How Audiobooks Killed My Muse

Let me tell you a story.

Two days ago, I wouldn’t have uttered those words, let alone written them. I’d been too afraid to commit to telling any kind of tale; every idea that entered my head felt too fleeting, too flimsy.

After coming out of edits on two books over the last couple years, and writing a mere…

34,525 words to a new book during National Novel Writing Month, I felt like a shriveled husk of creativity. I’ve got my bag of excuses of course–kids, work, Netflix, life. However, behind the scenes, I have been filling every spare moment with reading. Paper books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Every moment my hands are busy but my brain is free, I found myself plugged into an audiobook (currently: Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune). This is because I have always felt that books provide knowledge and inspiration, the most important food groups for the writing kind. Thus, I find myself in an addictive relationship in which I feel if I can just read–well, everything, then I’ll be a better writer and a better human. I mean, yeah, it’s partially true, but at one point, you have to set the book down (and unplug the headphones) and live. Or in this case, daydream.

So after a veritable Mojave-like dryness of inspiration and drive, I happened to be washing dishes like a normie (i.e. no book being narrated directly into my earballs), and ideas for my November novel came pouring in. Are they genius ideas? No, just little snippets of scenes, glimpses at the characters’ minds, but this is the bread and butter of keeping a story alive in my imagination.

I realized I couldn’t expect to keep on filling every empty space with someone else’s words and have the work of daydreaming do itself. I was living in someone else’s final vision of the daydreaming into which they’d poured countless hours, days, months, maybe even years. I needed to give myself the breathing room to settle into the completely free-to-wander headspace I remember being able to call upon with ease as a child. Good old-fashioned staring into space fertilizes the ground to be struck with inspiration.

Next time I’m doing the dishes or checking the mail, I won’t take my phone with me, because I know now that my muse needs to run through empty fields.

Of course reading inspires, but do you think is it possible to read too much as a creative? What’s the first thing you change when the ideas stop coming?

The Horizon of Possibility

Photo credit: Greg Rakozy

God, it’s been a long time. I blame work mostly, but before that it was a general lack of inspiration. I was even flirting with the idea of just never updating this blog again, but for some reason, I couldn’t let it go. Now that I have actual thoughts to relay, I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t even know if anyone is still with me, here. Hello? Is thing on?

Anyway. Nanofreakinwrimo brings me out of my self-imposed hermitude. (I’ve dutifully transcribed my experience with this novel writing month here, here, and yes, here) Possibility is in the air. Do you feel it? Do you see how it breathes through the leaves on the shivering trees? Wait. Is it growling? Just me? Okay. So many ideas and current works-in-progress to dedicate myself to, and I just want to–do them ALL. My gothic work in progress, Wrathmoor, that I’ve been writing since 2011; my contemporary work in progress The Rosen Tales; and Other Points of Contention, which just makes me giddy and terrified every time I think about it; the short story I wrote for a contest that didn’t win, but that I love so hard I want it to have a face so I can pinch its cheeks; and the poem that is writing itself in my brain right now, revealing itself to me from the end going backwards, so yeah, that should be interesting.

This month makes me want that exhilaration of a cause and accomplishment and fighting tooth and nail to do the thing I love and what matters to me. I will never have an acceptable answer that “demonstrates critical thinking” or is particularly unique and especially meaningful for why I love writing and why writing these novels matters to me. Why does a child love painting and drawing? Why do we love to go to parties? Or, contrarily, why do we love to stay in and submerge ourselves in fanfiction? Just because I don’t have a textbook or Nobel worthy answer for why I love it, is it any less valuable?

No.

This life is too transient to get caught up in abstract, diaphanous terms like Meaning and Purpose in attempting to justify why we do the things we love. You get all tangled up in Plato’s Perfect Forms, and when you live in an imperfect world, it’s just not an ideal place to be, am I right? So, I say to you, my friends, on this day of new beginnings, of fresh, dewy eyed wonder, go. Find your horizon of possibility. Grasp its coat tails and let it carry you through the night.

Anyone else venturing into the great beyond with National Novel Writing Month? What will you be working on? Something new or something you’ve already started? I’m curious to hear how other people do NaNoWriMo: a little every day until you reach 50,000? Or just push yourself into the project with more gusto during this month of possibility?

