Fear and Loathing in Marquette, Michigan

“I had seen how my ego and desires would inevitably lead me toward writer’s block and self-loathing, how worrying about critical responses or negative reactions would eventually dry up whatever creative flow I had managed to bring forth.”

-          Dinty W. Moore, The Mindful Writer

Are you a creative person? Here is a sure-fire way to find out. Make something. Write something. Draw something! Create a piece of yourself for everyone to see. Then take a good hard look at it. If you feel a crippling sense of doubt, self-hatred and horror, then you are definitely creative.

This disabling fear of failure occurs every single time I write. Sometimes it occurs immediately as my finger taps that final period on my keyboard, other times —and this is worse—the bone shaking anxiety ensues after a day of feeling empowered as an author and just as I'm about to try and relax. 
 
What is it with this utter self-loathing that individuals who choose creative paths feel? I cannot think of a single imaginative person with whom I’ve had long conversations with who hasn’t expressed some form of this intense uncertainty. We all wonder if we’re failures—misguided stranglings with a misguided, egotistical outlook on our own work. We second guess each supposed success and, if only for a moment, we feel happiness when our work is praised, it soon evanesces like dew on a hot morning. I’ve rolled this question around my mind for weeks now, and have come up with only two ideas: mental illness that behaves as both a creative person’s muse and mischievous gremlin, and the giant ego that makes us human. No one wants to fail, but no one, especially a writer, wants to live without doing what they are passionate about. But, we often do, and why? Because failure is terrifying.

When I first started my novel, I believe I was maybe a quarter of the way through my first draft, Kathryn—writer, editor, and general wonder woman—asked, after praising me for actually managing to get my story onto paper, “How do you keep,” she paused, tactfully searching for a word, “from hating yourself?”

 I didn’t have an answer for her, and gave her the only advice I’ve ever consistently given: “Just push through.”

I’ve spent a lot of time lately asking my fellow friends and fellow artists about this because I am heuristically certain that we all go through it. John Broadway, a new friend of mine, informed me that he’s been working out an idea for a novel in his mind for nearly six years and has yet to get a line written down on paper. It’s silly because simply from our conversations it's obvious that he has a brilliant way with words. What’s stopping him?

My oldest friend and a talented digital artist, Terra Maki, presented me with this gem she found online after I broached the subject of creativity and feeling like a failure.

Ah yes, the beauty of creation—followed by the crushing realization that we are shit. I asked my mother, an amateur artist/painter, about her thoughts on this phenomenon. Her assured response: “I’m not self-loathing; I just know that most people are better than me.” 

It’s only natural that we should feel this way when we’ve invested so much into our creative outlets and turn to face the world, only to see a swarming sea of sharks—friends clamoring over friends and cut-throat competitors willing to turn their backs on any sort of moral compass just to get ahead of anyone who might make the mistake to get in their way. Some days, it seems as though everyone and their neighbor is writing and competing for those coveted publishers. This reason alone is why I cannot bring myself to join any writing circles on the internet, which is encouraged by many books and essays on authorship. I’m simply too afraid of competition.

When I look at what appears to be a ferocious ocean that is the competitive world of professional authorship, I wonder, how can I hold onto my integrity as a person, live by my code of ethics and still succeed?

This is where I, and I venture to make the guess that most aspiring authors, feel lightheaded consider giving up.

But can you imagine our success if we help work with one another, put ourselves out there to be scrutinized and challenged? What if after putting in all of our time and hard work, we work harder, and we refuse to give up? Rearrange this angst and turn it into an avenue for greater accomplishment?

We might succeed. And why not? If we refuse to be stopped, is there any other option?

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My Three Lives

I am three people. Maybe more; it’s hard to know for certain. Through the days I participate in each life and wonder how long I can be each person without blowing my cover.

I am like a double agent, living these lives and avoiding their intersection. It’s not easy, and it isn’t that I like it or that I’m sure it is necessary, but this is my life.

I am a nursing student at Northern Michigan University. I’m not sure that I fit in, but when I think about it, I don’t think anyone feels like they do. NMU is made up of many nontraditional students. I am not the oldest student, I am not the only mother, and, if I investigated enough, I’d find that I don’t have the strangest political views. 

