IWSG: Writing books is hard to do.

I am finally back for the Insecure Writers' Support Group. And I've got a heck of an insecurity to write about today.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year because I needed a real kick in the pants to get back into the writing groove again after months of writer's block. I think on some level I thought of "writer's block", even when it's caused by stressful life issues, as something that would eventually just go away and then I would be back to normal. I'm beginning to realize that it's not that simple. It seems writer's block is not necessarily like a cold, where all you have to do is weather it for a few days with the help of some sudafed and then it goes away by its self and you get on with your life again. My experience of trying to break free of writer's block is more like... Well, something that is the opposite of the above cold analogy. I said I've had writer's block, ok?

The truth is that since the beginning of November I put in almost 2000 words on one story, then decided I couldn't possibly speed write that story so I decided to start a completely different story. On story number two I have put down a little over 1000 words but now I'm beginning to think that I can't write this story because when I think about the story there is no story in my mind. So maybe I should look for a different story to write. And here's the thing... Every single one of those 3000+ words I've had to sweat and struggle over. I'm beginning to wonder what I was thinking when I signed up for NaNo. It must have been a moment of insanity because there's no way I can write 50,000 words in one month like this.

Yesterday I sat back and tried to mentally deal with the fact that at the moment, writing anything is extremely difficult for me. The words just don't come the way they used to. The stories that used to fill my mind are no longer detailed and alive. Every word I write feels like dead weight. And I feel so jealous of all the writers out there blogging about their latest writing accomplishments, of all the manuscripts they've completed and all the amazing ideas they have. I want writing to be easier again.

But it's not going to be. I know that I'm going to have to fight to get that back again. Writer's block isn't just going to go away and leave me where it found me. It's going to be a battle of wills every single day just to get some words set down, just to make some progress. I can't give in, no matter how much a part of me wants to just throw my hands up and declare that this was all a mistake and I just can't do it, can't be a writer. Because, as my wonderful husband assured me yesterday, my stories are something worth fighting for. They are important. And victory will come with dedication and perseverance and a ton of effort. Someday I'll feel like a writer again.

Yet Another NaNo Post

This is going to be a quick one (though not nearly as quick as last time) to proclaim:

Woah, I am doing NaNoWriMo this year.

This will be my first time. (Be gentle with me, NaNo.) I have to admit that I always thought NaNo was kind of gimmicky and viewed that as a bad thing. But as I grow older and wiser I begin to realize that a gimmick isn't necessarily bad. Our brains are curious machines and sometimes we need to trick them into giving us the results we want. For me, I've had such a long bout of writer's block due to life issues that I finally decided I needed a gimmick to try and get myself back on track. I need to trick my brain into remembering that I'm a writer. NaNo seems like a great opportunity to try that.

So I've spent some time the past few weeks trying to get ready. I worked on getting most of my resource notes into a single notebook for ease of use. Then my son spilled chocolate milk all over that notebook so I'm currently working on another notebook that will be better protected. I've been working out what my overall story arc will be as I write this month and I think I'm satisfied with what I've decided to go for. Unfortunately, I realized this morning that there's a crucial area of research that I totally forgot to complete. I'll probably just have to play catch up with that while I progress through the month.

Il Sigh.

Anyway, wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

Why

Thoughts on Lovecraftian Horror

Recently, in honor of the month of October and its upcoming spooky holiday, I decided that in my quest to become more well read in the genre of fantasy I would delve into the infamously creepy writings of H.P. Lovecraft. He of the Cthulhu Mythos fame. So I purchased a volume of his complete writings and decided to read through them chronologically.

Now, in general I'm a person who just doesn't do horror. For one, I get too easily frightened. (The Sixth Sense scared me. Seriously.) Also, I tend to dislike any art form that emphasizes darkness and ugliness over light and beauty. So I avoid horror like the plague, but I decided to make an exception for Lovecraft.

Lovecraft wrote in the 1920s and 30s, mostly short stories with a few novellas for variety. He was not, it seems, a very popular writer during his lifetime and was never really able to rise above poverty on his writing. But Lovecraft was hugely influential to other writers of "weird" fiction and fantasy and his legacy has lived on to the point that his most famous creation, the monster/deity Cthulhu, is now well know in popular culture. For this reason alone a person wanting to become well versed in the traditions and history of modern fantasy, as I do, must read Lovecraft.

