A post from last year: updated to reflect the fact that my memories of both Man of Steel and Star Trek: Into Darkness have soured considerably.
I’ve been blogging for years. I’m not sure if you’d call what I’ve done or have been doing successful or not, when it comes to blogging and other areas of my life, but what I keep coming back to is the fact that old stories still have something to tell us. I have no problem, on a fundamental level, with something getting a reboot or a re-imagining, as long as the core of the story remains intact and the talented people telling the story are either plying close to that core or going in an entirely new direction with it.
The problem, as I see it, is that it is far too easy to stick to the old story points and simply apply modern thinking to them, rather than take a tale’s themes or characters or message in a new direction. What really bothers me about the practice is how lazy it seems. If you want to use an old tale or property to tell a story, go for it; all that I would ask is that you do something new with it. Another example would be the difference between Immortals and the Clash of the Titans retread: while Immortals had a little trouble staying on-point with its storytelling, its visual imagination and portrayal of ancient Greece felt unique and striking, while the new Titans felt drab and lackluster on pretty much all fronts. I mean, sure, it was still fun to see Sam Worthington fight giant scorpions, and Liam Neeson was born to play gods, but the thrust of the story felt weak because there was nothing new about it.
As scarce as new ideas tend to be, it’s no wonder that older stories often come up for a rehash now and again. As I’ve said, I’m all about old stories getting told in new ways. The emphasis here is on ‘new’ – a good storyteller should try to do something that hasn’t been done before, or mix things together that haven’t been mixed. Any idiot with a keyboard can bash out a story about a superhero or vampires or old myths – the question is, what makes your story about a superhero or vampires or old myths stand out? What will make people want to read it? Why, at the end of the day, do you have to write it?
With everything that’s been happening, I am more and more aware that it can be extremely difficult to maintain a consistent pace. From running to writing to preparing for life’s next adventure, things seem to be happening in short, irregular bursts, rather than unfolding according to any sort of plan. I keep telling myself that I’m going to do X, or set things up for Y, or be more vigilant regarding Z, but more often than not, I’m just satisfied in getting home and being free from responsibility for at least a couple hours.
A big part of it is, I believe, momentum. Last year at this time, I was working out regularly, pretty much every day, and pushing myself to write more. I’m not sure where all of that energy went, or if it never left and I simply lost my pace of the long, cold winter and the rough road I’ve been on over the last few months. It can be hard to start certain things, like an exercise regimen or an intense artistic endeavor, but I’ve found that once you do get started, it can be equally hard to stop.
There are a lot of things you can do to jump-start your endeavors. An adjustment in sleep or diet can be a good place to start, as can changing your surroundings. Leave what’s holding you back behind, at least for the time being, and let one of your new ideas have some time in the spotlight. You really don’t know how something is going to turn out until you try it, after all, so even if a new project goes nowhere, if it leads to you coming back to something you were struggling with stronger than ever, it will not have been a waste of time.
In fact, time you spend trying to regain momentum is not a waste, either. I’ve never been mountain climbing, but I imagine the same applies. The first few steps up a mountainside are not a waste of time, no matter how deliberate you make your pace to prepare yourself for the climb, take in the scenery, snap photos, or take another inventory. When you’re preparing to run, you may spend time making sure your water, your music, your shoes, everything is in order. Again, not a waste of time. It helps organize your mind to deal with what’s ahead. And it’s likely to make the event even more rewarding.
This is a case of saying it to myself as much as to anyone reading: Don’t give up. Keep trying. Continue to push forward. Even if you’ve stumbled, tripped, or slowed to catch your breath, the race is not over. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’ve lost your pace, don’t worry. You can get it back. Just keep breathing and measure your steps. Before you know it, you’ll be beating your old times and on the road to victory. You just have to want it. You can do it!
