Throwing the Lantern
Dubrovnik, November 3 through 23, 2019
The first morning, as I take my shower, the tinkling of the water in the pipes sounds like music. After the first morning, I don’t notice anymore.
My hotel room looks down over the Adriatic Sea.
Blue water crashes against the hotel, four stories below. I sit on the balcony in the morning and look over the water, and at night I leave the window cracked so I can fall asleep to the sound of sea-waves.
My original hotel reservation was canceled, because the place was going to close for the off-season halfway through my visit. Tablet Hotels rebooked me into their sister hotel, The Excelsior. It’s a nice hotel; good location, great views. A little run down, but very relaxed.
Old Town Dubrovnik is an ancient walled city, paved with limestone.
The walls are 80 feet (25 meters) high, where they’re highest; they tower over the city, which is only a few dozen square blocks.
The summer was tourist season. In November, it feels like an empty museum. Most restaurants are empty. After a couple mediocre meals, I ask the Michelin guide where I should eat, and more than half its recommendations are closed for the season. More places will close throughout my trip, till I’m cycling between about four restaurants.
On Fridays, a tour bus or boat will land, and there will be huge crowds at the drawbridge gates into the city, or strolling around on top of the walls. It only takes about twenty slow-moving, picture-taking tourists to completely clog up the gates into the city. I can imagine how much harder it would be to get around if this were peak season.
The weather alternates between beautiful sunny blue skies and heavy rain. The rain makes the limestone in the Old Town slick; some parts, especially the east entrance, through which I usually arrive, have bricks angled down, and you have to walk carefully to avoid falling on your ass.
When I’m returning to the hotel uphill through heavy rain, it’s clear there’s no drainage on these ancient streets; the water is running down in a 2 inch (4 point something centimeter) deep river. Several times I get back to the hotel with soaked shoes and socks, and have to disassemble my shoes into their several components and leave them out on the floor to dry overnight. (Each shoe contains a metatarsal support orthotic with an arch support glued on, two heel lifts [like Donald Trump has, but for reasons of gait correction instead of toxic masculinity], and a cushion that I lay on top of all of that hardware to keep it from cutting into my skin.)
Old Town was a major shooting location for Game of Thrones, particularly the west gates, the walls, the fortress around the corner, and the staircase Cersei was forced to walk down while nuns (septas?) rang a bell and said SHAME, SHAME.
Cersei’s staircase is a landmark I use to get to a cliff bar called Buža Bar, on sunny days. (It tends to be closed on other days, and at other, unpredictable times. It’s open only when they feel like it.)
You look down over the sea from the cliffs and drink over-priced, watery beer (the guidebook claims the slogan of Ožujsko beer is “You can drink it,” though I cannot find real support for this claim). The staff is extremely relaxed, and sometimes take a while to notice that you want a beer or want to pay. They’re just hanging out. And that’s fine. So am I.
There are street cats everywhere; they come up and stare at you intently while you eat, hoping you’ll toss them something. If I reach out my finger like God reaching out to David, they’ll reach out their nose, and then I can pet their heads. I realize I should probably wash my hands after that, but I don’t. They beg. Some of them seem to enjoy being petted, rather than just putting up with it. None of them rub up against your leg.
Mostly, the food and beer are not great, but the wine can be. I recommend Dingač (a kind of Plavac Mali, a broader category, which I also recommend), which reminded me of Port in its texture and structure but is more savory than sweet. There is also Pošip, which is almondy and interesting but also a white wine, and thus hard to get too excited about, because white wine is trash.
There is one Michelin Star restaurant, with a plum location inside one of the giant limestone walls of the eastern entrance hall, called 360° Dubrovnik. Inside the restaurant space, there was a staircase down to a metal bar door with waves crashing through it.
They have a tasting menu, which I enjoy, and an à la carte menu, which I enjoy when I come back the second time and want variety. They close for the season on November 15.
This country was part of Yugoslavia for the first twenty-something years I was alive, so there’s a bunch of remapping I have to do for older memories; not that many American 1980s stereotypes hang off the name “Croatia.” Do they still have Yugos? I didn’t notice any. I did notice a van painted with a Confederate Battle Flag, which annoyed me, and started an interesting and treacherous conversation on the Facebooks that revealed a bunch of interesting things. The short version is that it’s common symbology in Eastern European nations with a poorer south dominated by a richer north. Which is interesting, but it’s still gross.
The language is Slavic. They give the letter “r” a lot of respect, allowing it to serve both as a consonant and a vowel; e.g. there is a vineyard named Grgič which we would probably spell Gergitch, and Serbs are called Srbs. It’s Indo-European, but sounds unfamiliar to me, aside from places where it was similar to Russian words I learned in Red Dawn and the Hunt for Red October; “yes” is da, and “goodbye” is dosvedanja.
Swimming
I’m teaching myself how to swim the front crawl, in the hotel pool. I’d learned it once before, but I was in my single digits, and have completely forgotten all the mechanics; I only remember that you swim with your head in the water, looking forward, and somehow rotate your head up for air on the regular.
A posture where you can’t breathe through most of the motion seems daunting, but I like the fact that you swim with your face forward and you can see where you’re going. The one skill I still retain from those swimming classes in my single digits is the ability to hold my breath for a long time, so I figure I can work out the breathing thing.
The pool is probably about 15 meters long; I measured with my feet, for which I don’t have a good measurement, but I got 81 foot-lengths, and I’m guessing my feet are about 7 inches long each.
I take notes every day on as I teach myself to swim from YouTube videos. See Appendix I, or don’t.
How to Write Novels Like an Engineer
November is National Novel Writing Month, an event I have been observing since 2002.
This year was a breakthrough. To explain why, I’ll have to come clean about how it’s been going for the last several years: badly.
In November 2002, I was living in Berkeley in a small one-bedroom house. I hadn’t had a job in several months and I was running out of money.
