1
A young woman described the memoir she wanted to write.
The story gripped me: a bright and talented child struggling to assert herself against narcissistic parents, become the master of her own identity. Except every few minutes she would backtrack and say how her parents weren’t actually that bad, they had a lot of good qualities, she was grateful for the life they had given her…
When she talked like this, her body language became stiff and awkward, her voice a bit robotic.
It was like she was flipping between two personalities: the good daughter she had been trained to be, and the bad daughter, the rebel daughter, she wanted and needed to be.
I heard myself say, “You need to write like the bad daughter.”
If she could tell how she fought her parents for the right to her own personhood instead of being an extension or reflection of them, she could claim the truth of her life and herself — and offer up a valuable story in the process.
If she wrote as the good daughter, she was doomed.
2
I like bad girls. I’m not talking about Paris or Lindsey or Britney: they’re too lost or damaged or attention-seeking. They want you to love them, or to look at them, which to them is much the same thing.
A true bad girl doesn’t give a damn.
One of my favorite quotes is from Twyla Tharp. In her book The Creative Habit, she talks about her decision to become a dancer and choreographer.
She says, “I became my own rebellion.”
I would turn this phrase over in my mind, thinking that it sounded good, but what did it mean, exactly? Why did it appeal to me so much, and seem necessary to anyone who wanted to be an artist (or entrepreneur or hacker or any other thing that demands stepping off the beaten path)?
Probably because of this: the statement is rooted in such spirit and defiance. It’s not just a challenge to the conventional ways of living, the accepted wisdom, the status quo, the established Establishment, etcetera…but a challenge to the self.
We are all born into ways of thinking that we take for granted. We are raised within certain belief systems. We take the dominating voices of the adults around us and internalize them until those perceptions of us become what we are to ourselves.
But when you become your own rebellion you say a healthy Fuck You to all of that.
And if you’ve been raised to be the good daughter (or the good son), you maybe start to think that what is ‘bad’ is in many ways ‘good’ and what is ‘good’…might be killing you slowly.
3
A good girl does not defy.
She pleases. She listens. She serves. She supports.
She makes no demands. She has no natural sense of entitlement.
She doesn’t say anything that might offend, or make you dislike her.
She has some spirit, sure, but it’s contained. She is ‘fiesty’.
Which is just another quality that makes her really cute.
And if she doesn’t have anything nice to say, she won’t say much at all.
This could be a problem if you want to be a writer.
One of my earliest lessons in “show, don’t tell” — or, as I prefer to think of it, “imply, don’t say straight-out” — came from Stephen King’s novel ‘The Dead Zone’. A salesman walks along a country road and a dog gets in his way.
The man kicks the dog.
Point made.
The guy is a douchebag, but King is too good a writer (some of his critics notwithstanding) to say, “Here’s this dude walking up the road, and by the way, he’s a total douchebag.” So we see him commit canine abuse, and later on, when he goes into politics and becomes increasingly powerful, we know we’ve got a problem.
Things that a less-experienced writer might do:
1. Show too many things.
I used to do this. Writing instructors and workshops place such an emphasis on showing, such an emphasis on detail, that we pack our paragraphs with five specific details when one or two would suffice; we show our protagonist doing five actions displaying five different character traits when only one is relevant.
King showed us the dude kicking the dog, because the dude is mean and crazy, and we need to know that. It’s crucial to the development of the story.
King could have also shown us what the guy ate for breakfast, and the careless way he brushed his teeth, and how he didn’t bother to put on deodorant.
Except those things don’t serve the higher purpose of the story that King wants to tell. The reader does not need to be overly educated about the dude’s hygiene.
A detail should imply something. It should gesture at something bigger than itself.
We go through life everyday experiencing a million details. We are oblivious to most of them (if some of us more than others). The details that filter through to our conscious awareness say a great deal about who we are, how we process the world and what we care about. The details that filter through any narrative should be just as revealing.
When a detail implies a piece of the bigger picture, it has meaning. That makes it interesting.
If it’s just a detail, then it clutters the narrative, slows it down, and bores the reader.
2. Tell too many things.
A dude walks down a country road and kicks a dog. That’s the scene. Many aspiring writers, however, seem reluctant to jump into the scene or shape a scene at all.
A scene is the basic building block of the novel. It is, in many ways, a novel in microcosm. It builds to its own little climax or turning point. Something happens that reveals something that the reader needs to know. The story moves forward.
