I’ll be a farmer, or a pickler of pickles, or a toastmaster, or a bicyclist, or a telephone operator, or a lighthouse keeper, or a brakeman for the train company, or a watcher, or a maniacal laugh-track laugher, or a cowboy, or a grocery cart getter, or a lumberjack, or a ventriloquist, or a floor polisher, or a wax-on-wax-offer, or a door-to-door magazine seller, or a cellar dweller. Just don’t make me be a writer right now! Ack!
Ever get those days? You would do anything but the thing you have to (want to) do? I even considered macramé plant holder maker today. What’s a word? They look so weird to the eye today. And I have to put them one after the other together in a row until they make some form of discernible sense? What now!? Say it isn’t so!
These are the days…
Today, I shall sail a ship to a far-off port where there are no pens, no paper, no computers, no notebooks, no words, no letters, no readers, no books. I’m allowed you know. Yes I am. Don’t look at me like that. Writers can forswear writing if they want to. Yes we can! (I may appear to be arguing with you, the reader, but trust me…it is ME that I argue with). What is it about writers that makes them think they are not allowed to take a break, step back from words for a day? It is okay to do so.
If you’ve had enough of words for now, grab a stinking paintbrush. Paint the world with brushstrokes, not with letters forming words forming sentences forming stories. Give yourself a break. It’s the best way to re-energize yourself!
It’s a SNOW DAY! Have fun! Enjoy your day off, SLACKER!
REMEMBER THIS: Writers NEVER take a holiday. Even when we’re not writing, we’re thinking about what we’re going to be writing. SO…if the words aren’t coming, give yourself a day off. Enjoy something else. The writing can wait. It will percolate in the background while you’re playing hooky!
As writers, we all have our own ways to capture those ideas that flit in and out of our brains a million times a day. Sometimes, the trick is to grab on to the right ones…and to let those less than stellar ones float back into the morass from which they came. The brain is like a TV screen on crack. We all know this. It’s often the loudest idea that gets the most attention, too (kind of like when you’re channel surfing and you run into Jersey Shore—you know it’s a brainless horrible creation that you should not even glimpse at. BUT it’s just SO loud and neon-glow like. Its sheer horribleness makes you stop surfing for a minute. Maybe even so you can just scream at your TV for having such a vile thing on it). The loudest idea is not always the good one. When you’re fighting for attention, though, you can really be convincing (cue a knock-down screaming brawl on Jersey Shore—don’t change that channel!).
The writer’s job is to listen…to try to catch a glimmer of each of the ideas as they float past. AND to know that the best idea could be under a quagmire of very bad ideas. To harvest the best ideas takes practice. How we practice is of no significance. That we practice is.
For me, I like to jot down ideas on little scraps of paper as they come to me. I remember to have a pen handy at all times. There was a time when I carried a little notebook, but I found that to be less effective than scribbling on scrap paper. A word of advice…if you prefer to carry around a notebook, make sure it is neither very pretty nor very cool. It’s pretty crappy when you have this perfectly good journal and you don’t want to mess it up with writing. This has happened to me on more than one occasion. I attempted the notebook again recently, when I found a very cool one. I carried it around for several days. The pen paused over its awesome pages many a time. But I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sully it with ink. How useless is that?!
My uber cool and drastically empty Andy Warhol Journal!
So, I always have a pile of shopping receipts in my pockets and I scrawl little notes on them in the most interesting of ways. At times, the writing goes in a circular route around the outside of the receipt…so I can fit everything in that I want to write. It looks messy, it’s hard to keep track of…but no beautiful notebooks are dying at my hand. You never know when the ideas will hit. Even if all you have on you is your smart-phone, make sure you have a memo app that you can open quickly and add notes to on the fly. The brain thinks…that’s what it does. Listen to that thinking. The next Great Canadian (American) Novel might fly past you one day. You have to be ready to grab onto it and go for the ride.
My less than pretty highly functional shopping receipts. A great ‘mason jar’ in which to trap my ideas.
I find the smart-phone memo app most helpful when I’m dialogue-surfing. What? That’s really a thing. It’s one of my most favourite games. When I’m out and about my day I seek out the quirky people. You just know the quirky ones are gonna throw out some bitchin’ dialogue. And if it’s out there, it’s up for grabs. Nobody suspects a thing—sort of—when you’re standing beside them thumping your smart-phone keys at the same rate that they’re talking. They’ll just think you’re texting a friend. Just don’t forget you’re not actually a stenographer…don’t ask them to repeat a line if you missed it. (-: So, yeah, shopping receipts for ideas from the brain-screen and smart-phone for dialogue-surfing. That pretty much sums up my needs as an idea harvester. It’s not how you trap the idea. It’s what you do with it once you have it. Remember that it doesn’t have to be pretty.
