Tag Archives: writing

Non-fiction

Writer’s Block

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Somewhere, someone is laughing because I can’t think of a word to write outside of the fact that I’m writing about not knowing what to write. Does that make any sense? I thought not. But let’s go.

Writer’s block is real. Some people claim it isn’t. It’s fine if they can give it another name. How about constipation? Does that make it sound better? I didn’t come up with writer’s block, so I’m fine with whatever someone calls it. It’s real. I think the muse is real, too. Some writers deny it. They say hard work and determination are what produce words and paragraphs and pages and chapters and whole works. I say that’s part of it. A writer has to sit his ass in the chair and stay there until the work is done for sure, but there are outside influences that can determine the writer’s success.

I’m staring out the window, watching a barista take a break from work. It isn’t distracting in the least, but he intrigues me enough to stop and watch him. He’s sitting on a park bench on the sidewalk in front of a Sunglass Hut, reading from his smartphone and vaping next to a star of Harry Lee Coffman, M.D., on the Walk of Fame in Palm Springs. He’s drinking iced tea out of a plastic cup. He has walked back in. Now I go back to writing. My Adderall can only help so much.

When I was younger, I used to run into a man at the coffee shop whom I was convinced was the devil. He was short, skinny, had a bald head, and wore all black with black sunglasses in which I couldn’t see his eyes. His appearance didn’t make him the devil, although his pale complexion and skinhead jacket did make him look sinister. It was his behavior. I tried to get work done there, but he would walk up to my table and start talking. I forget whether I wore headphones in those days. I was only in my twenties when dude entered the frame of my life.

“There he is,” he would say.

When I looked up, I saw him approaching me with a grin, and I thought, “Oh shit. Here we go. He’ll waste my time for about twenty minutes. There goes my muse.”

What fascinates me is how no one bothers someone who’s reading, and nine times out of ten, no one will bother someone who’s writing. Except this guy. Yep, the muse is real, and it’s delicate. He would elucidate to me random facts such as the difference between yellow mucus and clear mucus, as mucus was forming on his lips. And I would just stare at the mucus in morbid fascination.

He was a cokehead who would bump lines in the bathroom. I never had clear evidence, except he would come out sniffling after a long time while other people waited for their turns.

He also claimed that he was the ex-drummer for a famous 1980s hair band. I recognized the hair band but couldn’t think of one of their songs. For some reason, I believed him.

Anyway, he was the devil to my muse. My muse would crumble and die when he was near. He sent telepathic messages to me that I was doing something unimportant or at least not as important as what he wanted to say to me.

I never found out whatever happened to him. He’s probably at some other coffee shop in the universe, chatting it up with someone by himself who’s trying to focus on something, telling him about his days as the ex-drummer and how much coke he did. The man was a vampire. He was writer’s block personified. I never found out his name, but who needs a name to identify him when he served only one purpose, which was to kill someone else’s muse?

Non-fiction

Writing on a Laptop.

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It still feels funny to me, writing on this laptop. I write in longhand every morning, and it’s tiring tiring tiring. But that was how they used to do it back before the typewriter. It’s hard to imagine people used to write letters to each other rather than send text messages or emails.

I don’t know why it feels weird. It must be that it’s artificial. I can produce with a hand and a pen in a different sort of way. My thoughts are copied quicker on this machine than they are with a pen and paper, but that doesn’t make it better. It makes it lazier.

I copy my stories from longhand. The problem is I can’t read my own friggin’ handwriting. It’s as sloppy as spaghetti. My alphabetical letters look like squashed insects. Squashed black insects because of the black ink. I choose not to write with blue ink every morning when I journal.

Some people are opposed to journaling. I don’t understand them. How do they jump right out to writing without warming up? That would be like skipping stretching.

Journaling is hard work. I usually write the same crap every day, but I know better not to show it to anyone. No one would want to read it anyway. They would think, “My god, what is this person doing?” Or “Lock this person up.” Yes, some morbid thoughts intrude in the morning. They’re distracted as the day continues by worries such as my job. I would rather keep those thoughts and bottle them up for later, but they dissipate like dreams. Then I’m stuck with dull thoughts, like what shall I do later?

I’m reading a book. I’m always reading a book, except my ADHD doesn’t allow me to focus. The books I read are long, such as The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Damn, it’s long and dense. I have no idea what I’m reading.

But anyway, my laptop is a fountain of activity. I use everything for it, it seems, as it pertains to writing. But I can’t just dive into it without my stretches. I have to get loose, and this is one way of doing it. If only I could read my own handwriting, I could write a whole book that I copied by longhand.

But no. I have to do it the hard, unnatural way, and that’s by jamming these keys with these fingers and pressing ENTER every time I finish a thought. That’s right. I space it out like a weirdo and then go back and form these paragraphs to fit the prose together.

