PS: For those prepping for NaNo, and for my friends: The Voice of Doubt

This week’s NaNo prep email says:

     This week, figure out what you think your main obstacle to NaNoWriMo success will be. Once           you’ve identified the obstacle, come up with a three-bullet-point plan to overcome that hump.

My main obstacle is myself — or, more specifically, The Voice of Doubt.

I suspect there are many Voices of Doubt out there.

Maybe your Voice of Doubt says, “You can’t possibly write 50,000 words in a month” because you never have before.  You will — if not now, someday. Just keep the good work up.

Maybe your Voice of Doubt says, “This stuff you’re writing is garbage.” It’s a first draft — it exists to get the shape of the novel out on paper. You’ll refine it later in edits.

Maybe your Voice of Doubt says, “Your plot is so stupid.” I have one word for you: Sharknado. Feel better?

My Voice of Doubt says, “Why bother? You’ll never get published.” Every day, I get better and better, closer and closer.

What is your Voice of Doubt? Take away some of its power and make it merely a voice of doubt. Contradict it, or agree with it and turn it around: “Maybe I haven’t had a novel published yet, but I’ve had several academic journals published, and I’ve published a couple personal essays in liberal religious journals. And I have 28 readers on my blog!”

 (And I still want to know who you are!)

Interrogating the Dream Revisited: The Story of Inanimate Objects.

I’ve talked about “interrogating” before — a way to understand characters by asking open-ended questions. In that sense, it’s not truly “interrogating” in the sense of bright lights shining in a captive’s eyes while the interrogator wields a rubber hose.  Open-ended questions (or open questions) help pull a chaaracter’s story from your imagination.

But what about inanimate objects in your dream, or in your subconscious? Gestalt therapy, pioneered by Jung — every writer’s favorite psychologist — suggests that, in interpreting a dream, one must tell the story from every significant object in the dream. Yes, it seems ludicrous to write, “Hello, I’m a footstool. People put their feet on me,” but for a dream, that inquiry provides more insight into the subconscious pressures in your mind — objects become symbols, shorthand for meaning.

For the purpose of writing, you’re not limited to interrogating dream elements. Just as you can interrogate (ask open-ended questions about) your characters, you can interrogate objects you want to put in your story as well, to see if they further the plot or the symbolism or the scene. In terms of Chekhov’s Gun (the object you introduce early to use later), it’s good to know why a gun and not a knife, what kind of gun, who owns the gun, etc. Make your important objects count — not only as functions, but as deliberate items carrying the weight of the mood, the provenance, the scene, the sentimental meaning.

*******

This is a segment from Gaia’s Hands, where Josh has a dream which speaks of his subconscious knowledge of his girlfriend Jeanne’s inner turmoil:

     He and Jeanne stood on a small wooden stage; he wore his gi pants and hakama, but no shirt.               Jeanne wore a white nightgown with a high neck, yet the glaring light shone through it, betraying       her shape. A folding chair stood on stage, his iaito leaning against it. The chair and sword stood           between them, casting shadows.  He walked around to her and tried to touch her, but she turned           and ran. Tripping, she fell to the floor and curled into a fetal position. When he reached her, the           lights went out. “It’s my darkness,” she shrieked. The iaito began to glow like a lightning bolt.

The iaito — the proper name for the type of sword we call a “cheap samurai sword”, was described earlier.  Here is the interrogation:

Me: You’re an iaito, correct? (Yes, I started with a closed-ended question which can only be answered yes or no. This is because I wanted to make sure I was talking to an iaito, and not a wooden bokken 🙂

iaito: Yes, you are correct.

Me: Tell me about your history.

iaito: I have pretty humble origins. I was mass-produced in China, even though I am a Japanese sword, and made to look aggressively Asian. My blade is aluminum, and can neither hold an edge nor cut grass, much less humans. I suppose you could bludgeon someone to death with my blade. I have function, though, if only to hang on someone’s wall as a symbol of what they aspire to. Some people aspire to flashy combat, some to fighting prowess — my owner, a pacifist, aspires to balance his dual nature.

