ROBUST discussion

Hope everyone is busy writing and adding up the money from all those sales. I'm failing on both counts: not writing and not selling. Worse yet, I'm not feeling sad about either. Can I possibly be a has-been when I never was?

You worked twenty years to be an overnight success, and now you want a holiday?

It's good to see you around, Patricia!

I'm busy, but I'm not writing or selling any books to speak of.

My yarn habit has taken over my life. I'm spinning wool and llama fiber, dying some of it and then knitting or crocheting it up.

Nothing literary in that. LOL

K. A. wrote: "My yarn habit has taken over my life. I'm spinning wool and llama fiber, dying some of it a..."

At least you're doing something. I'm on cruise control. Ever since the time change, I've been feeling out of sync. Haven't done much of anything.

Andre Jute wrote: "You worked twenty years to be an overnight success, and now you want a holiday?"

It's not so much I want a holiday as it is just not having anything to say. All my starts quickly stop.

Patricia wrote: "It's not so much I want a holiday as it is just not having anything to say. All my starts quickly stop."

For a junior writer that might be tricky but for you it's just a sign that the story you need to go with hasn't announced itself yet, nor characters' voices in your head found their rhythm yet. It's miserable, I know, but you just gotta wait it out.

Andre Jute wrote: "For a junior writer that might be tricky but for you it's just a sign that..."

Exactly. I have one character firmly in mind. A fairly good sense of another, and a device that'll give the plot some form. But I'm not hearing that elusive inner voice that gives me dictation.

This is useful for newbies. One character is all you need. His problem, which is really where your story starts, implies other characters. That's a story already. So you're a bit further down the trail than we thought at first. What you're waiting for isn't the character or his problem but the tone of voice in which the story will succeed. Of course, if it doesn't yet speak to you, it probably won't speak to readers either.

All round useful advice indeed...

Patricia wrote: "Andre Jute wrote: "For a junior writer that might be tricky but for you it's just a sign that..."

Exactly. I have one character firmly in mind. A fairly good sense of another, and a device that'll..."

Hi Patricia! Great to see you here again!

I am in the same boat as you, love the way you put that, "...not hearing that inner voice that gives me dictation.

Even though a 'junior writer' (kinda fun being a junior anything, kench) I am not sweating it...

I'm still stalled all the way around. But it seems if I do something else for awhile, take my mind off writing, I eventually come up with a story worth writing.

Good plan, Kat...

Sharon wrote: "kinda fun being a junior anything"

I ordered flowers sent to the girl behind the liquor store counter who demanded to see photo ID to prove I was over 18 before she would sell me any liquor.

Kench!

Ah...has-beens. We shall all be has-beens, sooner or later, sinking back into the dust as we dream of the girl in the liquor store, the stranger catching our eye for a moment on the train platform in Geneva, the chocolate truffle behind the glass that we never bought. I say, enjoy the sink (kitchen or otherwise).

There was hit song about a girl seen on a passing train about forty years ago. About the same time as "Tell Laura I love her", not too long after "Theme from a summer place" was big.

Oh, Nostalgia, I miss you!

I could go for some truffles about now.

Hi, Sharon!

Christopher, I was taking a petition around, getting signatures in 1995. There was one signer I can't forget. I still see how the sunlight rested on him, the expression on his face, his eyes -- and I kick myself for not saying "Let's get married." I didn't even pay attention to his signature. If I had, I'd know his name and address -- and there's no way he could ever get away.

Patricia wrote: "... there's no way he could ever get away"

He clearly never has Patricia. I'm with Christopher, we should enjoy the sink. Perhaps you should go back to the general neighbourhood and stroll up and down, maybe he'll show up...

Patricia, I've been there. A Saturday marketplace in Lausanne. Sigh. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...

J.A. wrote: "I could go for some truffles about now."

Leonidas, the nearest maker of Belgian truffles, is a round trip of only 44 miles...

Sharon wrote: "Patricia wrote: "... He clearly never has Patricia...."

Ha! You're right.

One day at a concert I saw this truly beautiful violinist in the orchestra. Afterwards I arranged an introduction. It was a mistake. It wasn't that she was stupid, it was that she was so stunted by the constant training and focus of learning to be a musician that the rest of the world didn't exist for her. She was an empty seashell sounding far away against your ear.

The only time I saw any real emotion was when she left me. For a bet with a conductor I programmed my computer to write a symphony. This joke was performed by the national symphony orchestra and broadcast and was, as one would expect, crap. Of course the critics' reaction was between respectful and ecstatic: I was already an established artist, I had considerable influence, and even my jokes are of a certain unmistakable quality. I collected all the scores and invited 400 of my closest friends to a party to watch me burn them ceremoniously. All my musician friends decided this was an act of artistic desecration and little miss ice cube screeched at me that I was an unfeeling brute, slamming the door on her way out (taking the half-million dollar violin I bought her with her to prove *she* wasn't unfeeling...). But I have pretty good taste, and I know what in the arts is genuinely new and worthwhile, and what is merely trivial fashion dressed up in pompous self-importance, and there was even then nothing lacking in my confidence in my judgement, so I just faced them down. Years later the conductor, almost on his deathbed, called me to apologize for calling me a barbarian. He said he wished he had my courage, that he would withdraw half his recordings if he could. I offered him space in my bottom drawer and we had a giggle, and a fortnight later he died and was given a State funeral in Israel.

As for the girl, she tried a solo career but lacked the spark, and married a dentist, ironically one she met at one of my parties (those days for some reason I had a whole entourage of gay dentists, though this one was the hetero exception), and bore three children whose lives she ruined trying to live her dreams through them.

It would have been better to let those ships pass in the night just beyond hailing distance. We were a waste of time for each other.