Whether you jot down your ideas and borrowed dialogue on toilet paper or on a beautiful leather-bound journal, think of them as fireflies in a mason jar. They’re awfully pretty. Make sure you follow the prettiest…not the loudest.
I know I’ve been talking a lot about the Muskoka Novel Marathon lately, but I can’t help it. It’s coming. Like a freight train that sneaks up on ya when you’re walkin’ the tracks and singing old Buddy Holly tunes. Or…yeah! Blancmange! Something something about a train going down a track…
The atmosphere of the marathon is such a magical non-quantifiable thing. You cannot write about it and do it justice. You just can’t. You try to stay up all weekend, you write non-stop…but you also socialize non-stop. You eat non-stop. You listen to music non-stop. Skip the light fandangle, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a high like no other.
As if there isn’t enough going on to warp your mind, you step out of the building on the Saturday night and the streets are turned into a carnival of milk chocolately, caramel stickable gooeyness. Because…don’t close your eyes…you have walked into the strange and magical world of Nuit Blanche North. Art installations and crickety crawling stilt-walking juggling sensations. And what would a Nuit be without a fire-eater.
(Just a side note, I love that most of my words today are being underlined in red squiggly lines.)
When THIS is happening INSIDE at the Novel Marathon, you pray that you will find sanity OUTSIDE! (-:
I always think of that classic line from Bill & Ted when I’m at the marathon. “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K!” That pretty much sums up the marathon. Just when you think you have to get outside to embrace a reality that is NORMAL, you walk out into this:
And this:
But before you run off down the street like a madman, you take a hard look at your surroundings and you realize that things are just as they should be. Writing a novel in a weekend SHOULD be a magical experience. Your heart SHOULD stop every now and again. You need these moments of wonder peppered throughout the weekend. It’s another classic reason for me to haul out that overused saying of mine. “Don’t be afraid to eat the dishes!” You’re gonna have some hard times over a 72-hour writing period. You’ll get cranky. You’ll get tired. You’ll get bloated. You’ll get indigestion out the wazoo! You need to step out of the world and into a carnival.
I’m sure that’s why the city planners threw Nuit Blanche into our weekend. They knew that into every novel marathoner’s life, a little magic must fall.
The tree that you see above ^ is a tree completely wrapped and enshrouded in TIES. Yes, ties. I sat beside that tree for about half an hour before I saw it at last year’s marathon. At first, that scared me. But when I stopped to think about it, it was pretty par for the course. I was, after all, writing. We marathoners took turns writing in the street in downtown Huntsville. We were our own art installation…and we collected a nice sum of money for the cause (the literacy program of the YMCA of Simcoe/Muskoka). If you see us out in the middle of the street this July, BRING MONEY!
I guess the lesson there is DON’T EXPECT TO QUESTION THE EFFICACY OF A TIE TREE WHEN YOU’RE MARATHONING. Or something like that.
Did I say juggling fire-eaters and stilt walkers? I think I meant fire-juggling stilt-walkers.
You’ve heard of the player piano, I’m sure. But did you know that Huntsville had a play-me piano. Right there in the street. Just waitin’ to be played. How frickin’ awesome-sauce is that! My only complaint? I DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY A PIANO! I wish I did. That corner of the downtown core would be hoppin’! This year, one of my goals is to get a fellow marathoner punchin’ those keys to an awesome sing-a-long song. Or something like that.
WRITING! It really does happen at these things! I have 5 novels to prove it. This is a shot of my screen during Nuit Blanche. If you want to know the height of exhilaration and dare-devilness, just write a novel in the street while hundreds of people are walking by reading over your shoulder! YIKES. Okay…I know you’re probably thinking that jumping out of an airplane is a whole new plateau of exhilaration that is miles above writing in the street. So what. By it’s very nature, it would have to be at least a mile above a street. There’d be no exhilaration jumping out of an airplane that’s parked on the runway. For a writer, public writing under a microscope pretty much does it for adrenalin rush-hour kicks.
So, am I excited for this year’s Muskoka Novel Marathon? Nah. Nothing good ever happens at these things. Just. BIC (bum-in-chair) writing. Nothing else. Move along. Nothing to see here (or do I mean see-hear-smell-touch-taste?)!
REMEMBER THIS: Writers NEVER take a holiday. Even when we’re not writing, we’re thinking about what we’re going to be writing. SO…if the words aren’t coming, give yourself a day off. Enjoy something else. The writing can wait. It will percolate in the background while you’re playing hooky!
KEVIN CRAIG 