Lilith Saintcrow

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check us out!

Also, the complete Dante Valentine omnibus is now officially released!

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I think it was Flaubert who kept rotten apples in a desk drawer. He would open the drawer, lean over, and take a deep whiff to evoke autumn.

Everyone’s got their something.

Ritual and habit: the best of slaves, the worst of masters. The habit of sitting down and getting your hands on the keyboard can take you through when your discipline is faltering, but your habit of “needing” to catch a particular television show can interfere with your writing time. The habit of consistently saving and backing up your work can save your cookies, but the habit of surfing the Net during writing time can cut your productivity by an order of magnitude.

To little people, the world is a big and scary place, and rituals are comforting. To bigger people, social rituals–weddings, funerals, what have you–serve as social glue, give a framework for celebration, and provide closure. To practicing witches or occultists, ritual is a way to build a trigger allowing you to step into another psychic “space.” Human beings love rituals. We can’t get enough of them. Left to ourselves, we’ll make a ritual out of anything. Even the abstraction of writing.

There are two varieties of Things You Need To Learn To Have A Shot At Being A Working Writer–two species, if you will. I call them the two currents. One is the method of swimming against, the other is finding the best way to swim with. Ritual and habit help with both.

We’re very fond of swimming against. The idea that all we need is a little willpower and some hard work is a very intoxicating one with a lot of cultural weight behind it. The whole diet and self-help industries, for example, are largely built on the notion that if you just have enough willpower you can “fix” yourself. (That brings up a rant, but that’s–say it with me–another blog post.) The Puritans thought enough hard work and repression could fix just about anything, and we are heirs to that obsession. For some things it works very well, and for some short-term creative endeavours it’s a godsend. Sometimes, the sheer stubbornness of swimming against has taken me through several ticklish situations, especially that one memorable 48-hour revision stint. (I was unwashed and a very cranky cupcake afterward, let me tell you.) I have nothing against the swimming against. It’s just not the only way, and for a lot of things it’s not terribly efficient either.

Swimming with, on the other hand, is the process of taking one’s own laziness and habits and making them work for you. An essential part of a writer’s career is learning to manage one’s laziness in the most efficient way. Human beings like habit because it’s easy. The needle slips into the groove, we slide into the track, and a significant amount of effort vanishes. We can just follow the groove. The initial investment of making a habit is swimming against; the payback is when the habit has become a groove and we’re kept in it without much effort on our part.

This is why every writer needs a working knowledge of how to build a habit, what constitutes a ritual, and the borders of their own laziness. This working knowledge can’t just sit there, it has to work. In other words, the writer needs to do something with it.

Building a habit takes anywhere from four days to a month of doing the same thing, whether it’s smoking a cigarette at 10pm, peeing in the shower, reading for a half-hour before bed, or picking one’s nose. Or carrying a notebook everywhere, jotting down dialogue on your lunch break, eating the same pastrami on rye for twenty years, tapping the dashboard when you go through a yellow light, or knocking on wood. Rest assured, most of your day is made up of habits. Gurdjieff swore people live in a sort of waking sleep, robotic. He’s probably right, only I don’t think you have to work yourself to exhaustion to be granted a taste of consciousness. I think habits are a grand thing–I mean, I like that my heart has the habit of beating–and the gift we have is the ability to choose a few habits all on our own.

A ritual is a set of actions. (The actions may have a religious or social meaning, yes, let’s not get bogged down.) One of my rituals when I finish a very emotionally draining scene is to get up and walk around the room I’m in, clockwise. It leaves the scene in the story where it belongs, instead of it leaking agony inside my head. I often touch the statue of Ganesh on my writing desk when I’m about to start a new story. The plum tree in my back yard gets a cup of milk the first day I notice it’s bloomed. I read an edit letter once, then scream and stamp and throw it across the room; a week later I go back and find out it’s not really that bad. (That’s a ritual of processing, right there.)

To get your habits to work for you, first you have to figure out what habits you have. The easiest way to do this is to try to start a new habit. Do one thing at a specific time for four days in a row, and each time you do it, write it down. If this is hard to do, if you keep forgetting, take a look at what habit you might be inadvertently cutting across. Bingo, you’ve found one. Once you’ve practiced this process a few times, you’ll start spotting habits everywhere. You can’t change what you can’t see–spotting your habits is the first step.

Here’s a secret: it is much easier to replace a habit than it is to lose one. I call this the Addiction Theory of Self-Change, with varying degrees of tongue-in-cheek. I know several people who have substituted playing with a pen or pencil or chopstick or what-have-you at all times for smoking, which seems to work okay until stressors pile up. I myself have substituted working a heavy bag for self-injury for years. Currently I’m trying to substitute deep breathing for my obsessive email-checking. (We’ll see how that one works out.) If you can’t break a habit, work it around by degrees until you’ve replaced it with a better one.

