Tag Archives: mental-health

Ritual

You know, if I were smarter, I’d’ve set up some posts to go up while I was at GenCon*.

I didn’t do anything book related at GenCon except for when a new friend gave me their Insta I immediately friended them from my writer account and we’ll all just have to hope they’re okay with werewolf smut. I don’t do anything from my personal account, anyway, on account of being bad at accounts.

But I promised you something coffee-adjacent, didn’t I?**

When I mention in conversation*** how much I produce in a writing session, the most common response is “Whoa,” and the second most common response is “Damn,” and the third most common response is “How?” And only one of those is a question, so that’s what we’re going to be answering today. And by “we” I mean “me” because you are in the future at present, so we’re all just going to do our best.

The answer is, sadly, a combination of boring things and irreproducible things, and I think it’s important to be upfront about that. I think that, a lot of the time, when someone asks “How do you do X?” the question that they’re actually asking is “How can I do X?” and that’s a very different question that I have no way of answering.

The unhappy truth is that any individual’s process for making art is going to be individual, so you have to find your own combination of inspiration, discipline, and brain hacks. Borrowing mine is more likely to lead you to frustration than fortune. But I will tell you anyway.

First, my known obstacles.

  1. I’m autistic as heck. Like, super autistic. Autistic as a jigsaw puzzle tournament.
    1. I have a flirtatious, but noncommittal relationship with “inspiration.”
    2. I have one gear and it’s “full throttle.”****
    3. There are no breaks and no brakes.
  2. I have a high-needs toddler, which puts a bit of a limit on my time, and also means that I can’t really snag bits of time here and there. She is determined, strong, smart, and quiet, so if she doesn’t have my full attention, I will find her on top of the fridge eating bananas.*****

My advantages

  1. Over twenty years of GMing experience. I think I’ve talked about this before. Let me know if I haven’t, I love talking about myself and I’ll do it again if I need to.
  2. A wonderfully capable co-parent.
  3. A supportive early reader who can supplement my dopamine when I reach 30k words and look at it and go “why am I so ass at this?” She will pat me on the head and say “No, no, it’s great, I love it.” and she has an Australian accent, on account of being Australian, so it sounds even more soothing when she says it.

So first, I lean into my advantages. I don’t even think about writing anything substantial unless the gremlin is with my coparent. If I have an idea, I pop it in the Google doc I have pinned to the home screen on my phone.******* I have to get things out of my brain or they will rattle around in there and it gets real loud, so I don’t try to remember a damn thing. Into the doc it goes, and then I ignore it.

I keep my early reader apprised because she’s excited about everything, and that helps so much.

And I lean into my strengths. Outlines don’t help me, so I skip them. I follow things that seem interesting and don’t stress about it. If I write it down and it’s dumb, I move the heck on. No amount of prep will save me from first contact with the players (characters), so I don’t bother, but I do keep detailed notes about the things that I have written so I can reference them later when I need to shake things up.

To address my weaknesses, I have put in place a series of triggers that tell my stupid brain that it’s Writing Time ™. There will be a cup of coffee, no matter what time of day it is, even if I don’t drink it. I will light a candle.******** I will put on headphones, but I don’t play anything in them unless I need to play white noise.

That’s it.

Told you it might not work for you.

But this is how I sit down and write around twelve hundred words an hour.

I might look up a synonym or do a real quick Google so that I can properly name the anatomy of a feather, but that’s all. I don’t pick up my phone unless the name on it is particularly exciting. I don’t scroll Instagram. I just don’t do those things.

Because the candle is lit, so it’s Writing Time ™.

Does editing count as writing? Yes, yes it does, and thank you for asking. I did finish my third round of edits on Depth Rose and now I’m letting it chill until I get either reader feedback, or Faces of the Moon is no longer in agent hands and I can do the BIG EDIT.

Does writing these posts count as writing? Yes, yes it does. The candle is lit, the engagement machine calls for aid. End of story.

Nothing special, just basic brain tricks, and the fact that not planning means never having to figure out how to make the writing follow the plan. I just follow those lil idiots around and write down what they do.

And I hope you like it.

Recent Writing

She tapped the toes of the bronze statue of the turtle and the otter that stood between the doors to the administration building. The metal’s patina was touched away by hundreds of passing hands, until the feet of each animal gleamed, as well as the curve of the otter’s tail where it dipped on the right side of the statue. Charlie preferred the turtle, and always entered on the left.

Next time I’ll talk about how I go about editing.

Do good, friends.

*but I’m not, so I didn’t

**I did, I checked my last post before coming over here to write this one

***which I try not to do because people get weird about it

****Also my favorite energy drink, btw. Original citrus slaps, but the red ones are chef’s freaking kiss.

*****True story. She was eighteen months old. Now she’s three. She has as much chill as I do.******

******Which is none.

*******I would love to be the sort of person who has a day book, but I’m not, and no amount of finding, buying, and/or carrying the perfect little notebook will overcome that.

********Currently it’s Haunted Library by Cascadia Candles. I know you were interested. Tell them I sent you, they don’t know who I am so they will be entirely embaffled.

