It’s going to be a quiet week here at Alive & Knitting, as I’m off to the RWA National conference in Orlando.
I hope to meet some of you there – the Literacy Signing on Wednesday night is open to the public, btw.
I’ll be posting again next Monday, August 2, just in time for the release of WHISPER KISS on Tuesday, August 3. Here’s a little eye candy to hold you:
Have a great week!
I’ve added a category for reading related links. These are mostly review sites and blog sites, but there are a few writing sites tossed into the mix as well (because readers are writers). I did a quick run through my email to gather links, but know I’ve missed a bunch.
So, have a peek and if you think that something obvious has been omitted, please put a comment on this post for me. Meanwhile, I’ll keep adding to the list as well.
Thanks!
This week I found another connection between writing and knitting.
Like many knitters, I have a lot of projects on the needles. U.F.O.’s seem to breed in my knitting basket. I’ve been trying to be more disciplined about this, which means understanding why it’s happening in the first place.
The reason is simple. I get to some part of a knitting project that I find boring. It seems like work instead of fun. Feh. So, I start looking around at other patterns and yarns (in stash or not). Sooner or later, something will tempt me to cast on right this minute, and I surrender to temptation. Once the first project is at that ho-hum stage and has been put aside, chances of it getting picked up again become pretty slim. And so, the U.F.O.’s breed merrily away, languishing in the basket.
This is not unlike the process for a lot of aspiring writers. It’s pretty easy to be tempted to put a manuscript-in-process aside when you get to the tough part. Like knitting projects, ideas sound marvelous at first. They’re exciting and original and we writers can barely wait to begin. But at some point, every writing project starts to feel like work. The middle is tough to navigate, for example, or the revision process is hard. We each find a different part of the process of creating a book difficult, but when we reach our own dreaded bit, it’s easy to be seduce by another shiny new idea.
With writing, I’m always tempted by new story ideas when I’m writing the middle of a book. Somewhere between manuscript page 175 and 250 (of a 400 page or so ms) I will have a fabulous idea, one that I feel compelled to write, right this minute. I call these gremlins. They’re often not particularly good ideas. They’re just tempting glimmers. The thing is that if you surrender to your gremlin, putting book #1 aside to work on idea #2, it’s only a matter of time before gremlin #3 pops up to tempt you. You end up with a lot of unfinished book manuscripts, each of which is at some hard bit.
Kind of like a knitting basket overflowing with U.F.O.’s.
Either way, there’s not much finished work to show for your efforts. With knitting, there’s nothing to wear or give away. With writing, there’s nothing to sell or to publish. Oops. If your plan is to be a published author, that’s a problem.
(There’s another variable at work, too, but one that isn’t so easily solved. Why do I always take on such epic projects? This is another factor in the project boredom quotient, but one I still need to think about. The fact is that I do the same thing with my writing projects. Dragonfire was always intended to be a 13 book series. Maybe I just think big!)
Over the years, I’ve become pretty good at ignoring my writing gremlins, continuing through the tough bits to end up with finished books. I have discipline with my writing. With knitting, not so much. That’s what I’m trying to improve this year – my plan is to finish knitting projects, even when they get to the boring bits, to just continue knitting until each project is done.
When I was tempted by idea gremlins, I made a compromise – I would write down the idea on a slip of paper and put it in a file. (Some people use blank notebooks for this. I’ve done that too.) So the idea was recorded, and theoretically I could go back to it after the mip was done. Over time, I noticed that I never ever did this, and when I did, the tempting idea wasn’t so interesting after all. I stopped keeping those notes. But
I’m trying a similar process with the knitting, that of acknowledging the idea without investing much time in it. I’ve been putting patterns with yarn on the coffee table, as candidates for my next project. Of course, in the past week – because my current knitting project is at a boring bit – I’ve put about 15 potential projects out there. This is funny, as there’s no way I can knit that quickly. I’ll have 15 more ideas before even one of them is completed. Similarly, I have ideas faster than I can write books. I have multiple ideas per day, probably one workable idea each day. It takes somewhat longer to write a book! 
I’ll probably put those potential knitting projects all away again soon, but the exercise seems to be helping with my discipline.
So, what have I been knitting that’s awakening the project gremlins? I’ll show you soon. Maybe that promise will motivate me to complete the 10,000 miles of applied I-cord. I like it a lot, but wow, I wish it was done already – the coffee table is really loaded down!
In the meantime, tell me where you get stuck – either with knitting projects or with writing projects. Are you bored by the plain bits or challenged by the complicated bits? How do you help yourself to be more disciplined and focussed?
One of the goals of my Pyr guys in the Dragonfire series is saving the earth. And one of the forces that the earth needs to be saved from in this series is humans and our influence on the planet.
So, maybe it’s pertinent once in a while to talk about “green” issues here. And what I’m going to talk about today is reducing one’s environmental footprint. This is an analogy – an environmental footprint being a measure of how much of a mark your lifestyle has upon the planet. It’s a reference to the idea of leaving a footprint in a wilderness zone, quite possibly to an old saying “Take nothing but a picture; leave nothing but a footprint.” How we choose to live, quite reasonably, influences our energy consumption, our waste generation, our consumption of products, etc. etc. and generally, the size of the mark our presence makes on the earth.
