The War of Art Review

I recently finished The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  This was recommended to the world at large on an episode of NaNoWriPod by Ben. It continues the trend of Ben and I disagreeing with one another.

This is another book about writing (or any other artistic/spiritual endeavor).  It focuses mostly on motivation without using the word "motivation".  Pressfield puts forth a framework that has three main parts.  1. The force that holds us back from completing our endeavors is Resistance, which whispers in your ear about all the reasons you shouldn't work right now. 2. To overcome Resistance you must be a Professional, who shows up every day to work and behaves professionally. 3. Ideas are created by muses in a higher plane of existence, and if we are Professionals we can listen in and transcribe what the muses have to say.  Ideas come through you, not from you. 

This book was not written for me.  That much is obvious in the number of golf anecdotes, the quietly pervasive sexism, and the metaphors about motherhood and childbirth designed by and for someone who has not experienced motherhood and childbirth.  Aside from these more overarching issues, the prose also alienates in more subtle ways.

He asks questions, then assumes how I answered.  "Have you ever worked in an office?"  No.  "Then you know about Monday morning status meetings."
Well, I do know about those, but I guess you're talking to the guy standing behind me right now.  I'll just wait out this passage until you move on and maybe address me again.

This is a shame since the main idea of this passage is interesting and something I could use.  His idea here is that, when you are writing Professionally, you should run your own status meeting with yourself.  What do I need to do this week? What do I need to do to get that done?  How can I improve?  I've basically been doing that this month with the weekly NaNo updates, even though those focus on looking back at the previous week rather than looking ahead to the next week.  But even though this is an idea that resonates with me, it's hidden under jabs that turn me off.

Sometimes he'll be in the middle of making an interesting, useful point and--suddenly!--spew bullshit everywhere!  It's like going for a nice walk and--scwelch!--dog shit, or--splat!--bird shit.  It threw me completely out of whatever he's saying.

"Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder.  These aren't diseases, they're marketing ploys."  Bullshit!  "...Woman learns she has cancer, six months to live.  Within days she quits her job, resumes the dream of writing Tex-Mex songs she gave up to raise a family." You couldn't look up the word Tejano?  That's bullshit.  Also bullshit: the way he talks about raising families.  For example.  "Tolstoy had thirteen kids and wrote War and Peace." ...Seriously?  Ugh.  Just...stop.

These seem like little nit-picky things, and in the grand scheme of things they are.  The real trouble I have with this book is much deeper.

The way he describes various aspects of Resistance can be useful.  They're concepts I've heard before using different vocabulary.  Resistance is entirely internal; no one can force you to not work on your project.  Resistance is strongest at the very end of a project.  The amount of Resistance you face is proportional to how much you love the project because you'll be more afraid of failure and more likely to make excuses to not experience that failure.  If you give in to Resistance one day, Resistance will be twice as strong the next day.

Most interestingly, he talks about how Resistance is sneaky.  The arguments it makes for not working are all perfectly reasonable.  Resisatance doesn't want you to be able to identify it and say, "oh, hey, this is Resisatance and I should ignore it."

When I began this book, Resistance almost beat me.  This is the form it took.  It told me (the voice in my head) that I was a writer of fiction, not nonfiction, and that I shouldn't be exposing these concepts of Resistance literally and overtly; rather, I should incorporate them metaphorically into a novel...Resistance also told me that I shouldn't seek to instruct, or put myself forward as a purveyor of wisdom; that this was vain, egotistical, possibly even corrupt, and that it would work to harm me in the end.  That scared me.  It made a lot of sense.

I've experienced this before, where I started to doubt a project and thought to rework parts of it to the detriment of the work and my sense of self-worth.  However, I've also had doubts about a project where I reworked it to the betterment of the project.  He doesn't talk about how to tell the difference.

He says that Resistance is in fact so sneaky, that whatever reason you have for not working is just Resistance disguising itself in reasonable clothing.  You have no excuse.  The reason you're putting it off is because you're not a Professional.

Now, I take issue with that.  I'm letting my family take priority over my writing because my family has priority over my writing.  Is that really letting Resistance win?  I guess so, because it sounds reasonable and is keeping me from my work.  Does this make me not a Professional?  Yep!