A friend introduced me to National Novel Writing Month, which challenges you to write 50,000 words during the calendar month of November. Ideally what you write sort of looks like a novel, but the focus is on quantity, not quality, and that’s brilliant: it gets you past thinking, planning, trying to be perfect, and into just writing. You will throw a lot of what you write away, but you’ll discover things you would never have written otherwise.
The first year, I wrote about half as much as the target, but it was still revelatory. I made some mistakes. The most serious mistake, I now realize, was that I set up a webserver so that people could read my story as I wrote. That meant I was thinking critically as I wrote, because I was thinking about what people would say. Even more damagingly, people did say things, and I would think about what they were saying and it would affect my writing. That was why I failed, the first year; I was too hung up on feedback and thought myself into a corner.
But I wrote a 142K story — and I’ll get into this in a moment, but the way I was writing, a 142K doc means I literally typed 142,000 characters, whereas an empty document in a modern word processor might be several megabytes. That’s more than could have fit in RAM on my first computer, and it was a story I found interesting enough to keep thinking about.
Second year, 2003. One of the other premises of National Novel Writing Month is every year is supposed to be a new novel. That way, you’re not hung up on consistency, your own expectations, or other things that might slow you down. You can just sit down at a blank page and churn stuff out. I started ignoring this rule the second it was possible to do so (except in 2016).
In 2003, I rebooted and rewrote the same part of the story I’d written in 2002, and it felt better and more natural, and I have been continuing that story since then (again, with the exception of the 2016 excursion).
I write in a text editor called “vim.” Once you know how to use it, it is the fastest possible way to write and edit text. That said, even among people who know of it, most think of it as a terrible and outdated and clunky way to write. This is because of its learning curve, not because of its capability; the people who complain about it never learned how to touch-type commands as little bundles of letters and digits that can make paragraphs move around and words change at the speed of thought.
(There are also people who think that it’s better to write in a way that involves coding little text-editing functions in LISP and typing commands that involve pressing five keys at the same time, complex chording sequences that stretch the fingers in ways that stress the tendons. I am sympathetic to their beliefs while also disagreeing with them in practice.)
I write fiction in vim as plain text, and I’ve written software that can render that into webpages and other formats so that it has all the basic features you expect to see in normal fiction: bold text, italics, chapter headings, section breaks, etc. If I were to set this up today, I would be writing in Markdown, and using pre-existing software to render it, but I started before Markdown was a thing. Some day, I’ll write a translator for the existing files and switch over. (Later: “some day” turned out to be January 2020, though I haven’t switched all the existing documents.)
I keep these files under revision control, a technique from software engineering, which allows me to save checkpoints, and look at differences between what I’ve written now and what I had at arbitrary checkpoints. For example, if I’m curious when I introduced a character, I can go back through older versions and pinpoint the day and what else I added at the same time, and if I’m curious when I search-and-replaced the name of a character to something else, that’s easy to pinpoint as well. Google Docs or, probably, Microsoft Word (if there is still a piece of software by that name — nobody around me has mentioned it in decades) have their own ways of doing this. It’s just less precise, and harder to write little analytical tools around.
In practice, during National Novel Writing Month I submit (save a checkpoint) once a day, and the submit comment is usually just the current word count.
Another feature my system has, which is also borrowed from software engineering, is called “comments.” I can start a line of text with a special symbol, ‘#’, and everything else on the line is ignored by the system but visible to me as I’m writing, so I can leave little notes to myself, like a reminder to go back and explain how this character ended up with this tattoo, or a note to remind myself that I don’t like the direction this plotline is going and I should rethink the character’s motivation if I want them to end up at all likeable.
Around 2004, I started using comments heavily, not just for comments about the story, but as warm-up, to start writing when I couldn’t figure out what was coming next in the story. E.g. “Today I went to a party, sat in a corner and resented people, and there’s a way in which it’s somebody else’s fault. Here are my thoughts.” Eventually I started separating this kind of comment out from the story, into a separate section, or some years a separate file, and I called it the “garbagehole.” It is fine to write anything in the garbagehole. The bar is nonexistent. And sometimes, on a hard day, I need that in order to start writing.
National Novel Writing Month is based on a word-count target, so I counted the words in the garbagehole as well as the words that were actually for the novel.
Year over year, the ratio of garbagehole to novel grew and grew.
Between 2014 and 2018, I was averaging nine times as many words of garbagehole as novel. My worst year, the ratio was over 14. That was 2018. (It wasn’t my least productive year, though, and I was particularly proud of the title I came up with that year: The Forlorn Mother and the Cult of Morning.)
I wasn’t happy about the declining story volume, but if I hit 50,000 words and most of it was garbagehole, I was still sort of happy, because that is still a tremendous amount to write, and the garbageholes, when I’ve gone back to read them, are engrossing. Some of it is just describing my life, my thoughts, working through things; other parts are wrestling with ideas of how to tell stories, ideas about the story I’m telling, etc. Writing 100 to 125 pages of anything real feels like something to be proud of.
The garbagehole for a year could serve as raw notes for maybe 3–5 blog posts as deep as this one. That said, confessional non-fiction is like white wine: I know some people are into it, but it’s not what matters to me.
The first few years, I noticed a lot of the text in the garbagehole was about how angry I was with myself for procrastinating, or not knowing where to go with the story, or for being behind on word count. Which is particularly boring on re-read. A rule I have now is: be kind to yourself. I will allow myself to write things that are hard to read, or painful, but not things that are cruel.
50,000 words in 30 days means fractionally more than 1666 words per day. As much as the word count goal is artificial, I find that when I’m behind, I feel more desperate, less creative, and more focused on writing whatever I can to drive up the word count. When I’m ahead, I’m more willing to experiment and play around.
My writing set up: I arrange my screen so that most of it is taken up by the text editor, and there are little windows on the side continuously calculating and telling me my word count. This year, I had separate windows printing novel word count and total word count (including garbagehole).
