What I've Learned So Far

A friend on Twitter posted this quotation from the novelist Brian Aldiss:

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

This got me thinking about how the lion’s share of my attention seems to be given over to solving problems — and exactly what sorts of problems they are.

Life Problems

We all have these to some degree: hangups, relationship issues, neuroses, illnesses, addictions, or other Big Stuff. Depending on how serious the issues are and how long they last, this category can become all-consuming.

What’s interesting to me, though, is the way that frustrated or constipated creators — “would-be creators,” we might call them — will shut down their artistic processes in the face of these problems. Meanwhile, committed creators plow on through, even to the point of obsession. Think of all the novelists who have continued to write through alcoholism and divorce, for example. I do not know what the difference is in the wiring or the approach of these artists. But that difference allows them, or compels them, to carry on with their work even as life falls down around their ears.

For the rest of us, I think the lesson is this: expend the energy required to keep your life from becoming a shambles . . . but also focus enough energy on your artistic challenges that you keep creating anyway.

Logistics Problems

If you recall what I wrote last week about the priority trap, you can guess that keeping this one in check has been a bugbear for me. Instead of focusing on an artistic problem — how Character A relates to Character B, for example — I end up spending that time planning a new filing system for story drafts, or estimating how many words per day I could average if I got up at 4:30 a.m.

A little bit of planning, well applied, can do wonders for you. By all means, create a filing system that works. Get up and start working at 4:30, if that’s what you need to get the work done. But don’t get lost in those problems as a way of avoiding the artistic problems you need to be solving.

I once attended a talk by the late Douglas Adams in which he talked about his creative process. He explained how he would procrastinate by working on his “OS” — his personal operating system as a writer. This included things like (if memory serves) how his desk was situated, or whether his car needed repairs. When he buckled down, however, he let the OS issues slide in favor of solving the problems of Arthur Dent or Dirk Gently.

Artistic Problems

This is where the artist should live, using creativity to address the challenges embodied in the work itself.

Sure, successful artists have life problems, too. They may, on average, have more problems than usual. And they have to handle logistics like the rest of us, which can be even harder if you happen to be living on a typical artist’s wages.

And yet.

They don’t let the time and energy spent on those other problems distract them from the narrative / musical / painterly problems that they’ve set out to solve.

Don’t you get distracted, either. Take your creativity and give the lion’s share of it to your the problems embodied in your work.

Image by dullhunk.

Because if you don’t do it first, it might not get done.

It might not get done just for today . . . or it might not ever get done.

Years could go by in which you devoutly intend to set yourself to the real work — right after you finish this, this, this, this, this, and this. Oh, and also this.

So if writing (or whatever Your Thing is) means something to you, show that by doing it first:

• First thing in the morning.
• When you first sit down to work.
• Before you check your e-mail again.
• At the start of your week.
• When you first have a free moment.
• . . .

Simple concept, hard to execute.

First.

Photo by s0ulsurfing.

Five years from now, what will you wish you had written?

When your future self is on its deathbed, what will it wish your current self had done with its abilities, energy, and time?

I know, I know — the deathbed thing is so overdone. But it will always be relevant because we will always be mortal. You’re going to check out someday, and it will be better (for you, for your loved ones, for the universe) if you have done more with what you have been given.

Thinking this way doesn’t need to be morbid, or even introspective. In fact, writers and other artists are often prone to be too morbid and introspective: the same sensitivity that allows the artist’s mind to capture the fine details and emotional nuances of life makes it prone to fall into navel-gazing funks . . . during which art isn’t created. So be sure to skip that part.

Instead, do a priority check on yourself, taking into account your feelings of today — because they have something valuable to tell you — as well as the reckoning that you’ll make of yourself in five years, in twenty years, or at the end of your life.

You will wish. I venture that you will wish you had painted the picture or written the novel that you feared was beyond what you could accomplish. You will wish you had taken better care of yourself — financially, physically, emotionally — from day to day so that you could get more good work done on an even keel. You will wish you had stuck with it.

Today, right now, you have the chance to play the role of fairy godmother, granting the wishes of your future self. I suggest you take up that role with gusto.

What will you wish?

After too much delay . . . more stories that fit in a single tweet.

Her choice in the category of “Favorite Album Ever” told him that he could never, ever fall in love with her.

~ ~ ~

He was successful, & cute. But she couldn’t decide whether his misogyny, his drinking, or his self-loathing was most revolting.

~ ~ ~

She couldn’t rid herself of him. She wasn’t stuck on his love or the sex or the money. She was addicted to the struggle.

~ ~ ~

Desperate to do something big – & get laid – he dreamed of starting a social-hookup-network called Qwiki. But the name was taken.