Sketch of Cthulhu by Lovecraft

 (However, a word of warning, if you are like me in your feelings toward horror, DON'T try to read Lovecraft's entire works straight through, as I did. Take it in bits and pieces.)

My overwhelming impression of Lovecraft's writings is that they are works of incredible imagination. They are strange, wild and weird; constructing an unfathomably old universe of creatures and deities beyond the conception of human thought. But it is a dark and tainted universe where the truth does not set you free, it drives you mad and reduces you to a quivering wreck of former humanity. There is no hope or redemption in Lovecraft's world. There is only insanity and degradation.

Juxtaposed with these harsh realities, made manifest through the Cthulhu Mythos and other various stories that highlight the horror of the human condition, there is the Dream Cycle, a series of stories where the protagonists are able to make their way into the world of Dream which is full of just as many wonders of exquisite beauty as it is shadowed with ugliness. At first descriptions of "the marvelous city of Celephais" and other wonders seem like a breath of fresh air. At last! There is beauty in the world after all! But then in stories such as "The Silver Key" it becomes clear that the world dreams exists because there are those who are aware that the world of men is undermined with implacable horror and these need a place that they can flee from reality to. The man called Kuranes forsakes his earthly existence, dying in the real world, so that he can become the king of Celephais in the land of dreams.

I cannot help being awed by "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath", a novella about a man who takes an epic journey through the lands of dream to find the beautiful sunset city that he once dreamed of in the past but has lately been forbidden visions of. Partly I am blown away by this work because it is entirely "told" (rather than "shown") by an omniscient narrator. There is no dialogue, external or internal, until a final long speech from the deity Nyarlathotep near the climax of the tale. It is precisely the way in which we are warned these days NEVER to write. And yet, I was utterly hooked by the sheer wonder and imagination of what Lovecraft conjured in the land of dreams. I think it is a clear example that if you, as a writer, have a vision to convey in story, there is simply no way that it can't be told.

I am glad that I delved into the worlds of Lovecraft, but I know now that I should have taken it slower and in stages, reading other works in between. Because by the time I had gotten through to the point where began really exploring the Cthulhu Mythos, I was sick in my soul from the unceasing darkness and ugliness and hopelessness of the majority of his stories. I had to stop reading them and turn to something much lighter to break through the melancholy mood into which I had sunk.

I admire Lovecraft's powers of imagination, but I wish that he had tempered his horrors by providing some room for hope and dignity. I can't help wondering if he was a very unhappy man.

A Vast and Lofty Fabric

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.

 ~Saint Augustine

When you're a writer, everything you see and everything you read tends to have significance to your writing. Take the above quote from Saint Augustine. On the surface, it's a quote about humility. But to someone whose days are filled with ponderings about imaginary worlds, it suddenly struck me as brilliant advice about worldbuilding.

You see,  I do desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric. I want to create the kind of stories that will be remembered in a hundred years or more. I want to create whole worlds to tell those stories in. And the above quote reminds me is that every great thing, every lofty construction must begin with a deep and solid foundation.

But what exactly does that mean when you apply it to imaginary worlds? To put it simply, it means you need to think about your world's basic nature. Worldbuilding isn't just saying "this place is here and that place is there and this is what the societies in those places are like". Worldbuilding is also establishing how and why your world exists and what are the natural rules that govern it. In our world we have the laws of physics, but an imaginary world could operate on entirely different principles.

Don't settle for just explaining things away by saying "it's magic". Know the reasons that your imaginary world operates differently from our world. Don't get caught up in the thinking that science and magic don't mix. Science is just another word for knowledge and magic is really just an application of knowledge. (Albeit usually specialized or arcane knowledge that can only be used by some.)

So when doing your worldbuilding learn to think like a philosopher. Get metaphysical with your creation. It will make your imaginary world feel all the more real and genuine to your readers.

When Life Takes a Sledgehammer and Slams you in the Gut...

There's not much you can do but roll over and try to protect your innards from another swing. No lemonade involved.

I have a 5 year-old son. He's always been a sort of difficult child. Very quick to learn in some areas, very slow to learn in others. Give him a lever and he could totally move mountains, but for some reason he has spent most of his life talking in quotes from movies. Communication is not his forte. Nor is being told "no" about anything he'd set his mind on. But for a long time my husband and I just thought he was slower, but not abnormally so.We assumed that at some point he would get better on his own, that he just needed time.

Perhaps we were foolish. But we were still young parents and we didn't know any better.