This year, I tended to have my text editor split into four panes: this year’s installment of the novel, the garbagehole, the story bible (names and backgrounds of characters, timeline of major events, descriptions of various cultures, technology in different time periods, etc.), and this year’s additions to the story bible (for new characters, new settings, etc.).
For word count purposes, I would treat this year’s story bible as extensions of the garbagehole — that is, the words didn’t count as story words, but did count towards total words.
I have replaced all of the lowercase letters in the files visible in this screenshot with the letter “f” so as to avoid leaking details about the story. (This is the same way I disguise the story to upload it to the NaNoWriMo.org website to validate my final word count.)
Yearly Word Count Metrics and Thoughts About Writer’s Block
Here’s the length, in number of words, of the amount of story I’ve written, broken down by year. (That’s total word count minus comments, garbagehole, etc.)
- 46481 2006: The Country of the Stars Falling
- 43642 2005: The Ibex and the Aurochs
- 26021 2002: The Heresiarchs
- 24031 2003: Auto-da-fe
- 22632 2019: The Courtship of the Jaguar and the Chrysalis
- 22393 2007: Till the Moon Burns us Away
- 12878 2010: The Sea is Cold and the Sky is Empty
- 12485 2012: The Dance that Ends the World
- 8862 2011: Of or Pertaining to the Seething Outer Madness
- 7772 2009: Feynman Diagram Over a Fleshpit
- 7683 2008: The Garden of Grieving Memory
- 7637 2015: The Law of Milk and Horn
- 4816 2016: To Sleep in Turpentine
- 4360 2017: The Vault of Faith
- 3919 2014: Chooser of the Slain
- 3169 2018: The Forlorn Mother and the Cult of Morning
- 2998 2004: Litany for the Eldest Battle-Queen
- 559 2013: Cocaine and Sweetmeats, lama sabachthani
I started out strong, but volume of actual novel words (“payload”) has been crashing for the last decade, while garbagehole generation has become more reliable — until 2019, when I wrote more actual novel than I have since 2006.
So this increase in garbagehole, and decrease in payload, was that writer’s block? Probably.
And where was this writer’s block coming from? It’s hard to say with certainty, but two explanations jump out, and both are probably true.
One: when I started, I was unemployed, and then for the next few years, when I was at my most productive, I wasn’t particularly invested in my day job. But then work started to become really interesting, and used up a disproportionate amount of my headspace, and I started not having the energy to write in the evenings when I came home after a long day. This is why in 2014 I started batching up vacation and taking it in November and traveling, but even then, as the metrics show, the writer’s block held on for quite a while.
Two: the story stopped being a throwaway story and started being The Story I Had Been Working On Since 2002. And every year, that weight was heavier, and it meant that it was harder to sit down and write something without being afraid I would disappoint my past selves. At every moment, I was completely aware of this risk, totally aware it was happening, and decided to do it anyway and to not regret it, because part of what I wanted to teach myself to do was write a long story, over a long period of time. The only way to learn the thing I wanted to learn was to force my way through this barrier.
The fact that I got stuck turned into part of the learning process, although I can only say that now that I feel like I’ve pulled out of the tailspin.
Operationalizing
Establishing a Routine
Since 2014 I’ve been taking Novembers off and traveling to focus on writing. (Return on investment: not so great till this year, from a noveling perspective. Still worth it as a way to vacation.)
Novembers have become a window into an alternate life.
I’ve found that it’s important to establish a routine. Figure out when I’m going to wake up, exercise, shower, how long it takes to get to restaurants, etc., and therefore figure out when the reasonable timeslots are going to be to do my writing. Am I going to be writing in my hotel room, in the hotel bar, or am I going to take my laptop with me into town and sit with it open in cafes, restaurants, cliff bars?
Without a routine, I end up pulling the laptop out after dinner, feeling a little desperate, and I don’t enjoy writing that way as much.
This year, I ended up borrowing yet another technique from engineering, called Pomodoro (yes, that’s Italian for tomato), in which you do little 25-minute focused bouts of work, before which you decide explicitly what you’re going to do, during which you allow no interruptions or distractions, and after which you explicitly make yourself stop and take a break. (At least, that was my impression of it; I’d never done it before, and I didn’t put a ton of effort into making sure I was doing it right.)
I wear a Fitbit which wants me to get up and walk about a block’s worth of steps every hour, so the enforced breaks were a good time to get some steps in. I didn’t use the Pomodoro Technique every day, or even every time I was getting good stuff written, but it was a useful way to put bounds around how much time I spent futzing around.
Writing-related Things I Ingested This Year… not always for the first time
I’m not a huge Stephen King fan, but I really like his philosophy of writing, which boils down to: you’re not making the story up, you’re giving the story space in which it can tell itself to you.
(And then this ties into one of my other favorite aphorisms about writing, which is that the first draft is you telling the story to yourself, and the second draft is when you tell it to others. I totally believe this after how the first couple years, where I let people read the story before I had told it to myself and their well-meaning comments derailed me.)
Another writing paradigm divides the mind into an editor, a writer, and a creative unconscious. The editor judges, analyzes, rips apart or sharpens existing text, but cannot create. The writer tries to balance the editor and the creative and emit balanced text; this is who writes your emails, which are only going to get one draft. And the creative unconscious is the part that should be writing your story, because that’s where all the emotion and everything that’s surprising comes from. The challenge of creative writing is holding the editor and writer at bay so the creative unconcious can play on the page.
The creative unconscious is something you can’t know, or understand, or inhabit, consciously — hence the word “unconscious.” So what Stephen King is saying is that the creative unconscious would like to tell a story, and you have to let it.
I suspect we’re born knowing how stories work, and every story we hear makes the lesson stronger. But there’s a difference between knowing how to recognize whether writing works (the work of the editor), knowing how to create passable writing rationally (the work of the writer), and being able to write intuitively (the work of the creative unconscious).
You start with an image; that turns into a change you want to see in a character; that turns into a character in a setting; and your intuitive understanding of story keeps tickling at you, telling you the part you need to go back and write down in order to set up where you’re going.