The Importance of Not Having A Plan

Going on a writing retreat without a plan as to what to write let’s you take in the beach, rather than wracking your brain for something that will be relevant to your readers. Write what’s natural to you, they say. Unfortunately, what’s natural for me is doubt and self-consciousness.

Instead, I open my hands in the sand and dig until dry, loose grains give way to the hard-packed aggregate sleeping beneath, still covered in the blanket of last night’s high tide. I dig with my nails, breaking it up, feel each piece in my hand, an individual and collective weight. Nothing else feels quite like this–a handful of damp sand. I let it go at some point, either before walking out to the water or once I get there. Going anywhere without a plan does not mean without purpose; aimless and unmotivated, the journey begs for your enjoyment, your presence. You can feel the salt cauterizing your lungs. You jump and laugh in the waves without remembering you’re 31 goddamn years old. After, you lay on the beach, sore from fighting against the ocean, only somewhat displeased by the sand granules imprinting your cheeks and sticky salt expanding your follicles. You sit on the emptied beach at night with your best friend beside you and stare toward the sound of the waves, seeing ghosts at the break.

You lay in a strange bed with only a screen, which may or may not be locked, between you and the outside (your friend was drunk when she attempted to lock it). You listen to the sound of the waves lapping, like listening for your newborn’s sleeping breath. You have a full-blown night terror about a Dementor stepping out of that Conjuring wardrobe in your room, throwing your heart against your rib cage, and jerking you back to consciousness on the other side of the bed.

Maybe it was the overindulgence of nicotine or alcohol, or the cappuccino from the self-aware Italian restaurant just steps from your temporary residence. Either way, you’ve dreamed. You’re alive.

Going on a writing retreat without a plan cracks you open–a bone saw to your waiting sternum that bursts apart with a sudden break in the pressure. It lets you see, think, and feel again. It lets you breathe with new, raw lungs, washed by the salt. It lets you carry home that sand still under your nails and shows you that you don’t have to let all of your doubt and negativity go. You only have to outsmart it by writing in spite of it.

5 Unusual and Practical Ways To Break Writer’s Block

Below are 2 practical and 3 unusual ways to help overcome writer’s block. Most of these revolve around immersing yourself into your story, while some suggest taking a step back. Sometimes all you need is a seed of inspiration to have you busting through that writer’s block like the the Kool-Aid man. Ah, apologies. Only people who grew up in the 90s or earlier will get that reference.

Unusual

1. Draw your characters. Or draw the warehouse or stronghold or spy headquarters in your novel. Design the room your gentleman frequents, or even more intriguing, the room your lady finds respite in. Or just doodle something entirely irrelevant to your novel and let your mind wander.

If you don’t like to draw, Pinterest is a great way to stimulate visualization of your work. If you want to be a perfectionist about it, here’s a how-to to make a really professional, themed storyboard for your novel. Below is the board I am working on for my novel, The Seer. As you can see from my board, there are foreign landscapes and travel in the novel. Because The Seer takes place in faraway places and dated societies, Pinterest has aided me in going to those places and seeing those societies.

Board for The Seer

Practical

2. Read. You’re probably rolling your eyes, writers. But truly, stop drafting/editing/revising and take some time to read. And read outside of your comfort zone at that. Here’s a WriterUnboxed post on the benefits of changing up your reading habits. I never read biographies, but I’ve picked one up on my favorite author, Charlotte Brontë (Harman, 2015), and have gotten loads of inspiration for my Gothic romance WIP, Wrathmoor. And from the smallest things too:

“Patrick Brontë’s [Charlotte’s father] quirks included…having a ‘volcanic’ temper that he sometimes relieved by firing his pistols out of the back door ‘in rapid succession’.”

Unusual

3. Make a mix tape/CD/youtube/spotify soundtrack for your novel. There are songs I will forever associate with certain novels of mine, because they belong, heart and soul, to those characters. For instance, Loreena McKennitt’s Beltane Fire Dance will forever be associated with the novel mentioned above, The Seer, and Apocalyptica’s Metallica covers are being hardily applied to Wrathmoor for the good ole’ Metallica rage expressed through a mid-nineteenth-century-approved instrument, the cello.