Earlier this year our pediatrician told us that he believes our son has Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. (The two often go hand in hand in young children.) We had him evaluated by our local Handicapped Children's Association and their assessment was that it is highly likely he places on the Autism spectrum (Asperger's is at the high functioning end of the spectrum). We haven't had a chance to see a specialist who can give a proper diagnosis yet, they are hard to get in with it seems. But because of the HCA assessment our school system placed our son in a special needs class when he started school this year.

So we have had to come to term with the fact that we have a child with special needs, not a child who is just going through a difficult phase or who is slow in some areas. And we have to accept that he will always have special needs. You can't treat Asperger's away. You can learn to cope with it, often with therapy, you can get certain drugs to help with some aspects of it, but you can't make it go away. It's a part of you. It's a part of our son.

We've learned a lot about how to relate to him better in the past several months. We've learned that touch, such as stroking the sides of his face, can help calm him down when he gets overwrought. He is extremely sensitive to touch and so, conversely, to him a simple smack on the hand is agony. We've learned to be more careful. We've learned that routine is really important and that public places where there are lots of people he doesn't know around are difficult for him to handle. We've learned how better to communicate with him on his own terms, often using what seems like his own personal code.

But as much as we've learned most days are still filled with strife. Everything tends to be a battle with him. We have to struggle with him to get him up in the morning for school, struggle with him to get dressed, struggle with him to get on the bus without flipping out because it's a small bus and not a big bus. Then several hours later we have to struggle with him to get off the bus and come home, we have to struggle with him to settle down and stop asking for impossible things about every five minutes (those are the tough ones, when he asks for something that I literally cannot give him), struggle with him to eat dinner, struggle with him to go to bed. And then it begins over again the next day.

It's taken a lot of adjustment. Not just for myself and my husband, but also from his two sisters. In one sense nothing has really changed. Our son has always had these special needs, we just never realized it. He's the same boy he's always been. In another sense everything has changed. Or at least it feels that way. It feels like we're leading an entirely different life than we were at the beginning of the year. I feel like a different person.

And that's why I've been gone from the blog for so long. To be honest, I've felt incapable of writing anything for months now. Words just don't seem to flow together in my head the way they used to. But I've had enough. I'm going to break out of this rut. I'm not going to let my daily stress levels decide whether or not I can write anymore. You should be seeing me around here more often, but not too often. I have so much fiction writing to catch up on.

What are Stories for?

I've been giving some serious thought lately to the question of what stories are truly for. Stories have been a part of human culture since the very beginning. From Gilgamesh to the Iliad, from King Arthur to The Lord of the Rings, we've always told each other stories. And the stories we tell can survive centuries and even millennia. The Trojan Horse, the Knights of the Round Table, these things, passed on in story, have become part of humanity's shared cultural consciousness. They mean more to us than science or history. Much more than entertainment.

There is no doubt that reading stories has a positive effect on our brains. It increases our vocabulary and makes us smarter in many ways. Reading stories also provides an important diversion for our intellect. It's essentially R & R for our brains. And yet, I doubt that these are the reasons that stories have resonated so strongly with the human experience for thousands of years. Probably that stuff is just the icing on the cake, a positive side effect. After all, stories aren't the only way to relax your brain and reading isn't the only way we learn. No, something tells me that the real reason we love stories goes deeper than that.

But there is one thing that stories can help us do like nothing else can. They exercise our imagination. Stories can take us out of ourselves. They let us forget who we are and where we are, just for a while, so that we can experience places and situations that we never could in real life. They let us take risks without being at risk. But most importantly they let us experience what it's like to walk in the shoes of another person, to see things from his or her point of view, to think and feel like another person.
The ability to imagine and thus to empathize is a very important aspect of human nature. But most people seem to underestimate the crucial role that the imagination plays in the act of empathy.

Because it isn't easy to look at the world from someone else's shoes. It's far easier to look at someone's situation from our own shoes and condemn them for not doing what we would have done or not thinking the way we do. Imagination can help us to empathize because a healthy imagination really can see things from another point of view. And stories let us practice this.

This is, I believe, why stories are so integral to the human experience. They are a key part of the process that allows humans to relate to each other in a constructive way and they help us to recognize that there is more to this world than ourselves. They get us out of our own heads in a healthy and risk free way.

That's why it's so important for us to continue always to tell stories and why it's a very noble calling to be a storyteller.