My theory is that it’s the writer that sits down to write, and the writer has to learn spells to summon the creative unconscious. The editor doesn’t get to come out till the second draft.
Anyway, as I was wrestling with re-teaching myself to write, I ended up re-reading the center section of Stephen King’s On Writing, which is his book of writing guidance.
He says: situation comes first. The characters start bland and featureless, ready to be blown by the winds of situation.
The most interesting situations can be expressed with a question starting with “what if.” The best stories end up being about the people, not the event.
The statement that the characters always start out bland and featureless was very reassuring; I’d been combing through personality type catalogs and so forth trying to know my characters before they were on the page. I liked the idea that I could trust that they would come to exist on if put in the right situation.
Lindsay Ellis
Lindsay Ellis is a YouTube creator who analyzes movies.
I try to limit how much criticism I ingest when I’m trying to write. The part of the brain that surgically slices through art looking for meaning needs to be turned off when you’re trying to wake up the part of your brain that creates art by extruding mysterious goo from your subconscious. Analysis wakes up the editor, who should be taking a nap during November.
I watched a bunch of her videos anyway.
One was comparing and contrasting Independence Day and the Tom Cruise/Dakota Fanning War of the Worlds (I’ve seen the former, haven’t seen the latter). She pointed out that for big disaster movies, September 11th was a huge dividing line. Independence Day came out after the fall of the Soviet Union, before the War on Terror. Americans were comfortable, and explosions were escapism. There was a scene where they blew up the White House, and it was played for spectacle, not horror. War of the Worlds, on the other hand, was about terrorism and asymmetric urban warfare. It presents disorientation, horror, post-traumatic stress, existential fear.
And she pointed out other examples of action/horror drawn from zeitgest fears, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers exploring the fear that your neighbors might be Communist sleeper agents.
If these big, sometimes dumb blockbuster action movies were about the fears of American society in the time that they were made, I started asking myself: what kind of story would comment on today’s fears?
My country democratically elected a transparently racist slow-witted authoritarian narcissist who lies so much we’ve stopped paying attention. He’s being impeached for something that would have taken down any other leader in history, and which he’s explicitly admitted to doing. He keeps trying to redefine truth, and it works. The thing I’m most afraid of is not him, but that his approval ratings have never dropped far below 40%. I’m afraid of the people who live in my country, and what I’ve learned about them.
There’s a growing wealth gap, and I’m on the oppressor’s side of it, living in comfort while my industry’s refusal of meaningful self-reflection hands human motivation over to engagement-optimizing machine learning algorithms. My job is to build single-minded idiot gods who co-opt and destroy a freedom they can’t understand.
Meanwhile, the scientific consensus is we have a narrow window to dramatically change everything about the way we live to avoid climate change so severe it’ll make the world unrecognizable, and the political consensus is we are going to refuse to respond to that challenge.
What kind of blockbuster could comment on those fears without literally describing the current reality? (Just climate change is easy; too many examples. I want all three elements.)
Disguised reptile people? Zombies? Vampires? Secret societies? Mind control chemicals? How do you get across how much of the fear is caused by the sheer numbers of the enemy idea living alongside you, your inability to control the gods you’re building, the realization that this is not the world you thought it was, that it never was?
Just Write
Like Lindsay Ellis’s channel, the Just Write channel is structured around analysis of movies and TV shows, but it’s more focused on using them to teach storytelling skills. I’m fond of it during Novembers because it feels constructive — giving the writer clues as to how to cast spells to summon the creative unconscious.
One video that particularly struck me was about The Last Jedi. (I know. You hate it. There’s also a video about why you do, and it explains, compellingly, why you’re wrong.)
The premise is that at root, a good story is about characters going through arcs, and a character arc really just means the character changes. But why does a character change? Because the way they were at the beginning of the story was lacking, in some way. So that points to scenes you need: show the character as they are at the beginning of the story, show them confronting the situation, in the face of which they are inadequate, show them learning, eventually show them, changed, confronting the situation and overcoming it with their new changed self.
And the video talks about how, in The Last Jedi, three different characters get compelling arcs through three applications of the same technique: surround the “arc character,” with two characters: one represents what they think they want before they go through their arc, and the other represents whet they will realize they need after they go through their arc. By bookending the arc character with characters representing the beginning and end of the journey, you can use those characters to establish the initial want, to establish the inadequacy, to have arguments that lead our arc character towards the philosophy of the character who represents their need, etc.
Mythcreants
http://mythcreants.com is a website full of articles about fantasy and science fiction. The first time I heard of it was when one of its articles, about how to avoid hackneyed rape tropes was circulating, and I appreciated both the insight and the constructivity. Most of the articles talk about common tropes in fantasy or science fiction stories that are unexamined patriarchal colonialist bullshit, but they’re also really good about talking about what you can do instead.
It feeds the writer, not just the editor.
Some time around the middle of the month, I realized that most of the time that I wasn’t sleeping, swimming, taking a shower, or writing, I was listening to podcasts, and most of those podcasts are about current events, people’s stories, and fiction criticism. From a writing perspective, that’s a mix of inspiration and of criticism; food for the editor and the creative unconscious (everything is food for the creative unconscious), but nothing for the writer.
I was excited to find that Mythcreants has a podcast, which, like their articles, is excellent food for the writer-brain, talking about ways to build stories that are less hackneyed and less supportive of dark power structures. This podcast is so obscure that you usually can’t find it through the search feature of your Podcatcher — you have to plug the URL (https://feeds.feedblitz.com/MythcreantsPodcast) into the custom “add RSS feed” button that most of them have hidden somewhere.
I do have to comment that the recording quality is low on some of the episodes, volume control and noise in particular being problems. But it feels like sitting around a D&D table [not actually my scene, but closely enough allied to my scene that it feels comfortable] with a bunch of insightful friends who are extremely nerdy about the same things I’m nerdy about, who sometimes lose it and dissolve into awkward, self-conscious laughter that I find endearing.
