In Love with Life

It’s almost the end of May, everybody. In a few short days, this month will be entirely used up and cast aside in favour of June, and I’ll have to make good on my promise to myself that my book – my ‘Eldritch’ – will be ready to start the process of finding an agent.

That’s the problem with making promises to yourself, isn’t it? You’ve got to keep them.

I’m not saying that ‘Eldritch’ isn’t ready. It’s sitting here beside me, in a satisfyingly thick bundle of paper; I’ve read it over and over again. I’ve tweaked it, and fixed it, and pulled sentences apart, and unmixed my metaphors, and checked for continuity errors, and taken out some of the millions of commas that seem to grow, unchecked, in everything I write. But, somehow, it just doesn’t seem good enough, still.

Image: moma.org

I just wish I looked as glamorous as this when going through a crisis of confidence. Actually, I look a bit more like Kathy Bates in ‘Misery’. But anyway.

On top of working slowly through The Novel, I’ve also spent the past week writing short stories. I’m trying to work through my list of submission deadlines – lots of competitions are looming, and I want to push myself to enter as many of them as I possibly can. It’s been a while since I made a big submission, and I’ve got to keep this ball rolling as long as I possibly can. However, there is a problem.

None of the short pieces I’ve written have made my personal grade. I’ve worked very hard on them, and I’ve sweated over them, and I’ve chosen words with extreme care, moved paragraphs around, deleted half the story and started again from scratch, changed titles, changed characters, changed everything that can be changed, and… I still don’t like either of the two major pieces of work I’ve completed over the last few days. Hackneyed, cloying, clichéd, boring – this is how they seem, to me. I just know they’ll never be good enough.

The first piece I wrote was a story about a little girl who, confused by something which is happening in her home life, takes out her rage and fear on another girl, a child at school, who innocently involves herself in the first child’s life. The story follows the two girls as they grow older, and shows us how, at one point, the second child has a chance to help the first, but chooses not to because of the pain she still suffers as a result of the first child’s bullying actions when they were younger. I’m not sure why this story didn’t work. It should work. I wanted it to. For a while after I’d written it I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, which is unusual for me; normally, I’m visceral about these things, and I know straight away how I feel about a written piece. But for this one, I wasn’t sure. I wanted to like it, but it didn’t turn out the way I’d seen it in my head, perhaps.

The second piece was about a shy young man and his forceful, abrasive mother, and their strained relationship. For reasons the boy doesn’t understand at first, his mother’s angry sorrow is focused on a particular place near their home. It’s a place she asks her son not to go to, but it also happens to be a popular meeting point for parties, and so – inevitably – the day comes when the young man betrays his mother’s trust, and attends a party in this strange place, sacred to his mother. When the mother discovers her son has broken his promise to her, she is extremely angry, and in her subsequent breakdown the reason for her dislike of the place becomes clear to the boy at the same time as the reader.

Again, a story I really wanted to like. But it just doesn’t work.

Because of all this, I’ve probably been feeling a bit defeated over the past few days. My energy levels are a bit depleted, maybe, and my brain seems stuck in first gear. I needed some inspiration, some encouragement. I needed a reminder of what I’m doing here, and why I’m doing it.

And, yesterday evening, I found it.

I’m not sure if you’ll have heard of a poet named Dorothy Molloy Carpenter. Sadly, Ms. Molloy Carpenter passed away almost a decade ago, just before her first book of poetry was published (two further volumes were also published posthumously). During her time of illness, when she was facing into treatment for the disease that claimed her life, she wrote a prayer of sorts, called her ‘Credo’. This prayer was printed on a card that was distributed at her memorial service, which happened to be held at the University in which I used to work. Many years ago, someone gave me their copy of this card, and I’ve held on to it ever since; somehow, last night, I happened to read it again just when I needed to. I want to quote a little bit from the beginning of the prayer, if you’ll indulge me:

The one essential thing is for my voice to ring out in the cosmos and to use, to this end, every available second. Everything else must serve this. This is being in love with life.