Rituals are a little different. I always end my books with the same finis. I always sit and stare for a few moments after I’ve typed it, while the engine in my brain slips its traces and starts the rebound process. I always do the same things on a release day–no, I will not tell you what they are. When a well-loved book gives up its ghost and its pages, I give it a funeral and a proper burial. I have rituals that hedge in each day’s writing sessions, and each time I perform them I am reinforcing the little click inside my brain, the shift over to another mode of being. The rituals have changed as my writing space has changed–for example, when I was writing in the middle of the night in the bathroom while a boy slept in the bed my ritual was very different than the sitting down ritual I perform nowadays.

There are Speshul Snowflakes who use habit and ritual as excuses not to write. “I can’t write if I don’t have X!” they wail. Bullshit. Your habits and rituals are here to work for you, not the other way around. It’s not “I CAN’T write,” it’s “I WON’T write.” Fine, if you don’t want to, don’t. Be a Beethoven Blonde. It’s your life.

Swimming with is easier in that it takes advantage of one’s natural propensities instead of fighting them. The drawback is that it’s easy to slip under the surface of the habits you’ve created, and not take notice of changing conditions. Keeping the swimming in either direction balanced is a little tricky. You need the swim against to cut across the grain every once in a while and figure out if the current you’re surfing is really taking you where you want to go, or if you need to nudge it by a couple degrees and find a slightly-new groove to slip into.

And now that I’ve beaten that metaphor to death, it’s time for me to engage in the private ritual marking the beginning of yet another revision. (Two points if you guessed it involves a fair amount of swearing.)

Over and out.

It’s time for a Friday post. But this Friday, I’m going to do something a little different.

From now until teatime–4pm PST here at Casa Saintcrow–I’ll be checking in over at the Deadline Dames regularly and answering your questions about writing in the comments. I figure most of you have listened to me pontificate for long enough, and this will also give me an idea of what sorts of things you’d like me to cover in future Friday Writing posts.

Now, we’ve got to have some rules (more like guidelines) to keep things from devolving into anarchy, right? I like anarchy as much as the next girl, but the guidelines, they are a necessary evil.

RulesGuidelines

* Comments are closed here. Go to the Deadline Dames site HERE and ask your questions.
* Play nice. I reserve the right to ban or delete.
* The subject today is writing. If you have questions about my work, check my FAQ.
* Don’t ask me if I’ll read your novel/short/query/whatever or do critique. Please.
* You guys know me. My advice is geared toward the people who want to hopefully aim for making a living from writing for publication. If your aims are different, fine–but keep in mind I’m going to answer according to my lights.
* No honest question is too silly. But please understand if I fall behind on replies–it’s not personal, I have a finite amount of time today.
* Have some fun and offer your own expertise! Mine is not the only route, and I’ll get just as much from this as you will.

All right. You’ve got some questions, I’ll answer as best I can. Pick my brain. Let’s tango.

The Dame Smackdown proceeds apace! Remember, if I–I mean, WE, if WE–win, I’ll post an excerpt of Jealousy or Heaven’s Spite. So if you ever wanted a signed Jill Kismet, now’s your chance!

I have been astonishingly productive in a million ways this morning, none of which involve writing and all of which have grated on my Very Last Nerve. Some days one just needs the Administrivia Mallet to play whack-a-mole with all the varied and nibbling responsibilities of daily life.

But I got home about half an hour ago, crossed everything off my task list, had a quick lunch, and am ready to spend the afternoon luxuriating in writing. I am hard at work on Dru 5, and feeling that subconscious easing that means the Muse has figured out the story even if she’s not going to tell little old me yet. Which means I just have to relax, put my head down, and grind out the words. And the Muse, that tricksy wench, will take care of the rest.

This is the handwaving part that I call “when the magic happens.” Because really, that’s what it feels like. The book takes a left turn, bumping off the road I thought I had mapped, and starts jolting into terra incognita. I’m left hanging onto the dash and praying while the Muse laughs, lights up a cigarette, and shoves the accelerator all the way down.

Yeah. So if you need me, I’ll be over here in the passenger seat, scribbling furiously.

Over and out.

There are Issues. My Friday post is not forthcoming this week. Here, have some links instead:

* Steven Pressfield on “Do It Anyway”. Yes, you knew I’d agree with this.

*The inimitable Judith Tarr with 10 Ways To Prove You Didn’t Do Your Horse Homework

* Stacy Deanne on trad vs. self-publishing, and where writers are actually better off.

* I often get writing links from Wyrdsmith’s Smart Things; her link roundups about writing are always worth a peek. (And I’m not just saying that because she sometimes links me. Honest!)

And a big shout-out to Jess Hartley. I can’t say why in public, but OMG SQUEEE!