~ ~ ~

He’d always hoped to cut a dashing figure. But the pretty woman talking to him at the party had already forgotten his name.

~ ~ ~

He’d been happily off the market for years, but it didn’t hurt his feelings to be flirted with by a slim woman in the beer aisle.

~ ~ ~

She had a saucy mouth. He couldn’t stop looking at that mouth. He would learn that she also had the conscience of a dragonfly.

~ ~ ~

She looked tough and beautiful. For the first time in his life, he wished he had tattoo sleeves.

~ ~ ~

Believing that she would die without any of what she wished for in life, she settled on trying not to be miserable.

~ ~ ~

His vest, tie, and shades were just so. He thought he looked cool. Others thought he looked like a waiter who just got off duty.

~

Previously:

• Tiny Stories, part 4.
• Tiny Stories, part 3.
• Tiny Stories, part 2.
• Tiny Stories.

Image by JD Hancock.

If you’ve been following along with this blog, you’ll see that I’ve recently jumpstarted my posting here, and that mostly I’ve been discussing the writing process and other topics of interest to writers. There’s a reason for this — but also a risk associated with it.

• The Reason — I’m reminding myself, day in and day out, that I’m a writer first. This helps me do my day job better (since my job centers on writing), but it also keeps me mindful that I have bigger fish to fry over the long haul. I’ve made no secret that I want to write books for a living, but the daily grind sometimes leads me to lose sight of that goal. Talking about books, writing, and the challenges of being a creator — all of that helps to keep the long-term objective in view. (It also helps keep me in touch with people who share similar interests, which is more than just a beneficial side effect.)
• The Risk — The risk is that I’ll using talking about writing as a substitute for the writing itself. Surely you’ve seen this — a person talks about what they plan to do or want to do or will do (“I really mean it this time!”). But the talking becomes a false proxy for the actual doing. (I know there’s a name for this in psychology, but I can’t find it. If anyone can help me out, I’ll be grateful.)

The same thing applies, by the way, to business and finances and fitness and everything else: are you going to talk / dream / ruminate about it — or are you going to DO it? If the “thinky” part outweighs the active part, you’re doing it wrong.

My goal: reap the benefits without falling victim to the risks. Please help keep me honest on this.

Photo by nimbu.

Possibly it’s just me. But I flinch when someone uses the “blog” to refer to a blog post.

Case in point: today I read a blurb via social media that extolled “Four must-read blogs on Topic X.” Given the source, I thought to myself, “Cool, I need to know more about Topic X, and I’ll bet this guy knows what he’s talking about. So let me check out these four blogs. Maybe I can add one or two of them to my RSS reader to help me keep up with Topic X.”

Alas, the guy was just pimping four individual posts from his company’s blog.

I would understand it if the technical term for “post” were something unwieldy like “transmogrification” or “categorical imperative” or “flux capacitor.” But it’s just “post” — as short and sweet as “blog.”

To recap, in my world:

• “Blog” = venue in which posts are made
• “Post” = individual installment within a blog

Rant over. Thank you for your attention.

Image by Mark Gstohl.

I have a confession to make: I’m a lousy self-pimper. Here I am, turning out (what I hope are) high quality posts on the CareOne Life Balance blog, week after week, yet I’m not sharing them with you, my adoring public. Let me begin to rectify that damage now with this:

3 Ways to Keep Your Kids from Driving You Crazy this Summer

(Foreshadowing: child labor!)

Please do enjoy it. And note this: the good folks at CareOne have now made it much easier to leave comments there — no registration required — so I would love to have your feedback on that page.

Thank you — thank you all.

Photo by Nina Matthews.

Creators: If you’re having trouble getting your mojo working, take a hard look around to discover your own weaknesses. One of mine is getting myself mired in planning and prioritizing.

Once you find a weakness like this, do whatever needs doing to free yourself from it — but without losing the real benefits that you were trying to gain from it.

In my case, gaining the benefit means thinking hard about priorities and making myself work in line with those priorities. Freeing myself from the weakness means strictly limiting the amount of rumination and over-planning I will allow myself.

To do this, you have to be willing to let go of what might work for someone else. Somewhere, there’s someone for whom my level of planning would be the very key to success. That person should burn the midnight oil to gain absolute clarity about priorities. More power to them. But long experience says that “rough and ready” is the way for me to plan and prioritize. My process, when it works right, runs like this:

1. Quickly get clear on what you’re after;
2. Figure out the top couple of things on your to-do list;
3. GO.

Someone — I think it was either Rousseau or Samuel Johnson — said that you shouldn’t worry about the order in which your child learns things, because in the time it takes you to decide which to teach first . . . another child has learned them both. That’s the approach I have to take.