I spend my days on campus looking up drug information on my kindle and searching through pages of notes on pathology before learning the proper way to give a geriatric patient a bed bath. Being a nursing student is a juggling act. But so is my entire existence.

I am the mother of two little girls, beautiful blonde imps with strong personalities. I wash their smudged faces, make them dinner, read them books, and play dinosaurs on the dubious-smelling carpeting in their bedrooms. Their father and I work together to get them into bed, struggling with their wriggling bodies to brush their teeth. When they are comfortably tucked in for the night, falling asleep as they “read” to themselves, we sneak off to enjoy some alone time. This life I know, and although I’m never certain I’m doing the right thing, it’s the life that I feel most certain in. The map I’ve plotted with my intentions for life has changed with every passing year, but my first strong memories include wanting to be a mother. There is much to be said of watching your genetic material grow into a full-fledged person.

I am an aspiring author, who fights off hordes of doubt with the tip of a pen. I consider story ideas with every moment of silence and behave, underneath it all, much like a researcher as I watch the behaviors of the people in my other lives. I underline sentences in books that steal the breath from my lungs:

“The weapons that my enemies raised against me are venerated in hell as holy relics;

Plans that my enemies made against me are preserved as holy texts;

Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell’s sacristans and placed in a vessel of silver and ivory.

I gave magic to England, a valuable inheritance…”

                                                        Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell

I devote an hour a day to paper and feel empowered when my pen glides across the page with great, inexorable ease. This is the life I feel the least confident in, but it’s the life I love with all my soul.

Someday these lives might all come together, and I can be one whole person instead of three, but perhaps not. Maybe I’ll just become more people instead, and treat each life as a research opportunity. After all, “Writing is a socially acceptable form ofschizophrenia.”

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Understand My Characters!

It isn’t easy, but I try to live by the philosophy that a person should never claim to know anything, especially when it comes to another person’s actions. When someone does something to us that we see as “bad,” we can be quick to attach an explanation behind their behavior, usually to exaggerate their poor disposition. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that people’s lives are not a single thread forming from a single loom. There are thousands of variables that come through our lives each and every day that affect our conduct.

As I wrote my first draft, I frequently worried that people would take a few specific actions committed by my characters and label them immediately as bad people. In this black and white thinking, I’m reminded of a passage from the Christian Bible, Matthew 7:16-18. 

“…By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick fruits from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Every good tree bears good fruit and every rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit…”

There are many interpretations of this particular passage, but I tend to understand it as an unjust way of thinking. If the metaphor here is that good people do good deeds and bad people do bad deeds, and that by these actions we can know a person, I believe it fails. Of course good people do bad things! It happens all the time; we snap at our children after a long day, we cut others off in traffic because we’re in a hurry, we send questionable text messages after having a few too many alcoholic beverages, and yet we still believe that we’re ultimately good natured. And, after having lived a few years, most of us are aware that bad people can occasionally do good things as well. Just spend a few minutes reading the business section of your local paper. You’re sure to find a business person who has donated money to a good cause, all the while paying off lobbyists to fight against equal rights. Most pertinent to this blog, it’s important to remember that blatantly bad or purely good characters are simply boring.

Still, even knowing this, I worried that my future readers would jump to conclusions. To compensate, I wrote long paragraphs after the incriminating events to try and explain away any negative actions. This created boring and redundant lulls in my work.

Eager to bring down my word count, these lulls were the first areas I tackled. Before I deleted them I asked Kathryn if people would understand my characters without these parts. She laughed at me and said, “Yes!” I was, apparently, spoon-feeding my readers. For example:

“…the receptionist didn’t notice, or ignored, Erin and Thomas as they jogged up the stairs, understandably dodging the five dollar entry fee.”

Oh, goodness. I look at this now and cringe. In this scene, the main characters have recently become aware of a scandalous plot taking place right beneath their noses and are being followed by a mysterious man. My fear of snap judgments caused me to, unnecessarily, clarify that it made sense for my beloved characters to dodge an entry fee.

