No Time to Write

"I have this cool idea for a story, but I won't have time to write it until after finals."

This is a perfectly legitimate thing to say if finals are next week, but not if they're in five months. Stress, health problems, uncertainty at work or at home, children -- all of these are legitimate distractions that require careful, prolonged attention and consequently prevent long, solid, intense investments in writing, that's absolutely true.

But there's more to writing than just those intense, satisfying, all-else-by-the-wayside engagements that make us feel like consummate creative titans.

A working adult has very few opportunities to spend four hours at a time doing anything without distractions. There's chores and shopping, there's a day job or study, there's social activities and an endless, structural cycle of little distractions. And there's a predictable incidence of conjunctural distractions as well. Illness, accidents to one's person or property, unexpected changes in employment or home situation -- and anything that can happen to you can happen to your friends or relatives, which may also impact the stability of your daily life substantially.

The Not Writer doesn't feel that he or she can perform under those conditions, and believes it best to wait till they're resolved. In fact, though they'd never articulate this even to themselves, it's almost as if Not Writers feel that writing a little bit under those conditions will actually inhibit their ability to do the inspired binge-writing they see as an ideal.

Like writer's block, many of these excuses are indeed legitimate. Again, serious, unexpected life changes or tragedy near to the heart have tremendous effect on our emotional state and our ability to function, and we're all responsible for making our own priorities.

But rare is the circumstance that prohibits us from feeding ourselves, or bathing, or dressing. We take walks, drive, read, watch TV, play games, hang out with friends -- often in short intervals, true, but those are things we rarely neglect no matter what else is going on in our lives.

To the Writer, writing is like bathing or cooking. The Writer doesn't often put it off entirely; when times are hard and stress is high, the Writer writes a little less per day or week, but rarely nothing.

The surest way to realize whether you're being a Not Writer is hearing yourself say "I don't have time to write." If you have time to say that, you have time to write.

Doesn't have to be a masterpiece, doesn't have to be part of the Epic Ten-Novel Saga you're 'working on'. A quick domestic scene, a little joke, a tragic monologue... there's always something in your mind that you can write and there's always a moment to do it in.

Institutionalize the habit of writing, ingrain it in your daily activities as you do eating, bathing, and masturbating. As little as a hundred words a day nets you a novella in a year -- and when the stars align and the spirit moves you, you can still binge-write a couple grand of brilliant prose.

- Alex F. Vance

Year of the Bad Dog

2007: The Year of the Bad Dog.

(this message is also available as an audio podcast at Baddogbooks.com!)

When things go quiet at Bad Dog Books, it can mean three things.

One: we're having a party and you're not invited. This doesn't happen nearly as often as we'd like it to. Alas!

Two: we're working very hard on something. This happens all the time. We wish we could have more parties, but between schmoozing, editing, wheeling and dealing we just don't have a whole lot of time to spend just drinking. Usually we end up drinking while working.

But there's a third option, too. That's when we're working very, very hard on things, so hard, in fact, that often we can't even drink. Can you imagine?

You don't have to. This is that eventuality. And we of Bad Dog Books, the hardworking yet comically underpaid Ben Goodridge and the money-grubbing, egomaniacal and always humble Alex Vance, are proud to reveal to you all the sweet, golden-hued fruits of our labours.

 

Dirt Herding.

Of late, my goal's been to make money and I've really been putting my education and my writerly sensibilities to work, breaking my back in factories and raking leaves and such. The latter got me a cold--yay cold!--and the former got my hands covered in bruises and wounds. When I came home at night the skin on my fingertips was so marred by the dirt and the heavy-duty soap at the paper factory that everything I touched felt coarse, and now I can't see my fingerprints--but that's not important now.
What's important is that I learned a new activity. In sweeping the floor while coughing my lungs out, red-eyed from all the paper sawdust in the air, I noticed while I was climbing across the gaping, chomping blades of The Shredder (guess what what does) that there was a hose dangling from the ceiling, with a gun-style handle at the nozzle. Some of you may recognize this as a compressed air hose.
A world of Newtonian play opened up for me. Blasting the floor with the proper intensity, from the proper height, causes the dust to be blown away in a circular fashion, so to guide the dirt into the proper corner for later sweeping took some skill, which I slowly developed. Blast to get the dirt moving, then shoot past the rim to get the excess back, then step around...
Sweeping would indeed have been easier, but much less fun that this: dirt herdin'. Git alawng, li'l dawgies!

This mode of speech reminds me of the White Wolf Western Omnibus by Hal Dunning -- which has nothing to do with the role-playing games manufacturer, but rather a tawdry Western fiction writer. I picked the book up for two pounds at a thrift shop in Belfast and the style of it is a constant marvel to me.
I write long, you see, detailing the look and feel of things. People, places, motions, intentions, interior dialogue, all that post-bicameral stuff, but not Hal. For Hal, it's perfectly possible for a man to ride into town, round up a posse, head over to Hacksaw Johnson's farm to bring the varmint to justice, hang him in the village square and then go to the Lone Star Saloon to drink to their victory, all in one single page.
The amount of plot in his stories is astonishing to me.
While I was giving the NaNoWriMo workshops at the local American Book Centre, I brought two books to illustrate writing 'short' (Good old Hal!) and writing 'long', for which I had brought my Oscar Wilde collection in hardcover where I had a three-page sentence bookmarked.

Merry christmas, everyone!