My fun writing summer!

Good-bye guilt, good-bye anxiety, good-bye trying...hello doing!

Reading time: approximately 12 minutes

Hello my darlings. 💖 It’s the end of June, a month since my last post, and since then I’ve completely given up. It has been so so so so so so good.

After spending—what, three straight weeks?—working with Jack Grapes’ Method Writing book for hours every day, trying to extract, digest, and apply his process, I was so frustrated my daily writing practice looked less like practicing a skill and way more like Julia Cameron-style morning pages. The ones where given free rein you vomit up every nasty, toxic, angry-depressive thought you’ve ever thunk onto the page and they sit there like flesh-eating tar, and the only sensible thing one can do with it is burn the whole notebook and bury the ashes.

😬 😬 😬

That’s when a sensible part of me quietly mentioned that perhaps maybe possibly I could look into taking a class? Because numerous people who have studied with Jack teach classes on the process. (Jack Grapes teaches classes too, but I could tell from that three hour interview I watched of him on YouTube that he is not the teacher for me.)

My writing practice response to that idea:

This is insanity. And I’m sorry, unconscious. I’m sorry for not turning to you. For not trusting I could assimilate this and make it mine. I’m sorry for looking for some authority figure like a princess waiting for a kiss. I just want to write. I just want to be…

It’s past time for me to take control of my writing. I have the tools I need to find my own path. I can look for more books when I’ve digested the ones I have. They should be enough to get me started…

I want to understand about Tori Amos’ Song Beings. I want to talk to the stories and have them help me manifest them. I’m tired of rules. I’m tired of not writing, of having my ideas die on the vine, wither away. I am beginning to think the only reason why they do is because I shrink away from what they could be. I de-power them with worrying about how I should craft them instead of just crafting them. I don’t even care anymore if they are good or right or wrong or bad. They just need to be written in my voice. Not one that gets committee approval. I don’t want to play by workshop rules. I don’t want amateur attempts to judge my work. I don’t want to be the tide that rises all ships. I need to do my own thing. I need to be my own stories. I just need to reclaim all those stories, all those bits of myself I tucked into those unfinished stories, before they fade completely and I am lost.

That’s not over the top at all. Yes, a completely rational response to the thought: “hey, maybe get some help with this thing you are struggling with?” 🙄

What was all that, really? That was me being terrified of going back into a writing workshop class setting. It feels like it’ll undo all the work I’ve done to de-program from my previous writing class experiences.

Also, during March, April, and May I tried some doctor-recommended supplements and messed with my thyroid medication levels on her advice. All of which led to months of brain fog, fatigue, aches & pains, bad sleep, dizziness, and gastro-intestinal unhappiness. Important safety tip: it’s so easy to forget when you are feeling gross that your brain—that thing that thinks the thinks and feels the feels—is a piece of your body, so it too feels gross and doesn’t work quite right along with all the other body parts. Ridiculous, I know. Being a human is for the birds.

So I pushed through my fears and brain fog, contacted the most touchy-feely Method Writing teacher I could find (Jules Swales), and talked to her about the method and the class and what I was looking for and what I was afraid of. Jules was really quite lovely, and explained how the classes are not like traditional writing workshops at all (work is shared with the group, but instead of feedback on the content of the work, feedback is on how closely the work stuck to the assignment). She informed me that this stupid Method Writing book I had been tearing my hair out over is on its 11th edition and Grapes has added new information into each release without once going back to edit anything. So it’s not me—taken in total, the thing is legitimately incomprehensible.

She convinced me to sign up for her beginner class, which starts in September. When she got my payment, she sent me the sweetest little personal e-mail:

Yay!

Cannot wait to start our creative journey together.

Permission to put the books aside and have a fun writing summer.

❤

My darlings, this e-mail is everything.

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I have never, not once, gotten permission from myself or anyone else to not produce. I know there are people in the world for whom writing is a hobby and they write whatever they want without any care of ending up with a finished, publishable piece. But I want to be a published author. I want people reading my pieces. So every single thing I have written or tried to write over the last 30 years has been written with the intent of not just being published, but to (somehow) make money. Even when I wrote in journals that writing was simply an exercise that was supposed to help grease the wheels to getting finished pieces accomplished.

I know my old process doesn’t work for me. I have found a new process, but I need help learning it. That help will come in September. Until then……until then, my teacher gave me permission to have a fun writing summer.

It has, in a word, been glorious.

I kept with my daily practice writing by hand, and I write 2-3 pages a day in my journal. I still practice writing in my speaking voice, but instead of trying to “not write a story” (??), I take a small piece of that space and dump out what my brain’s been fixating on since the last entry. The rest of the space I use to tell myself stories.

I’ve been going back through each of my old, unfinished story ideas and, writing in my own speaking voice, have tried to tell myself each story. I’m sort of doing it as a way to not lose these stories forever, and as a way to prove to myself I can get to an end. I’m not planning anything out, I’m not problem-solving, I’m not getting bogged down in structure or form or details. I’m just telling myself a story, seeing what brilliant or corny or tripe or inventive or utilitarian plot point comes next. I’m 10 stories into the list, I’m 90 pages into my journal, and it has brought me more delight than any other writing I have ever done, ever. The end always shows up, the middle is always gotten through, and I can feel my fears of not being able to finish melting away.