But the writer won’t get to the scene. The writer “talks too much”: he gives us too much set-up, about what kind of day it was and how when the dude got out of bed that morning he didn’t know that several hours later he would kick an innocent dog. The writer might tell us how the dude doesn’t like dogs, even though he had a terrier named Jack when he was growing up, which might lead to a flashback about when the dude was a kid and running through the woods and got home so late for supper that his mother was annoyed and his stepfather yelled at him. The writer might tell us the history of the countryside the dude is traveling through, or the fact that the dog he kicks is a German Shepard, which segues into a short history of German Shepards, and into the backstory of the boy who owns that particular German Shepard but forgot to close the gate when he left for his baseball game that morning because he was too excited about the girl he knew who would be watching from the stands.
I’m being a bit facetious here, but you get the point. The reader gets a lot of information, but doesn’t get the scene itself, or why any of that information is important.
Show us the stuff that’s important.
Show us the stuff that makes some kind of point.
The space on your page is like valuable real estate. Give it away with great care. Better yet, don’t give it away at all: make everything pay for its position.
3. Wax lyrical.
This is the equivalent of a singer like Christina Aguilera who wants to show off her range instead of just singing the damn song.
When Aguilera was making her first album, she objected to a song that her producers wanted her to include, saying that it didn’t demonstrate her talent as a vocalist. The song was “Genie in a Bottle” and became a huge hit and launched her career. It’s also a good and catchy pop song. What Aguilera forgot, or hadn’t realized yet, is that people don’t care whether or not you can hit a high C.
They don’t care about you, but the journey you take them on, the experience you provide for them.
They care about the song.
They care about the story.
So tell the freaking story.
When the writer-equivalent of Aguilera wants to demonstrate “her talent as a vocalist”, we’ll get long lovely sentences about the quality of the sunlight. We’ll get clever wordplay. We’ll get meditations on nature, reflections on the souls of animals, word-streams of interior consciousness.
We won’t get a scene, but a poetic abstraction, a kind of mental dreamscape.
Like details, like backstory, like flashbacks, like dream sequences, lyricism has to be earned. It needs to be there for a reason. It needs to serve the story, not your ego, not your vision of yourself as a scholar and a poet.
Because anything that doesn’t serve the story is boring.
And a bored reader will toss your book aside and go to the movies instead.
cross-posted at Storytellers Unplugged
1
I was hanging out in a writer’s forum and came across the age-old question of how do you define genre and literary? which always turns into genre vs literary: genre types bash the literati for lacking plot (which is absurd), while the literati bash the genre-ati for lacking everything else (equally absurd).
One person said you could recognize a genre novel by its “shallow theme and simple characters”. He wasn’t trashing genre novels; he considered himself a ‘genre’ writer writing a ‘genre’ novel. He had given himself an ‘out’ when it came to considering things like theme or characterization.
I thought, Wow. There’s someone who will never ever be published.
Personally, I think rather than defining ‘genre’ or ‘mainstream’ novels by their artlessness — as this person did here — literary novels, by far the smaller group of the two, should be defined by their ‘literariness’.
Literary is not a genre so much as a sensibility. It’s a feel for language, a complexity of theme and character, a general overarching intelligence that informs the novel. It can apply to any and all of the genres.
If you say that genre/mainstream novels are characterized by artlessness, you’re also saying that most readers want an ‘artless’ experience — and that, as an aspiring writer, you can get away with writing an ‘artless’ novel. But in today’s “brutal” marketplace, where an agent will complain about”passing on really good novels because currently I believe that really good might not be good enough in today’s market“, how successful is a writer likely to be if she thinks it’s acceptable to be ‘artless’?
This is the part where someone says, But there’s so much crap on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. There’s so much crap on the bestseller lists.
Those books managed the difficult feat of publication because enough people loved them to spend time and money developing them and putting them into the marketplace.
And just like the public didn’t understand why Julia Roberts married that quirky-looking country dude, you don’t need to understand why some people love Dan Brown or James Patterson…only that they do.
Which doesn’t mean they’ll also love you.
2
What writers tend to forget is that ‘genre’ is a marketing term as much as anything else.
Booksellers want to know where to put the books so that the people most likely to buy them can find them. The people who want to read about space aliens can go to one section and the people who want to read about forensic investigators tracking serial killers can go to another section and the people who want to read about young women coming of age in the city while wearing fabulous shoes can go to yet another section.
No one decides, “I’m looking for an Artless story. Where’s the Artless section?”
In fact, many of the ‘genre’ writers who rise to the bestseller lists bring a literary quality to their novels, like Dennis Lehane, who started out writing experimental short fiction in an MFA program. He established himself with a series of critically acclaimed mystery novels, then broke onto the bestseller lists with a novel called MYSTIC RIVER that was so bleak and ‘literary’ people had predicted it would end his career.
