[TK] Have It Your Way

Hello, my friends. I opened the draft of this newsletter and saw “we’re over halfway through January now,” which gives you some idea of how long I’ve dragged my feet. I’ve always found that January goes by incredibly slowly and February goes very quickly. You wouldn’t think three days (two days, this year) would make that much of a difference in the pacing of a month. But it feels as if I’ve barely opened my eyes into February and it’s already the fifth day, while January 5^th took approximately five years to arrive.

Another reason for the lateness of this substack: at the beginning of the year, a class I pitched to a local college had so few students I figured it wouldn’t make. Obviously, I’m still learning how enrollment works, because now I have enough students to feel both excited and, uh, kinda intimidated. It’s been a while since I’ve officially taught, though my book events have thankfully kept me in practice with public speaking. Prepping for this course (A Crash Course in Novel Writing) has forced me to take all the vague, chaotic bits and pieces of writing advice I draw on myself and transform it into targeted, PowerPoint-friendly lessons. Turns out, this has been incredibly useful for my own craft, and I’m grateful for how wonderfully engaged everyone is. It’s lovely to be in a big room full of writers and chat about our craft.

(A taste of the riveting slides I’ve been creating.)

But! My plans to write JUST for myself have not been especially fruitful lately. You’d think this would be simple. I’m not asking anything of myself except to sit down and write something I’ll never show anybody else. This should be the most effortless part of my week, one that nobody else can judge me for, one that is free from the expectations of performance and productivity. And! Yet!  

I find myself falling into either of two extremes. I want to be productive (i.e., plan my class, work on a project that’s under deadline) or I want to let go and let my brain drool over TikToks. I’ve forgotten how to hold myself accountable for something that doesn’t fit into a preconceived, external sense of productivity. I know some of you are pros at writing for yourselves, whether through journaling or creative writing, and I would appreciate learning from you. How do you silence the part of your brain that sees writing as content? (This isn’t rhetorical. Tell me. Show me a PowerPoint slide.)

Here are some desperate ideas I’ve brainstormed. Little shortcuts that will trick my brain into writing something and knowing this work CANNOT be for anyone but me.

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

1.      WRITE ABOUT PEOPLE I KNOW.

A deeply dangerous idea to me. I’m obsessive about not basing my characters on anybody I know in real life. I’m very scared of the litigious, what can I say. With my latest novel, I got a lot of questions about who I based my characters on – reasonable, since it’s a book set in a fictionalized version of my hometown, and since the protagonists are teenagers during Y2K, much like I was a Wet Seal-wearingY2K teen myself. (What’s a word for people who came of age during the turn of the millennium? I’m sure we’ll think of something.) Anyway, I’m realizing I might be disappointing readers by NOT basing fictional people on real ones. But since it’s my hang-up, I may as well lean into it. I’m considering writing something transparently based on my actual acquaintances and loved ones. A husband named Brian instead of Ryan. Or maybe a good old-fashioned self-insert! A Mary Sue. A character named Tara Cannery Durphy who has frizzy auburn hair and is scared of turning forty. Since I’m one of those cowards who uses fiction to obfuscate and hide, I would NEVER dream of showing my Tara Durphy self-insert fanfic to another living soul. Perfect.

2.      MAKE IT SLOPPY.

I revise as I go. It’s very hard for me to write a messy first draft. Oh, sure, my first drafts are messy. They’re meandering, poorly paced, and full of flat, inconsistent characters wandering gingerly through a chaotic landscape. But it’s hard on me. I don’t usually use [TK] or [insert detail here]. Or, much less, [insert big important scene here]. I’m not bragging! Look at any writer who does use [TK] generously and I can almost guarantee that their books sell better than mine, and that they’re more prolific writers than I am. My way is just as uncertain as theirs, but I take much, much longer to be imperfect, while they rush through their imperfect stages at record speed and are that much closer to a good draft. My thinking, often, is that I want to have something ready. Something cohesive enough to hand to my writers’ group, or my editor, or my agent. It’s important to me to have those ten, twenty, fifty, whatever amount of pages ready to go at a moment’s notice. Does this make sense? No! Publishing is slow. I rarely need to have a draft ready so quickly that I don’t have time to revise. But there I am. So my proposal to myself is that I finally let myself [TK] a draft. Nobody will ask for it, so why not? I’m excited to [TK] and eventually [TK]!

(Credit: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finger_moustache_tattoo.jpg)

3. WRITE EXTREMELY EMBARRASSING THINGS.

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t you already do this? I mean, sure. Rude, but yes. Overcoming the need to be taken seriously is a huge problem for me. Writing is vulnerable, and I live in quiet terror of readers finding my work corny, cringe-y. According to TikTok, Gen Z seems to view all Millennials as possessing Ned Flanders levels of oblivious sincerity and theater-kid gumption. I fucking wish. I grew up during a time when being heartfelt was just as agonizingly painful as it is for today’s jaded youth. (Although remember those mustache tattoos on our fingers? Maybe Gen Z has a point? I wonder if those cowards will bring back fedoras and Tumblr tattoos or just stick to the low-rise jeans.)

I’ve tried to grow beyond this, because I’ve found that my desperation to be taken seriously as a writer just makes me uptight, stiff, and unable to engage with readers – how do you enjoy a book when you feel the author nervously peering at you between the sentences, gauging your reaction? But my fear of being humiliated is still enough of a problem that I can, at least, use it to my advantage. I can write something so unabashedly corny that I would sooner post my social security number on Reddit than let anyone else see it. (I’m purposefully not detailing what “embarrassing” looks like to me, because that’s personal.)

Other ideas? Other thoughts? How is writing-for-yourself-and-nobody-else going for you?