East or West

I spend a lot of time talking about writing, so for a change, let’s talk about NOT writing, something I excel at.

Last week was my best writing week in over six months. I cranked out over 10,000 words. This despite buying a car, visiting friends, building a crib for baby, and a number of other appointments.

It would be a great accomplishment, that, if 10,000 was really that many words in the grand scheme of things. Shit, this blog will be over 500, and I’m knocking it out in 5 minutes. If I was writing as much as I should be, 10,000 should be my fricken’ minimum for a week’s work, regardless of circumstance. But I spend a lot of time not writing. That is, time spent sitting at the computer, with the appropriate word documents open and the full intention to write, but not doing it.

Most of the time, I just don’t wanna. Novels are big things that need to be broken down to manageable bits that you can work on as you slowly assemble the whole. Some of those bits are fun to write. Other’s aren’t. Some characters practically write themselves. Others don’t. Those not-fun, uphill writing bits are the bane of every author I know, and we all fight against the internal voice nagging us to shut up and power through.

So I sit at the computer, and check my e-mail. That’s important, right? What if there’s something the publisher or my agent needs me to act on RIGHT AWAY that can give me a moment’s respite. Maybe my friends have good gossip. Maybe my mom has forwarded me a list of jokes that’s been passed on to so many people with so many different e-mail clients that the formatting is horrid and near unreadable.

Deciphering bad cat jokes still beats forcing yourself to write something you’re not feeling.

After e-mail, I tell myself I can’t write well if I’m not informed, so I start hitting news sites and learning what’s going on in the world. It’s a natural progression from news to blogs, which aren’t really news, but we pretend they are. There are people I know whose lives I want to keep up with, and people I only know through their writing, but I feel like I know anyway. I also have to check up on my stories.

Of course, then there are the usual quick excuses: going to the bathroom, digging in the refrigerator, doing dishes, cleaning the cat’s box, taking out the trash, etc. When you’re procrastinating from one kind of work, guilt will frequently push you into doing your other chores, which I guess is okay. It feels good to do something constructive.

But it’s just like frantically cleaning your house right before people come over. You know in your heart that you’re still a slob, and this is just a cheap facade.

So I go back to my desk and check e-mail again. Sometimes something comes while I am out of the room. I pretend that whatever it is is really important. Have to keep up on your correspondence, of course. Then I usually check my social and business networks. That is, the traffic statistics on my website, pingback and keyword trails, facebook, myspace, comments on my own blog.

After that, not writing gets tricky.

Oh, I’ll leave my e-mail client open, so I can drop everything if someone sends me a message, but that only works sporadically. Other times I will start writing and then get stuck on a word or object I am writing and switch over to Firefox to look it up on Dictionary.com or Wikipedia. From there, it’s only a few keystrokes away from googling myself, which is the ultimate self-indulgent time-waster. If I find hits I’ve never seen before, like this one, I can convince myself that the writing time I just squandered was somehow worth it.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I take not writing to dizzying heights.

There are and always will be two aspects to writing. One, is actually typing (or hand-writing, if you’re a luddite) the words, and the other is thinking about what you are going to write. During the aforementioned easy parts, you can often do these both at the same time. If I have to write an action scene, I usually give it little thought and just dive in. So long as I’ve decided who is going to win or lose, survive or die, and know more or less how the story picks up post-action, I can crank out a fight or a chase off the top of my head, writing it in about the time it takes someone to read it.

Other scenes require a great deal of preparation. The one that’s killing me right now is one where the main characters in the story have to go before the duke. They’re really only going to talk to the dude for a couple of pages, but even so, I need to know what the palace is like, how his court is comprised, who’s in his inner circle, etc. It took hours of preparation just to get all that more or less sorted, and even then, I have to reference every damn sentence I write against all the notes to make sure I am being consistent. It’s like pulling teeth.

Sometimes, in situations like this, my mind even cooks up excuses on its own. I spent hours the other day trying to decide if this desert hamlet should be east or west of the city the hero comes from. I pondered the direction of the sun, how shadows fall at different times of the day. I sketched little maps and pondered them. Then I ended up not even saying in the story which direction it was. It was irrelevant.

And yet a tangent worth hours of my time.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, blogging is just me making an excuse not to write for real…

Posted on June 3, 2008 at 8:22 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Writing
3 Comments »