Martin Scorsese is now making a movie based on Lehane’s novel SHUTTER ISLAND. Starring Leonardo Dicaprio. Maybe you’ve heard of them.
Many ‘literary’ writers write books that have a strong and riveting sense of story (I challenge you to put down Ian McEwan’s much-praised ATONEMENT once you get past the first 50 pages).
In his introduction to Poe’s Children, Peter Straub acknowledges this kind of crossover when he mentions “literary” writers such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem “who have no problem embracing their inner Poe.” He also lists the wave of fantasy/horror/SF writers (Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand, Graham Joyce) who are “literary and genre writers at the same time”.
I like that: literary and genre writer at the same time.
As a reader, that’s what I look for. That would be a perfect world. Some books would be better than others, no question, and art would still range from ‘high’ to ‘low’. But writers, with the exception of those so experimental in nature they resist any categorization except ‘literary’, would be literary and genre at the same time. Novels wouldn’t respect such a clear cut division between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’. That division would cease to exist.
3
Publishing is changing. We’re witnessing a revolution and entering the digital age, where writers will still write and readers will still find them but the middleman might just get eliminated. This is the age of tribes, personal brands, author platforms and “1000 True Fans”.
Dean Koontz once remarked — way back in the 80s, when a Kindle was a thing in science fiction movies — on his publishers’ insistence that he write his different genre novels under different pen names in order “not to confuse the reader”.
What Koontz discovered, he went on, was that his publishers were wrong. Readers who really like your stuff “will follow you anywhere”.
Ultimately we love our favorite writers not for the type of stories they write but their voice, their worldview, the way they bring their characters into existence so that we may develop relationships with them and, through them, touch the writer’s mind.
I’m reminded of a fan of Poppy Z Brite’s who said, when she found out that Brite had a blog, “now I can have Poppy every day!” She didn’t care that Brite’s blog doesn’t chronicle vampires (from her early work) or chefs running a New Orleans restaurant (her later work). She craves Poppy’s voice, that mash-up of style and thought and personality that defines Poppy’s work and marks it apart from everybody else’s.
In the digital age, as writers are forced to grapple with blogs and Facebook and Twitter, and develop an author platform alongside their body of work, our ‘voice’ will define us more than ever before. Our ‘voice’ becomes our ‘brand’, and readers connect with it — and us — directly.
According to the theory by Kevin Kelly, in order to survive, artists only need 1000 True Fans who will buy anything he or she does (because if each fan spends $100 a year…).
True Fans are the ones “who will follow us anywhere.”
And with that kind of access to us and our work, do we have to adhere to such rigid genre categories?
In fact, might it be kind of dangerous to do so? In a world as cluttered and chaotic as the Web — where anyone can upload a manuscript and set up a blog and call themselves a novelist without having to deal with the age-old filters of agent, editor and publisher — how can any writer develop enough ‘pull’ so that readers will single him or her out from the competition?
I think Seth Godin had it right: in this age of overabundance and oversupply, where the reader’s time and attention are at a premium, the way to survive is to be remarkable.
To use your voice to tell your stories your way, in the best way you know how.
And in a world where readers increasingly flock to author-brands online — and build tribes around them — maybe the emphasis will no longer be on what genre you belong in but the genres you bring together to form what Koontz (who did it himself, with great success, before the Internet was even born) a “cross-genre novel” that isn’t like anything else in the marketplace.
4
Copyblogger compares the Internet to the Renaissance, creating what this blogger calls a Technorenaissance:
The Renaissance was one of the most innovative eras in human history, and many credit the Medici family as the catalyst that made it possible. By attracting talented souls from so many different fields and cultures, the Medicis caused these varied artists and scientists to come in contact with one another, trade ideas, and discover the intersections that allowed for giant leaps in creativity and innovation.
…allowing people to seek and find the connections between different disciplines and cultures led to an explosion of exceptional ideas. This intersection of ideas produced huge advances in literature, philosophy, art, politics and science from the 14th through the 17th century, starting in Italy and spreading throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
The Internet isn’t about neat little boxes and tidy definitions. The Internet has become, like Florence in the era of the Medicis, a place of access, opportunity and creative convergence. The Internet is a crossroads where ideas from different worlds can meet and synthesize. It’s where you smash old boundaries and let the new stuff in; read and write across the disciplines; be both literary and genre at the same time.
I like to play with the idea of what the first ‘true’ bestselling 21st century writer will look like, a writer who rises from the online world as well as traditional print publishing. I don’t think they’ll rise from some box marked ‘mystery’ or ‘thriller’ or ’science fiction’ but, instead, those places where the genres intersect. They will give us what we hunger for: something accessible and engaging, yet innovative and new.
