This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “hesitation,” comes to us from Wendy. Check out her blog here!
Hesitation has to be my biggest downfall. It happens on different levels.
At the smallest level, take this post, for instance.
I got the title and the first two lines ready to go almost two hours before I finally started writing what was going to be in the body of the post.
At the most critical level (of my writing and publishing career), I tend to hesitate before I publish a book, putting it off—putting off the steps to getting ready—sometimes for months, leaving me to scramble at the last minute to get everything set to go.
I’ve often thought this might be a form of self-sabotage.
And maybe it is.
But the core reason behind my hesitation is the NEED for everything to be perfect.
And it never is and never will be.
What sucks is my hesitation causes me actual physical pain.
Before I started writing this post, my heartburn was extremely painful. Now? After, like, four minutes of writing? It’s almost gone. In fact it was gone before I started writing this paragraph, but now that I’m thinking about it … (Stop thinking about it, Linda. It’s entirely stress-related.)
So yeah. I wish there was a cure for hesitation.
For perfectionism.
And for worrying about screwing up when I’ll never know if things will go smoothly unless I actually start doing them.
This woeful post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “confusion,” comes to us from Dan. Check out his blog here!
Now that I’m in my sixties, I expect to get confused occasionally. Or at least my younger self expected it.
And yeah, sometimes I do.
But when I sit down to analyze why, I realize that if I’m focused on something, I don’t get confused at all. It’s when I’m thinking too many things at once.
And yeah, maybe I used to be able to juggle a thousand things in my head and not forget why I walked into the kitchen, but in my defense, I think I’m juggling three thousand at the moment.
Take my writing for instance.
In the space of ten and a half months (November 1, 2023-September 18, 2024), I wrote three novels in a series—approximately 271,000 words total. Now I’m editing two of them at the same time.
Which makes sense because although they’re about different but related main characters, the second half of Book One takes place at the same time as the first half of Book Two.
It’s all about the details. If it’s snowing on January 12th in the first book, I have to make sure it’s snowing at the same consistency on January 12th in the second book.
If information comes to light on the common enemy in both books, I have to ensure everyone is on the same page, both literally and figuratively, twice.
You can see where that might be confusing at times.
Thank goodness I have a program like Plottr to help me keep track of the timelines.
Would I have been able to keep track of all that without a program back in my twenties? Maybe. But I didn’t have all the responsibilities I have now on top of juggling two books simultaneously.
A thousand things vs. three thousand.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
This enterprising post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “emphasis,” comes to us from Dar. Check out her blog here!
Among the things I still struggle with most when I write a novel is how much emphasis to put on a detail.
There’s a fine line between not mentioning something enough for it to come across as important to the story and mentioning it so much that the reader says “Enough already” and throws the book across the room in frustration.
At least that’s what I’d be tempted to do when I read a book with too much repetitiveness if I wasn’t reading on a device.
One of the most repetitive comments (there’s a twist) I leave for my editor when I send her my book is “Have you read this before?” Pertaining to details, not the whole book.
Because I’m far too close to the story to see my mistakes.
What it comes down to is emphasis is important. Repetitiveness sucks.
This geographically correct post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and the prompt word, “personality,” comes to us from Astrid. Check out her blog here!
In a way, I’m jealous of authors who can plot and plan a novel or an entire series before they start writing. I haven’t published a full-length novel in a year because I’ve been busy writing three of them in a continuing series, and I’m afraid to release the first one in case the details in the third one require a change at the beginning of the overall story.
All this because I’m a discovery writer, or a “pantser,” as we often call writers who write by the seat of their pants. I love being a pantser—finding out what’s going to happen in my story and to my characters as I write is both fun and fascinating.
Many times for me, an entire book will start with a single personality. And often, that personality will come to me from listening to a character’s voice and seeing them in my head.
Because my stories are character-driven, personality is essential to pin down. Personality can often help me to decide what situations to put them in.