What’s the proper way to form a paragraph? Do I even know, or do I just make an attempt? I never diagram sentences. They never taught me how to do it. When I was in high school, they showed me how to outline, which was the worst thing they could’ve done. I’m terrible at outlining. A. Ab. Ab1 Ba1. How much more confusing can it get? I always skipped the process and dove right into the writing.

Of course, my mother would help. She showed me a short story I’d written in elementary school. It was obvious that she’d helped me. I didn’t have such a rich vocabulary when I was eight, but she swore I’d written it on my own. Yeah, right. But I guess I’ll take the credit.

Anyway, this laptop has saved a lot of time and effort. I just wish I was born in the age of the typewriter. It would’ve taught me much more discipline. I would’ve had to toss the page after a typo and start all over, not simply tap DELETE. Oh, well.

Fiction

A Tangled Web

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I belong to an online writing community. To earn points, I write critiques for other writers. Enough points grant me the opportunity to post my own work for others to critique. I joined it five years ago, and I can’t forget my first one ever—not one that I wrote, but one I received. It was the most vicious criticism I’d ever read about my work. I won’t mention the person’s name, not because I don’t want to expose the person, but because I forgot it. I wouldn’t have exposed the name anyway if I remembered it because I’m not that type of person.

Anyway, I remember him writing that I shouldn’t use metaphors because I wasn’t that good yet. He tore every sentence of prose that I wrote, meaning not one sentence passed his test. It was a true story with names changed to protect real people, about my time as an intern in Hollywood. I lost sleep over the critique. It was that hostile. I thought I could never write another story again.

I could write a message to those who critiqued me on the website, any message, as long as it wasn’t hateful. So I simply wrote, Thank you. And he simply wrote back, You’re welcome. That was the end of our exchange and our parting words as well.

Just out of curiosity, I read his story. We could post chapters of our manuscripts on the website. I must say, he was a pretty good writer, so I couldn’t write him back saying, Your writing sucks, too. That would’ve been untrue.

His criticism of my work was so vicious that after I posted more work, I wouldn’t read the critiques. I just stuffed them in a bottle and watched them float down the river. This went on for three years. I would post a short story for others to review and receive emails when people critiqued the work. The emails would tell me how many words the critiques were. In a nutshell, the fewer words, the better. If someone had written something like a two-hundred-word critique, that was a good sign. But if someone had written a thousand-word critique, that was not a good sign. Some stories did receive over a thousand words. And my heart would start pounding. I wouldn’t read them.

I finally brought this problem up to my therapist. We practiced EMDR to desensitize the blows of criticism. Let’s be frank. There are bigger worries in the world than critiques of my work. But to me, it was significant. EMDR (or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a technique used by therapists in which you follow a round light left to right and right to left with your eyes while you relive the painful memory. You’re supposed to report the physical sensations in your body to the therapist after each round. When remembering the critiques, I would feel the pressure in my chest and throat. After several rounds and several sessions, the bite of the critique wasn’t as vicious.

My therapist and I decided to read the next critique in our session. I read it out loud, and we examined the meaning behind the words. Over time, the critiques weren’t as bad as before. I could handle the criticisms better. They didn’t feel as personal.

We continued EMDR through each critique until I could read them on my own and didn’t need her help. This took about half a year to resolve. Now I can read critiques like they’re nothing. As I’d said, there are much worse worries in the world than a critique of my literary work. But I’m so self-absorbed that I can see why they would bother me so much.

I now welcome the critiques. They help me more than they hurt me, I guess because my writing has grown. It’s an ingenious website. I won’t bring up its name just like I won’t bring up the name of that vicious first critic. I hope he’s doing well. Wink wink.

Non-fiction

Self-Taught

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My writing has been self-taught, except for a few screenwriting classes at universities. I read many creative writing books and committed many hours of intensive labor but never set foot in one of those creative writing classes.

A friend of mine once set me up to audit a screenwriting class at UCLA sometime in my twenties. That’s right. It was free to sit among pursuers of a Master’s degree. It felt like winning a lottery. What was the professor’s name? Anyway, she taught us the rules of screenwriting. This was before my dive into the creative writing books and before my collaboration with an ambitious soul.

The class hated me. They knew what was up. The students would comment on each other’s work, but when it came to my turn, one of the women said to me, “I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time to read it.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. She’d had time to read everyone else’s work.

My psychiatrist said, “You know what that means?” He raised his middle finger at me. “It means fuck you. I paid for this class, and you didn’t.”

She’d offended me. But that didn’t stop me from attending the classes.

At the end of the semester, the professor called me into her office. I was excited to hear what she had to say.

“Throw all of it away,” she said.