The emphasis won’t be on what genre.
The emphasis will be on great storytelling.
I’m taking part in a memoir/novel workshop that starts this Saturday, and I’m psyched.
Although in general, I have mixed feelings about workshops.
The right workshop can be a thing of wonders, but I never found the ‘right’ one: I found, instead, nooks of ‘right’ scattered both online and off.
I would start a class with enthusiasm and then, at some point, drop out, not because I thought it was a waste of time (it wasn’t) or because the other writers were stupid and untalented (they weren’t), but because critiquing others’ work ate up so much time and energy that the benefits didn’t seem to justify the compulsive-obsessive effort I put in.
I’ve always found it a bit odd that aspiring writers would seek advice and guidance from other aspiring writers. If you’re an aspiring brain surgeon, do you go to another aspiring brain surgeon and ask, “Hey, can you show me how to saw open this guy’s head?” Or do you go to the best brain surgeon you have access to, who has accomplished what you want to accomplish?
Admittedly, it’s a flawed – and extreme – analogy, and doesn’t take into account the other reasons for participating in a workshop, such as the sense of community, the support, the commitment to produce the required work, as well as the pleasure of talking about writing.
Critiquing is a skill like anything else, and the way to get better at anything is of course to practice practice practice. But when it comes down to learning the craft – and not just the craft but how to make it serve your vision – I can’t help thinking that the better investment is to seek professional help.
Seek out mentors: published, accomplished writers and editors who hire out their services; you can pay them to give a critique of your stuff. Revising a novel with a professional’s one-on-one assistance will teach you the most in the shortest amount of time.
It will also hurt in a way that workshops tend not to.
Real growth – and this applies to writing as much as anything else – is painful. The only way you can make your story better is to fix the things that are wrong with it, and often the only way you can learn what’s wrong with it is by getting somebody else to tell you.
This means, however, that that same person has to a) have the depth and knowledge of craft to be able to recognize what’s not working b) convey that to you in a constructive manner and c) not care overmuch about hurting your feelings, either because they know we’re all professionals here, putting aside our egos to get the job done…or because they’re a sadistic sociopath.
My advice is to avoid the sociopaths.
Also avoid family members and friends (some of whom may be sociopathic themselves, although that’s beside the point).
Learn to love and seek out the tough, constructive criticism delivered by knowing professionals. After all, that’s part of the job description: once you’re published, that criticism will come from agents and editors whose own careers are riding on the quality of what you produce.
In my experience – and keep in mind this is only my experience – many aspiring writers can’t do it.
And it’s not a question of talent – often the most talented are also the most defensive, so accustomed have they become to ego-stroking. Instead of being open to change, willing to re-envision – re/vision – their work, they throw up excuses and rationalizations for why they shouldn’t have to change anything.
And as a result, they don’t progress.
They don’t progress not because they’re not talented, but because they’re not teachable.
And to be teachable, you have to be open, unarmored, and vulnerable.
That is where the power is, the strength : being able to look at your work through someone else’s eyes, seeing what they see and making decisions according to what is best for the manuscript, not your ego or self-image. Find people who are better than you, who know more than you, who are willing to invest their time and attention in you…and listen to them.
If you can do that, you are way ahead of the game.
You are teachable.
1
In my last blog entry I talked about finding your novel ‘hook’ — the one or two sentence description that strikes at the heart of your story and sells it to the right reader.
It’s useful to work this out early because it forces you to hone your sense of the story that you want to tell, in a way that helps you tell it.
It’s hard to find the center of a completed manuscript if there’s no center there to begin with.
You want to make sure you put the ‘there’ there.
2
Dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, in her excellent book The Creative Habit, talks about ’scratching’ and ’spine’.
Scratching is what you do to find ideas.
You scratch at the world around you, searching for whatever will spark your imagination.
‘Scratching’ generates your raw materials. These are the ideas that you want to explore, but in and of themselves lack forward movement. You could say you want to write about love, or the hidden lives of families, or the return of the repressed. These ideas are important to your storytelling, but useless on their own. They sit there. They look at you. Okay, genius. Now what?
My scratching produced these materials: love, forbidden desire, friendship, reincarnation (the return of the past), the secret emotional legacies handed down within families that play out in other relationships.
Then — to find the ’spine’ (and the beginning of my ‘hook’) — I ask: who are my characters and what do they want?
One of my favorite sayings is “desire rules the world”. People who go after the things that they want — and how they succeed or fail — create the society that we live in.
Desire creates politics; creates history; creates stories.
Your narrative begins with desire, and ends with how it does — or does not — get fulfilled.