Every voice is needed for the full harmony.

Well.

There you have it. Use every available second. Sing your song. Make your contribution. Say your piece. Write your story. Be in love with life.

Image: insehee.egloos.com

Happy Thursday. Use it as well as you can, and remember that the world needs every scrap of positivity, every drop of happiness, and every flicker of love that it can get. We can’t all save the world from terror, but we can all do our best to add to the communal store of joy. Let’s all do what we can.

 

 

Positivity Will Catch You – Honest

In conversation with my husband last night – after a long, long day for both of us – the topic of positivity and optimism came up. I described to him how hard it is, at times, to keep my thoughts positive and focused, and how easy it feels sometimes to let myself sink under the burden of ‘Why bother? This whole stupid writing dream is never going to happen, anyway.’ My husband, as he is wont, made a statement of such profound wisdom that I felt the need to share it with you all this morning.

Being positive is a safety net, he said. Think about that for a while.

Image: tayaradio.net

Isn’t that a brilliant thought? Positivity will catch you, like a safety net. What he means is, of course, if you keep a positive outlook, little setbacks (like rejections, failed story-ideas, missed deadlines) will somehow not seem so bad. Being positive helps you to take things like that in your stride, and every time you choose to be positive in the face of a setback, it gets easier. There’s an added benefit, too – every time you choose to be positive when something relatively minor goes wrong, the easier it gets to stay positive when something more serious goes wrong.

Having said that, nothing serious (thankfully) has yet gone wrong for me, really. Things are, more or less, going to plan. But as anyone who’s been alive for longer than a few months is aware, nothing ever goes to plan for long.

Image: awaypoint.wordpress.com

Habits, like plans, are easy to form, and hard to break. This is not news. For example, I’m a person who’s notorious for chewing the inside of my mouth; I’ve done it all my life. Even though I know it hurts, it can lead to lacerations, and all that, it’s a habit I can’t break. I do it without even thinking about it. Heck, I’m probably doing it right now. Of course, this is a bad habit, and one I could easily do without, but because people are complicated little things, it’s always easier to form bad habits than good ones. They do have something in common, though – the more often you repeat an action (whether good or bad), the more habitual it becomes. The same thing applies to mental habits, and particularly to positivity. I do believe positivity is a mental habit, and I believe it can be practised and learned and encouraged to become habitual. It just takes a huge amount of effort, particularly for a person who isn’t naturally positive – i.e. me.

My mother spent my entire childhood telling me to develop PMA, as she called it – Positive Mental Attitude. I knew she was right, and what she was saying made sense, but for some reason I could just never do it. I allowed myself to be beaten by pessimism time after time, making silly choice after silly choice, giving up on dream after dream. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m older, or more secure in my life and myself, or because I’m doing something I really, truly love and want to devote my life to, but being positive now seems like the only logical thing to do in a situation like mine. Mam, if you’re reading this: I finally learned what you were trying to teach me all those years. And – you were right.

As well as the benefits of trying to think positive, and taking the optimistic view in every situation, there’s also this to think about: the more often you succumb to negative thinking, and pessimistic choices, the easier that becomes, too. Every knock-back you get, if you’re in a negative frame of mind, puts you down so much that you just don’t have the time or energy to fully recover from it before the next one hits you. Then, you get put down again, and you sink even lower than you were before. And so on, and so on, until you reach rock bottom, and you’ve no further to sink. Negative thinking, like positive thinking, is a cumulative thing; every choice builds on the one before it, and forms the foundation for the one after it.

This is easy to understand in an abstract sense. It probably sounds quite logical (hopefully) when divorced from a context. When you’re going through something crushing or complicated or upsetting, of course, it’s not so easy to keep your thoughts positive. But, if you’re anything like me, once you start trying to do it, and you let the light in just a little, it begins to get easier and easier, until eventually – I hope – it will become effortless. Imagine what you could achieve if you just believed that you could do anything that came your way, and that you’d give it the very best shot you could. If you were enthusiastic about challenges, and met them with a smile on your face, instead of fear in your heart.

