Getting Some Distance

You have just finished your brilliant work—a piece that combines the wit of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman with the social commentary of Midnight’s Children and the style of Finnegan’s Wake—and you are soaring in the clouds. Your long-awaited goal as finally arrived and you are ready to pack your baby off to the nearest publisher and wait for the money and Pulitzers to roll in. But, before you do, there are some things you need to consider that, if they catch you unawares, could cause you to stumble and fall from your great heights in angsty, writerly frustration (Be honest, you’re a writer and thus have a slight tendency towards the melodramatic).

Be a tortured artist, but don't be a spoiled writer.

You’ve written the book, and it’s good. It’s even published—whether by you or by a traditional publisher—and now you want people to read it.

But you don’t really want to have to think about how to GET them to read it, because you’re not a publicist or a marketer—you’re a writer. You spend minutes, many of them, searching for the perfect word (Work? no…Toil? nooope…Labor? yes! labor!). You craft your sentences with purpose, intentionally choosing words with a certain number of syllables (and maybe some assonance, too), and you place your commas (or refrain from placing them at all) very deliberately, all of it working together to draw the reader into the scene or the narrator’s mind and mood. You’ll even spend days—days!—pondering a character’s name—Paulo? Chadwick III? Bob?—until you find the perfect fit for your protagonist’s second cousin. How could you, an artist, be asked to—*choke*—sell your own books?

Blogger's Block

Today I will be writing about that Sauron to your creativity’s Frodo, that Magneto to your intellect’s Professor X, and that Jar Jar Binks to your inner fanboy’s self-respect. Today, I will be writing about writer’s block.

The irony of writing about writer’s block does not go unnoticed by me, your heroic blogger. I came up with this topic following a desperate bout with this ultimate evil that left me with a fragment of an idea and a near-concussion after applying my forehead to the desk multiple times with increasing force. Now, I wouldn’t suggest such a response to writer’s block if one can help it. If not professionally done, the Head-Desk Method will only result in blunt trauma, a trip to the hospital, and possibly a broken keyboard. So, you may be asking, how do the non-“professionals” deal with this juggernaut if we don’t wish to fork over the money for a new keyboard? Well, I’m glad you asked, as it will provide me with a post for today.