In Creamed, my latest release for instance, Tom comes to town and inadvertently steals Mary’s business at the Christmas market where they both have booths. If not for Tom’s strong feelings on the subject of fairness (he hates unfairness), the story might have gone a completely different way.
In other words, the personalities of characters have a lot to do with conflict and its resolution, and therefore, plot.
And that’s my lecture story structure for the day. Not sure how I came to this point, but here we are.
(Seriously, I didn’t plot this post ahead of time. 😏)
This wandering post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
Why is it that I can write three books with a total of 280,000 words and can’t come up with one- to three-word titles for them?
In other news, look for my three new untitled novels coming out this year! 🙄
If you would like to participate in this prompt, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a pingback, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post, and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
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As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a pingback from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.
3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.
4. Add our lovely badge to your post for extra exposure!
Once upon a time … You’d think this would be easy for me, wouldn’t you?
I tell stories all the time.
And yet, every single time I write one, I ask myself, Is this autobiographical? Am I writing about me?
I don’t want to write about me when I write fiction, so I try to steer away from it.
But I think it’s a common thing for writers to wonder. How else can we write aside from relaying what we’ve observed about the world? And how much of those things, those experiences, has seeped in to make us who we are?
I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).
An article about bamboo.
I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.
Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that it seems miraculous. Some species can grow as much as three feet in 24 hours. (I picture the analogue of my son sprouting up to my height overnight and it gives me the shivering willies.) Yet many people who try to grow bamboo get frustrated and give up and never see it achieve that growth, because the first five years of the seeds’ growth is entirely underground.
Imagine it.
Day one, plant a seed.
Day two, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day three, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day four, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day five, water, check for growth, nothing.
Wash, rinse, repeat, until …
Day 1828, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day 1829, water, check for growth, nothing.
Day 1830, water, HOLY SHARKNADO THERE’S A FOREST OF BAMBOO IN MY BACKYARD.
That’s a heck of a lot of days, a heck of a lot of faith, and an ungodly amount of patience and tenacity: an untold amount of time spent doing a simple but time-consuming thing (watering the plant every day) with not an ounce of feedback that the thing you’re doing is useful, worthwhile, or even productive in any way. For all you know, on day seven the seeds died and turned to dust in the ground, and you might very well be wasting your time. But if you don’t keep working, the seeds will definitely wither and crumble.
And this is a little like writing, innit? Or maybe a lot like writing. Actually, make it a metaphor for whatever you like, but I think it’s particularly fitted for writing. Because we writers do our work underground. We have the inspiration to write and plant that seed deep in the loamy earth of our minds. We enclose ourselves in our batcaves, our secret chambers, our dark enclosures isolated from all human contact, and the words spill out of us like so much irrigation on the soil of our precious ideas. For days, weeks, months we toil in quiet and fear and clandestine hope that our pet projects, our favorite characters, our brilliant plot lines, will take root and spring forth, filling the world with color and the sweet scent of our inspiration … but we have no idea if it’s going to happen. Whether that field of bamboo represents simply getting published, or penning a bestseller, or even just finishing a draft, the finish line can feel so far away it might as well not even exist.
We see the bamboo fields that have sprung up in other authors’ backyards, and that gives us hope–I could have that, too!–but it simultaneously fills us with doubt–will it happen for me? And we don’t have a master gardener standing over our shoulder, telling us to keep our heads down, keep watering the seeds, keep fertilizing the soil, and all will be well. We don’t even have that five-year guarantee that bamboo has. For some, it may happen faster: they’ll have a backyard full of bamboo in the space of a year or two. For others, it may take longer: their garden may take a decade or more to sprout. For still others it may never happen.