November 2018, the thing I was trying to figure out was the concept of “breaking a story.” As I understand it, the writer’s room of a TV show will brainstorm a list of one-liner topics for a story, e.g. “Worf gets a girlfriend,” at the beginning of the season, and then week after week, they’ll pick one-liners off this list and sit down and try to figure out how to turn that snippet of an idea into a story with three to five acts, character development, conflict, and stakes.
It turns out there is not a lot of documentation of how to do this, but there is a podcast about it, called Story Break. It’s by the writers of a straight-to-YouTube show I’ve never seen called Video Game High School, but it’s exactly the thing I was looking for: examples of how to take a thin idea and turn it into a story.
It’s three guys, and when they get excited they start interrupting and talking over each other. One of them, when he gets excited, yells out “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” which is fucking awful to listen to. Also, they were mostly writing stories with all male characters, and then realizing near the end that “it was a sausage fest” and gender-flipping a couple characters. All of which resulted in me giving it a six-month timeout at one point.
But it seems like after the first hundred or so episodes, somebody must have pulled that dude aside, shaken him till his brain was suggestible, and told him to stop telling people to shut up, and then they introduced a new catchphrase, “Bear with me,” which substitution makes it far more tolerable; it’s more like listening to a bunch of excited dorks than a bunch of jerks you want to tase.
Recently, they’ve switched the format from each episode being a complete story, to each episode being the development of one scene from a movie. The new format plus the downplaying of “shut up” have turned it back into something I’m interested in listening to.
Masterclass
http://masterclass.com has classes from Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood on Creative Writing, and from David Lynch on what I can only describe as “How to be David Lynch.” The classes are usually structured as a set of video lectures plus a PDF file that you can download to do exercises/homework on the topics discussed in each video lecture — except that in the case of the David Lynch class, the PDF was instead a bunch of stories about amusing things that have happened in his life.
Gaiman’s advice fits very well with King’s. He says first you explode all over the page, and then later you walk around the shrapnel, examine it, and figure out what works and what doesn’t. That’s first as in first draft, and later as in during editing. Given my experience during the 2002 installment of my story, where I didn’t maintain a proper separation between first draft and editing, this rung very true.
He also said: when someone tells you that something in your story doesn’t work for them, they’re always right; when they tell you what to do to fix it, they’re almost always wrong. And that helped me put into words frustrations I’ve had in writer’s groups, where I’d share my stories with people and get feedback that I knew I couldn’t act on.
In another bit mirroring both King’s advice and the National Novel Writing Month philosophy of quantity over quality, he says that if you write something, it can be improved, but you can’t fix a blank sheet of paper.
His rules for writing:
- You have to write.
- You have to finish things.
- Once it’s finished, you have to send it out into the world to somebody who could publish it.
- Refrain from rewriting unless it’s at a specific request from the editor — and don’t follow the editor’s advice if it would compromise the integrity of your story.
- When you send the story out and no one buys it, you have to send it out again.
- Start the new thing.
Atwood made an observation about Point of View that hadn’t occurred to me before. For the most part, you can transpose between first person and limited/subjective third person, but an advantage of first person is that it is so clear that the narrator is a character that in the first person you can lie to the reader.
And Lynch, well, taught me nothing, but I had a good time watching it.
There is also a class from Joyce Carol Oates, which is next on my list.
What I think I have learned
Recently, every time I’ve sat down to start writing, my brain goes down a rabbit hole. Should I plan ahead, or should I discover where I’m going by writing? Do I need to outline, or does outlining kill the creativity? And, because I’m so focused on the stupid mechanics of word count, do I count the words I write that are part of the planning, and not part of the story? Because there are many years where the planning ended up being most of what I wrote.
In the last couple years, my starting position has been to try to just write, without planning. (This is known as “pantsing,” as in flying by the seat of your pants.) I feel like I’ve tried the alternative, planning, and it’s an infinitely deep well and becomes inorganic, dead, like the story can’t actually live inside an artificially constructed skeleton.
I take an existing character from the story, maybe remind myself of the last place they were standing, and sit down and squint at the blank page hoping it will start writing itself, like Stephen King told me it would — that the story will want to be told, and my job is just to let it out, not to make it up.
But for the most part, when I’ve done that, I got a page or so written, and it was mostly my character staring back at me, sweating, stressed out, having dark nameless emotions and yelling at me asking me why I’m doing this to them and what do I want them to do?
About a month before Dubrovnik, I went to Bellingham, Washington, for my brother’s birthday, and we watched a 1995 movie called Tales from the Hood. Which is… something, and probably not what you think it is, but also, it sort of is? And it’s an anthology, with like four or five short stories packaged together in a frame story. The inner stories were short, so they were easier to analyze.
I spent a lot of time thinking about one story, about an abused child who (spoiler) saves himself with a novel take on a voodoo doll: he has a drawing of a monster who represents his mother’s abusive boyfriend, and he discovers that when he crumples up the paper, the monster crumples up in exactly the same way.
And I kept thinking about that story, and I realized: you can’t write that story unless you have the image in your head of the monster crumpling as you crumple the paper. That one image has to be the starting point, and then you can reach back and figure out the characters, and the setting, and the events that get you there, by intuition, by knowing that you’re going towards that scene. But if you sit down without knowing you’re going to get to defeating a monster by crumpling paper, and start describing a kid in school, and then, three quarters of the way through the story, hope that something surprising yet satisfying is going to occur to you to resolve the tension — it’s not going to work.
This all seems obvious; if you’d asked me, I would have told you I already knew this. But I didn’t, at least, not in an applied way. It was a solution to the question of how to balance planning and pantsing: you pants towards something you’ve planned. And Stephen King’s fundamentally pantsy philosophy worked in this framework.
For a scene, what I needed to do was capture that one interesting snatch of an image or idea, standing alone somewhere ahead of me in the story, toss it out there like a lantern, and then pants my way to it.