Well, being able to identify these sorts of sentences for what they are—mistakes—shows a level of growth and maturity as a writer. I consider this an accomplishment. Learning what is and what is not spoon-feeding can be difficult, and as much of a balance as walking a tight rope. The difficulty to avoid this practice is not an excuse to allow it, but a reason to continue evolving. As aspiring authors, we have to remember that using any sort of spoon-feeding to get our points across is, in the end, insulting to our audience and bad authorship.

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Congratulations to Amy and Christina!

The winners of yesterdays contest have been chosen!

The winner of "John Dies at the End" is Amy B.!

The winner of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" is Christina H.!

It was such a pleasure to see all of the entries. Thank you very much for entering. The winners will be sent their books this week! Thank you for reading!

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Would You Like to Win a Prize?

“Literally, a Blog,” is nearing ONE THOUSAND visits! To show my appreciation, I'm offering a prize to my wonderful readers. I'll be giving away two books which have been purchased from the lovely Snowbound Books in Marquette, Mi.

 To enter, email me at Skeskey@nmu.edu with your name and address (for shipping purposes) and when the blog count reaches one thousand visits, I'll randomly select two names and declare them winners! As a bonus, if you suggest a person enter and they tell me you referred them, I'll give you two extra entries! Share away, please, as it will only give you more chances to win. So post on Facebook, tumblr, twitter, etc!

Prizes:

“John Dies at the End,” By David Wong

In honor of the soon to be released second novel in the series (This Book is Full of Spiders), I'll be giving away "John Dies at the End!"

“Eats, Shoots, and Leaves,” By Lynne Truss

"A bona fide publishing phenomenon, Lynne Truss's now classic #1 New York Times bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes its paperback debut after selling over 3 million copies worldwide in hardcover. We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with"


You have until one thousand visits to enter! I’m not sure how long that will take. I suppose it all depends on the popularity of the next few posts, but I’m guessing it will be within the next few hours/days. Enter now! Good luck!

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Thirteen and Twenty-Three

When I was thirteen, I wrote roughly three-quarters of a novel. It was, well, plagiarism. It took three stories that I was in love with: The Lord of The Rings (I was, somehow, going to marry Aragorn, whether he was fictional or not), A Wrinkle in Time and the animated Disney movie Atlantis. In fact, I can recall re-writing the scene from The Fellowship of The Ring, where the Kings of Old run across a dirt path while the hobbits hide in a ditch. My story didn’t have hobbits, but otherwise the scenes were unmistakably similar.

When I realized, a year after never finishing the book, that it was little more than a work of fraud, I was ashamed and mortified. I immediately deleted the file. Now that I've re-opened my writing hobby (which I’ve done several times since then), I am regretting my disregard for what I have grown to see as an exercise in writing. I may have been copying plot pieces from other works, but I was practicing descriptions, action scenes, and learning how to fit ideas into a cohesive plot. It would have been a nice exercise to go back and look, if only to see how far I’ve come.

There were many parts of my youthful story that were original, but I can remember struggling quite a bit with them. I think my issue was not with the plot, but with character development and how it relates to the overall piece. When I write now, I usually am inspired by an event, either a real event that I've experienced or just something that popped into my head—usually as I lay attempting to fall asleep at night. After procuring inspiration, I think of the characters, and instead of writing the course of action I want them to take, I set aside time to consider the actions the characters would take.

Although I tend to write plot-driven tales, staying true to the personality of my characters is, arguably, one of the most important skills in any sort of story-telling. Often, when I put a character into a situation, the plot develops purely in response to the personality of said character.

When I wrote as a girl, I never thought much about the character’s personality other than the superficial. I may have said a character was bold, but in order to make a scene that I wanted to write occur, I would change the character’s personality to fit. That was a mistake, but immaturity results in a lot of those.

Everyone has different ways of making it easier to stay true to their characters. I tend to create character sheets before I begin writing. This way I can flesh out the person as a whole before throwing them into events. I can also go back and make notes on these sheets while writing to keep track of any essential character trait that has been affected by the plot.

I’ve found that by throwing a few well-rounded characters, especially characters I’ve grown to love, into an event, an organized plot will form on its own. In doing this, my own manuscript nearly wrote itself.

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