What is holding you back?

I understand why people live with peeling wallpaper and ancient kitchens with drawers that jam and stick. It takes courage to venture beyond the planning stage. Once a renovation starts, there is no turning back. The old bathroom gets ripped out, but what looked good on paper may not proceed according to plan. Electricians, plumbers, and builders come into the mix. They each have an opinion and they often contradict each other. Maybe it’s easier to live with the crack in the bathtub and the toilet that flushes away 13 litres / 4 gallons of potable water with each use.

Word count: 327                                                                                          Reading time: 1-2 minutes

Is an unknown result the reason some people fail to finish the big artistic projects they start? How many outlines of stories have I scribbled into my notebooks over the years? I love that playful stage. So I write the first scene. It’s satisfying to see the characters come to life, say and do things exactly the way I expected.

Deep into a manuscript, I often find that a story is not unfolding the way I expected. The electrician arrives on the scene and says that my protagonist has no spark. No one is getting a charge from her. The plumber informs me that my throughline is jammed and needs to be reworked. I need to rip out half of what I’ve written.

Sometimes the weaknesses are beyond repair. Better tear the old house down and salvage the parts. Other times I just need to pull out the rotted wall and replace it with something  more substantial. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge according to Picasso.  So really, when unexpected obstacles pop up in the narrative, isn’t that the time to muster the creative courage and smash what needs fixing?

Do you avoid writing your great novel because you know hard it’s going to be? Or do you have the perseverance to get through the project, so you lay out your blueprint and get started?

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Bedroom and sitting room of the White House during the Renovation 2/27/1650 by Abbie Rowe from the US National Archives & Records Administration

Theoretically speaking

Word count: 318                                                                                       Reading time: 1 minute +

When I first confided to a photographer friend that I had started writing fiction, he shook his head.

“An accountant? Writing fiction?” he said. “I don’t know about that combination.”

I was confident enough to ignore his doubt and charge on through. I figured out back in grade 8 or so that math demands a lot of imaginative problem-solving. Furthermore, anyone who has ever tried to tame the complex tendrils of a business operation into the few thin lines of a balance sheet knows how much creative thinking is involved.

Recently I watched Constraints and Creativity in Mathematics and Fiction, by Dr. Hannu Rajaniemi author of The Quantum Thief. Rajaniemi says that mathematics and writing both create something out of nothing. He urges writers to consider the parallels. Both mathematics and writing:

• are not about the numbers,
• conceive of different realities,
• look at the relationship between the imaginary things and draw conclusions from what is studied and
• should create something beautiful.

After I watched the video I lost myself down a rabbit hole, looking at relationships between mathematics and art. I discovered that because mathematics is the basis of all sound, music theorists often use it to understand music. Mathematics and visual art have a relationship that dates back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks who defined the golden ratio to describe something that was aesthetically pleasing.

I’m not saying that all mathematicians can be writers (or painters or musicians) or vice versa. I’m suggesting that creativity is a force that once unleashed in one area of our lives will spill into all others. And let’s face it, a huge part of creativity is just hard work, lots of practice, and a mountain of perseverance.

What outside, non-core skills have helped your writing? Were you a midwife or a soldier before you picked up a pen? How have creative habits from another discipline advanced your development?

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Photo by: Alan Bolitho

On your mark....

Word Count: 398                                  Reading time: 1-2 mins.

Australian swimmer Leisel Jones has collected a sack of Olympic medals since she first competed in Sydney in 2000: 3 gold, 4 silver, and 1 bronze. Not satisfied with that outstanding record the Herald Sun newspaper attacked her this year because of her body size. How much does a person have to give before it’s enough?

When I think of Olympic athletes, I think of how young they have to start, how early someone has to recognize their talent and start grooming them for a prize way down the road. I envision all the dark mornings when parents get up and chauffeur them (if they are lucky enough to have a car) to far away venues. I imagine all the holidays that focus on sporting competitions. The costs must be off the scale and family sacrifices immeasurable, like those of Chinese diver Wu Minxia who rarely speaks to her parents so her training won’t be disrupted by potentially disturbing news.