If I wanted to write the scene at all, there was probably some idea, some image, that had made me want to write it; I just had to put it in front of me and let my gut rediscover it by writing the scene. I’ve read a million stories; my subconscious can figure out what happens next once it knows where it’s going.
Both Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood, in their Masterclasses, kept emphasizing: you have to finish stories. Don’t just keep starting new stories. I asked myself why.
Is it just the satisfaction? If you keep starting, or keep kicking the can down the road, is it just unsatisfying and you start to lose motivation? I’m sure it’s like anything else, and you need periodic satisfaction if you’re going to keep motivated. Or is there something else? And I realized that there was something else. The different parts of a story require different skills, and when you don’t finish stories, you’re not practicing the skills that make up the back half of the process — in particular, you’re not practicing paying things off.
I thought about unpacking the phrase “this is it,” as in, this moment is the make-or-break moment for whatever I’m doing; you say it when you’re writing the conclusion to your story. And I think that writing the conclusion is it, it is the story, in a very real way. Until you’ve finished the story, you haven’t been writing stories. You’ve been starting stories, and that’s only part of the skillset.
So I took these two observations, that I could toss out an image as lantern and pants towards it, and that I needed to finish something, and I dug through my dream journal till I found something that felt interesting: the weak-voiced king of a Meso-American city-state employs a loud-voiced woman as a human megaphone to read out his public addresses from the pyramid in the middle of town, and by being his voice she slowly takes over all of his power. I spent a couple days turning that into a short story. A short story is only two or three days worth of writing, if you’re writing 1666 words a day. You could rip a lot of them out during a November and still have capacity left for a novel.
A story is made of scenes, and maybe, ideally, I’d have that image of the story’s climax driving me as I wrote the whole novel — but maybe I’d just have some image, somewhere in the future of where I was, and I could work back from that and say: in order to get there, I need to introduce this character, and then show why she’s unhappy, then throw her into conflict that will make her start heading in the direction of this image, and that handful of scenes could power me for a few days, even without having the overall plot outlined.
And again, if you had asked me, I would have told you I’d already known this. This is how I was writing in 2004 through 2006 when the story was just coming out of my fingers. But at that time, I had known it intuitively, and when I’d started to drown in over-rationalization and self-doubt, the intuition stopped being loud enough for me to hear. I had to learn it rationally, as words, not just as intuition, to make it loud enough that I could hear it again.
And then, by doing it very intentionally at first, I was able to teach myself again to feel it as intuition — to remind myself that I knew how to do this. Mental muscle energy.
From November 9 through November 11, I wrote a short story. From November 12th on, I was writing a solid one to two thousand words of novel every day.
Writer’s block, banished.
Somehow, rediscovering how to write felt very connected to re-learning how to swim the front crawl.
Is This a Life?
My day job is intellectually interesting, and there’s a strong mentorship aspect to it that makes it feel more human and humane. But the company is just continually fucking up, the leadership is weak and incompetent, it’s getting less and less pleasant to work there, and while I was on vacation, they fired some people, including a friend.
Maybe I should keep fighting to save the company’s soul. Maybe I should keep working because my extended family needs somebody with an illogically high-paying job to serve as an insurance policy if and when anyone else falls on hard times.
But it sure seems tempting after this November to think about dropping out and doing this full-time. I am fully aware that no one who has ever had to work for a living will ever have any sympathy for the choice I’m struggling with.
Appendix I: Swimming Diary
I have been wanting to check out the hot tub, and possibly check out swimming. I intentionally packed a swimsuit (almost said ambulation trunks) with this in mind, figuring a luxury hotel might have water immersion options, and in fact this one does, and I can see them from the fitness center (it has big windows and the pool level is the next one down).
But then going down to the swimming level seems awkward in itself. Do I change here or there? What do I bring with me? What if somebody’s already in the hot tub?
Eventually I decided I was just being a chicken and changed into my swimsuit in my room and unfolded the robe and slippers under the sink, which fit pretty well. It’s weird how you lose fifty pounds and suddenly you’re like the default human size and everything fits. My swimsuit, on the other hand, is too loose; I have to keep a hand on it to keep it from falling down around my ankles. So now I have the happy task of buying a smaller swimsuit.
(I also should buy some goggles, if I’m going to go in the hot tub again. I was surprised how much the chlorine stung my eyes.)
I wandered down 4 floors on the stairs in slippers, and there were in fact some people in the pool area, but they were old and slow-moving, which seemed better somehow. I set my robe and card key on a table in the corner and explored the pools. Two were wading pools; one was large enough for laps.
I slowly tried to teach myself again how to do the front crawl; I couldn’t remember how the breathing was supposed to work, and at first I was trying to breathe on every stroke of the arms, and then I realized I could hold my breath for a few strokes, then I realized I was trying to both exhale and inhale during the awkward moment when my mouth was out of the water and there wasn’t time, so I started exhaling underwater and going up just for the in breath, and then I started focusing on the rhythm of the hands and the legs, and after maybe four to six laps I felt like I was doing a passable job. I will probably double-check some materials on the internet to make sure I’m aspiring to the correct form. I was breathing hard at the end of each lap; it’s hard to say whether it was because of holding my breath or because of the exertion. I want to think it was the exertion.
There was an older dude in the hot tub, but I eventually decided he didn’t get to have it to himself just because he got there first, so I wandered over, nodded, and sat down. After a while, he got up and left.
It was in the hot tub I realized how much my eyes were burning. But they felt better when I closed them, which suggested to me that my tear ducts had the power to dilute the chlorine (though it occurs to me now that it might just have been the chlorine reacting with the air), so I made an effort to keep them open and blink until they felt OK.
I feel pretty good right now.
So if I want to do it again, which I think I do, I need to buy some smaller or at least elastic-banded swim trunks, and goggles. And trust in the fact that everything fits me better now that I’ve lost a heckton of weight, seemingly without trying. I mean, I tried, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t start trying in earnest until some of my initial efforts had “caught” and progress was visible.