It's this all or nothing mentality that I find the true problem here.  There's no room for slack.  No room for forgiveness.  You beat back Resistance or fall prey to it.  You're a Professional or an over-emotional loser.  This is really dangerous thinking, because in all or nothing, the vast majority of the time you'll be in the "nothing" category.

And I think that's why my earlier pet peeves bother me so much.  This book put me in all or nothing mode, so if parts of it ticked me off, then the whole thing must tick me off.

NaNo Review

I consider this National Novel Writing Month a success, even if the official website doesn't.  I hit my goal of 30,000 words.  I stayed confident and compassionate.  And, most importantly, I established some good routines that work with my new lifestyle.

I missed a few days in there.  Thanksgiving happened and so did some other day where I had no time and then got too tired.  I logged onto the site to see I was 2,000 words behind plus the thousand for the day, and I set about making it up.  "I can do it," I said.  "I'm amazing!"  I then proceeded to not do it.  I made my daily 1,000 word goal, but 3,000 was not going to happen.  "Tomorrow," I said.  "I'll do it tomorrow.  I haven't lost any ground."  The next day I didn't do it either.  The day after that I got frustrated.  "Would I still be happy with myself if I changed my goal to 28,000 words?"  No.  I wouldn't.  "Well, okay.  Let's accept that this deficit exists.  If I spread it out over the remaining days, how much to I have to write every day to hit the 30,000 word goal in the days I have left?"  Turned out it was 1,666.  (Or close enough.  It was like 1,672.)  "You mean the NaNo word goal that everyone else is doing?"  Yep.  "Wow!  I can do that.  I'm amazing!"

Turned out that the timing worked out really well.  With Thanksgiving, my husband had a few days at home and decided he was going to take over the baby's afternoon nap.  Maybe the baby would sleep in his bassinet if someone other than me put him there.  Worth a shot.  Turns out he won't sleep in his bassinet, even if someone other than me puts him there.  However, he ended up sleeping on my husband instead of on me, giving me nap time with both hands free and a couple hours to write.

I won't bore you with more news on my baby's clinginess or his terrible napping habits. 

I will tell you that after that day of frustration--a definite low point for the month--I came back strong.  And not just in terms of word count.  The writing also improved.  I've been asking myself why this is.  I'm definitely getting to "the good part" where things start to fall apart for our hero.  Scenes are more dramatic, more lyrical, more emotional.  But I don't know why the emotion was completely absent in earlier scenes and here now.  It is supposed to get more dramatic, but not by that much. 

It could be that the middle of my story is saggy, and now that I'm getting into the home stretch, where instead of setting up the dominoes like I was earlier, I'm now knocking them down.  The prose flows, the word count comes faster, it's easier to tap into the emotion.

It could also be that I've been painfully out of practice.  My writing muscles had all atrophied and it took three and a half weeks of NaNo for me to build back some muscle.

I don't know, but I need to keep this momentum rolling into December.  The plan is to keep up this pace of 1,000 words a day until I leave for my holiday road trip.  At that point, I'll reassess how much I want to write during the trip.

NaNo Week Three

Chugging along.

This week I'm really starting to notice that this draft is awful. 

It needs another draft to be even with my usual first drafts.  It's like a preme baby draft or a uncooked cookie dough draft.

This means I'm doing NaNo correctly!

The main things that I'm shoving onto the back burner, noting that I need to suck it up for now and deal with them in January are the characterization and the world building.  This is boggling, because in my self-evaluation I rank myself pretty high on those.

I blame my outline.  It's not that I don't know how characters are feeling, it's that I'm not writing it.  The only reason I can figure that I'm doing this is that I didn't write it in my outline.  The outline focuses on events (with the rare frowny face thrown in), so--with my current MO of checking my outline and writing what it says for 20 minutes--I'm missing out on...everything but plot.  There's no racing heartbeat.

Now, I needed to know how the characters were feeling to make my outline.  In fact, I re-outlined the end a few times making sure the stresses would build enough to break my main character.  I have post-it to-do lists stuck to the folder that holds my outline that have check boxes like "angry enough?" and "Keep <side character>'s attitude consistent."  Just for some reason notes about the character's emotions didn't make it into the outline.  Maybe I didn't think I needed to spell them out.

