Hitting The Reset Button

I like sticking to a plan. I put a lot of thought into them, examine the angles, read the terrain, make educated guesses based on statistical analysis (that’s what I call my bias assumptions) and line item my reasonable and incontrovertible conclusion. But then everything goes to shit and I have to hit Reset.

When I began chronicling my ascent toward fame, infamy or madness (time will tell); I believed I had a good, well-reasoned grasp on what I was attempting to accomplish. My objective was simple: get some practice in and some much needed real world feedback. But in my pursuit of that noble goal, I took a strange detour. I began obsessing over quantity, not quality. My initial posts came quick and easy. I had them loaded and raring to go. I was off to a fast start and then my momentum hit a wall. Now, this is to be expected but it ran up on me so fast that I began beating myself up over it and frustrated self-flagellation does not allow for inspiration to flow.

I was forced to make an uncomfortable choice. Scale back and lose face or dump out whatever half-baked idea just so happened to crawl into my mind at that moment and say, “Good enough.” It took a sadistic “pep” talk to get me to relent. Like I said, I really enjoy sticking to plans.

But I am nothing if not adaptable and though the sting of not meeting the expectation I set out for myself is significant, the adjustments I’m making will ultimately, I hope, lead to a more genuine and consequently, more rewarding experience.

The biggest obstacle in this was my raging Ego. I’m in perfect agreement with quality over quantity but as the missed deadlines began to mount, I became increasingly rigid in my thinking that simply ticking the box on the “To Do List” was more important than what I’m trying to accomplish, which is to come into my own, to be authentic. Fucking rookie mistake. That’s all it is. I’m a newbie who got caught up with maintaining the appearance of consistency instead of actually being consistent. These are the bumps in the road, the boilerplate pitfalls most novice dive headlong into. So when you fuck up; adjust. It’s not about being error free but about learning the lesson in each failure. If you ever find yourself in a position like mine, don’t hesitate to pivot and take a different approach. Our best-laid plans can propel us forward when all goes well or cement us in our current state when shit goes sideways.

As for me, I’ll keep plugging away at these keys and remind myself that no matter how difficult things become, I can always blow up my arrogant little plans and start over from a new angle.

Reset.

The Style of No Style

If it were up to me, I’d live and die in loose fitting jeans, a Pink Floyd tee-shirt, black hoodie and steel toe work boots. And yes, I have gone to the beach dressed like that. But this post isn’t about my complete and utter lack of fashion sense but about my lack of writing style. See what I did there? No? Me neither; it’s late and my foot hurts but follow me for a while.

My writing has always been off the cuff. Up until recently, I would write sans outline, typing by the seat of my pants, not knowing where I was headed or what I would find when I got there. It’s an exciting method but I would always write myself into a corner, get frustrated, scrap the whole bloody thing and start over. Thankfully, I’ve remedied this but my nomad system of writing has also informed my style or lack thereof.

The most accurate description of my style would be scatterbrain but I like to think of it as flowing. I like to move from place to place, weaving a tapestry. It’s probably an awful thing to read but there is just so much story to tell that I often go off on side tangents. It’s difficult for me to pin down if this hodgepodge of prose would really be that confusing since I haven’t written anything in this style to the end. For all I know, it might actually work.

I’ve been writing a couple serials to figure out if this drifting type of storytelling is as horrible as I imagine it to be. I’ve given myself free reign to experiment. I’ll be exploring my natural method, learning its tendencies, honing what works and overhauling what doesn’t. At the end of it, I hope to figure out what my style and voice actually are. It’s been an interesting process so far and it’s alleviated a lot of my perfectionism.

I’m not entirely sure what a “writing style” would be. I’ve read several books from the same author and each book felt different and unique. Anne Rice wrote both Memnoch The Devil and Christ The Lord Out of Egypt but I can tell you right here and now that each book has a vastly different style. Same with Mario Puzo. Mario wrote the masterwork The Godfather, which is one of my favorite books of all time. But he also wrote Omerta, which left a lot to be desired. Did Puzo lose his style? Or is style just some marketing term ascribe to the discernible patterns in an author’s writings? I think the subjective nature of storytelling is going to leave that one unanswerable.

So where does that leave me; the lowly aspiring writer? I don’t know. Maybe there’s no such thing as style and I’ve spent far too much time thinking about it. Or maybe my style will be whatever the hell it will be and that’s the end of it. No epiphany. No greater understanding of the method or how I came to the conclusion. Just one voice speaking clearly. And entertaining-ly.

Episode One of my first serial will be posted February, 15th, right after Valentine’s Day. So if you’re sick and tired of your sweetheart and want to jump in on a quick tale, drop on by.

Bird in a Blizzard

It’s faint at first. And random. That’s the best feature. I never know when a story is going to start. I could be walking the streets of Downtown Los Angeles or stuck in its endless traffic and a voice will begin, faint at first, to tell me of a strange occurrence or confess something it dares not utter to anyone else or explain to me how what went wrong wasn’t their fault. But it’s always a whisper. Never much more than that at the start.

Then the chase begins.

If I absolutely cannot pull myself away from whatever bullshit I’m doing, I’ll jot down what the voice is saying and come back to it at a more appropriate time. This always sucks because I can lose its cadence altogether by the time I arrive at a suitable writing surface. But I’ll follow its remnants in the swirling of my mind, like listening for the chirping of a small bird in a blizzard. It’s a difficult task but once I’ve located the sound of that fleeting murmur I can begin to transcribe its words. It’s here when I’ll discover if my pursuit has been in vain. These voices can be so compelling but the majority lose their strength as I sit alone with them, as I ask them questions, the who, what, when, where and why. It’s natural. Not every voice should be given life. And some come to tell a fragment of a much larger story, one which will require many more voices to complete, while others only speak up to remind me that this, the sound of an unfamiliar revelation, the thrill of the chase, the speechless confession, is why I love writing.

This is the only process I’ve known. A process I didn’t choose for myself. I find it wonderful. To take in hand such a fragile form and grant it absolution with every keystroke. If only everything else in life were as simple.