Betty R. Black

Negativity and writing

At the time of writing this, the world is a mess. This isn’t about that, but that ain’t helping.

There are times when I’m late posting something because I’ve just been burdened with other work or am lazy. Once or twice I was just uninspired, which is against everything I think about when it comes to the work of writing. This week though, my issue was one that I deal with on a regular basis: seeping negativity. This week I nearly drowned in it.

While my private life is just that, I do find myself spending nearly every day with a terribly negative person. It is not a relationship that is easily severed, though distance can sometimes be achieved. When days are good, I find myself impenetrable to the dark aura and the distant yells. When I am in a weakened state, less confident in my identity or ability, those tendrils sneak past my defenses and seriously fuck up my day. Or two days, or three. I can usually cap it there, but I’m increasingly weary.

My situation is not uncommon and I think I could find some help in talking about it more. Not just with professionals, but with people (especially fellow writers) who deal with a similar issue and who find themselves wasting a lot of writing energy just protecting their own happiness.

What say you? Do you have tips on how to remain hopeful in the face of negativity?

Meet me in the middle

Getting stuck and unstuck in the center of writing.

I tend to have trouble with middles and I think this is common. Normally I am a “pants” writer, someone who discovers the story, the characters, the whole package, as they write. This has typically ended with me getting bored about halfway through and abandoning the project. In the darker moments, I suspected that I was never going to take writing seriously and that it would always be something I played at. I didn’t have the “stamina” to make it through a whole story. I just wasn’t good enough.

Then, after listening to countless podcasts, watching videos, reading blogs of other writers, I realized that I can combine the best of both worlds. The moment I start to feel the enthusiasm wane while discovery writing, I could stop an outline the rest of the story. I expected this to help me through the fear I have about outlining in general: that telling myself the story in an outline would be satisfying enough that I wouldn’t go on to drafting. That is still a fear and I am teetering on the edge of that being a possibility now.

With The Shape of Us, I wanted to experiment with telling a story from an outside point of view. The game from the NPC perspective, as it were. After the first three episodes, I quickly realized that I needed to outline a full story for Sykes and Baron, a true plot in the background that my POV characters were getting a glimpse of. It then became an exercise to see how much of that plot should bleed through to make it relevant to the POV character’s life at that moment, but also allow the reader to piece together the background story. So I plotted out a 14-episode “season” for The Shape of Us and right now we’re at the half-way point.

I didn’t post on Friday because I didn’t write episode 8. I could give a number of excuses, but I wasn’t ready. I felt that having a space at the mid-point would seem intentional (it was not) and comfortable (it was definitely not). Also, not many people are reading this right now, so the insecure part of me thought “who would miss it anyway?”

I did. I missed it. I fell in love with these characters the moment I finished episode 1 and I am determined to give readers glimpses into their lives, one unwilling bystander at a time. Whatever behind-the-scenes method I use for writing these episodes, in the end it won’t matter. What matters is if I’m satisfied with how the story plays out. So far, so good.

The next seven episodes start posting tomorrow. I hope you enjoy them.

Rant: The Last Bookstore – What the hell is this shit?

As if the whole world has to be Instagrammable — and yes, it must since soon the only way we’ll be able to feed ourselves is with that sweet, sweet influencer affiliate money (I’m counting on you, Hot Pockets)…

This article from June floated along my Twitter feed this week and I was immediately destroyed by the images of book sculptures and color-coded cases. I get it, I do. The aesthetic nature of book displays can be satisfying and the physical book itself can be a medium for a new art and blah, blah, barf.

Whatever, man. Whatever. While the website allows you to order from their book catalog online — and, full disclosure, I was prepared for that online store not to exist in some sort of Presence-Only Hipster Timeline — I find the shifting of our artistic consumption priorities from experience to the mere recording of experience and displaying of experience to be…sad.

Not that I’m some sort of extroverted adventurer, but I’ll be damned if I line up my books by color. (Hides my shelf of black, Penguin classics. “Those don’t count!”)

Source: The Last Bookstore in Downtown L.A. Is Still an Iconic Spot

Status Report 191401

I’m writing mostly academic words today — pre-semester set up, etc. — and while words are words and I’m keeping track of them, it’s not as satisfying as those words that I pull out of thin air and plop down on to the page like flicking paint off a toothbrush. (This should give you an idea of how clean my process is.) Tracking what I produce instead of writing down what I want to produce is helping me get what I want done. Now all I need is someone to tell me how I can unfriend everyone on Facebook forever without having to deal with people’s feelings. Ugh.

Rant: Am I The Right Kind of Writer?

There are great advantages to being a viewer of the online writing community. Not a member, per se, but an observer, lurking in the mists just outside YouTube, Instagram, or Goodreads, listening, learning, leaning in now and then to give a like or a “yay,” but never jumping in with both feet into the great advice-laden oblivion. For me, this is probably the best.

I find myself getting anxious, watching videos in particular, about who I am supposed to be as an independent writer and how productive I need to be to succeed. While the publishing advice is helpful and I understand the Amazon-fueled distribution model demands more and more blood sacrifice, I am starting to think that there is a whole market/niche/community out there of “writers” who only give “writing advice” and don’t necessarily write anything else. Please understand I am a novice here and baby hasn’t become cynical yet.

So before I download your “helpful” PDF or sign up for your “complete marketing course” I’m going to want to see a list of your non-writing-business related books, please. Yes, yes, I understand you write under a pseudonym (as I obviously do as well) but before I invest any more of my time (my most precious resource) I’m going to need to see your bibliography. Because otherwise I’m going to think that the best way to make a living as a writer is to cobble a bunch of blog posts together and market them as an ebook to other would-be writers.

I was so thoroughly impressed with this young writer’s discussion (and the subsequent responses) that I became an instant fan of Shaelin. I especially appreciated how she calls out how the community is mainly middle-class, U.S.-based, white women.
(Full disclosure, that’s me too.)

Just to reiterate what Shaelin talks about in her video (which I’ve only just come across, pardon my tardiness) is that writing and writers come in all forms. The Writing Process (capitalized because it’s fucking important) comes in all forms and changes, not just by writer, but buy Project. Every project, whether non-fiction, blog post, article, or fiction has a different Process going into it, during creation and revision, and in the final packaging. The idea that anyone has the secret to the perfect Writing Process is ridiculous at best, an unscrupulous lie at worse.

And, man oh man, don’t get me started on videos about bullet journals and the “Writer’s Planner.” Fhgnaklakdglishdflksndlfkhlsdkfslkdf!

Yup, I said it. I’m unimportant enough to get away with it, too. Wait until my next post when I talk about how a chunk of the writing community appears to be supported by spouse salaries.

Answer: Yes.