I’ve been finding it difficult to write lately. I have a ton of ideas chasing themselves around in my head, projects to complete and new novels to start, yet I’m running into some serious roadblocks. I have to assume that I’m not alone: a lot of writers are pre-occupied with many things, from life events to other endeavors to all sorts of personal issues. You should be writing – we all should – and if you’re not writing, something has to change.
If nothing else, you have to change your scene. A lot of writers have a particular area set aside for their craft. Away from foot traffic, secluded in some way, or just portioned off from the rest of a room, it is their fortress of solitude. When I move, I will be taking my writing desk with me, and it will be in a different corner from my computer desk. Even if it’s just across the room, that separation is crucial.
When life gets tossed into upheaval, it can be difficult to maintain the things that are essential to both our futures and our happiness. There’s a great deal of immediate tasks to deal with when changes occur in life, and not everybody has the same reaction time. To get back to the good places from where we can be productive and happy, sometimes the scene has to change.
I’m going to keep working on getting myself to that place. That’s how I’m going to beat back the dark things and stay on track with my goals.
Reality’s a stone-cold bitch. That’s why I mostly write fiction.
I identify first and foremost as a writer, not necessarily a programmer or a social media guru or mediocre gamer. As such I’ve come to accept several truths about myself.
Any emotional problems from which I actually suffer will be exacerbated by the short-sighted stubborn sociopathy inherent of being a writer.
If I take up writing as a full-time profession I am going to dodge debt collectors and utility bills even more than I do now. (Don’t panic, family members, my knees are unbroken and will remain so. I’m just not dining on steak and drinking cognac. More like dining on pasta and drinking cheap pop.)
The longer I do not write full time and cram writing in whenever I can into the nooks and crannies of a packed schedule, fueled by whatever energy I can spare, the more my writing is going to suffer for it and the less likely I am to get published before I’m facing off against Gandalf and Dumbledore in a long white beard growing competition. Which I’ll win because they’re fictional.
While writing is an evolutionary process that requires several drafts, torrents of trial and error, and accepting that one’s final effort might still be a flaming pile of poo, processes in the professional world are very different, and being writerly will rarely be tolerated long in the face of clients who want what they want yesterday for less than they want to pay. If you don’t get something right the first time, there’s the door, don’t let it hit you on those fancy pants you thought you were wearing.
I am never, ever, for as long as I keep breathing, going to give up writing.
Sure, I’ll be miserable more often than not. Who isn’t? I’ve learned to seize and capitalize on my joy when I find it. The smile of a loved one. Pulling off a win in Hearthstone. Meeting fellow geeks in person instead of just over the Tweetsphere. The open road on a sunny day. Enforcing. A decent movie or video game with a coherent story and three-dimensional characters. My mom’s cooking and my dad’s laughter. Good pipe tobacco.
And finishing a story.
That’s the hidden beauty of writing. If you do it right, you get to finish it multiple times. After your first draft, you go back and edit it. And when you get through the edit? Guess what, you finished it. Awesome!
In my experience it’s not a case of diminishing returns. The next round of edits might not be as heady in its completion as the last, but it’ll be different and it’ll still be good. And let me tell you, it’s a long hard road to get there.
Even if you do write for a living, you still have to produce. Instead of the aforementioned clients you have looming deadlines, a constant and gnawing doubt that your writing just won’t be good enough and the cold knowledge that at least a dozen younger, hungrier and more talented penjockeys are just waiting for you to fuck up so they can take your place, and your paycheck. Pressure from clients or deadlines or those lean and hungry wolves becomes pressure on you, pound after pound after pound of it, and when you go home at night with even more words unwritten, you’re going to feel every ounce of that pressure on your foolish head, and every word you haven’t written will pile on top, each one an additional gram of concentrated dark-matter suck.
It’s a love affair with someone who never returns you calls when you need them but always calls just when you think you can’t take another day of this tedious, soul-eroding bullshit.