I hope it helps to remember my clever husband’s phrase – positivity is a safety net. He’s right, of course. Start small with positive thinking, and see if it doesn’t bloom throughout your whole life. It’s worth a try! I’m by no means there yet – positive thinking is still a conscious choice for me, a conscious turning away from the downward-pulling power of the negative. I hope eventually it will be instinctual.

When the knocks really start rolling in, and the challenges start mounting up, we’ll see how much progress I’ve made. I’m going to practise as much as I can in the meantime! And, of course, if I can do it, so can you.

Swings and Roundabouts

Yesterday was a sort of ‘mixed fortunes’ type of day. Some good stuff happened, and some – well, not exactly bad, because that would be overstating the case, but perhaps we can settle on ‘not so good’ – stuff happened, too.

So, a more or less normal day, then.

The good stuff included such highlights as waking up alive, husband waking up alive, the sun shining, my brain working, and gaining my shiny second publication in under a week – my flash fiction, ‘Reunion’, appeared in Issue 22 of The Bohemyth Magazine. (If you missed the link to it, it’s at the end of yesterday’s post, or under the new ‘My Writing’ tab on the blog’s homepage.) Another twisty and dark story about death and messed-up families, I’m at a loss to explain where it came from, too. Suffice to say that my brain normally works in pink and fluffy terms, so there logically must come a time when it needs to venture down the rarely-trod path of evil. You know, for balance.

On the other hand, I learned yesterday that I was not shortlisted for a writing competition I’d entered. I was proud of and pleased with the story I’d written, and I thought I’d handled the brief reasonably well. However, I’d also sent an author photograph with my submission, and it – to be fair – was pretty gruesome. I’ve since found another one where I don’t look quite so much like a Vogon overlord, so let’s hope I’ll improve my chances of being selected now. (I’m joking, of course. Not about the photo looking like a Vogon overlord, but about how choosing a better photo might improve my chances. Of course, it’s all about the writing, and this time I didn’t measure up. No big deal.)

Lest the word ‘Vogon’ mean nothing to you, I’ve helpfully included this illustrative illustration. Behold!
Image: lebaum.blogspot.com

Perhaps a little more upsettingly, I also came to the realisation yesterday that an idea I’d been working on, and a WiP I’d written nearly 40,000 words on, will now have to be scrapped. (Don’t worry, though – the WiP I’m talking about is not ‘Tider’, nor ‘Eldritch’, nor any of my most recent novel ideas, which is a blessing.) You remember how I spoke about buying books recently, and how much I was enjoying reading them? Well, this is still true, but the book I’m currently reading is also causing me a bit of pain. I’ve been meaning to read this book for a long time, ever since I first read a synopsis of its plot somewhere online, but I was putting it off because I knew it sounded similar to an idea I’d had several years back. This sometimes does happen, and you feel that your world is ending because someone has written the book you wanted to write before you had a chance to – but then you actually read the book, and it’s not so bad. Life carries on, and you keep working on your WiP, and there’s space in the world for both stories.

This is not one of those times.

Despite the fact that the author has created an entirely different sort of society to the one I wrote about, and her characters are all different, the core concept of the world and the way it functions is exactly the same as the idea I’d been working on. So much so, in fact, that the same terminology and descriptions are used, along with the same images and explanations I’d come up with to convey the ‘reality’ of the fictive world. It’s almost weird to see the word I thought I’d created, used by the characters to describe their world, appearing in print before my eyes, yet not in a book written by me. I have pride in my little idea – clearly, its essence was good enough to make a book out of – but I know my own work wasn’t a fraction as strong as the work in the book I’m reading. In a way, that makes it easier to take. I couldn’t have done as good a job as this author has done, and she has done greater justice to our shared idea than I would have. So, it’s hard for me but better for the world of books and stories that it has worked out this way.

There are differences in our stories, too, so there may yet be something I can salvage from my own work. It’s not a total lost cause yet.

