Writing about Writing

Accountability and the art of going it alone

/ sarahelund / 1 Comment

When I first moved in with JT, he suffered an adjustment of perception. We had been together for years, and it had been firmly established that of the two of us, I was social and talkative, and he was quiet and introverted. After we became “housemates,”  he was forced to become acquainted with a side of me rarely experienced before.

Here’s the deal, reader. I like being quiet. I like being alone. In my spare time, I gravitate to activities that allow me the freedom to embrace those states of being: reading, running, painting, baking, Netflix binges and, of course, writing. I love working at a task – or indulging in a less goal-oriented activity – solo, in my own time, free of judgement and the expectations of others.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m also on a competitive sports team and several committees. I can play nice with others, and I really am social. However, it’s nice to create or complete or achieve or experience something purely for myself, without it being coloured by the influence or opinions of others. That is, it’s nice to create or complete or achieve or experience something purely for myself… when my will is fully charged, when I’m full of excitement and inspiration and creativity, when everything is going right.

The question is, when everything is going wrong, how do you stay accountable to yourself?

There are roughly a zillion articles, books, life coaches, and talk show special guests touting their mantras on persistence and visualization, trying to answer that question for us all. Maybe one or many of them have a foolproof way to make me more driven, focused, and self-motivated. If so, I haven’t come across it.

I struggle with follow-through in writing. I’m strong at the beginning, but when the thrill of newness wears away I’m guilty of abandoning stories and characters to the permanent limbo of a computer folder to grow old but never to maturity. Poor stories. Poor characters.

So how have I learned to stay accountable?

#1: I get honest with myself. Why do I want to write whatever I’m writing? For accolades? To enter in a contest? For a friend’s birthday present? To become rich and famous? Because I’m genuinely interested in where the story is going? I don’t think that any of these reasons are bad (unrealistic or shallow, maybe, but not bad), but some have more value than others. I’ve found the amount of effort I put into a project is directly proportional to the reason I’m doing it. If the reason is less valuable, then I need to find another reason (as simple as “if I finish a first draft of this story, I’m buying brand-name groceries next week” or as significant as “Finishing a first draft of this story could be the most important thing I do for this entire year, and if I fail, it will be indicative of everything I attempt in 2014”).

#2: I give myself a break. Some people work well with a scheduled writing time or set number of words every day. But some people don’t. My relationship with structure is complicated. I enjoy rules. I find they not only give me something to work within, but also through and around. NaNoWriMo taught me that structure (1700 words a day or else) certainly can have positive results in my writing. But come December I took a break. I turned off the laptop and ignored my draft for a couple of weeks. When I felt like writing again, I did it for the pleasure of it, for the creativity, and with the happy looseness of freedom from the taskmaster of my NaNoWriMo contract. I’ve discovered that writing on a strict schedule is beneficial for me only if I can see an end point. Otherwise, it saps the joy.

#3: I get social. In the end, sometimes it’s not enough for me  to be accountable only to myself. When I was in a writing group, they expected me to show up with new material every week. If I tell my parents and sister, teammates, or best friends about something I’m writing, they immediately ask when it will be done, and when they can read it. This keeps me going sometimes when I need a kick in the ass that self-bribery, threats, or white-knuckle will power just isn’t providing. (JT isn’t good at this, and I’m thankful for it. Sometimes I need someone who will just blindly support me in whatever choice I make… even if it’s quitting.)

Will my rules be a foolproof solution for your own struggles? Probably not. They only work for me about two-thirds of the time. But maybe the main theme of each (honesty, joy, support) can be customized to fit your needs.

Much love,

S.E. Lund

Because grammar.

/ sarahelund / Leave a comment

Is it odd that I am a lover of grammar rules, but I also appreciate creativity, evolution, and innovation in language use? 

I think there is a difference in saying something like “Will you borrow me a pencil?” (my personal #1 pet peeve) and denominalizing words (as in the article “You’ve Been Verbed“).

The first example is giving a word its exact opposite meaning. It’s not creative. It’s lazy. The speaker knows that they mean lend, but don’t use it because… I don’t know. The kindest explanation I can think of is a kind of Jedi-mind-trick idea of framing the question as if the action has already taken place (because nothing can be borrowed until it is first lent). Or maybe some folks really do think that “borrow” and “lend” are synonymous. Regardless, I prefer innovations in language to come from more deliberate consideration. Innovation can make things simpler without being lazier, if new meanings are extrapolated from the original definition of the word.

One of my favourite positive examples of this is highlighted in The Atlantic’s article “English Has a New Preposition. Because Internet.“

It discusses how because, traditionally a subordinating conjunction, has developed a new prepositional meaning. A highlight of the article (other than the hilarious tweet at Donnie Whalberg) is, “[…]the usage of “because-noun” (and of “because-adjective” and “because-gerund”) is one of those distinctly of-the-Internet, by-the-Internet movements of language. It conveys focus […] But it also conveys a certain universality. When I say, for example, “The talks broke down because politics,” I’m not just describing a circumstance. I’m also describing a category. I’m making grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time. I’m offering an explanation and rolling my eyes—and I’m able to do it with one little word. Because variety. Because Internet. Because language. “

Now go write something. Or read something. Or clean under the bed because you and I both know it’s been a while.

