Sleepychameleon Hangout v.3

It sings in my blood and in my brain, but I’ve ignored the music for so long that it no longer rises to the surface as easily and smoothly as it once did. At first it was my speech, and I withdrew into my head and spoke with pen and keyboard. And now it’s as if those conduits have grown old and dusty, and I have to trace my way through the forking paths once more. The truth is, I never know how to say exactly what I want to say; the truth is, I’m not sure I want to say what I know I need to say. And so it sits, wearing a smooth little track inside my head, with nowhere to go but wanting out.

So it goes. So I go.

Diablo Cody in Variety:

“Blogging helped me cultivate a voice in a way,” Cody says. “But the thing that is most useful about it is just doing a daily writing exercise. You’re using the muscle even as it stagnates in a cubicle or wherever.”

Btw, Diablo Cody is an awesome nom de plume. Kind of like the Reverse Cowgirl, only more old school Western. Girlie probably needs a mustache ’cause she’s BADASS.

Neil Gaiman, in Fragile Things:

The ingredients of the story I had in the back of my head combined in ways that were better than I had hoped when I began. (Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.)

It is a strange thing, after limiting myself for so many years to “just one endeavour” or a “single-minded pursuit of a goal” to suddenly open up to possibilities and then get a whole bunch of things dumped in my lap.

Chief among these is the (perhaps overdue) recognition that I do have latent artistic skills that have never been…nurtured, at least nowhere near the same way I have kicked and beaten and stabbed my writing ability into some passable form. And even that has been slow in coming. But within the last several weeks, a mere change in perspective has suddenly impacted the way I make choices about my life. This is not a bad thing, but a trifle jarring for someone like me whose goal has never been to forge my own life path, necessarily, but to find the shortcuts that will let me take the shortest and easiest way to the next destination.

I’ve never lacked for places to go, to continue to indulge in that overused metaphor, but I’ve always lacked the motivation to get there faster on a consistent basis. I’m easily distractable, hardly ever focused, prone to procrastination, and susceptible to basking in admiration and accolades for which, although earned comparatively to everyone else, are nowhere near the full measure of my capability. Call me Atalanta in Love. But recently, circumstances have changed. Existing obligations have reorganized themselves around new ones. Former projects are taking a back burner–the equivalent of moving something from “Projects” to “Someday/Maybe”, to use GTD-speak. (And yes, I refuse to abbreviate that S/M. I’m in San Francisco. That construction triggers different connotations to me.)

So now I find myself learning Photoshop skills on the fly, between cramming for school and trying to maintain some semblance of physical fitness. It’s self improvement of the strangest, sort, this “I need to do this, because I can” and the taking on of assignments in order to further my ability. This is probably a result of the last few years’ activities and introspection–I can probably point to specific reasons why I choose to do certain things, but there is nonetheless a strange sort of wonder whenever I complete an action that progresses exactly as I had intended it. One of the few perks of having low self-esteem: you never, ever, take anything for granted.

Re: Ursula Vernon’s sporadic “Elf v. Orc” illustrated (and episodic?) work-in-progress:

She has the same cantankerous muse that I do - attempts to force or cajole it into doing things makes it move slower, bolt in random (generally opposite) directions, and stand stock still refusing to go anyplace you’d want to lead it.

Some people have wise owls for a muse, or gossamer-winged fae, or perhaps particularly-clever ferrets. Other people are stuck with the muse-mule. And really, the best way to get a mule to go someplace is to get one that knows the way already, sit on it, and wait.

–drakkenmaw, over at Ursula Vernon’s Livejournal.

And this is why I’m not a professional writer.

Writer’s disease: if something affects you, you spend an obscene amount of time picking it apart to find out how it achieved the effect and whether it can be adapted and replicated.

From Elevator Lady.

From http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html via lifehack.org

[Reformatted for Personal Use by VTH, because I like quick, easy scanning to find the particular line I want. Everything else has been kept intact, including author introduction.]

March 2005(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes– 23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

As for how to write well, here’s the short version:
1. Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;
2. rewrite it over and over;
3. cut out everything unnecessary;
4. write in a conversational tone;
5. develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours;
6. imitate writers you like;
7. if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;
8. expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it,
9. and 50% of those you start with to be wrong;
10. be confident enough to cut;
11. have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag;
12. don’t (always) make detailed outlines;
13. mull ideas over for a few days before writing;
14. carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you;
15. start writing when you think of the first sentence;
16. if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first;
17. write about stuff you like;
18. don’t try to sound impressive;
19. don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly;
20. use footnotes to contain digressions;
21. use anaphora to knit sentences together;
22. read your essays out loud to see
(a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and
(b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading);
23. try to tell the reader something new and useful;
24. work in fairly big quanta of time;
25. when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far;
26. when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with;
27. accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file;
28. don’t feel obliged to cover any of them;
29. write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;
33. if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
34. ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most;
35. go back and tone down harsh remarks;
36. publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas;
37. print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen;
38. use simple, germanic words;
39. learn to distinguish surprises from digressions;
40. learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.