Since I know what everyone's feeling, I can insert that into a second draft.  Plot is usually where I struggle, so going into the next draft with that skeleton already in place is going to be a huge relief.  I can read through and note where the story is missing heart, where it needs to be flushed out.

The world building problem comes from the fact that this is several stories squished together.  When I removed the main threads from the old stories, they dragged other remnants along with them, like when you pull a weed up by the roots to find clumps of dirt snagged with it.  Now that I'm getting deeper into the story, those remnants are coming to light, and some of them are contradicting each other.  The big example is the state of magic in the world at large.  In one old story, everyone knew about it.  In another of the old stories, the magical world was a secret, underground community.  So now, in this story, how do people react when magic happens in front of them on the street?  Do they panic?  Are they intrigued?  Are they annoyed?  This needs to get answered and these disparate stores need to meld together completely, or this endeavor is destined to fail.

I'm not going to let that happen.  So the world building will need another hard look (or several hard looks).

The Intern's Handbook Review

I recently finished The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn.  I think this one was recommended to me by Goodreads in one of their monthly e-mails about what was coming out that month, the interesting synopsis got it added to the To Read list.

In this one, assassins pose as interns in prestigious companies in order to kill executives.  The idea is that interns are invisible.  They work right under everyone's nose and no one remembers their name.  At the same time, they can gain all kinds of access by doing work vitally necessary for the functioning of the company but so boring and tedious that no one getting paid wants to do it.

It's presented as a kind of handbook with rules and tips, written by John, an assassin about to retire, for newbie assassins to read.  Instead of just a series of rules, he walks the newbies through his last assignment, pointing out rules as necessary.  So it ends up being like a memoir, where we get the story of his last job and the story of his life.  Meanwhile, there is a second framing device where this handbook has been intercepted by the FBI and is being sent to field agents.

I've gone full cycle with this one.  I had a lot of fun during the six or so hours it took me to read it.  But when I was done and started thinking about it, it stopped making any sense at all.  Then I started to think that maaaaybe this weirdness was intentional.

Let's start with the plot holes.  Why, once John has continuously screwed up the super important job and proved himself untrustworthy, does his boss insist that (even though he'd usually kill him) John can't be replaced mid job, even though the job was switching to phase two and it would have been a perfect opportunity to change guys? Why would the FBI agent offer to help John find his father, and how did John manage to give her enough information to do that without blowing his cover?  Just.  What?  As I was reading, I assumed this was hand-wavy on the part of the author to keep the plot chugging along.  I rolled my eyes and moved on.  Towards the end of the novel, it turned out that most of these plot holes were holes in the narrative to manipulate John.  People were lying to him and even in the world of the novel this doesn't make sense.  That meant the author had covered himself, filling in his own plot holes.  But then...John's supposed to be the best.  If I picked up that something was screwy, why didn't he? 

Then John consistently breaks his own rules, screwing himself over in the process and repeatedly messing up the job.  There's many examples, but let's stick with the big rule: to stay unnoticed.  That's the premise of the book.  He breaks it almost immediately and then keeps breaking it throughout the book.  He contradicts himself in other ways too.  For example, he says that his early development has made him incapable of having feelings or strong emotions, which makes him such a good assassin.  But then he gets downright tearful at least twice. 

Then I start to wonder.  Who is this handbook even for?  By the time the book is over, the newbie assassins would have heard of him and how he completely bungled this job.  He even embarrasses himself in front of them at one point in the story.  Does he actually expect these people to read his memoir when he sends it to them?  

And this is where things almost start making sense again, because Yes.  Yes, he does.

He's so deluded that he thinks people will want to read his crazy manifesto.  He doesn't realize that he actually does have emotions or that that contradicts anything he's said.  He thinks he's the best of the best, even after missing giant red flags and screwing things up over and over.  

That's part of what this book does really well.  Every now and then there are transcripts provided by the FBI.  Afterwards, it will go back to the handbook, where John will summarize the conversation in a way that it most definitely did not go down.  Some conversations he won't mention at all.  It's clear that he is completely full of shit.