S.E. Lund

How 10,000 hours is a useless goal for writers

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Today I read an article on Forbes.com, in which the author assesses Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours of dedicated practice” to become an expert in the frame of becoming an expert writer and finds it… well, ludicrous.

Despite the name and driving inspiration of this blog. I agree with the article.

The central argument is basically this: if you’re writing about 216 words an hour – as the author of the article does – applying Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, means that your first 2.16 million words (equivalent to about 21 novels of 100,000 words each) are basically, um, trash. And if you haven’t figured out how to write a good book after 21 novels… then you will probably never figure it out.

For me, however, it’s not as literal of a goal as all that. The number is aspirational, and (as the author of the article concedes), being a novelist is about more than putting words on a page. The purpose of this blog is to experience hours upon hours upon hours of writing, whether that’s through reading, writing, editing, research, discussion about words, or whatever else might fall within the blog’s loosely defined raison d’être.

Also I’m not keeping track of hours. Let’s be honest here. That sort of eye-on-the-clock attention makes everything way less fun.

A journey to excellence

/ sarahelund / Leave a comment

Dearest reader,

You’ve stumbled upon a blog – or actually, a blogger – with an ambitious goal:

I will write (creatively) for 10,000 hours.

“But why would you do that?” you ask.
“To become an expert.”
You look at me, head tilted, one eyebrow raised, and shake your head slightly.
“That sounds boring,” you say. “Why not do something more entertaining for 10,000 hours? Like juggle. You could become the best juggler the world has ever seen. You could make juggling into more than a clown’s favorite activity. You could make it a sport to be revered.”

Now, I’ve got to admit that you have a point. To be the world’s foremost juggler, maybe the best juggler in history, would be super neat. It would certainly be more interesting to watch than writing. Plus, as I can already juggle (four balls on a good day), I have a solid base on which to build.

But my ambition is not the be the world’s foremost juggler. I just want to be a really, really fantastic writer. What’s more, I enjoy writing more than juggling. Love it.

So even if no one but my patient boyfriend, ultra-proud mum, and occasional writing group ever notices the difference between hour one and hour 2500, this is something I want to try.

WHY 10,000 HOURS?

If you’ve read Outliers by Malcolm Galdwell, you may be familiar with the 10,000 rule. Basically, Gladwell puts forth the idea that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the magic number for true expertise in an area. I’m sure we could all come up with examples of great achievement without this kind of time expenditure, but it is an interesting and inspiring idea that if a person has an average amount of innate talent in an area, the difference between being good and being great is simply a matter of dedication and willingness to work.

THE JOURNEY

I think the digital age allows for a host of opportunities for creative writers. There are sites for posting short stories and poetry, and there are sites dedicated to helping novice writers through writer’s block, with inspiration, with editing. There are online communities which allow you to write collaboratively with complete strangers, and there are blogs, which can function simply as publishable journals. The time we live in gives us dozens more opportunities for sharing, connecting, and writing publicly than ever before.

Part of what this blog aims to do is test out and share those opportunities with you, as I work my way from hour 1 to hour 10,000.

You might ask how long it will take to get there, and that is a reasonable question. Let’s do some math. If we break this down into reasonable chunks – let’s say one hour a day, every day, without exception – it will take me approximately 27.4 years. Two hours a day will take about 13.7 years, three will take 9.15, and four hours of creative writing per day will take 6.85 years.

Basically, sit down and strap in for the long haul, folks.

One down.

Sincerely,

S.E. Lund

Unretreated.

/ sarahelund / Leave a comment

Hi ink splAters.

One of the things I was most looking forward to in my last semester of college was the opportunity to go on my very first writers’ retreat.

For those of you that don’t know, a writers’ retreat is an event where a selection of writers (or aspiring writers) get together in a cabin in the woods or the mountains and sleep, write, critique, receive criticism, and drink. Retreats can last anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks, and authors I’ve talked to are fairly evenly split on their usefulness.

Anyway, the idea of going out to a cabin somewhere with some of my favorite literary-minded classmates and two Writers-in-Residence to talk about writing and books (and in my case, faeries) for a couple of days sounded like a fantastic time.

And then the news came. We were no longer able to go away for the retreat. Instead we would have it at school over the weekend. *Shudder* Nothing, I thought at the time, will make it feel like I’ve paid good money for extra homework more than having this “retreat” at a place at which I spend 6 days a week from September to April. But I had already committed to it and I was still eager to have some of my book read by an author who earns a living from writing books.

The weekend turned out…bittersweet. Though it was fun to do a reading on the second day at a local bookstore, and then go out and gorge on cupcakes afterword in celebration, the group of us felt that we had missed out on that bonding and camaraderie that would have grown from being forced into one another’s company miles away from civilization, unable to escape.

I’ll talk about the author I worked with soon.