago.

And on Facebook, I’ve been doing some housekeeping as well. On my personal page, if I see a post from someone I don’t know (vestiges of my 5000 friend days — I moved everyone I didn’t know over to the fan page years ago, but there are still some I missed), I hide it. Especially if it’s something incendiary. I am a believer in democracy. I took an oath to protect and defend this country, one that I still take seriously. And I have faith in our people to make their own decisions. Some of the posts I’ve seen lately have been obscene, and hateful, and even though I’m not thrilled with the way of the world right now, I respect the process of democracy.

Now, if someone I know and like says something I don’t, no big deal. I firmly believe in free speech, and seeing my friend’s different opinions isn’t an issue for me. I might make a mental note to tease them a bit the next time I see them, or even comment, but in general, I read and try to understand where they’re coming from. I learn from my friends with whom I don’t agree 100% of the time. This is a good thing. I like a good clean debate, well-reasoned arguments, and being exposed to new ideas. I actually don’t know many people who don’t.

But strangers clogging up my feed with hate get unfollowed. Simple as that. And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it, either. 

Now if I could just teach Facebook to give me the most recent posts ALL THE TIME…

Sea Changes, Part One

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.
 

-Shakespeare, The Tempest

Leave it to Shakespeare to come up with a perfect idiom for internal alteration. 

I am undergoing a metamorphosis of my own these days. My change is not wrought by the sea, per se, but it is of my own microcosm. 

It’s no secret I am a fan of minimalism. This bleeds into my life in interesting, and mostly productive, ways. Inbox Zero, for example. When there are more than 20 emails in my inbox, I start getting a strange, itchy feeling between my shoulder blades, which won’t go away until I’ve cleared out my inbox. Amy always teases me that my procrastination results in productive things, like blogs (ahem) and business attended to.

So what is this sea change of which I speak?

I’ve stopped taking my iPad to bed.

My normal evening/morning involves reading before I go to sleep, then waking up, immediately grabbing my iPad, and reading the news. Inevitably, this means I’m doing email at 11 p.m., and at 8 a.m. And playing on Facebook and Twitter. I have a designed format I follow, site to site to site, news to social media to email (which, if I’m feeling rebellious, I flip, and go from email to Twitter to the news…) but it means I am always plugged in. Always.

I read this piece last week, and it really affected my thinking about how I’m using my devices — or, how they’re using me. Lent is coming soon, and with it, my annual social media sabbatical. The six weeks I spend off the socials is always a psychological boon to me, simply because I allow myself to focus my energies elsewhere without guilt. 

I’ve always been rather proud of the fact that my phone stays plugged in on the kitchen counter by the door when I come home. I don’t carry it around the house with me. If someone calls, they’ll leave a message. If a text comes in, I’ll deal with it when I get to it. 

And then I realized I’m a complete and total hypocrite, because my iPad is simply taking the phone’s place. I have an unhealthy habit of having my iPad attached to me at all times. I’ve started leaving it in the kitchen during my work day so I’m not tempted to look for things, check email, and the like. That’s helped. My January felt more peaceful and settled, absolutely.

But I realized the moment the workday ends, I’m just trading one screen for another. When my laptop goes off, my iPad comes out. And stays in my hand the whole evening, until I literally fall asleep with it in my hands.

So over the weekend, I left it downstairs. I read on my Kindle. That worked just fine. What I love about the Kindle is the ability to fix fonts to my liking, turn down the backlight, and read in the dark, so I don’t disturb hubby with the bedside lamp. 

I wasn’t able to access the news, my email, Facebook, etc. And when I woke up… I got up. The cats weren’t happy, but my day suddenly felt longer. I combined the news reading with breakfast. And I was writing by 10, instead of noon.

I’m several days in to this new habit, and it feels more and more comfortable every day. We’ll see if the cats agree, they aren’t happy they don’t have the warm cuddles in the morning. 

I realized immediately this should equal more words per day, one of my biggest goals for 2017. And that’s good news for EVERYONE!

12.15.16 - I Have an Idea...

First, thanks so much to Amy for her great piece on the Barnes & Noble Concept Store. Don’t know about you, but I vote for more Amy blogs here, don’t you?

Okay, onward.

One of the questions I get most often is, “JT, where do you get your ideas?”

I answer the same way every time — where don’t I get my ideas?

Ideas are everywhere. They’re the easiest part of being a writer. The world, nay, the universe, is brimming with concepts and inspirations. I can’t walk down the street without coming up with four or five solid concepts.

The question that you should be asking is: “How do you decide which idea to write next?”

This is the tricker of the two questions, mainly because oftentimes, there are deadlines and reader expectations and contractual obligations for stories, especially when you write a series. It would stand to reason that, for the sake of your career, you find a great idea and funnel it directly into your next series book. 

My problem is, I write three series, all slightly different but firmly entrenched in the thriller genre. I also write standalone novels. And I write a couple of short stories every year, too. How do I decide what goes where, and in what order to proceed?

The logical answer is: I focus on deadlines, and try to channel all my energy into the book that’s due next. But sometimes, this is wishful thinking. Sometimes, an idea sparks, and you have to decide whether to abandon your current project to follow that fire.

It’s a tricky business, ideas. I often warn about finishing the story you’re working on lest the trail of half-eaten sandwiches start taking over your house. 

Less disciplined (AKA new) writers often see that shiny new object and pursue it, and end up with multiple unfinished stories. You gotta finish. Rule #1 for a successful writing career.