3
After my last entry, readers suggested to me the following:
The book is about a reincarnated Hollywood ‘It’ girl who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men that ignites traumatic memories and starts repeating an erotic obsession that, twenty years ago, ended in tragedy. (Steve Prosapio)
Sounds to me like it’s about the reincarnation of a murdered actress who finds three of the men involved in her disappearance, and how they fall into the original behavior patterns that led to her murder, even though she’s not fully aware of her past life.
This, I think, might be my spine…but not my hook.
The spine is when different ideas hook together and the basic narrative reveals itself.
But the hook is the center. The center is where all the different elements meet, and crystallize, so that one or two sentences suggest the entire novel.
Which means my ‘hook’ needs to include the group of wealthy hedonistic thirtysomething friends that the dancer gets involved with, because the group dynamic is a major part of the narrative.
When I put this to a reader — the writer Stacia Kane — she came back with this:
Perhaps something about how the relationships of a group of wealthy, hedonistic friends are forever altered when a new woman enters their circle and it turns out she is the reincarnation of a murder victim, and her former self seeks to use her as a tool for revenge?
I played with this and came up with:
A group of wealthy friends in Los Angeles is forever altered when a young dancer with memories of a past life gets involved with two of the men, igniting a drama of erotic obsession that echoes events from twenty years ago, when one of their own disappeared.
I think I’m getting closer, because what these last two examples suggest that the previous ones did not is this: transformation.
Because stories are not just about desire and conflict, but change.
Somebody wants something and has to overcome obstacles to get it, but in order to overcome those obstacles he or she has to transform.
So I have some more thinking to do, about my ‘hook’ but also the novel itself.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m writing a novel called ‘The Decadents’ and need to figure out the answer to the question people ask when they discover you’re writing a novel (usually after, ‘Are you published?’ and ‘Have I heard of you?’ and sometimes ‘Who is your publisher?’, which is another way of asking, ‘Is it a real publisher?’)
They ask, “What is it about?”
It’s a powerful question.
And if you can’t answer it – without going into some rambling description that makes your listener’s eyes glaze over — you have a problem. You have a manuscript that might have all the elements in play (strong writing, great characters, good pacing, etc.) but which an agent or editor will reject because it’s muddled at the center.
Often you don’t know the real, deep answer to what the book is ‘about’ until you’ve completed at least a draft of the thing. And that’s as it should be: the first draft (and the second, and the third) is all about exploration.
Exploration of the story, exploration of the characters.
Exploration of yourself.
But when people ask, “What is it about?”, they aren’t looking for the deep answer. They want the ‘hook’. They want the thirty-second elevator pitch, so they can nod and smile and sip their cocktails and change the subject.
It’s what agents want when you approach them with your manuscript.
It’s what editors want when the agent approaches them with the manuscript.
Because a manuscript doesn’t get sold once. It gets sold over and over again. The agent sells to editors; the editors sell in-house, to other editors, then to sales and marketing; the jacket copy sells to readers; you yourself are selling the book, unwittingly or not, whenever you talk about it.
The point of the hook is to intrigue, through suggestion and implication.
You aren’t laying out a detailed synopsis of the story. There’s no time. You are, in just one or two sentences, suggesting the shape and reach and style of the story.
You are promising that the story has a center, and it is sharp and clear.
So answering the question, “What is your novel about?” is good practice. You have the chance to refine your answer according to your developing sense of the story and how people respond. At the same time, you can fake it a bit, because all you’re doing is suggesting and implying.
My rambling answer goes something like this:
I’m interested in the idea of repetition compulsion — how we unconsciously repeat relationships from the past in order to master or resolve them — and also about how survivors of incest and emotional incest tend to find each other, and also how people with dysfunctional family backgrounds will form their own little families of friends to make up for what they never had. So ‘The Decadents’ is about this group of wealthy hedonistic thirtysomethings who live in LA and are close friends and this young dancer wanders into their midst and sets off this drama of erotic obsession that echoes events from twenty years ago when a Hollywood ‘It’ girl went missing, because the dancer might be the reincarnation of this girl, and she’s traumatized by these memories of her past life and gets involved in a love triangle that might culminate in the same tragic end if they can’t figure out what really happened to the missing girl…
How do I find the ‘hook’ in this?
I can ask myself: who are the characters and what do they want?
Well, the dancer wants to feel whole. She wants to overcome not just her past, but her past life. She also wants love, acceptance, and safety.
And there are two men who want her. Who happen to be best friends. And one of them is married and not quite what he seems. And both these men were deeply involved in the life of the disappeared girl, which is why the dancer compels them, and vice versa. All three are driven by an attraction that they don’t understand but sets them against each other in various ways.