Anyway. To end on a high, the most incredible beams of sunshine are bursting through my windows, the sky outside is so blue it would put the Riviera to shame (we can ignore the fact that the wind is cold enough to skin you, because luckily I’m inside with the heating on), and I’m going to a Christening ceremony tomorrow for a friend’s new and beautiful baby girl, so that will be wonderful.

Life is good.

Image: visitgrandforks.com

 

Brain Training

And, as seems inevitable, Monday has rolled around once more. It’s amazing how time just keeps on keeping on, isn’t it? I hope you enjoyed your weekend, and that you managed to spend at least some of it doing something you enjoy. As well as seeing my best friend this past weekend, I also managed to fit in two long walks in the cool, clear Spring weather we’ve been having lately, and I ate some lovely food. So, life is good.

Image: donasdays.blogspot.com

One of the (many) things I have on my mind this morning is the elasticity of the brain, and the suppleness of the imagination. I’ve realised this over the course of the last week. Those of you with eagle eyes will notice that this time period coincides (more or less) with my recent focus on the short story form. The changes I’ve seen in my thought processes are quite astounding, and they’ve given me hope that my aged brain isn’t beyond learning something new just yet.

I’ve always been a long-form writer. I always thought in terms of novels, or perhaps novellas. I’ve talked before on this blog about how I found it difficult, even when in school and university, to bring written work in under the required wordcount. For whatever reason, I never really thought of myself as a person who was able to write short stories, and so I never really tried to do it. There have been a few attempts at writing stories, somewhere around the 2 or 3,000 word mark, down through the years (one about post-natal depression, another about an abused woman who begs a vampire to ‘turn’ her so she’ll be powerful enough to take revenge on the man who brutalised her, among others), but I always found myself lacking in this area. So, I’ve surprised myself lately by really falling in love with the flash fiction form. I’m almost bemused by my desire to create a story which can fit into such a tiny space, and it’s the complete opposite of how I normally think and write. My brain’s a-changing, and it’s a good thing.

On Saturday, during the course of my walk, an entire short story popped into my mind. The setup, the characters, the family, the situation, the conclusion, the dramatic arc, the whole lot. I saw it play out in front of me like it was a short film. I’ve been letting it brew ever since, but – with any luck – I’ll get it down on paper today. The most amazing thing about this, though, is that it appeared fully formed in my head as a short story. There was no question in my mind that it should be written in no more than 500 words (so, really it will probably end up being a flash fiction piece). It felt different from my usual story-seeds, ones which bloom gently into my mind and might reveal a character, or a family name, or a pivotal event, or an emotional showdown, all of which will clearly seem like part of a longer story. This was an idea which made no apology for being short. It was no coquettish thought, flirting with my neurons and promising to give me more details if I’d spend several thousand words on it. Instead, it arrived like a boisterous guest at a dinner party – the type that makes straight for the drinks cabinet with a mind to livening up the place. I liked it immediately.

As I walked, examining this little story-gem from all angles, I realised ‘I can do this. I can change the way my brain works, and how it thinks and comes up with ideas. A little bit of practice is all it takes.’ It was quite the realisation. It made me understand that, sometimes, the only thing standing between a person and their ability to do something is themselves. I knew this already, in a sort of abstract sense, but it’s only when you find yourself in a situation where it becomes tangible that you really understand the truth of it. I had myself boxed off as being one particular sort of writer, and I never even allowed myself to try any other way of working; now, when I give it a go, I find I’m enjoying the freedom found in newness. I’m not the best short story writer or flash fiction writer in the world, and I know that. But I’m getting cautiously positive feedback (amid the rejections) from some of the work I’ve been sending out lately, and that’s enough. That’s good enough for me. This positivity, coupled with the fact that I’m really enjoying my experiments with these new forms, means that things are looking up on this sunny Monday morning.

I really hope you’re having a positive start to the week, and that you’ll look for the newness, and the excitement, in whatever your life presents to you today. If things seem tough, maybe stretch your brain to think about things in a different way. It might relish the challenge, and end up surprising you.

Image: breakingmuscle.com