Because writing is hard. It is. That’s no lie. One of the biggest challenges is sticking with a story to the end when you haven’t done it multiple times and you’re being assailed by cool new ideas.

Personally, I have an Evernote folder for every book, current and upcoming. When I see a cool, shiny new idea, I clip it to Evernote, open a Scrivener file with the concept laid out (I call these “treatments”) and move on with my current story. This works 90% of the time.

But every once in a while, an idea is too good to pass up, and I all-stop on a project to write it. NO ONE KNOWS is a good example of that. So is THE OMEN DAYS. And it’s just happened again. I’ve been working on a new standalone, but something’s been holding me back — an idea that bloomed fully-formed in my head back in August. I wrote it all down, gave it a Scrivener file and an Evernote notebook, but it’s been eating at me. I finally stopped the standalone and indulged this new idea. 50 pages later, I have a super weird, surreal horror story finished, and now, at last, I can return to the standalone unencumbered.

For me, it’s a fine balance between controlling (though corralling is perhaps the better term) the new ideas (Shiny! Exciting! Happy!) and finishing the current work in progress (WIP = long hard slog). It gets easier with practice. And as Stephen King says, when an idea is so great that you don’t need to write it down, you know it’s a keeper. I still write everything down, just in case, but I’d amend King’s concept to this: the idea that won’t leave you alone is the one you need to write next.

Just make sure you FINISH!!!

5.5.16 - On The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

From the time I was able to hold a pencil and write, perfection was my friend, and mistake my enemy.  

It was a paralyzing combination.  

I wanted to be an artist, but when faced with a blank sheet of paper, I was terrified. Not with fear that I couldn’t draw, couldn’t create. I knew I could. No, my fear was I would ruin the pristine paper with a line out of place, and I’d have to throw it away.

I would have ruined the paper with a mistake.
 

When I realized writing was a simpler thing for me than drawing, I had the same issue. If I misspelled a word, or miswrote a word, that was it. The paper was ruined, and I had to start over.

Nothing but perfection was (*ahem* is) acceptable. 

This holds true for most everything I do, all these years later.  Now I understand that this urge for perfection is a manifestation of OCD, and I find ways to push past the early paralyzing moments when faced with blank pages. For new novels, I have a formula for starting. This includes building a book journal, building a file, naming the book, putting together epigraphs… little things that mean the pages aren’t entirely blank.

But that’s easy to do when you’re in a computer screen. When you’re doing it by hand, it’s a whole different story.

All these years later, I’m still always terrified that I’m going to make a mistake on that first page and have to rip it out and start over. Trust me, there are a number of notebooks in my house with a first page missing.

I’ve been examining these urges lately, because I came across something interesting. It’s a story about how dependent we’ve become on the Cloud, and how we’re losing a lot of our history because everything is typed on computers.

Thinking about this, I had a realization. This is directly related to how we’re so carefully curating our lives for one another. If you think about it, we are always striving for perfection in our written work, so much so that we’ve become dependent on spellcheck and grammar checks, and nothing that makes it to public consumption hasn’t been edited to death.

What are we losing by working electronically? What bits of genius, or specialness, are we losing when we can so easily delete and write something fresh? 
 

Not only are we curating our lives for one another, we’re curating our thoughts… for ourselves.

Whether your desire to have a clean, perfect document is pathological or simply a result of the way you want to present yourself to the world, we are eliminating some of our finest work when we edit ourselves online, on the computer screen, in our writing programs.

Think of what we’re losing? That original thought, that original impetus, the original words, edited into coherent [[thoughts]]… *

*I JUST did it. I saw the words “thoughts”, and even though it’s correct, I immediately backward deleted to come up with something else, something unique that isn’t a repetitive word. It’s instinct; I do it without thinking. Which makes me wonder: How much do I delete throughout a day? I don’t keep track of how many words I type in a day, I keep track of the end product. At the end of the day, I have X number of words.

What if I didn’t delete and rewrite? What if I was forced to write by hand, in a notebook, and had a record of all those words I decided weren’t right, weren’t correct, were misspelled?

I’ve always wanted to write a book by hand. I do a lot of handwritten work already, from journals to note taking to planning and processing ideas. Could I stand to write a whole story by hand? Could I stand the XXed out words, the arrows drawn to realign paragraphs, the hundreds of mistakes I make in a day of writing? Moreover, how many words am I REALLY writing in a day? I’d bet I write two to three times as much as is recorded at the end of the day, trying out sentences, trying ideas, words, themes. I immediately delete when something isn’t working.

What if I stopped doing that?
 

We’re talking a monstrous sea change for me. For us all. Paper isn’t the precious commodity it used to be. Ink and pens are easy to work with. I don’t know that I could give up my laptop—the ideas seem to go through my brain directly into my fingers onto the page, without stops or bypasses, and I don’t feel that flow when I’m writing by hand.

But it’s doable. It’s totally doable.

And I would have a record—a real record, a true record—of the words. It wouldn’t be perfect, and all that markup would probably give me hives, but it’s something worth thinking about. At the very least, I’m going to try and be more intentional about how I self-edit.

In the next few weeks, look for a few more posts with the theme of perfection stifling our art. It’s something I really want to explore.
 

So….

What say you? Are we losing our culture to autocorrect and spell check and the keyboard?  Do you write by hand or by keyboard?