Me: Tell me about your owner’s dual nature.

iaito: Josh has a temper, which he claims comes from his mother. From what I’ve overheard, his father is the origin of the other side of his nature, which is calm and harmonious. Josh wishes not to abolish his temper, but to channel it, which he does through martial arts. I represent both power and beauty — Josh sees me as a reflection of himself.

Me: Could you explain representing power and beauty for me?

iaito: I am just a sword; people define my symbolism.

Me: Explain your phallic symbolism.

iaito: Uhhhh….

*******
In the book, the iaito manifests several times — the first time, Josh hands Jeanne the iaito to examine while they’re alone for the second time in his apartment. The first time in that apartment, they had sex and she pulled back from him. She says she doesn’t trust herself with it (phallic symbolism?)

Then the phallic symbolism accidentally gets exposed when Josh’s best friend Eric asks, “Jeanne, has Josh shown you his sword?”

When Josh leaves for the summer, he leaves the sword with Jeanne so she feels his presence when he’s gone, so its importance changes from phallic symbol to representation of Josh.

Josh’s dream happens over the summer, and the nature of the dream resolves eventually to Jeanne’s long-hidden sexual trauma, so the iaito reflects both Josh’s dual nature and Josh’s sexuality.

Nice destiny for a cheap samurai sword that Josh bought at an import shop.

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Me Too

My books were in the empty gym.
I had to retrieve them —
I couldn’t just leave them.
I slid back the door.
The sound of dark and silent
sang back to me,
and chilled me to the core.
I asked the darkness
if anyone was home;
there was no answer save the echoes.
I wanted to shout,
let my voice ring above the rafters
in mighty trumpet tones!
I grabbed my books and scuttled out,
alone.

********
I wrote this my freshman year in high school; a year after an event that left a hole in my memory for ten years. This poem is about the hole in my memory, and about PTSD.

Cross-training in creativity

I have been quiet lately, as I’ve warned, because I’ve just finished one of the most rewarding events of my year: Missouri Hope, the major Emergency and Disaster Management training where I live. As I’ve said before, I’m the moulage coordinator, which means I supervise a half-dozen people in making our roleplayers look suitably injured. I also moulage, usually the most complex injuries — although this year, my crew did me proud by simulating impalements, open fractures, and eviscerations on their own.

I’ve been thinking about cross-training. Cross-training is the practice of incorporating physical exercise in areas other than one’s primary sport or exercise regimen. It’s incorporating cardio with weightlifting or walking with running. Without cross-training, one set of muscles can overdevelop while another set weakens, destroying stride, balance, and strength.

Do writers need to cross-train? I think so, especially when suffering from writers’ block. There are many creative arts, some soothing, some complex, some simple. I would suggest activities that have a little bit of challenge so as not to be boring, while providing a sense of mastery, because these activities add an important quality to your life — that of flow, a type of active meditation.

I don’t want to put journaling in here, because that exercises the same muscles. But how about knitting or crocheting, fingerpainting, sketching, sidewalk chalking, dancing, karate, crafts, mask-making, improv, or — or moulage? 🙂

Feedback and Creativity

This is a quick entry before I go off to make volunteers look like victims:

Last night at the Missouri Hope (disaster exercise) training, we discussed the model of learning we use in the exercise: Put the team into an unique and overwhelming situation, step aside to see how they handle it, and advise when they get stuck.

The key, however, is that how you give the feedback is vitally important, because insensitive feedback can create problems in the disaster scenario and, worse, hinder learning and the willingness to develop further.

For example, “You could do better” is content-free, offering a judgement without supplying any advice.

Obviously, “That was a stupid thing to do” merely insults the learner and suggests they may as well not try again.

“That was good, but …” People ignore everything before the word “but”, so it sounds much like #1 above.

“Don’t do that?” Just don’t do that.