Lots of people these days are talking about diminishing our individual (or household) environmental footprints. Once upon a time, there was a book called FIFTY SIMPLE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO SAVE THE EARTH. I liked this book a lot because its core notion was that small gestures add up – it was working for the cumulative effect. So, each change was comparatively minor, but the assumption was that, in unison, the changes would make a difference. The more people who took on those changes, the greater the cumulative influence.
My current issue of choice is the dryer. I don’t like the dryer. I don’t like how clothes smell when they come out of it. I don’t like the static that it puts in fabric, or how hard it is on fabrics. Ours is an old monster, and it’s losing functionality – right now, HOT works, which means everything gets cooked and shrunk. Ick. A new dryer is on the agenda for the future-and-yet-undetermined date when that room gets renovated. For the moment, I live with this one, and quietly despise it. (The feeling is probably mutual.)
Recognizing this, Mr. C. bought and installed a clothesline, one of those ones that works like a square umbrella.
Wow. I love it. I’d forgotten how much I like hanging out the laundry in the sunshine. It also takes longer than I recalled, but it’s good thinking time. The other thing I’d forgotten is how heavy a basket of wet towels is. I get a good workout when I do laundry now. Even if the washing machine was inside the door closest to the clothesline, it would be a bit of work to haul them over there – there’s a set of stairs between my washer and clothesline. It’s clear after a day of doing laundry just how those women in 1950’s ads had teeny tiny wasp-waists!
Plus each time I let that dryer sit and sulk, choosing the clothesline instead, I reduce our environmental footprint. As a bonus, I get some aerobic workout, esp if I take the stairs fast. It’s all good.
How about you? Do you have a clothesline? (Is it true that some neighbourhoods ban them?) Have you made any changes recently to green up your life?
We haven’t had an analogy to play with for a while, so I think we’re past due. Here’s one for today:
Writing a book is like gardening.
How so?
Well, deciding to create a garden is much like deciding to write a book. For creative reasons, you sign yourself up for a bunch of work, hoping that the result will be worth the effort.
Next, you need a broad plan. You need to figure out what you want to do. Will you have a garden like Sissinghurst, with only plants that have white flowers? Will you have an all-green garden? Will your garden be formal or casual? Will it have a theme? This is like deciding what kind of book you want to write – a romance, a mystery, a work of literary fiction.
Research comes after the broad plan. Once you decide to grow – for example – a medieval herb and flower garden, you’ll need to research what plants and varieties belong in that garden. You’ll also need to find out about your soil type, your climate zone, the amount of sun and shade in your garden, and modify your plan based upon those realities. This is similar to researching the market, learning what reader expectations are in your targeted genre. Just as you might visit successful gardens in your neighborhood, you might read popular books in your targeted genre to better orient yourself and refine your plan.
Then comes the heavy work. You’ll need to turn soil, plant trees and shrubs, add any hard landscaping (rocks) that you want. You’ll make paths through your garden, decide where there should be grass and set boundaries between the grass and the beds. You’ll pamper your new plants, watering and fertilizing them, with your gaze on the future of the garden. This, of course, is like writing the first draft of your book. You’ve got characters to meet, and character arcs to plan, a synopsis to write, a plot to tighten, conflict to heighten and emotional intensity to improve. Phew!
The next phase in the garden (often the second year) is similar the moment the book “comes to life”. There will be plants have died and left holes in the garden. There will be plants that have spread far beyond expectation, and “volunteers” from self-seeding plants will sprout in surprising corners. Essentially, the plants in the garden will have taken things into their own hands (leaves?) and grown in ways you didn’t necessarily predict. This is similar to what characters do to books, once they find their voices – they often run off and change the story. This would be a bad thing if they didn’t always have such good ideas of what should happen next. Just as writers learn to listen to their characters, a gardener listens to his or her plants.
Weeding a garden, especially once its shape and form is established, is a lot like editing. Some volunteer plants – like spontaneous paragraphs – work just fine where they’ve cropped up. Others have to be moved to a different place, or pulled out. Borders can be shaped and created as plants multiply. Plants can be moved when a fabulous colour combination appears – happenstance can become a planned feature, when it’s repeated over and over again. Editing makes the book a stronger expression of what it is. Weeding pulls a garden into focus, making the gardener’s vision more clear.
A garden is always in transition, always en route to becoming something different – just as a book will perpetually change. Trees will grow larger and cast more shade, making some plants unhappy (and others ecstatic). A big tree will fall or die, and the garden’s composition will change as a result. A garden, like a book, can always be tweaked and modified. But a garden, like a book, also reaches a fairly static point after it’s established, a point at which it can be maintained more or less the same with a minimum of effort each year. A book, too, reaches a point in which any modification will be minor and subjective – that’s the time to let the book go. It’s also the time to stop making radical change in the garden. It’s the time to enjoy them both for what they are.
So, what do you think of today’s analogy?
Or more importantly, do you garden? How does your garden grow? Mine is pulling out all the stops this year!