There are plenty of writers (and other creative artists) who waste untold time on writer-ish things that are not, in fact, writing. They organize their notes endlessly, for example, or they come up with elaborate plans for publicizing books that they haven’t yet written. Or they think through the series of movies that will be made from the multi-volume epic that they plan to write immediately after their First Big Book, which they plan to write just after their First Book, which they . . . well, which they haven’t worked on in a month, actually.

You see where I’m going with this.

If prioritizing keeps you from doing, choose doing instead. In fact, choose arbitrarily, if it comes to that. Just latch onto a project — or even a blog post like this one, if the iron is hot — and write it. Done. Then you can move on to the next thing. Chances are, you’ll be better at prioritizing for the next piece precisely because you just completed the piece at hand.

As with so many things, Goethe — who knew about steady production — said it best:

“Create, artist! Do not talk!”

Image by banalities.

I’m a serious fan of Pressfield’s The War of Art, and I quoted the other day from his interview with Seth Godin. But another thing Pressfield said in that interview rankles me, just a little. Here’s the exchange:

[Pressfield]: In your view, what is the connection between the abbreviated length of Poke the Box and Do the Work — and their manifesto content? Would a manifesto in longer form not be as appealing? Or, looked at another way, does the short length dictate that only manifesto-like content will work? (Like, say, a novel would not work at 100 pages—or a serious biography of FDR.)

[Godin]: Again, I think it’s about appropriate length. Snow Crash was perfect as a novel. Some of the later Stephenson novels had the same number of big ideas but were three times as long. He lost me.

In the world of the Kindle, the length isn’t a contributor to perceived value. All I care about as a reader is, “Was I moved?”

Godin’s thought at the end is a big part of the reason I disagree with Pressfield’s statement that “a novel would not work at 100 pages.”

Why Can’t a Novel Be Just 100 Pages?

Maybe Pressfield’s way ahead of me on this — especially since he’s published several novels and I’ve published zero — but here goes: The novel as we typically conceive it might not work at 100 pages, but there’s no inherent reason that fictional stories don’t work at that length.

Yes, typically we call a 100-page fiction a “novella,” but that’s just a convention, not some inherent structural feature of fiction itself. Recently I finished reading To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is whip-smart and weighs in at nearly 500 pages. But it’s not as powerful, to my mind, as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which might be squeezed into 100 pages if you formatted it right.

I agree with Pressfield that a serious biography of FDR wouldn’t work at the 100-page length. (In fact, my graduate-school advisor wrote a 900-page biography of Roosevelt.) Similarly, you couldn’t include enough events and context in a 100-page book about World War II or the Great Depression or the reign of Elizabeth I to do those subjects justice. And many of my favorite novels — for example One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — would not work at all if they had to be compressed so much.

But there are wonderful “big” stories that do their work in 100 pages or less, with Death in Venice and Heart of Darkness springing to mind.

Implications for the Future of Publishing

In Victorian England, the prototype novel was the “triple-decker,” a three-volume story in the vein of David Copperfield or Phineas Finn. When Trollope wrote a mere two-volume work, he considered it a short novel. (Even back then, however, Dickens found great success with A Christmas Carol, which is remarkably short.) These days, we still see big books published — for example, I’ve just started reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — but there is much more variability, apparently, in what the market will bear.

Getting back to the original subject of Pressfield’s conversation with Godin, I wonder if we won’t see a sustained movement in the direction of the “long story” or novella length. It’s obvious to point out that people are busy to the point of preoccupation these days, with many more entertainment options than they’ve ever had before. Many of them do keep reading books, and some of them have the appetite even for multi-volume stories like Harry Potter or A Game of Thrones. But it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see a typical novel of 2025 or 2050 come closer to 100 pages than 300.

~

A coda: As I was writing this, I debated about whether to italicize or put between quotation marks the names of the shorter works. It reminds me that we’re dealing with conventions here. By convention, we’d all use quotation marks for “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and we’d all use italics for Moby-Dick. But where’s the cutoff?

~

Now I’d like to know what you think:

• Is is still a “novel” if it’s only 100 pages?
• Would you buy and read fiction of that length and think of it as reading a “real” book rather than a not-quite-book?
• Would you be likely to read more fiction if more good stories were composed at 100 pages rather than 300?
• What am I missing?

Photo by guldfisken.

“Now, I am one of those people who makes a distinction between being a writer and being an author. A writer puts words on a page. An author lives in story. A writer is conversant with the keyboard, the author with character.

“Roland Barthes has said: ‘The author performs a function; the writer an activity.’ We are talking here about the difference between desire and obsession; between hobby and life. But in either case, I suggest you learn to write not with blood and fear, but with joy.”

—Jane Yolen (source)