Practical

4. Take a day off. Or a week. Seriously. Either from work, or from your writing, or both. Sometimes all you need is a reboot to come back to your work with a fresh eye and mind.

Unusual

5. Make a map. So your novel has an epic scene in a Buddhist temple or maybe a battle on a mountain side? Or maybe it has a ton of townships, cities, and ports. Make a map. You can do this the old fashioned way. For my fantasy WIP, Blood of the Realm, I dyed watercolor paper with tea water to make an approximation of parchment. I may or may not have referred to Tolkien’s Middle Earth for inspiration.

You can also take a more modern approach. If you own the PS3 game FarCry 3, you can use the map feature option for your novels! Writers, even if you’re not a gamer, this game–which would surely be on discount now–might be worth it solely for this feature. The game takes place on a tropical island amid the Indian and Pacific Oceans. There are countless combinations of different landscapes you can create and landmarks. You can even adjust the time of day and weather. It is one of the most unique and immersive ways, in my opinion, of diving into your own story.

WallpaperSafari.com

 

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After finishing my 6th novel in January, I had been pretty stagnant, just working on rewrites to an older novel, and nary a poem or short story in sight. But since I took vacation from my job, unearthed the “soundtracks” for my novels, and reading a lot, including things outside my usual reading repertoire, something has opened inside of me, creatively.

Have you ever tried any of these block breakers? Any others to suggest?

Letting Joy In

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleybaccam/25-cute-pictures-of-cats-playing-with-yarn#.hegBRwd3K2

Yesterday, a writer friend of mine announced that she signed on with a respectable agent at one of the big publishing houses. I’ve been following her journey since at least 2012. This person is one of the sweetest, hardest working, talented people I have the honor of knowing, even if only a little . I have looked to her as a mentor since I decided to try and carve a  career for myself out of this “whole writing thing”. She was also a major influence in the realization that I write horror, a brave affirmation, given all the misconceptions surrounding the genre. But her dedication is inspiring, and her passion is contagious.

Here’s the kicker. As a fellow writer I should be jealous, right? Shouldn’t I be gnashing my teeth at the fact that I haven’t reached—nay, have not even come close to—that milestone every writer covets, that so many never reach? Believe me, I have felt that green before; I have heard that mean voice in the back of my head telling me I’ll never be that good, or that lucky, that I’ll never make it. But what I felt upon reading this news was not even close to any of that negative white noise.

At first, I was ecstatic about eventually getting to read all of this friend’s works—that’s the reader in me. And then came a wave of joy that almost made me cry. I almost cried for someone that I’ve only met once in real life and talk to rarely. I almost cried for her success, because I am so proud of and happy for her. Yes, this emotion was the writer in me. Maybe it’s just the kind of person she is, maybe this news just caught me on a good day. Either way, I opened myself up to feel the good feelings. And I’m so happy I did.

In my past experience with jealousy and the self doubt that accompanies comparing myself to another’s success, I felt bad afterward, physically drained. Like coming down off a false high fueled by Red Bull (no offense, Red Bull. You got me through many an all-nighter during my graduate years. Just kidding. I fell asleep right after drinking your 11 ouncer). I never imagined how my reaction to another’s success could affect my productivity. But letting this joy in inspired me. I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front for some time, trying to come up with a topic, but nothing would stick. As soon as I read this friend’s news and felt my happy feelings, I was mentally composing this blog in my head. And just now, I furiously pecked away at my phone, getting this down as I held one of my six-month-old twins on my knee as she digested her dinner and I consumed mine. Joy inspired me to write despite everything else going on. And not just a blog post, I can’t wait to get to my computer and work on the next chapter of my WIP rewrite.

Will I still have days where the grass seems greener on the other side? Days where I envy someone else’s financial freedom or time to write, or maybe someone else’s right-time-right-place luck. Sure. But whenever I can, I will choose to let the joy in because it feels good. So much better than the negative stuff.

Congratulations on your hard-earned success, my friend. I look forward to reading all of your incredible work.