So my hook is somewhere in there.
Maybe:
My book is about a young dancer who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men, an artist and a CEO, who have been best friends since high school.
This suggests some of the shape of the story, and the conflict, but it’s not enough. ‘The Decadents’ is a supernatural psychological thriller, and the ‘hook’ should convey that.
So maybe:
The book is about a young dancer who gets involved in a love triangle with two older men that ignites traumatic memories of her past life and starts repeating an erotic obsession that ended in tragedy twenty years ago.
Hmmm. Kind of long. Kind of awkward.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER AND THE CREATIVE BRAIN: why a room of her own should not be near the mall
Originally published at Storytellers Unplugged.
So if a woman is to write, she needs a room of her own.
So I’ve heard, anyway.
After years of experimenting with different kinds of rooms, from my teenage bedroom in Canada to my shoebox apartment in Japan to the back-store café of the Border’s in Century City and a friend’s guesthouse in Bel Air… I have discovered that in order to write, at this moment in my life, I need a building.
Or more specifically: a warehouse converted into lofty cutting-edge office space that houses two dot.com companies (Mahalo and Causecast) on a street in Santa Monica that doesn’t offer the temptations of bookstore, movie theatre or shopping mall.
It is here that I am writing this essay.
I can look out the front door, the parking lot and strip of grass and palms marking it off from the street.
The Causecast CEO, youngish in t-shirt and jeans like he’s about to head to a rock concert and not a PR meeting, is talking on his cell and pacing the sidewalk. Just behind him is his brand-new Tesla Roadster. Nestled alongside, in the other prime parking spot, is a yellow Corvette. The Corvette belongs to the Mahalo CEO, who likes to bring his bulldogs to work. The dogs are snuffling around my chair right now.
"I guess I should have known/ From the way you parked your car sideways..." Maybe the song should have been 'Little Red Tesla'
Both men are friends of mine, but it’s the one with the dogs who offered me some of his extra office space to write in. I started out in one, got moved to another when the Causecast CEO decided to put his own desk and couch and lava lamp in there, and by the time I found myself moved to a third, I had discovered something:
What I really like to do is write in the open.
I use my office for storage. I pick up my laptop and roam. I like the red chair in the corner with the couches, coffee table and fake grass. But the sun through the windows can make me warm and sleepy.
So I like a spot at a table that puts me close to the espresso maker (this is important). I can take a break from my laptop screen, look up and watch guys wrestling with the antique video game by the entrance.
I like that.
I get to be in my own mental bubble while feeling involved in the world, or at least a nook of it.
Here’s another thing I’ve learned about why I need open areas: I like to move.
I need to pace and wander.
I’ve lost count of the number of times something has come to me when walking or driving, as if the brain needs the body to move its thinking forward. In the past, I took this restlessness as a sign that the day’s writing was over, life crowding in with so much else to do.
At Mahalo, determined to stay the course for a certain number of hours or pages, whichever comes first, I have no choice but to force myself back to my laptop. But then the writing flows again, and I finally realized that sessions of writing and pacing need to alternate.
Which seems so obvious I wonder why I never figured this out before. I am intensely physical; despite – or maybe because of – all the time I spend in my head, I come at the world just as fiercely through my body. I crave exercise, fill my closet with sensuous textures — leather, silk, velvet, suede, high-quality cotton — and have yet to outgrow my fondness for clubs, since dancing, music, lights and crowd act as cathartic ritual.
It’s almost as if the body has to take over so the mind can settle down, find its way back into that trance when ideas flow and the writing takes over. It might come in fits and starts, that state of waking dream, but it does come, and then come back. If I’m willing to hang around long enough.
This need for motion is what makes it a bad idea to work anywhere near places where I can buy books or clothes. It’s not just the body that wants to get away from the laptop.
Because if my brain is a creative brain, it is also a wild and fidgety one.
I am – as someone so nicely put it – a highly distractible person.
This makes it tough for me to attend to details or remember where I put things. I have had to replace way too many passports, green cards, and debit cards; ATM machines that aren’t swipe-through have been a bane of my existence.
I have a troubled relationship with the roof of my car. I will put things there to free up my hands and then drive or walk away. “This,” the Causecast CEO said the other day, “is why you lose your car keys,” as he took the aforementioned item off the sunbaked roof of my Lexus and handed them over, demonstrating one of the reasons why he runs a company and I do not.
I can, however, write publishable fiction. At university I could crank out essays at the last minute and get one of the highest marks in the class. I could also skip classes on a regular basis – and did, starting in high school – and still make the dean’s list.
