Are my lists making me procrastinate more?
I read a scary headline today at a website I half-heartedly follow. It went like this: News Flash - To-Do List Fans are Closet Procrastinators. The first point is that this is certainly no news flash for me, and I’m not even a closet procrastinator - I think I’ve made it quite clear to many (and especially on this blog) that my procrastinating is a highly-developed skill. And yes, my obsession with to-do lists is linked to this.
So what can I learn from this non-news-flash? Well, as they quite rightly point out, sometimes to-do lists become long and un-do-able, making you feel overwhelmed and unlikely to do anything at all. I’m sometimes guilty of this and sadly, one of the first things to go when I can’t keep my list under control is my fiction writing. (But the first of all is the housework!). It’s a reminder not to make my to-do lists unmanageable, and to be aware that when a list gets overwhelming I should stop and do something about it. Rewrite it, prioritise it, and be nice to the fiction-writing side of it.
As for the housework … well, some things just don’t need to be on a list, do they?
Visual inspiration: My wall of photos
When I started thinking about my second novel, to be set in Bratislava, I knew I wanted to do things differently from the first time, when I set my novel in Japan.
I set off writing about Japan with barely a look back at my diaries, notes and photographs of my time there. I did this deliberately, because didn’t want to make the novel too autobiographical and I was worried that digging too much into my own records of those experiences might do that. If I one day decide to revise that novel again, though, I can imagine gathering up photos and notes and using them to add some more “authentic culture” to the story, perhaps.
But this time round, the plot itself is not really at all related to my experiences in Bratislava, it’s much more a product of my imagination than anything, and is still evolving. So what I want is to be able to incorporate the “landscape” of Bratislava into the book, and these are less clearly embedded in my head than some of my experiences from Japan.
Recently I got a bunch of photographs from my Bratislava days printed up from digital so that I can create a collage to hang up in my study. I’ve got pictures of major landmarks like Bratislava Castle and Novy Most (the ugly bridge), snowy photos from a cold Bratislava winter and pictures showing the apartments, streets and shops in the residential area where I lived (and where, curiously, my characters also live!).
I’m hoping that this collection of pictures will have two effects. Firstly, that I’ll be able to use them to create more detailed and interesting descriptions of locations I use in the novel, and secondly, that seeing these pictures will provide me with sparks of inspiration - memories from my year in Slovakia that might also have an interesting place in the story. I’m also going to go back to my diaries and emails from that time to get extra details to help develop a good sense of place. When I’ve made some more progress with writing this novel, I’ll let you all know if the photos have helped or not.
Listening to the Perth Writers Festival
Yes, it’s a fair while back that I actually went to February’s Perth Writers Festival but I’ve only just got around to catching up on the promised podcasts of the sessions. At the time, some of the session organisers had promised that they would soon become available online to listen to, and in February and early March I checked the website regularly to find them so I could listen to the sessions I hadn’t been able to attend, and review those I had. But they didn’t appear.
It must have taken a few weeks - or maybe months, I have no idea - but the festival people now do have a bunch of sessions now streaming online. Yay! I’ve just started listening to them and they’re well recorded (so far) and almost as interesting to listen to here in my study as it was down at the university.
Unfortunately, there are just 11 sessions being broadcast (out of a much bigger number) but there’s still some quality stuff to listen to. #4, Secrets and Lies, was one of the most interesting sessions I attended. These will be handy things for me to listen to when I’m looking for a bit of inspiration but don’t have a writers’ festival at the ready. (Although having said that, I’ve started keeping track of other festivals around Australia to try to tie in some holidays with some inspiration!)
Another 24-hour short story is finished
When I got up this morning, I knew the topic for this season’s Writers Weekly 24-hour short story contest would be waiting in my email inbox. In previous contests I’ve been excited to get to it straight away, but somehow today my enthusiasm had waned. I read all my other email first and checked Bloglines too before finally reading the topic - in summary, it included a strange object in an old toy shop, and a word limit of 900 words, nice and short.
My strategy from here was to let this topic sit in my subconscious while I did some other blogging and took a shower. Unfortunately, my mind kept coming back to an old episode of Inspector Rex where a murderer uses his doll shop as a front for getting in the lovely women he wants to rape and kill! So getting to another angle on the topic wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.
