Writing is hard work

Why is writing hard work?  Because we keep thinking we are making a mistake.  After all all these words are sitting out there for everyone to see.  If you're like me, you've a big sister or a fussy Aunt who knows how to do it 'right' and you're not.  

I keep fussing.  "How do I get past that 'Editor'?"

Everything I've read is that you write right through the block.  You pick up a piece of paper and a pencil -- or what ever you consider your writing tools -- and write:

Writing is hard.

Then challenge that statement. 

Why is it hard?

Because the pencil is broken or Because I don't know what to say.

What evidence do you have that you 'don't know what to say'?  

For example, "I don't know what to say about horses, because I don't know anything about horses.  I've never ridden one, I've never pet one." 

Write about five minutes talking about the things that prove you "do" or "don't" know.  Look at what you've written and circle the parts (or highlight on the screen)  words that connect to the writing project.   Then write another five or ten minutes and pick out those important points. 

Day 1

My novel I slammed out for NaNo is a piece of crap.  I don't even feel it is anything close to a novel.

I did lay out a story map....

It is far from complete.  I still have to work out the rising action and what will constitute the story's Climax.  So I need to lay some of this out.

I will have to do some "Writing Practice" to get the old brain working.

I was reading Natalie Goldberg's book and she says to do "writing practice" instead of writing about myself "journaling."

Peter Elbow says it should be "freewriting."  I will see what it will entail in the morning.

NaNoWriMo

I reached 50,000 when I participated in the Novel in a Month program.  I felt proud even got an award

People were watching.  I had writing buddies who would comment on how we were doing.

Now it's over, and I'm sitting here staring at the computer, surfing the internet and getting depressed.  I don't want to lose my momentum.

So what am I going to do?  I'm going to do my own little "Writing Program" which calls for production.

I need to list
What I need to do:
What I accomplished:
What kinds of problems I might have encountered:
What is my plan tomorrow:

OK lets give it a try.

I'm a lousy blogger

I haven't posted anything on this blog for over a year.  I started it because I thought I could look at the points I thought were important and put them down on this blog.  But the problem was that I never really felt qualified to say anything.  I didn't feel I should post anything until I had full knowledge on the subject.  Boy, that stopped me dead in my tracks.

No one follows this blog.  No one sees it.  I could just write on what I am struggling with and think it out here, and it won't bother anyone.

Right now I am trying to polish up something I already wrote.  I wrote it in NaNoWriMo and I have gone through it again.  Well I have scheduled to have my work read and now I'm scared.  I don't know if it can ever be good enough.

So where do I start?  I really need to toughen up and just do it.  Well I did.  I got this written and now I'm scared of it.  Anyone who is not a writer would think that's nuts.  But writers.  They know what I'm saying.

Back to the writing books, my only advisers.  Let's go to "A story is a Promise" by Bill Johnson.

John Le Carre's last interview with CBS

(I admire this writer so much, I just had to post the information on this interview, so I could find it again and read it again.  Originally aired March 1, 2011 on the CBS show "Sunday Morning")

John Le Carre is the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, whose work has revealed much about the world of British Intelligence for which he once worked. When he spoke with our Mark Phillips, he started things off with a revelation of his own:

"This is my last American interview," Le Carre said. "We don't have to publicize that ..."
     When we sat down to interview John le Carre, we didn't know just how privileged we were.
     He had already announced he'd done his last British interview. Now, John Le Carre says this session with us will be his last anywhere. He's stepping off the publicity treadmill.
     Twenty-two novels and eleven film and TV adaptations later, it's not like he needs the attention.
     "I'm physically in good shape," he said. "I'm going into my 80s. I want to write. I don't want to be doing the personal publicity any more."
     Le Carre has been a book and movie machine for more than half a century. If anyone knows how to turn ideas into pages and then into movies, he does.
     It's a collaborative effort where he writes, and then uses his wife Jane as his first sounding board ... a process we witnessed in a "Sunday Morning" visit with them fifteen years ago.
     His work has been turned into four TV series, beginning in the 1970s with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."
     The seven movie adaptations began with Richard Burton's "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" in 1965.
     A "who's who" of modern screen deities - Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan - have played le Carre's heros (or anti-heros) over the years. They were attracted by the ambiguity and swinging moral compass that always made his plots and characters more interesting.
     The secret of le Carre's success in books and movies is his ability not just to see the frailties of the human condition, but to involve - even play with - his audience.
     "I love the art of building up tension, and this relationship which the writer or the filmmaker has to the audience that sometimes the audience is ahead of what's going on and sometimes the audience is behind the writer - doesn't know," le Carre said. "Hitchcock talked a lot about that, and I think a lot about that. That my reader is comfortable - here he thinks he knows everything - but then reverse it and he's discomforted, and then bring him forward again."
     Now one of his classic book and TV titles, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," is being re-made into a feature film with Gary Oldman as George Smiley.
     Le Carre's spies live in a world of shades of grey - none of the good guy/bad guy clarity of the James Bond world.
    That's not an accident.
    "We had the image of James Bond," le Carre said. "He had this extraordinary life: the license to kill, all the girls he could eat and so on, and wonderful cars. He was the Superman with some kind of mysterious patriotic purpose.
     "But people knew while they were watching that stuff, people knew then about this gray army of spooks that was around."