Perhaps it would be most prudent to simply torpedo other ships that pass in the night? Stand off at a distance and let fly.

Christopher wrote: "Perhaps it would be most prudent to simply torpedo other ships that pass in the night? Stand off at a distance and let fly."

I don't know about that. Rounded people are defined by their mistakes as much as by anything else.

Ah, Andre. Always entertaining...

I'd like to hear the violinist's version of that story.

Kench!

Great to see you all. A couple of weeks ago I was in a hotel room with nothing to read after I finished my work, so I read one of the Marmite threads. I won't eat that poison but it was such a witty thread...

Hi, everyone! I'm a long-time lurker in the Robust group. I found this thread after asking Andre if the topic of finding it hard to get started on a new WIP had ever been discussed.

I'm pretty much in the same state that Patricia said she was when she started this thread in mid-November. I have a couple of characters, a germ of an idea for the plot, and some other details, but I haven't found my brain percolating with ideas as it did with the last novel. I haven't been too worried because I know my subconscious is working on it, but I also know that I can and should prod it. That approach has worked in the past, but this time I can't even work up the energy to prod with any real intent.

Patricia, have your writing doldrums passed?

Nope, LeAnn -- no voices speaking to me yet. I don't know if they'll ever come back. Good luck with your voices...

I read once that Mark Twain wrote seasonally -- something like spring through fall. So he basically didn't write during the winter. I hypothesized when I learned this that he might have had SAD or something like it. Perhaps you and I will recover our literary energies once spring arrives.

I think Mark Twain was much, much more of a public showman than any writer today. It might be that in the winter he travelled to lecture and promote his books. It sounds counterintuitive, but given the choice, I write in spring, summer and autumn, and rest in the winter, because you write best when you get a certain amount of fresh air, and in the winter days can go by that the weather is too bad to get out of the house, and the pace and quality of your writing goes down perceptibly, for me at least. I like being able to jump on my bike -- my current bike is the fantastic Kranich you can see at http://coolmainpress.com/BICYCLING.html -- to catch a ride when I come to a natural break in my work, and for that reason I have pedal pals who need no warning or at most an hour's warning, so I just call them and say, "At the cattle mart by eleven o'clock."

I writer best in the winter. I like to goof around with all kinds of things in the spring and fall.

One way I like to work with story lines is to write out three or four different things I could do with a story line, then give each one a value between 1 and 6. Then toss a six-sided dice and see which one comes up.

Duh. Before you can do that, you must first have six ideas.

Kat's point is worth more discussion, so I've started a new thread "To plot or to roll the dice?"

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Andre, I think that I also read something about Twain's health, at least in his later years, that made me wonder if his taking winters off were more due to health reasons than being a showman. But that's an interesting point about showmanship. I read something online not too long ago about Dickens and how he performed his stories as an actor would with all the lines memorized and switching between characters. I can't help but wonder if that wouldn't be a real benefit for an author these days, but, alas, I think I'm not going to be able to succeed at that -- I'm sure I'd need years to hone that set of skills, which doesn't come from sitting in front of a computer.

As for the bike: I wish I'd grown up riding one. Unfortunately, we didn't live on a paved road and I learned to ride at a friend's house. I've never even owned one, though my children have each had several apiece. In fact, my husband and I just went shopping at a local outdoors store to price them for our eldest, who starts college in the fall and wants to have one on campus instead of driving. I can see how that would be very conducive to getting the mental juices flowing. I usually like to be outside puttering around when it's nice, so I don't tend to think about writing seasonally, but rather a weeknight/weekend activity (or, if I'm caught up in something, as long as it draws me, whatever the season or time of day).

Riding's healthy, but your child needs a helmet and to wear it, and to observe the rules of the road, just a like a driver, but with much greater alertness.

Duh. Before you can do that, you must first have six ideas."

Not really. Three ideas will work. They're just worth 2 points each.

I'll have to check out the post.

Saw this today about how 'not-writing' can be good (although it is focused on no or slow progress while writing a novel, not a dry spell without a novel).

Afterwards it will seem simple and natural, inevitable, to you too.

Well, Andre, despite having written three novels (or 4, depending on how you count them), I haven't really learned this yet because while I finished writing and editing the first, I'd already outlined the second, and long before I finished writing that one, I'd already had a kernel of an idea for the third. Within two months of finishing the second, I found myself absorbed with planning and imagining the third. Long before I finished the third, I had an idea for the fourth and realized that a lot of my "for fun and education" non-fiction reading really served to feed the development of the fourth. It's just been 9 months now of no writing and no outlining/planning, and no scenes, plot, or dialogue have started bubbling up yet.

Having had such a fertile 4-5 years, I'm a bit unprepared for the fact that I have to let my imagination go "fallow." I haven't started panicking yet, as I've said, but I fear what will happen to my skills and imaginative dexterity if I take too long a break. So I'm going to start disciplining myself to just write and throw away (I think you suggested this in the other thread) until I've cleaned the gunk out of my creative spigot and the juices flow a little more quickly. Uh, I hope that makes sense! :-)

That's the correct method, LeAnn. It works. A little fear is a good motivator. It doesn't actually happen as you fear it will because these skills are like riding a bicycle: once you've learned you know how and can take it up again with just a few wobbles even years and decades later. But the fear that it might, irrational or not, is real. I've been there too. Every professional writer has, and survived to ride the next big wave; that's essentially what defines a professional writer, a real artist of any kind.

What's happening to you is that you're on the cusp of a change-over between having told all the stories that were cooking away in your subconscious for years, maybe decades, and you're now entering a phase where you must find your stories, rather than them just being there, source almost unknown. Don't quiz the characters when they present themselves in your mind too closely. Give them space to breathe and soon one will develop a problem and start speaking to you.