My brain has an excellent ability to seek out connections and find relationships, very handy for fiction and essay writing. But just as the body adapts to trauma and stress by heightening some senses (a sudden eye for detail, adrenaline-fueled strength and increased tolerance for pain) while taking away others ( bowel control), the brain seems to operate along a similar exchange. The kind of accumulative skill- and knowledge-building necessary in subjects like languages, math and science seemed impossible for me as a kid.
I was an intellectually gifted child who nearly flunked fourth grade French, who won county typing championships yet barely – barely! – passed her typing class, who got a 50 in home economics because she never turned in the hooded sweatshirt she was supposedly making.
So when I won a significant four-year scholarship to one of the most prestigious universities in the country, a lot of kids and adults were shocked as hell — especially when the students who were expected to win those prizes did not do so well. Those other students were respectably well-rounded. I, however, was not.
I am a specialist, or what some psychologists refer to as “spiky”, and that has advantaged me just as much as it has disadvantaged me.
So it’s not surprising that I was recently diagnosed with a form of ADD; what is surprising is that I went so long without that diagnosis. But ADD doesn’t always look like the hyperactive kid cutting up in the classroom and swinging off the lighting fixtures; it is also the well-behaved girl staring out the window, who has trouble paying consistent attention in class yet can hyper-focus enough to write a novel in six weeks or progress rapidly through tae kwon do.
Who wins prizes and acclaim while also concluding that something is innately wrong with her; that she is, in fact, an incompetent, especially if other people in her life are too happy to support this assessment.
Adderall, for all its stigma, is a godsend; it’s like LASIK for the brain and has changed my life.
But a brain of abnormal creativity or intellect or both (although studies indicate that degree of intelligence is not reflective of someone’s degree of creativity) is also that – abnormal. It fails to work in the so-called normal ways and perhaps because of this overcompensates in others — or vice versa.
The body gives you one thing, but takes away another. We only have so much material to work with.
What my ADD brain has in common with many highly creative people and also schizophrenics is this: an inability to properly filter stimuli. The world rushes inside you and gets jumbled in your head. This creates a habitual mental pattern of free-associating words, images, ideas, bits of knowledge; of putting things together in odd ways and finding good reasons to do so.
It also might create a compulsion for narration: for organizing experience into story, finding order and meaning and a calm otherwise denied it. When these patterns are coherent, you might have an original piece of art, or a major scientific breakthrough. When incoherent, you might have…a breakdown in the mental process.
There are healthy brains, and unhealthy brains, and somewhere in the middle there might be creative brains.
The brains that are the most creative might also be the closest to the edge.
“Exceptional creatives”, when compared to “normal” people (who do not earn significant income through creative work, at least as defined by this particular study), have an unusually high number of schizophrenic and mood-disordered people in their family.
Writers especially tend to have depression and bipolar disorder riding their genetics. Is this, again, a consequence of the brain’s odd functioning, an increasingly troubled way of processing world experience?
Adderall not only clarifies my thinking in a way that seems miraculous to me – lifting me out of some dusty corner office of my brain to the CEO suite – it also kills off my low-level depression, as well as the anxiety I used to associate with too much caffeine even on the days when I hadn’t had any (that lack of attention to detail…). This is not unusual, a psychiatrist informed me; depression and anxiety are sometimes not the root cause, but symptoms thrown off by something else. Like ADD.
The brain is a tangled affair.
Understanding this helped me realize that I don’t require solitude to be creative – often the opposite. I need color and action, beauty and ugliness, novelty and stimulation. I need all that…if just to space out in the middle of it.
I need solitude to recover. My brain rides high through a hailstorm of sensation – then hits a breaking point. That’s when I get edgy and bitchy and need – in every sense of the word – to get away from the party.
I remember school assignments that required you to hand in your brainstorming, note-taking, early drafts, etcetera, so that you could be graded on process as well as final product. They were a pain in the ass for me. My first draft was my final product. I would have to fake the “process”, sometimes so unconvincingly that the process mark would drag down my “real” mark and make me want to bang my head against my locker.
But so often it felt like that, and not just in school: like I was coming at life from the wrong angle.
When you’re a square peg who has spent so many years trying to fit yourself into the same round holes, sooner or later, in order to save yourself, you must admit the stupidity of the attempt. A square peg, no matter how attractive it looks on the outside, or how round it gets clever enough to pass itself off as – is still a square peg, and will be so forever and always.
Far better to chop out a place that you can breathe in, than to keep carving away pieces of yourself, especially when there are children in your life who might suffer the consequences alongside you – and others who will hand you the scalpel and point out the next part that needs to go. They might even cut it off for you.