The FBI part comes through in another way too.  John addresses the junior assassins several times with the second person "you."  However, the stuff he says does not describe me at all.  It throws the reader out of the narrative, but then the FBI framework catches the reader as they're thrown out.  John's not talking to me.  He's talking to newbie assassins and I'm listening in.  It sets up a sense of voyeurism that works remarkably well.

So, it was really hard to tell how much was intentional and how much was me trying to reason through this one.  I'm going to go with that it was intentional, because I don't like giving bad reviews.

NaNo Update Week 2

Things are still going well.  Being forgiving of myself is still working very well.  I've realized that if I get to 30,000 words this month, I'll have felt accomplished.  This is 1,000 words a day, which is completely doable if I have an hour to myself. It also means I'm right on track.  The outline is also still working well.  I'm about to finish two pages of an eight page outline.  So that means if I stay at this pace, I'll get it done the end of December (or middle of January with traveling for the holidays).  Writing on my phone has gotten better over the last few days, but it's still not ideal and I've found that I'm much less likely to be in the mood to write on my phone than I am likely to be in the mood to write at night when I'm tired.

I'm not sure how well being motivated is work for me.  This is unexpected since I figured being excited to write is always a good thing.  Turns out it's a good thing when I can scrounge up the time to write.  But if I can't find the time, the excitement starts to bubble into an itch--a build up of creative energy without an outlet.  And then it turns into guilt.  I really could do the full 1,667 words if I would just suck it up and stay up another half hour.  Or Why am I not writing on my phone right now?  This is precious time that I'm wasting, even if I would have to spend it with a tiny key board.  So it's turned into a war between being motivated and being forgiving.  Thankfully, the forgiveness is winning so far.

On Thursday, I took the baby to a write-in at the Edgewater Workbench, which is a workshop for artist.  It smells pleasantly of wood shavings and hot glue.  It was a really low key affair, just my friend, Jim, and the two people that own the shop.  The baby and I came in, made introductions, and caught up a bit.  The baby sat in his sling, staring at the 3D printer as it jerked back and forth.  With the first onset of fussiness, I turned him around to sit in my lap where he could use his distracting cartoon eyes to stare at Jim.  Then Pooh Bear came out.  Pooh Bear makes more jingling noises than Jim and was more readily accessible for gnawing, and was therefore far more interesting.  Then we were out of distractions and, with the next wave of fussiness, had to leave.  I clocked our write-in time at 45 minutes.

Jim apologized that it wasn't more productive, which confused me because that was the longest I'd been able to sit and write in weeks despite the distractions of catching up with Jim and asking the baby, "What do you see?  Yeah, that 3D printer's pretty cool."  I also met about half my word goal for the day.  I wasn't upset at all, and I felt accomplished rather than regretful or itchy.

Oh how my life has changed.

We ended up getting a shout out on NaNoWriPod.  I feel famous.

Jim pointed out that I do this weird thing with NaNo where I'll stick with the project and finish off the draft after November, then go back and edit it.  It's been kicking around in the background of these posts, but I've never explicitly stated that that's one of my NaNo goals.  This doesn't end in November.  It starts in November.





 

Wool Review

I recently finished Wool by Hugh Howey, as recommended to me by my friend Eric.  Eric has earned himself a gold star.

This is a series of scifi novellas about a society that lives in an underground silo.  At the top of the silo, there's a jumbotron that shows continuous footage of what it's like outside.  As this is post-apocalyptic, it's pretty bleak, which generally keeps people from wanting to leave.  The acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you get the image of barren desert all gunky over time.  So if anyone starts spouting crazy talk about wanting to go outside, they get sent out to clean the cameras for the jumbotron, and then promptly die of acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you.  The mystery is: why does every person sent to their death--every single one throughout silo history--clean the cameras?  What's in it for them?  It's bonkers!

I really enjoyed this one  The five novellas all together were about 500 pages, but it was a page turner and I went through it in about three days.  The chapters are short and end on cliffhangers involving ghostly people running around in the dark or running out of oxygen while submerged underwater in a hand made scuba suit...okay, I feel like I'm not selling it very well, but I was having trouble sleeping and this did not help.