All that perseverance for a few weeks in the sun, once every four years if an athlete is lucky enough to qualify for more than one Olympic meet. And if they are off their form at any point in the qualifying rounds, they may never even hear the starting pistol; they’re finished before they’re out of the gate. Injuries may end their careers permanently.

So if you train and train and never make it beyond the city championships, has all that effort gone to waste? Not really; the habits of hard work, endurance, and courage last a lifetime.

Writing also demands hard work, endurance and courage. Katherine Anne Porter called courage the “first essential for a writer”; it’s essential if we’re ever going to be true to our stories and our characters. Getting a novel to reader-ready status demands both hard work and perseverance. In the end, if we are lucky, we might achieve moderate success, maybe the equivalent of a win at a city championship: a publication and good sales. And, unlike Leisel Jones, even the greatest among us will never have their pictures splashed the front page of the paper, questioning whether they are fit enough to compete in the frantic world of publishing.

What type of writing athlete are you? When you’ve had a bad day writing do you put your losses behind you and jump back into the pool, ready for the next heat?

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Photo by: Epicstock

Pick and choose

 Word count: 460                         Reading time: 1-2 mins

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When summer finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest (last week) I was on Salt Spring Island. Summer on SSI means swimming in lakes, hummingbirds thrumming, eagles whistling, and hiking the gentle mountains in the company of a golden dog. Roadside farm stands groan under the weight of organic produce and at Artspring, the island’s main arts venue, there are concerts and exhibitions.

On the other sides of this heavenly coin:

• it takes a half a day to get to SSI from Vancouver and BC Ferries seems to have forgotten its mandate to be part of the highway system as the fares ratchet ever higher.
• the house here uses aquifer well water. The rain stops in June and doesn't start again until September. That means constant vigilance about water use, listening for the sound of the pump which signals the time to turn off the taps. Showers are short. A soaker tub would be an obscenity.
• the gorgeous birds that sing outside the window feed on a wide array of insects. At night the thousands of bugs that didn't end up as bird food swarm through the screens and cracks in the doors and congregate in the bedroom, throwing themselves in my face as I attempt to savour the best moment of the day, my reading time.
• lake access is limited and the small beaches are often crowded.
• spiders lay eggs in the corners as soon as I dust them (which isn't often).

None of that matters. When I think of SSI in summer I remember only the very best parts: the great walks, the buzz of the farmer’s markets, and the soothing silence at night, broken only by the call of the barred owls. As I hiked up Mount Maxwell on Sunday a loose sock rubbed a blister on my heel, but I was too taken by the fragile Garry Oak meadow to notice until much later.

So let it be with my writing. I have to choose to let my strong scenes move me forward and forget about the times that the words fall flat and lifeless on the page. I have to remember the idyllic moments when the stories flow from my fingers and forget the moments when dull clichés launch themselves at me like desperate insects at a slim beacon of light. I have to choose today as the best day ever to write.

What choices are you making today to keep yourself motivated? When you feel the blister of discouragement do you look ahead to the next bloom of inspiration or do you stop hiking for a while?

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Photo by: Alan Bolitho, LM 

Stick-to-it-ness

 Word count: 286                    Reading time: 1-2 mins.

This past week we took a brief road trip to the Shuswap and Okanagan areas of BC to visit friends. We drove there on the old roads, the roads that have since been superseded by more direct routes forged by superior engineering. On the way home we switched to the Trans-Canada Highway, Route One, that winds along the Fraser Canyon. The often harsh landscape and the wild waters of the Fraser River reminded me, once again, of the determination of early explorers as they mapped the New World. I tried to imagine the perseverance those men mustered everyday as they woke to face new challenges, be it lack of food, inclement weather, hostile environments or (rightly) suspicious indigenous people.

That got me thinking, yet again, about perseverance as a writer. How hard should it be to keep at this endeavour, even in the face of chaos in the publishing world? Randy Pausch had it right in his Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University when he said, “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” (By the way if you have an hour to spare and need some inspiration, this lecture is worth watching.)

So where are you with your writing? Are you at the top of the canyon frozen with inaction as the white water churns below and the storm clouds gather above? Or are you heeding the words of Randy Pausch, determined to scale that brick wall?

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Photo by: Timothy Epp