So I had this idea in my head – this nice round hole of an idea – how a writer like me should go about writing. How I should find my room, just as Woolf said, and close the door.
And sometimes I need to do that. I need to soothe my odd little brain.
But maybe if I’d examined my life with more care, I would have realized that some of my most productive sessions happen in cafes or other places where, instead of shutting the world out, I could watch it go by, and let some of it in, and thrive off the energy it gives me.
After all, I’m a writer.
I like to watch.
So if my place isn’t at the center of things, it also isn’t removed to a room. I seem to flourish in the edges between, where there’s stuff to marvel at, and space to wander… and enough walls to ensure I drift back to my laptop instead of through Bloomingdale’s.
Adult ADD Strengths “We Need That Kind of Talent Here”
The below is from Mark Cuban’s blog. He was thinking up ways you could use Twitter and Facebook as an incentive or reward:
I would create a new, private account on twitter and you would be the only approved follower. You could ask me anything and I would respond for some period, probably 24 hours. After which I would replace you with another follower. I could do the same on facebook. I would set up a private account and only friend this person. Using the wall, we could have an exchange about any subject.
I’m intrigued by how a successful writer could use this idea, either one-on-one or with small groups of readers: you could set up a Facebook page specifically for an ongoing meeting with a book club, for example. I was at a formal fund-raising dinner the other night, and it would be fun to see something like this — with Neil Gaiman or Stephen King or [insert name of desired author here] — presented at the silent auction.
Facebook fan pages perplex me a bit. I don’t think it’s effective to set one up under your own name, then send out invites to friends who are now expected to be your ‘fans’, or strangers who have no actual reason to care about you or your book (and are benumbed by all these invites in any case).
Just like I question the effectiveness of using an image of your book cover as your profile photo (although at one point I also did this). I can’t remember ever once finding this charming or persuasive; usually it’s a turn-off, like the only reason this person is friending me is to sell me on the book.
I do play with the idea of setting up a ‘fan’ page (can’t they change that name to something else???) for my work-in-progress, to use for feedback and research questions and general discussion on related topics. A facebook page like that could make — among other things — a fun sounding board. You wouldn’t need a lot of people, just a few with time and interest.
I’m reading Kelly L Stone’s Time to Write and I like what she terms “the burning desire to write”.
She took the term “burning desire” from motivational speaker and author Napoleon Hill:
This desire — a persistent vision that inspires action to reach an end goal — becomes the driving force that motivates a person to do the necessary tasks to achieve success in any area.
That ‘burning desire to write’ manifests itself as a kind of addiction. After you write, you feel settled, content. You feel better about yourself. The day takes on depth and dimension.
When you don’t write, you start to get edgy. A feeling of agitation takes root in your blood and starts to branch out through you.
The only release is to write.
(I’m feeling better already just writing this.)
Ask yourself this question: do you like yourself better on the days that you do write versus the days that you don’t? That’s your Burning Desire to Write.
This Desire, continues Stone, is what spurs writers on to become “what motivation theorists call creative high achievers”.
I’m not so sure about this — does the desire to write make manifest “creative high achievers” or do creative high achievers make manifest the desire to write?
Traits of Creative High Achievers (and Writers):
Seek out solitude on a regular basis.
I used to think that being a writer demanded a freakish solitary streak, but I’ve come to realize that developing your talent in pretty much anything demands a capacity for solitude. It’s not like all those hours of practice can happen down at the pub. And now that I’ve met enough writers to make annoying, sweeping generalizations about them, I’d say they’re about as social as any other group, if some more so than others. Which is why the Internet is such a godsend for writers, who would have few opportunities to gather their scattered, farflung tribe.
Have vivid imaginations.
Well, duh. What I find interesting, though, is the relationship between creativity, the development of a rich inner life, and an unhappy childhood. When you’re a kid, and you’re miserable, often the only method of escape is to disconnect from the reality around you and plug into a different one.
Creativity as psychological survival mechanism.
“My problem,” an aspiring writer used to moan to me in university, “is that I had a happy childhood.”
I could only nod and pat his back reassuringly.
If I had had a happy childhood, perhaps I’d be a lawyer.
Are real go-getters.
They take “calculated risks”. I would say they’re attempting to avoid the more frightening risk of a so-called ‘normal life’ that seems, to them, a kind of living death, and which they’re probably not too competent at in any case.
Don’t follow the crowd.
Or maybe the crowd just doesn’t follow them.
Shoot for the moon.
They set formidable but realistic goals: high enough so that they feel challenged, low enough so that they don’t feel like “chance played a part in their victory”. Except there’s a bit of chance in everything. You just don’t want to feel like chance and luck rule your life, which is not much of an American belief to begin with.