Here’s a bit of a journal entry example:

The second idea on the list is Marjorie gets robbed. It was a writing exercise where a woman is out walking to lunch downtown, and she gets robbed at gunpoint. The thief wants her wedding ring. Marjorie is caught in the unreality of the moment, and she doesn't want to hand over the ring, even though she's not married anymore. A voice in her head starts talking to her, convinced it is going to die. The voice sweet–talks Marjorie into giving up the ring, promising to buy her another one, to take her to her favorite bakery afterwards. That's as far as I got with the exercise. Not much to go on, but I'm pretty sure the voice in her head is an alien. She gives up the ring, and goes to lunch, stunned. The voice helps her keep functioning. Marjorie tells her friend what happened and she finally breaks down. Her friend supports her, then suggests the bakery for dessert. Marjorie tries talking to the voice in her head, suspicious, but no answer.

A few days later, she gets a check from the IRS, getting money back that the agency says is from an error. It's enough to replace her ring. Marjorie is terrified, and keeps trying to talk to the voice, but it says nothing.

After a few crazy making days, Marjorie tries to kill herself to get the voice to speak. And it finally starts talking again to stop her. It reveals its alien parasite self, but explains its kind has been on Earth so long residing in humans they are basically a native species now. Not all humans have an alien, but all the rich ones do. They are all interested only in the comfort their host can provide. Marjorie knows she hast to free herself from her alien, but it knows all of her thoughts. How to do it?

The alien keeps trying to tempt her to leave it alone, to let things stay the same. Didn't she like her life? She was just one person. Did she really think she could make a difference?

When she doesn't listen and keeps looking for things that could incapacitate it, he turns on her. He can take over while she is unconscious, and distract her. His alien friends turn against her. She has driven out of her life.

That's when she is found, after she has been on the streets, in shelters. By others who know about the aliens. They subdue hers, then ask her to join them.

Now Marjorie is a spy! She didn't want to be a spy, and honestly, she's pretty disastrous at it. The rebels banish her to desk work. She can't believe rebels have paperwork. Then she read something in a file that leads her to realize she can take them down all at once.

That's when she realizes the rebels, know it, and are upholding the status quo. The rebels are controlled by the aliens, too! Indirectly, secretly. She's on her own again, and now intimately understands that she cannot work alone. She reads covertly in the alien files about the larger universe, and realizes there is a higher authority humans can appeal to. Marjorie forms a secret penpal club, organizes a petition and arranges to have it sent off.

Their petition reaches the Galactic Body, and humans are found to be invaded by the aliens. The Body sends in forces to liberate the planet, and brings us into the spacefaring fold, sharing technology as recompense. Marjorie and her team become the new planetary government.

THE END

Is this completely ridiculous? O my, yes. And somewhere in there I think is part of the plot of the show Alias? But that’s not the point. The point is, I found an ending. Not necessarily a great ending, certainly not a sensical ending, but AN ending. And I’ll take an aliens-defeated-by-penpals story any day over a story that never gets beyond the first couple paragraphs.

🙌

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Last week, an idea for a new project started to emerge. I was in the middle of a huge re-read of Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series (books 9-17), and my favorite YouTuber Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints came out with a video about liminal space for her patrons on Patreon. I decided that I love the idea of having one city setting with lots of recurring, familiar yummy characters that I can go back to over and over to tell all kinds of different stories. And I decided that many of the stories will focus on people who live in the city’s liminal spaces, people who were exiled from the main life of the city.

So I’ve spent the past five days or so building this city, this city built hundreds of years from now, after we completely f*ed up stopping climate change, and had to genetically modify ourselves to adapt to our new (apocalyptic-y) reality. This city is where the different groups of people have come back together after years of struggle in their separate pockets of the world to just survive, and are working to reverse climate change and bring the Earth back to what it was.

{For such an important place you’d think I’d have a name for it, but so far, none have fit just right…}

With the help of Midjourney, I’ve envisioned some of the city’s places, and I really like how its coming along.

I’ve realized that a lot of my old story ideas that I’ve been telling myself can fit in the city, and so can old characters whose stories never made it to fruition. I’m really excited about this, and I’m going to attempt to breathe life into it over the next six weeks while I’m participating with my writing group in Clarion West’s Flash Fiction Workshop during their Write-a-Thon. I plan on setting all six of the flash stories I need to write for the workshop in the city. I’ve started the first one already, about a woman named Netty:

And then. And then…..all her and thens had already happened. There are no more and thens for Sylvie. I would cry, but I’m not enough mer for it. Sylvie was, though. She’d cry for all us whose eyes are too liz to well up with emotion. I yank the sweater over my head, my arms into the sleeves. No tears for me, just this feeling like I’m a wildfire, like half of me is a scorched ruin. The other half is still raging, completely uncontained, decimating everything I have left.

I’m trying to write using what I understand about Method Writing’s concept of moments and image-moments. It’s a fun challenge, and in just 300 words it’s taught me how much story I unconsciously summarize, how many tiny moments I let slip by that are perfect opportunities for showing character, showing emotion, and controlling tension through time. Writing this way a little frustrating, because I can’t really get into a flow and it feels forced, but already I’m feeling like the results are drawing me deeper into the character, deeper into the story.

Glorious.

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I know this update is incredibly long, and I appreciate both your patience in waiting for it to arrive in your inbox and for sticking with me all the way down to here, the end. In part I’m hoping it will tide you over for a bit, because I expect to be completely swamped writing a story and commenting on five others each week for all of July and quite a bit of August. And I had a lot to catch you up on! I will be back when I can, and I will share at least one of my new stories with you in the next few months!

💖 💖 💖,

Elnora