Good critiques inform the client factually of corrective actions. “It would work better here if you would …” or “Think about …”

The training session had me reminiscing to that moment in my college poetry class where I quit being creative for many years: The time my poetry professor called one of my poems “greeting-card trash”.  Now that I’m older, I realize that not even professors are infallible, and many are just plain mean and ugly. But at age 20, I took it so hard that I didn’t let anyone read my work for years.

I still wrote, but in hiding, only lsharin my stuff in that brief stint as singer-songwriter (until I divorced my guitarist). I had lost the joy of creating, and I started my career as a professor with very little balance. I had become half of myself.

It took marrying Richard, I think, to bring me back to my creative self. The strange thing is that Richard is an aspiring writer, but doesn’t think he’s creative. He is; just not as flamboyant as I am. He loves being silly, and I think he should write children’s chapbooks with illustrations for the rest of his life. In that atmosphere, my creativity came back, because I could try new things in a safe atmosphere and use feedback to hone my skills.

Traits and States and Characters

Note: Tomorrow through Sunday I will be busy leading and doing Moulage at Missouri Hope, a grueling schedule out in the middle of a county park’s low maintenance/challenge course area. I don’t know if I will have the time, energy, or bandwidth to write installations. I’d love to find the time, because life in the moulage tent tends to be a gruesome party as well as a learning experience.
***********

In psychology, particularly in personality psychology, behaviors and feelings can be categorized in two ways: traits and states.

Traits are behaviors and feelings that are stable over time; they are patterns and behaviors. For those of us who write, traits are items that we document in a character sheet. So we have characters who are introverted or extroverted, quiet or loud, amused or hostile, mellow or excitable (all of these actually fall on a spectrum; there are few total introverts or total extroverts). These are modes we see our characters in day-to-day, and that we describe often through actions, facial expressions and body language, and verbal expressions.

States are behaviors and feelings that result from situations and motives at one point in time. They’re fleeting. When the situation resolves, or the motive is realized or released, the state resolves as well. Again, as writers, we express these through actions, facial expressions and body language, and verbal expressions. (Note: It’s better to show feelings in writing by describing than simply stating “I’m mad”.)

One way to think of states is that they’re the behavior that results from challenge, whether that be conflict, threat, or change.

A demonstration of traits versus states:

     Jill sat on the floor in the living room in sweats and bunny slippers, her legs sprawled out in front       of her, her back propped up against the couch. She sat with a bowl of popcorn in her lap,                     watching Next Generation on Netflix with her roommate Emma, who sat on the couch.

     “Data,” Jill sighed as she passed the bowl up to Emma, “I want to marry Data.”

     “Jill,” Emma pointed out dryly, “Data is an android.”

     “Yeah, but he’d never piss me off, would he?” Jill joked.

*****

Jill doesn’t face any sort of challenge. Her natural personality — the traits — show up here. She’s laid-back (her posture on the couch, her happy sigh), her bonding with Emma (the popcorn bowl), her sense of humor (wanting to marry Data).

Let’s introduce a challenge:

     Jeff strolled in on his lanky legs, puppy in tow. The scar on his cheek accentuated the cold look in       his eyes. Jill stiffened up as Jeff towered over her.

    “Jeff, do you have the rent for me yet?” Jill asked after a deep breath. “You owe three months               now.”

     Jill glanced up to see Jeff scrutinize her little black cat sprawled on a chair. She felt a chill as               Jeff’s face twisted into an arrogant pout and he casually offered, “It would be a shame if that cat           wound up dead one morning.”

     Jill felt herself stand as if pulled by strings; she strode up to Jeff and got in his face, spearing his         gaze as if she was his long-ago drill sergeant. Her voice turned to ice despite her internal                     trembling: “If you so much as lay a finger on my cat, I will take your puppy, I will strangle it, I           will cut it up and feed it to you, and you will think it’s chicken.” Jill turned on her heel and stalked       out before Jeff could see she was bluffing.
******

Jill has just gone from easygoing to menacing because of a threat to her cat. She carries it off despite the fact she is shaking internally, almost as if she’s possessed. But this is not her normal state — it’s just what she’s pressed to do.