But hopping in the shower, as always, got the inspiration flowing. I decided that for this contest, the plot – and especially a good ending – is the most important factor. So this time I wanted to plan out a good plot before I wrote anything. I think that by focusing completely on getting the plot right before doing any actual writing was good in this case – because (especially being time-limited) if I write real parts of a story I tend to feel wedded to it and reluctant to throw anything away. So I brainstormed a few ideas then turned that into a bit of a plot summary and left it to sit for a bit - I had a lunch and an afternoon tea to get to.
When I returned in the evening, writing the story turned out to be relatively easy. Whether it’s good or not is another question, of course, but I kind of like it, and having a completely structured plot (and a short word count) made it flow easily. Obviously it’s still, really, just a draft, but that’s all you can do in a 24-hour contest (especially since the time difference to the United States makes mine effectively a 12-hour contest instead). So, mission accomplished, short story complete. Each time this contest experience is a little bit different, but at least I’m always learning something.
Randy Pausch, the ultimate inspirer, inspires me too
And before you say it, yes, inspirer is apparently a real word (I wasn’t sure). If you’re the 0.0001% of people who haven’t been following the story of US lecturer Randy Pausch, then give yourself a gift by watching his famous Last Lecture on YouTube. It’s all about making the most of life, achieving your childhood dreams and dying happy.
Because unfortunately that’s the news today, that Randy Pausch has died after his pretty public battle with pancreatic cancer. But he and his family have got to be proud after his inspirational speech - he first gave it in September last year at Carnegie Mellon University, where they have a tradition of inviting speakers to imagine what they would say if they knew it would be their last lecture ever - buzzed around the world on TV and the internet and created a book as well.
But to bring this whole story back to me and my fiction writing - the story and the way that Pausch describes chasing his childhood dreams and succeeding is definitely inspiring. His lecture doesn’t patronise and it doesn’t make achieving dreams sound unrealistic. And of course, hearing those things from a man who knew he was dying gives us all a kick up the backside to do better in our own lives.
One of Randy Pausch’s childhood dreams was to design at Disneyland - it sounds like one of those totally unrealistic ideas that a child would have, akin to becoming an astronaut. But he achieved it, along with a bunch of other things. In comparison to that, my childhood dream of being a published writer seems relatively easy to achieve. Which means I’d better stop blogging and get on with it.
Melbourne mind meltdown
I was looking forward to exploring Melbourne last week to refresh my mind with a few new sights and sounds. And my Melbourne trip definitely had this effect, but surprisingly almost a little too much. I can’t imagine now how my brain used to survive when I was travelling for months at a time through places far more exotic than Melbourne, because all the stimuli on this trip were enough to almost cause my mind to meltdown: I was so full of new impressions and ideas.
While I was there (in fact mostly on the plane ride over) I read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
- I am standing in a field that is full of grass.
- There are some cows in the fields. … etc
… to what he sees:
- There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and white.
- There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible hours and a church with a square tower and not a spire … etc
This incredibly keen observation is not quite how I felt in Melbourne but it was certainly in this direction. Perhaps because I had writing in my head, I planned to be inspired and I was looking for travel stories as well, and my brain was trying to soak up as much as possible. It’s quite a nice feeling, actually. But I hope I’m able to capture all those ideas and inspirations and get them into words and stories and good fiction.
Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing provides a few sparks
It may not be fiction writing, but being able to attend the Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing while I was in Melbourne was still useful for my fiction writing ambitions.
The biggest message I got from attending the Saturday sessions of this festival was the one I usually get whenever I see writers speak: published book writers are totally normal people, just like me. (Friends might say writers, and me, are rather abnormal people, but the point remains the same - the people who can walk into a bookstore and see their book on their shelves are not so different from me). This is always a refreshing message to be reminded of, and something that I suspect might not happen in other kinds of arts - say you’re an aspiring musician and you go to a concert, the musician’s equivalent of a writers’ festival, seeing your hero on stage performing probably doesn’t do much to convince you that they’re normal and just like you.
And the second message I took away from this festival was that the stories I have to tell are definitely interesting enough to be told. I saw a few sessions by writers who have published travel narrative books about their experiences travelling in various countries, and I felt sure that my experiences also lived up to them - and in some case, might even be more interesting. Whether I tell these stories as a travel narrative book or use them to inspire my fiction, I do feel reasonably confident that I have something worth saying, something that other people will find interesting. And that’s very reassuring.