Under Advisement

Since I’ve joined the public writing space, I’ve had a huge variety of writing related content forced onto my feed by Big Algorithm. I am not on social media very much; my tolerance for the shenanigans is low, and my bandwidth is also low, so I just don’t spend much time there. As a consequence, I spent my first two months on Instagram being extremely down about everything.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m not terribly aesthetic. I missed some fundamental Millennial education, and have only a remedial understanding of how things work, and I’m also awfully trusting as a person. So, the beautiful pictures and neat homes and polished videos really did get to me. I’m fully aware that the vast majority of folks my age went through something similar about ten years ago, but I’m doing it now, and I had to limit my Instagram time to twenty minutes a day because it was giving me a bad case of The Sads.

Seriously. I went into the parental controls on my phone and set a timer.

I had my “Get of my lawn” moments where I wondered what ever happened to Authenticity, and then I decided that those were dumb thoughts and tried my best to move on.

The sort of posts that had the biggest effects on my mental health? The writing advice.

Every single post that started with “Your conflict is weak and I know why!” or “Here’s what’s wrong with your pacing!” or “Your characters all sound the same and I can help you fix it!” planted a little seed of unhappiness.

Not doubt. I like what I write.* I think it’s good; I have people who love it (and I love them for loving it because I’m a simple creature).

I have a mixed relationship with advice, especially broad advice like I see in those sorts of posts. The sort of advice that gets put in a book that then gets recommended as required reading for anyone who wants to write fiction. You know the ones.

It’s not that it’s bad advice; in fact, I can’t think of much that is, in my opinion, detrimental or harmful.

It’s the very broadness of it that gets under my skin.

Part of it is defensive, and I’ll cop to that. How dare you come onto my algorithmically defined scroll and tell me that my characters are flat? You haven’t even read my book!

Part of it is conflation of credentials with competence. I’m very happy for your seventy five years of writing experience and four hundred NYT Bestsellers, I am, but that doesn’t mean that your goals align with mine. Even when it’s commercialized, writing is art, and you can get a Bestseller by writing something that happens to hit at the right cultural moment, just like you can by writing something beautiful and timeless. And if you’ve ever received parenting advice, you know that people can spend a lot of time doing something and still not be someone you’d take advice from.

Reddit is my primary social media, and on there, I see a ton of people trying to apply the broad advice they’ve seen from posts like that, and getting profoundly frustrated. “Show don’t tell” is probably the most infamous example. Yes, yes, the moonlight glints on the broken glass, but sometimes other things take priority. Pacing, for example. In most things with specific choreography (fights, for example), I want the language to be invisible, to fall away and leave me with an intuitive understanding of the scene.

Which is why mentorship and peer groups are the superior forms of self-improvement when it comes to the arts.**

When you’re first learning anything, you have to actually do the thing so you can look at it and go “Man, I suck.”

When I was learning to cook, my first few meals were… not inedible, but it took some fortitude. But the concrete knowledge that the attempts provided were invaluable when it comes to improvement.

When I first learned to play the flute, the first few weeks were rough on everyone in the house.*** But the specific knowledge gained was absolutely crucial for improvement.

Writing something, anything, and then showing it to people and finding out the hard way whether or not you have successfully done what you set out to do is infinitely more instructive than any number of books on plot construction. Failure, or, even better, near success, is a wildly effective teacher.

So, if you’re interested in irony, here’s how I go about deciding what advice**** to take, and what to ignore.

  1. Evaluate the person. Do we share goals? Are they working in a related field? Have they actually done the thing, or is their business ‘helping others do the thing’? Are they yelling at me because something something engagement?
  2. Consider the content. How close is their area of expertise to my goals? If they’re a writer, but they write for television, and I write romance novels, then there’s probably something useful there, but I’m not going to take their word blindly for everything.
  3. Applicability. Can I think of something I’ve written that I can apply this advice to right now? If I did apply it, would I like what I wrote less? There are degrees to this one. I’ve seen several Instagram reels where, when I compare the advice to things I’ve written, I can see that I’m already doing that, but it’s a matter of degrees and I can put more emphasis on it.

And also, vibes. If I see some writing advice or a set of reels, or something and I come away feeling vaguely bad, then I don’t take it. I usually mute that person and move on. I think that it’s easy to feel pressured by time, to try to improve as much as possible, as fast as possible, especially when you are (like I am) trying to turn writing into a job but you’re not there yet.

Nobody out here is unique. Not me, and not the guy on Instagram who is constantly yelling at me about my writing. There is someone else who is delivering the same material in a way that is more compatible with my mental health, and I’ll find them.

I don’t think there’s much point in becoming The Best unless you’re becoming The Best For You. That’s the subjectivity part of it.

Recent Writing

Thinking of the way she shifted, the natural ease of it, her fine control over each pinion and bone, Aubrey reached for the wind again, and this time, she didn’t ask it.

And it dipped, brushing the surface of the water and rising again, white with moisture.

Next time, I’ll share how I build characters, how does that sound?

Do good, friends.

*In an attempt to ensure that I am not misunderstood: I am under no illusions that my writing is perfect. I do not think that I have nothing to learn. I understand that there is room for improvement. There are a great many authors I admire and study in an attempt to improve my work.

**In my opinion.

***My sister learned the clarinet, and my brother the saxophone. They terrorized the block, not just the household.

****This is specifically for generalized advice or craft books, not for the feedback you get from readers or editors. That is a completely different thing that I approach very differently.