But regardless of the speed at which the garden grows, I think any gardener will tell you that it’s not all about the end result. Sure, the rows of tomatoes and the baskets full of roses are the ideal, but even without them, the work is not a total loss. Because the work is therapeutic. Kneeling in the soil, breathing the unprocessed air of the outdoors, feeling the sun on your back, working your fingers in the dirt, plucking the weeds… the work means something in its own right. Likewise, forcing the words onto the page, exploring the characters, designing new plot lines… it means something. Yes, it’s about making the seeds grow, but throughout the process, you learn, you grow. And then, on day 1831, whether your bamboo has pierced through the ground striving for the sky or not, you come back ready to water it again. And again. And again.
Trust in the knowledge that the work matters, whether the bamboo grows or not. You have to be your own feedback. You have to fling your vision forward into the future and visualize those steely shoots springing out of the ground now, starting today, and let that vision sustain you, because the fruits of your labor are just going to be invisible until they happen.
Trust in the bamboo. Keep watering.
Thanks to Linda for allowing me to guest post while she’s out. For more drivel like this, check out my homepage over at Pavorisms.
Starting in a few days, your regularly scheduled operator will be unavailable for a couple of weeks, and she wanted to leave some of her regular features in capable hands to make sure you felt warm and snuggly knowing that your regular Stream of Consciousness Saturday posts would go uninterrupted.
But we all make mistakes in life, and she picked me as one of the stand-ins. You’ll be getting a prompt from me in a couple of weeks, and if things really go sideways, you may end up seeing some of my regular content here as well. If that happens, I recommend you just keep your head down. I can’t guarantee that there won’t be baby bodily fluids involved. I, uh… I brought a tarp. I left it somewhere around here. Just huddle up and make a friend, okay?
Am I qualified to stand in at a writing blog with a readership far beyond my normal, tiny circle? Here’s the skinny: When I was in high school I wrote prolifically. Awful short stories, horrible poetry, a really ill-advised novel, and a play that was maybe not so terrible. Then I stopped. I don’t know why. I think I knew my writing was about as appealing as a pile of badger droppings and decided I’d do the world a favor and stop dropping those little nuggets.
Then, in college, I picked it up again. This time, I stuck to plays, and I wrote a pretty good one and a handful of not-so-bad ones. A couple of them saw production at high schools and community theaters, and though I never made a dime off any of them, they convinced me that maybe I wasn’t entirely devoid of talent. But then I stopped again. Probably that badger droppings feel again, possibly the disillusionment with my chosen field of study, likely a total lack of confidence.
A few years have passed, now, and something inspired me to pick up the pen again. Starting in March of this year, I began the transcontinental trek of adapting my pretty good play into a full length novel, and peppered that with an (almost) weekly short story and a heck of a lot of reflection about writing and parenting and running, all of which I do with dogged regularity. Something clicked, and now I can’t stop. As a result, I’ve got a manuscript of about 96,000 words (yeah, I get a little obsessed with word-count) that I’m waist-deep in editing, and, oh, probably about 150,000 words of drivel not unlike what you’re currently reading over at my blog, Pavorisms. (If you’re curious about what I tongue-in-cheekly refer to as my capital “W” Writing, you can find my collection of short stories there as well.) In short, it’s been a productive year. (Whether or not any of what I’ve “produced” qualifies as readable, entertaining, or fit to print on toilet paper remains to be seen. I mean, badgers “produce” poop, as we’ve already established.)
So, uh, am I qualified to be here standing in for Linda? Meh, maybe not, but as Jules said in Pulp Fiction, “I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.” I don’t know what herding sheep has to do with the current situation, but it’s Samuel L. Jackson speaking there, and we all know you don’t fargo with that motherfargoer.
At any rate, I’ll be providing you with a prompt at next week’s end and maybe a few tidbits besides. In the meantime, if you felt like heading my way and giving me a read, that’d be super, too.
And, of course, my thanks to Linda for handing me the keys to the car while you’re out. I promise that I will kick it into reverse when I’m done with it and run all the miles back off before you get home. Don’t worry about the dents in the chrome, those will buff right out. Also, I don’t know anything about the scratches on the side panels, the crack in the windshield, or the bits of gore in the grille.
lindaghill.com 