I cared about all the characters.  The main character shifts for each of the first three novellas (Holston, Jahns, then Jules), then jumps around between several characters for the fourth and fifth.  I didn't slow down enough to remember that this is something I usually don't like, and didn't stop to think about it until I was done.  I usually get attached to characters and then get irritated when I don't hear about them anymore and have to start from scratch to forge a new relationship with a new character.  But here I think it worked for a few reasons.  First, the next point of view character was introduced in the preceding story, and not only introduced, but I was made to like them before the shift.  During Holston's story, I got to appreciate Jahns, and during Jahns' story I got to appreciate Jules.  So I wasn't really starting from scratch each time.  Secondly, when the point of view shifts in the second and third novellas, I felt content with Holston and Jahns' stories.  Their stories were over and I was okay with moving on from them.

I also thought the world was cool.  The silo is a self contained world with farms, water treatment, recycling, shops, schools, apartments, doctors, judges, security guards, a power plant, an IT department.  It's 144 floors, connected by a huge central spiraling staircase, and to get from one place to another, you have to hike up and down the stairs.  If this sounds really inconvenient, that's because it is.  It was designed that way.  The visual is just so cool, and it acts as both a setting and a physical barrier against anything the characters try to get done.

Compelling characters, exciting world building, and dystopian intrigue.  Fun times.

NaNo Week One Update

I'm one week into National Novel Writing Month, so this is a good time to do an assessment of how I'm doing. 

Quantitative assesments are pretty easy for Nano, what with all the graphs and stats they give to show word count.  But one of the steps of my four step plan of attack for this year is to be compassionate and forgiving to myself.  I'm making progress.  I made an effort.  So way to go me!  Great job! 

I'm kind of impressed that this is working so well.  I don't feel horribly guilty for how far behind I am or how horribly awful my product is, and I don't feel frustrated with my life and my family and my writing.  That's better than some of my non-Nano months.

Planning ahead of time has also worked out surprisingly well so far.  Every time I sit down to write, I check my outline, and I can see exactly what I'm going to write for the next half hour.  I've gone into my outline a few times to make some additions--little things that became clearer as I was writing--but I haven't made any drastic changes and no changes to anything I've already written.  The research I did before hand also helped, but not in that it's all done and usable now.  It's helping more because I did my research and then told myself I was done for November, and now when new things crop up that I didn't realize I would need to investigate, I'm SOL because research time is over.  Again, I'm kind of baffled that I've been able to let it go.  That's not like me.  But then again,iIt helps that I'm so strapped for time that there's just no way I'm going to manage to fool around on Wikipedia for ten minutes.  And by ten minutes, I mean an hour.

What's interesting is I think this is the closest I've ever been to doing Nano as the Official Nano Gods intended.  In previous years, I've had hours every day to write, so I've polished as I went along, taking my time to make the tone and the meter work for me, going back to incorporate my blossoming ideas.  But this year I have maybe a half hour before the baby wakes up and decides that he can't be in this coffee place for one more second, or before my husband comes into the bedroom where I've set up my laptop and closed the door for the illusion of an effective work space and says, "I've got a hungry baby!"  There is no editing.  There is no staring off into space to find the perfect phrasing.  There is just a mad dash to get as much down as I can.  There's just the cycle of setting Write or Die for 500 words for 30 minutes, then vomiting up sentences so the screen doesn't turn red.  Sometimes they're sentences.  Sometimes I don't even manage that.

It's by far the worst first draft I've ever written. 

It's just awful.  When I edit this thing in January, it's going to be a mess.  A painful, frustrating mess.  I'm going to have to relive this horror--or live it for the first time because right now I'm not even giving it the time to settle.  Tone, diction, exposition, epic dullness. You name it and it's a problem.  Today I wrote, "There was a fire metaphor in there somewhere, but he couldn't think of it," and then I wrote two hundred more words of equally stupid garbage.  It would be embarrassing if anyone read it, which they will over my dead body after they've figured out my laptop password and puzzled through which Untitled Document is the one I've updated most recently.