I said earlier I mostly write fiction. This, for example, isn’t ficton. I wouldn’t mind writing more recollections like this, but guess what, I’m not getting paid for it (I could be if somehting hadn’t gone wrong with my ad block, thank you SO much for that, Google Ads). My movie & game reviews, short stories, commentary on geek minutae, Art of Thor series, IT CAME FROM NETFLIX!, the Beginner’s Guide to Westeros? Not a dime. I don’t write any of that because I get paid for it. I do it to entertain those couple dozen of you who cruise by here every day. I do it because I feel I’ve got something to say that hasn’t quite been said this way before.
And yes, I do it because I love it.
It’s in my blood and my bones. It keeps me awake at night more than bills or code or politics or Protoss cheese or ruminations on the Holy Ghost. And since I doubt I’m going to be getting rid of it at this point in my life, I might as well embrace it and make the most of it.
I’m going to suffer more hardship. I might have to move, or change jobs again, or go through some embarassing procedure because I tried to hock my words at passers-by on the train and had made one of the first drafts of my manuscript into what I felt was a fetching kilt (nae trews Jimmy) and a matching hat that may or may not have been styled after those conical straw numbers you see atop badass samurai in Kurosawa movies.
So be it.
Say it with me, writers.
I will not whine.
I will not blubber.
I will not make mewling whimpering cryface pissypants boo-hoo noises.
I will not sing lamentations to my weakness.
I am the Commander of these words.
I am the King of this story.
I am the God of this place.
I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.
Last night was a bit rough. Workday stresses lead to an evening bereft of energy, and then I was awakened at 2 in the morning by a particularly aggressive peal of thunder. I find myself struggling just to write a few hundred words a day, which is never a good thing. I know a realignment is coming in the very near future, and I need to prepare for it, but there’s still frustration I have to deal with.
Anyway. Here’s a Throwback Thursday post from 2010. Some of my early posts were quite unfocused, even downright embarrassing. This isn’t one of them.
I am in the unfortunate position of not getting paid to do what I love.
I know, that doesn’t make me special. A lot of people are passionate about things that are very different from what they do. I doubt that most people that work for, say, Bridgestone or Michelin are passionate about making tires. Your average folks get up in the morning, put on some clothing that allow them to conform to the expectations of peers and coworkers, and commence a commute to some sort of job during the day that pays the bills, keeping the family feed and the lights on.
I’m glad to have people in my life who’ve broken this mold. They do what drives them, what fuels their imaginations and haunts their dreams. I know that sometimes the money that comes in from this lifestyle can be a bit more sporadic than the steady day job paycheck, and that bill collectors sometimes need to be dodged or placated. It might seem glamorous at first, but going for long periods of time with little to no income is no picnic.
I’ve been there. I was unemployed for quite a long time not too long ago. And even now, with this steady job I hold, things easily become strained. The combination of my pay rate with the necessity of supporting what I support takes a toll. But before I degenerate into self-indulgent whining, let me get to my point.
I need to make time to write. You might, as well, and here’s why it’s so important to do.
Nobody else can write what you’re going write.
The original idea, the seed from which your work is going to grow, is all yours. You might look to write it yourself, it might become a collaborative work or you may feel the need to hire a ghost writer. But however you plan to do it, there’s a big yawning gap between shaping the core of your idea and coming up with a finished product that’s capable of being sold. One of the biggest components of that gap is time, and to get across it you need to take time away from other things.
I say, when you get right down to it, sometimes you have to shut the world away. Disconnect the phone. Unplug the television. Turn off the Internet. Yes, believe it or not, you can turn off the Internet! Tweets, blogs, memes and streams will still be there when you’re done. Set goals for yourself, be it to write a few hundred words or a few thousand. Then, stick to those goals. Sometimes I have trouble with this, myself, so I’ll be struggling right along with you.
If you have any other tips on how to make the most of the time you try to set aside to write, please let me know. Because as much as guys like to project a “lone wolf” image, I know that until I reach that point where I can roll out of bed, amble over to the home office and flip on the espresso machine, I’m going to need all the help I can get.