I went down to the hot tub, as per my plan for the day. There were women at the front desk, but nobody in the pool area, so that was ideal. The hot tub: not very hot, but comfortable enough. The steam room was nice and hot; I was a little worried the stone bench would cook one of my calves. And then there were two shower stalls, and a mysterious button. I tried the button in both. They’re 360° showers — it comes at you from above and from the sides — and one of them is a cold shower, and the other alternates cold and hot. I was not hot enough to want either, so I didn’t step all the way in to the hot and cold shower and mostly just got the hot.
The chlorine in the hot tub is definitely intense; it’s where I noticed the stinging last time, so I wonder if it’s more intense than in the pool. That could make sense; smaller area, greater ratio of human to water, more important to sanitize. Anyway, my vision is a bit blurry now.
Also, it got dark and there was thunder and lightning. It was great. I didn’t see any actual electrical-line lightning, just the sky lighting up.
I’m going to change out of my contacts, and give them some time to recharge, assuming they’re not destroyed forever.
I talked to the hotel clerk about googles, and he said he didn’t know the name of the place, but there was definitely a store devoted to swimming across from an Orthodox Church in Old Town. He pointed at a place on a paper map and tried to give it to me, but I committed it to memory and demurred.
It was raining like the end of time.
I wandered into town, ended up at a nice restaurant, soaking wet, and quietly excused myself to the restroom to squeeze out my socks and literally pour water out of my shoes.
Once I’d finished lunch, the rain had stopped, though there was still some wind, and I squelched my way into Old Town, found the Orthodox Church, and started peering into storefronts adjacent. Sure enough, there was one that seemed to have a bunch of swimgear in it. I asked the clerk about goggles, making goggle hand gestures in front of my face, and she joked that I would need goggles after the rain filled the streets, and it was nice and we were suddenly friends. So I ended up buying goggles from my friend, and then squelching back out with goggles so that I can go swimming in my hotel’s over-chlorinated pool.
By the way, working at Google, it is extremely hard to type the word “goggle” correctly on the first try.
Went swimming. There was an older guy in the pool, paddling around slowly; he’s been there a few times now. There was a couple, early twenties; the dude seemed to know how to swim, the woman did not, and he was trying to teach her, and she did not seem enthusiastic. After several very slow laps, I got out and spent some time in the hot tub; my presence must have been inhibiting them, because from the hot tub I saw him holding her hands and walking backwards as she kicked and yelped in delight.
My feet… feel good. The calluses are soft; I can walk around on uneven ground. This must be like almost half as good as it feels to have normal people’s feet! I did draw blood during routine foot maintenance this morning, and have been wearing a bandaid all day.
I think swimming is probably causing me to sneeze. Not an unreserved good, yo.
I went swimming. I liked it. I was getting the hang of it, then I forgot the breathing thing, and then figured it out again and was again getting the hang of it. When I was in the groove, I could get across the full length of the pool with only one breath in the middle; and the panting was definitely from exertion, not from holding my breath. I noticed when I was swimming less well, I felt like I would go up for air a whole lot more times; I think this is because I just wasn’t moving that fast. I was starting to get the hang of the motion, bringing the hand into the water at a gentle angle and then pulling the water underneath me to get more thrust. Will do again, particularly depending on how my back feels tomorrow.
(I tweaked my back, overstretching during my morning exercise, and have been sleeping in to give it magical sleep healing medicine).
Today I did 18 half laps. The pool was mostly empty, which was great — aside from someone on a lounge chair, who left early on. I’m at this interesting phase where my knowledge outstrips my muscle memory, so I keep forgetting how to do one thing because I’m focusing on a different thing.
For kicking, I know I’m supposed to kick from the hips, keeping the feet floppy, rather than kicking from the knees; haven’t put much effort into that yet.
For the arm strokes, I know I’m supposed to enter the water with my thumb, with my hand at a 45° angle to the water, then do an “S-shaped” sweep under my chest to gather and push more water back. Again, haven’t put much effort into that, though when I do, I go way faster.
What I was focusing on was breathing, in rhythm. The YouTube video said: exhale with both nose and mouth; inhale with nose; basic swimmers inhale every second stroke, so always on the same side; more advanced is to inhale every third stroke. My preference over the last couple sessions was to inhale far less frequently than that, but every time I did inhale, my momentum came to a halt. So I was trying to get very regular about it: exhale through my nose as my right hand enters the water; turn my head against my left shoulder and inhale through my mouth as my left hand enters the water. I chose to exhale through nose only because when I tried to do both at once, I kept failing to exhale through my nose, and then my nose was always clogged up when I got to the end of the pool.
Also, I realized the breathing pattern is the inverse of meditative breathing, which is in through the nose, out through the mouth — but that’s focused on a much slower pace. I wondered whether the every-two-strokes rhythm was forcing me to breath faster than I really needed to, but nothing is really making my arms move that fast; I should be able to move at any speed, so long as the rotation of my head is not so violent as to disrupt my momentum.
By the end of the session, I was starting to feel solid on the rhythm, though the motion wasn’t quite right; I was still moving my head too much, creating a water-brake and slowing down the momentum, and my ear was definitely not up against my shoulder. I think maybe my arm strokes need to be closer to the center?
Also trying to figure out how to clean the goggles properly.
Oh, also the chlorine is, predictably, destroying my hair. Following a tip on the internet, I’m going to try showering immediately before swimming, to saturate my hair with non-chlorinated water — I assume that saturation doesn’t last, but it’ll take longer to get the same amount of chlorine in there. And also showering immediately after getting out, rather than after I get up to my room, which is maybe a five minute walk; I’m less clear whether that makes any real difference.
I have that nice energized burn in my chest right now.
22 half-laps today, and this is feeling more repeatable, and more automatic, to the point I can count on the mechanics to be working while I focus on fine-tuning one aspect or another. Something that seems to have been happening is that if the breathing rhythm gets off, my body panics and breaks the rhythm; my feet or legs paddle worse, my arms are sloppier, because my body is distracting me. So when I have the sense that I can trust the rhythm, it seems to put my body at ease.