     "Is it also in its own little way, turning Bond on its head, turning Ian Fleming on its head?" Phillips asked. "Everything Bond did, from smoke a cigarette to mix a drink to make love to women, Bond did better than anybody else. By creating a sporting environment in which the good guy doesn't necessarily always win, is that a little nose-thumb to that kind of spy racket?"
     "With the bond type of novel, the reader thinks, 'I wish I was him!'" le Carre said.
     "With the stuff I'm writing, they think, 'Oh, Christ, I hope I'm not him!'" he laughed.
     If le Carre has been anything over the years, he's been adaptable. He just about owned the literary rights to the Cold War. But he also found other universal themes: The Arab-Israeli conflict in "The Little Drummer Girl" . . . and more recently, he's found new villains in the post-Cold War world.
     Corporate villains, usually - the big pharmaceutical companies in "The Constant Gardner," and money laundering banks and the international arms and drug trade in others, like "The Tailor of Panama."
     Now he's pulled two of his favorite themes together.
     His latest book, "Our Kind of Traitor," is about crooked Russian oligarchs and their duplicitous friends in Western banking and intelligence.
     There's still plenty of villainy out there.
     "You're dealing with, how would you describe it? The immoral corporate world?" Phillips asked.
     "Yes," he replied.
     "Are bankers the villains here? Is the corporate ethos the villain here? What's the villain?"
     "I think bankers will always get away with whatever they can get away with," le Carre said. "An impartial body here that examined the catastrophe after the fall of Lehman Brothers declared our banking system to be socially useless, which is quite strong language coming from the right-wing.

     "But at the end of the Cold War in a lecture to the trainees at a spy school, George Smiley said, 'Now that we've dealt with the excesses of communism, we have to deal with the excesses of capitalism,'" le Carre said. "And I think that's what we're dealing with at the moment."
     It's not that John le Carre hasn't done very for himself in the meantime, splitting his time between London and his spread on England's wild southwest coast.
      He'll tell you the secret of his success is not to deliver a message in his books and movies, but to tell a good story.
     "It has a good beginning and a good middle and a good end," he said. "I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making."
     And that is the last thing he wants to say.
     "Actually we're putting up on the website - even I think today - saying the door's closed," le Carre announced. "This really is it."
     "How can I say thank you?" Phillips asked.
     "No, you can't," the author laughed. "You don't have to."

(His writing is easy reading and something happening on every page.)
Fiction by John le Carre:
"Call for the Dead" (1961)
"A Murder of Quality" (1962)
"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1963)
"The Looking Glass War" (1965)
"A Small Town in Germany" (1968)
"The Naive and Sentimental Lover" (1971)
"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1974)
"The Honourable Schoolboy" (1977)
"Smiley's People" (1979)
"The Little Drummer Girl" (1983)
"A Perfect Spy" (1986)
"The Russia House" (1989)
"The Secret Pilgrim" (1990)
"The Night Manager" (1993)
"Our Game" (1995)
"The Tailor of Panama" (1996)
"Single & Single" (1999)
"The Constant Gardener" (2001)
"Absolute Friends" (2003)
"The Mission Song" (2006)
"A Most Wanted Man" (2008)
"Our Kind of Traitor" (2010)
Non-fiction:
"The Unbearable Peace" (1991)
For more info:
johnlecarre.com
"Our Kind of Traitor" by John le Carre (Viking)
World Book Night (March 5, 2011) - "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold" is one of 25 books featured in U.K. promotion

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

The shape of Storytelling told by a wonderful writer
(I'm such a visual person)

The Secret to Writing in the Internet Age

This is some of the best advice to a struggling writer.
Every writer's conference I have gone to, someone brings up the problem they have with avoiding distractions.