I’d completed the first draft and spent all those hours, and there she was, telling me to throw it all away and start over. It hurt.

The rewrite never happened. I moved on to another script, one that didn’t make me cringe.

Then, the ambitious soul came into the picture. He found me online somehow.

“I got this idea, based on a book series about marines in space. I need someone to help me write the scripts.”

The idea was silly to me, but dollar signs were in my eyes. This guy really saw potential for a franchise to start based on these books that were written.

So we began our journey through the script about marines in space. The characters were stereotypes to the ninth degree. You had the cigar-chewing colonel, the tough-as-nails female officer, the Native American lieutenant who shot flaming arrows with his bow (in space), among other flat characters.

“Can I use a pen name?” I asked the guy.

“For what?”

What was there to say? He couldn’t hear about my embarrassment about the project. He was too prideful about it. He grew up reading the book series as a kid.

We even met the book series creator in Florida, where my partner also lived. The creator was an old man who lived in a meager house with dirt and trash everywhere. He was a sexist ex-marine who called all women mercenaries.

The project did go somewhere, just not all the way. Cable networks were interested; actors whom my writing partner had handpicked were interested. He even had a university art department sketching the storyboards. Everything fell in line, but it came up short after our agent dumped us. He saw the potential disintegrate, and so did my faith.

My writing partner and I stopped talking after about ten years of communicating and writing new drafts of the same old script and sequels. It was tiresome. One day, it was a film idea; the next day, it would be a possible TV series. It was Screenwriting 101 to me. Forget about the class at UCLA. It taught me not only the creative but also the business side of things, and it made me jaded. Industry people were flaky. Besides, there was no more belief in the project, and there wasn’t much belief to begin with.

As I’d said, this was just an education. I wanted to focus on my personal projects. Eventually, my enthusiasm for screenplays would die, and I would put forth my energy toward a manuscript, which took seven years to write.

I wrote my final screenplay in 2018, but after my friend wouldn’t read it, which was another problem (finding readers), I decided to give up. Now, I write nothing but short stories because I have no more novel ideas.

Should I take a creative writing class? What about a writer’s group? A therapist told me to join one, which made me skeptical, not about him but about groups, maybe because of my fear of judgment. What if their work is way better than mine, and I don’t belong there? Or the opposite. What if my work is better, and theirs is trash?

Anyway, I shall continue my journey through autodidactism, a word I learned from Hemingway. Who needs a school when there’s a wealth of knowledge on the bookshelves and the real world?

Non-fiction

Why Not?

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I haven’t received a rejection letter in almost ten years. Or maybe it was over ten years. I can’t remember. I know it was when my old psychiatrist was still alive because he scolded me for not sending out proposals. I was too afraid of rejection, and I still am.

It was for a manuscript that began as a memoir. I sent it out to over forty literary agents and received about five rejection emails. Most of them were generic. Actually, all of them were. The rest weren’t even responses.

I knew it was coming, so my new plan was to hire an editor. A writer for the Los Angeles Times told me that I shouldn’t pay for one, but he was out of touch. All amateur and professional writers need professional editors to keep a second eye on their material.

But anyway, I hired an editor for the manuscript, which I’d written for seven years—seven years of rewrites. After the editor tore it apart and told me that it needed a theme (which befuddled me), I wrote it once again for another year, and it turned into a surrealistic science fiction story that didn’t make any sense. I didn’t dare send it out to the public because it would be too embarrassing.

So now it sits on the shelf in my closet in one of those plastic boxes. I use plastic boxes now instead of cardboard boxes because of a bed bug infestation last year, and I heard that bed bugs could hide in cardboard.

But I digress.

My father knew someone whose daughter was supposed to be a high-profile editor in New York, and that person wanted me to connect with her. From what I heard, the agent begrudgingly agreed to do it. She sent me an email asking if I had any questions. I divulged to her everything that had happened in my writing pursuit. She responded coldly, basically saying that if I couldn’t handle the process, I should find something else to do. It crushed me, my only chance at something that could’ve changed my life for the better.

I gave up after that email.

That same year, I ended up in a psych ward, rehab, and recovery. I won’t say those two are connected, but they might be, along with my mother’s back surgery that same year, when I witnessed her anesthetized in the hospital for a whole week. I bawled outside where no one could see me. My psychiatrist was dead by then.

Ever since that email, I haven’t wanted any help from an agent. I’ve decided on the self-publishing route. It seems to be the only way to go, even when everyone else is doing it. I’m just another one out of millions. Oh well. Life is hard. What can I do?

It’s even more difficult to self-publish. There are all these different things I have to do for the book to come out right. I don’t want it to look amateurish like so many of those other self-published books. I’m not a book designer. All I can cling to is hope.