One thing I’m having trouble with now is inhaling as soon as Chloe Sutton (from the YouTube videos) says I should, just as the left arm is coming out of the water. That seems to require a huge jerk. I think I’m misunderstanding something. Will have to review that video again.
Something I found to be helpful, though it may be wrong, was to allow my body to rotate more underwater, so that it was turning to my left when my right arm was underwater, and to my right when my left arm was underwater, thus making the mouth out of water a more natural motion. Chloe Sutton says: always keep one goggle in the water when coming up for air. That sounds right, but is not yet natural. And I don’t know how to keep from gulping in water — moue my mouth?
There was a couple swimming; we maintained our own lanes and they eventually got out and used the hot tub. There were no clean towels, so I just used my bathrobe, and having done that twice now, I’ve tossed it in the tub to signal to housekeeping that I would like it laundered. I’m pretending it’s an overgrown towel and follows the same protocol, and that the slippers and belt do as well.
I used the steam bath for a bit afterwards; the smell is quite floral and pleasant when you first go in, and then you quickly stop noticing it, and a lot of my thoughts turn into: breathe through mouth or nose?
My hair feels maybe less destroyed; showered before and after and then used shampoo as well as the normal conditioner. And then I used a comb, as I’ve been doing all month because my hair’s a little bit on the long end of its cycle.
26 half-laps today. I think I am figuring out the arm motion; you pretend your head is connected to your left arm, so that when it is halfway out of the water (I double-checked what Chloe Sutton had said, and I did indeed have it too early; you wait till it’s straight overhead), your head is rotating up because it’s pretend-connected to your shoulder. This does seem to work better if there’s more of a back and forth rotation, around the axis of motion, so I’m leaning into that. I have found some videos that show people doing that.
I think the breathing out only through nose is eventually going to be a problem eventually, but for now it’s working, and getting to be very repeatable.
Something I know I’m doing wrong is the kick. I need to be kicking from the hip, with the knee more locked (?), and the foot locked on the downstroke and unlocked on the up. Which makes sense because the upstroke is effortless; you relax and let the forward motion bring the leg up.
I did a special exercise for four of the half laps, not stroking with my arms at all, just focusing on the kicking motion. I am much slower, and every time I come up for air I basically come to a halt, but I think this is also a clue: if you don’t maintain momentum, you can’t stay flat to the water, and therefore it’s harder to just gently bring one goggle out of the water. (Secretive nose tap.)
Cool. I think that went pretty well. I don’t know that I need to push up the number of half laps significantly; want to fit in 30 minutes, really, rather than going to exhaustion, at least given the way I keep doing this relatively late and it’s delaying dinner.
24 half-laps; I could have done more, but thoughts of my story were running through my head. To be fair, mostly it was just the name “Nacatobari” over and over. But before I went down, I had brainstormed some basic drama between characters and it definitely got my brain running.
The rocking side to side definitely makes sense; takes some work, but looking at a video I finally got it. It means when your arm is out of the water, you’re basically shoulder-to-shoulder orthogonal to the surface of the water. You’re going to get the deepest catch and pull that way.
Muscle memory is definitely starting to fill in; it felt much more natural all round this time, though there were still a few miscues, mostly on takeoff, where I forgot to exhale underwater and didn’t figure out fast enough to just skip a cycle (I can hold my breath that long, but not when I’m panting, or operating without conscious intent).
The kicking from the hips seems hard. It would feel more natural with flippers. I think just those muscles aren’t used to doing that work?
One other thing I figured out: I can keep the right arm outstretched and glide for a while before the catch and pull; that allows me to exhale and inhale on a more natural rhythm, though I think I wouldn’t do that if trying to go as fast as I could.
Seemed even more smooth today. 26 half-laps.
One thing I was trying to do was tighten my belly (“my core”) to keep my body flat in the water; moderate but not extreme success.
Another thing I was doing was pushing off and gliding underwater in a smooth wedge shape, and then trying to transition cleanly from that into the front crawl. This is supposed to be paired to a dolphin kick, but that wasn’t my focus.
I also played around with spinning around underwater once I reached the end of a half-lap; theoretically, I could do a full lap starting at the shallow end, flipping and pushing off the deep end wall, and crawling all the way back. In practice I didn’t quite get there, especially because, even though I’m doing half-laps, my brain thinks of me as starting in the deep end because that’s where I’m getting in the pool.
Got a solid 30 half-laps in, so averaging about a minute per. It’s not really the time across, but the time panting at either end, after, that I’ve been getting down. I’m also taking off and gliding underwater better, and transitioning smoothly into the front crawl; almost no breathing rhythm miscues this time.
Felt my body riding straighter in the water, too; I don’t know if I’d say I’m keeping my core engaged, even though I keep remembering to try to try, but something about taking off from the edge with velocity, and stretching my hand farther forward, and the realization that I can glide with the right hand forward, controlling the breathing and stroke rate seem to have evolved into something that is stretching out my body.
I tried a couple backstroke half-laps as well, just guessing how the arm stroke is supposed to work. I mean, presumably the mechanics are similar in that the hand is supposed to catch the water, but the angle is harder, to get the hand facing down into the water…. Perhaps obviously, I did not consult with YouTube first.
Got in 20 half-laps in a compressed timeslot in the morning before packing.
It’s funny how automatic it feels now, like it’s not a huge rigamarole of remembering ten hard things at the same time; it’s a process that can more or less run itself, and I can use it to travel around. Like in an extremely slow motorboat where you have to be very careful how you breathe.
Appendix II: some excuses and wild claims
The description of Dubrovnik is presented in the present tense because it is more important to see it as a setting, an eternal now moment, than as a story in its own right.
The only images I’m sure I have rights to are the ones I’ve taken myself, so you’ll see more pictures during the travelogue section than elsewhere.