For those of you worrying, nobody’s hurt and everything’s pretty much fine. There’s just…ARGH. Sometimes the argh gets in the way of the blog. Regular Friday writing posts will return next Friday. Thank you, and good night.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. I particularly liked Dame Toni‘s post this week.

First news, then your Friday writing post!

* MetaFilter saves two young women from (highly-probable) international sex trafficking. A drop in the bucket…but so completely awesome, and the best use of the Internet EVER.

* Events! On Sunday I’ll be at PSU for the Ooligan Press Write to Publish event; on Tuesday I’ll be at Beaverton Powell’s with Ilona Andrews and fellow Dame Devon Monk. Details are on my events page! I know some of you have emailed me about the events but I’m swamped, I’m sorry. I won’t have a chance to answer.

And now, onward.

I’ll be speaking somewhat about this at the Write to Publish event, but I also want to talk about it here. Last week’s post was pretty metaphysical, and this one will be half metaphysical and half practical. That’s fair, right?

There are two qualities I believe are essential for a writer, when you strip everything else away. If I were to reduce being a writer to two things, these would be what I’d pick: persistence, and seeing. Today I’m going to talk more about that persistence. (The seeing post kind of cuts close to the bone, so I’m holding that back. For now.)

A lot of the practical advice I give–make time for your writing, do it every day, never stop learning, keep refining, keep writing–have their root in persistence. I find myself often returning to Matthew Hughes’s No Surrender speech, and I can’t for the life of me remember the first person who said writers must have “near-pathological persistence.” Truer words, my ducks. Publishing is a game where the more pieces you have out on submission, the more finished works you have, the greater your chances of someone, somewhere liking something enough to charge money for it.

I am naturally stubborn. (I prefer to refer to it as a survival trait.) When I started aiming at publication, failure was not an option. The situation was dire. We needed money, my kids needed to eat, and I couldn’t afford any type of child care. There are a limited number of things a woman can do in such a situation, so I picked something I’d be doing anyway–writing–and promised myself that no matter what it took, no matter what I had to learn or how hard and fast I had to learn it, I was going to succeed.

The critical components were my willingness to work hard and my willingness to learn. The right kind of steady persistence eats away at hubris. (Besides, one can only be rejected so many times before one figures out hubris is so not a trait that’s going to get you there.) I set out to be taught. I did tons of research on publishers, agents, what separated a good agent/publisher from a scam, how to behave professionally. I wrote steadily and obsessively. I did not really care what I had to write in order to get paid. I only wanted to write as well as I could for as long as I could and get good enough that someone would pay me.

I’ve caught a lot of flak for stating openly my belief in everyday writing, in constant effort. I haven’t cared much, because I know for a fact that without the daily effort I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell. If I gave up on the daily effort, I was dead in the water. And we would starve.

I don’t mind starving, but I’ll be damned if I let my kids go hungry.

I’m going to draw a metaphor here–one I heard, I think, from Malcolm Gladwell. Say you play the piano. You practice hard every day for ten years. Will you become a Chopin or a Mozart? Not likely.

But you will become the best damn piano player in a 200-mile radius, or at least close to it. Which makes it easier to get a gig. The persistent practice prepares you to take advantage of every opportunity to play for cash that comes your way, no matter how small–and each gig you play is a chance to expand your network, impress someone, and get more gigs.

You do not have to turn out a NYT bestseller on your first round. You just need to get good enough, widen your options, and persist one more time than the rejections.

I couldn’t afford to fail, and it gave me the strength to keep going after the rejections reached a stack as high as my knee. I wrote serial stories, I worked slush and submissions editing, and when my chance came–when a small publisher said, “I like your work but I’m not the right publisher for it. Do you have anything else?” I was ready.

Boy howdy, was I ready. Not only was I ready, but when the editor/publisher came back and said, “I can take this piece, but only if you make these revisions…” I was more than ready to learn how to take my revision lumps.

What resulted? A four-book contract and the start of my career. Every hard-fought inch of success I’ve had since that moment, I trace back to being ready when the call came. And I was ready because I’d persisted. True, I did not even allow myself to think there was another option. For this reason I don’t consider it bravery–I don’t think there’s a lot of bravery in having utterly no choice. Privately, I think I was stupidly lucky in not even daring to think of failure; it would have bled off much-needed energy.

You only need to persist one more time than you are rejected. Every book in every bookstore, everywhere in the world, is the product of someone who gave it just one more shot more than the number of rejections they’d received. Sometimes in life you need to learn when to give up–like, for example, when your date says no. (But that’s–say it with me–another blog post.)

Writing for publication, however, is not one of those times. Persistence does not guarantee success. But it gives you a fighting chance to be ready when the call comes, so that you can leap on your chance and grab it instead of regretfully watching it slip through your fingers.

Don’t ever give up.