******

When focusing on state-based behavior (i.e. behavior as the result of a challenge), it has to be believable — wrapped in trait behavior and an incident that proves the change has a reason.  It also helps if the character has to examine the change in the behavior:

     Jill stood in the bathroom, staring at herself in the mirror. She saw her pale face, but she knew t           that was not the face that had faced Jeff. She had felt only fury, fury she didn’t know she had, fury       that she could channel into lethal ice. She knew she would never kill the puppy, much less cook           him for dinner. But she would never let Jeff know that, or else she would fall into danger again.

******

Study yourself. What would you consider your traits? What are some situations that have had you “not acting like yourself” — in other words, personality states?

Fresh Eyes

(Note: Polish reader, if I email you some Polish dialogue translated by Google Translate, will you tell me if it makes any sense to you in Polish? It would also help if you could give me the corrections.)
*********

Yesterday I discovered the marvel that is looking at a Work in Progress with fresh eyes. 

After work, Richard and I spent time at the local corporate coffeehouse to play with ideas for NaNo. The neutral walls are plastered with glossy posters of their wares and perky, pithy sayings in vinyl decals made at the home office. I prefer independent coffeehouses with their quirky rustic walls and hand-chalked menus paying homage to local institutions, but the nearest one is 45 miles away.
This story starts with the fact that I have two computers, and one of them is more likely to travel with me. I discovered I couldn’t get access to Whose Hearts are Mountains because it was open in Scrivener at home, a feature to prevent conflicted copies on two different computers.
So, as not to waste valuable coffee time, I pulled up the document I set aside to start a new novel for NaNo. That novel is Prodigies, and I was almost halfway done when I shelved it. Plotwise, that was the easier half, although I think my protagonists spend too much time running and I may have to go back and fix it.
When looking at it with fresh eyes, however, the questions began rushing through my head: “What if the mind control was a distraction? What if the little girl had her father’s healing talent and could use it in reverse? What is the implication of doing this to a young girl?” This could raise the stakes of the plot — who could you kill at the UN General Assembly meeting that would reduce the world to an exploitable chaos? 
I also found two resources I hadn’t been able to find before — the floor for the UN Assembly Building and the UN Assembly schedule, which will make writing this story much easier.
I may have learned a valuable lesson here — sometimes putting something away for a while works better than beating your head against it. Lesson two — work on more than one idea at a time.

Short post — Moulage and External Validation

I may not be writing as much this week, because this is my big week for performing moulage. If I haven’t mentioned it, moulage is casualty simulation for emergency workers. This week I do two events — a small one this morning where I help out with the high school’s annual docudrama where they hammer home the consequences of drinking/texting while driving. Richard and I will moulage seven high schoolers.

This Friday-Sunday is the big event, Missouri Hope. The biggest of the Hope exercises held by Consortium for Humanitarian Service and Education, we will moulage about 200 people by the time we’re done. I will have a bigger crew, perhaps 8 per day, and I will provide hands-on training while we create victims — all simulated injuries of course — of a major tornado so that emergency personnel and students can use their skills in a realistic scenario.

I have developed a reputation for this among the CHSE exercises, which makes me happy. I know I can do better, and I always try to do better. In that way, it’s like writing, but I feel more secure about it because I have external validation. And external validation is one of the biggest motivators there is.

My colleagues call me the Queen of Gore. What better external validation is that?

PS: Light and dark

You believe you know me because we have laughed together on a golden afternoon, as the first of autumn’s leaves turn gold and tumble lazily.
You do not know me until you have walked with me through sodden leaves on a night where the wind whips sleet in your face and white-hot forks of lightning bleed into your vision. Here, I am a witch, the child of the storm; I stand on a hill singing to the maelstrom.
You’ve only seen me laugh. I laugh because I’ve screamed; I smile because I’ve raged; I champion the wounded because I’ve been beaten. I rejoice because I have survived.

You cannot honor my light without accepting my darkness.