Creative naming might okay in books, but …
I’ve been having fun using the Behind the Name site to generate names for characters recently. When I wrote my first chapter for my Bratislava novel, I needed a Slovak girl’s name, a Korean boy’s name and an English girl’s name, and after plugging that information into the website and clicking a few times to reject the first suggestions, I found names that suited, without having to use names of people I know - I find it hard to separate a character from a real person if I’ve used the name of someone I know!
But while I was generating names, I was very careful to try for names that are normal. I have a real problem with abnormal names and in 99% of cases I don’t think they have a place in fictions. They also don’t have a place in real life, even though I read today that some parent named their child Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Eek. This was in New Zealand - which says to me that the same thing could happen in Australia - but the poor child (who’s 9 now) went to court to be allowed to change her name, and won. According to the report:
Judge Murfitt added that he was dismayed at New Zealand’s trend of parents giving their children wacky names.
Kids have been called Number 16 Bus Shelter, Midnight Chardonnay and Violence. But officials did block Sex Fruit, Yeah Detroit, Stallion and Cinderella Beauty Blossom.
One couple had a bid to call their twin children Fish and Chips blocked but the names Benson and Hedges for twins were allowed.
I’m dangerously close to beginning my rant on how some parents should be shot for the names they give their children, but I’m going to make a big effort not to and instead return my thoughts to choosing names in fiction. My big take-away point here: I’ll strive to choose names that are memorable, but not too unusual, unless the character is particularly unusual. My feelings about what kind of person has a particular name will differ from my readers. More important, I discovered while choosing names for characters in my Japanese novel, is giving the characters names that are easily differentiated - nothing worse than reading a book where you get confused about who’s who.
Creativity is written in the stars
My horoscope looks good this week. Now, I usually only glance at a horoscope page as an example of creative fiction, but when it’s good, I’m happy to believe it. Some astrologer in a local paper is predicting me a four-star week and in particular, a good week for a fiction writer:
Classy Venus moves into the sector of creativity where it puts a glow back in your life and glint in your eye.
Good to know. I don’t have a clue what “the sector of creativity” is when we’re talking astrology, but I’m glad there is one and I’m glad I’m going to be under its influence this week.
But seriously … I wish I could work out what exactly does influence my periods of creativity. Sometimes I’ll be full of ideas and writing energy for weeks at a time, or some days I’ll not really feel up to it at all - and it doesn’t always tie neatly in with some factor like tiredness, how busy I am or how stimulated I’ve been by inspiring sources. I’ve been especially taking notice of this recently because I’ve sometimes been really surprised by just how creative I can be when I least expect it - under time pressure, for example, or when I’m really tired. But it doesn’t always work!
I’m starting to turn in circles here, but my point is simple: I wish I could have a tap for creativity and turn it on at will, but I don’t. Perhaps just taking advantage of my creative moments as much as possible will inspire them to happen more often. Or I perhaps I just need to seek out more good horoscope reports!
Am I ignoring short stories?
Observant readers will know that I have a category tag especially designated for short stories, yet I rarely mention them. Surely short stories are an important part of becoming a fiction writer? So what’s going wrong?
For a start, I haven’t read a short story for ages. I do go through phases where I rather enjoy one of those “Best Short Stories 2005″ kind of collections, but even then I do only read about half of them - unlike novels, I have no qualms about breaking off reading a short story half way through.
I used to think that writing short stories must be good training for novel writing, and that’s why I read them and tried to write them. But I just don’t seem to get that much pleasure from them. As I reader, for a start, I need the longer engagement that a novel gives you - there’s time to learn to love the characters and to really care about the different things that happen to them in the course of the novel. If I read a novel I also have a vague chance of remembering something about it afterwards, but with a short story this is virtually impossible. And while writing a novel is an absolutely monstrous task compared to writing a short story, it somehow seems easier to me.
However … I could be wrong. Maybe I’m just lazy. You know, like a sportsperson who only likes one aspect of their training - swimming laps, say - but ignores other things, like eating well. So after my trip to Melbourne I will head to the library and get a few more collections of short stories and try to do them justice. I also have the Writers Weekly short story contest coming up next weekend - a chance to write the only short story I’ll write for another three months, until their contest comes round again - so the short stories category will at least see a little action.