Number ## in 30 in 30, a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (sometimes even in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing was inspired by XXX.
Congratulations!
Your baby’s gender is
a brush fire
an inferno
burning a state park
destroying a house
causing an evacuation
exhausting the firefighters
smoldering to ash
finally extinguishes
Aren’t you so happy to know?
30 in 30 is a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (perhaps even in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing was inspired by an article on how Peru is cremating the dead instead of burying them, as is custom.
I said goodbye
to my papaw
my last living grandparent
on Zoom
and a week later watched
his funeral
livestreamed
(the irony is not lost on me)
Ten mourners permitted
lost behind masks
Our shared emotions
stolen too
In other times
before times
after times
(ojalá)
we would gather together
and hold each other
in sorry
in memory
the rituals of death
our healing
In the now times
we have only
wounds
30 in 30 is a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (maybe even in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing comes from an article about the surge in kite sales in India during the pandemic.
A flutter
of paper wings
glides over
the hot summer sky
The kite carries
all of its family’s
yearning,
a life line tethered
to their balcony
Children chase
each other
Lovers tangle
their strings
Adventurers reach
higher
higher
higher
until
the kite escapes
its bounds
to explore the world
newly lost
Oh, what joy
to set your heart free
again
30 in 30 is a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (hopefully, in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing comes from an article in the LA Times on the players’ walkout/strike in response to the shooting of Jacob Blake.
The stadiums empty but for the scuffle of feet, the squeak of sneakers, the sweat of the game. Outside these doors, a world on fire, and the pressure – order – to keep it out. From the empty seats, let the fans imagine for a moment, a breath, that things are as they were, as they never will be again. Protect them from the fire.
No.
When the fire burns hotter, deadlier, against the players and their people, No. When the moment requires no respite for some until justice for all, No. When the reckoning must happen, even here, especially here, No.
What a gift to us all is this No.
Oh, the work in progress. The struggle, the self-doubt, the flow, the joy: all the myriad feelings that go into taking a seed of an idea and creating a garden of story. My current one is a novel that I’ve been at for nearly two years. I’ve drafted other novel length stories, but this one is the one I promised myself to get all the way through the editing process and make it something of which I am proud (even if proud of actually finishing). So, in the spaces between my work and my life and now also the ones between dealing with the pandemic and searching for my place in this much-needed racial justice reckoning, I’ve been writing. And writing. And writing.
I’ve been scared of finishing this one, because it is requiring levels of vulnerability and self-evaluation and risk that I haven’t yet asked of myself in my writing. That’s a whole other blogpost. But I sub-promised myself earlier this year that I would draft this plot through to the end, let it be whatever it was right now, and go from there. I was doing great, about halfway through, with a good plan for the next quarter and enough trust in myself and the story to take me all the way to the end.
And then I had an idea. Not just any idea, but THE IDEA THAT PROMISES TO FIX IT ALL! (aka the TITPOFIA!)
I was finally in a place for the story to tell me what it needed: I had done the work to get to know these characters and I had reached the point where story could start making demands, sending up ideas from my subconscious that had been marinating for my writer-brain to deal with. The TITPOFIA! is a good one, but it will ripple across the story in such a way that most (all) of what I’ve written will need to change, at minimum, but a lot is probably going to get tossed out.
And that left with me with a dilemma. Do I keep that promise and finish this draft, making the change in the next round, or do I abandon it and implement the idea now? How do I know that the idea isn’t just my brain trying to keep me from the scary work of getting to the end? What, exactly, should I do?!
I needed a method. Something that engaged with both this gut feeling that I needed to write this new idea into the story right now, and the part of me that knows that finishing this draft is a very important practice to my development as a writer overall. So I came up with this: Evaluate, Mind-Map, Draft.
Evaluate the idea. This probably seems pretty obvious. But when I am in the throws of a TITPOFIA!, it can be really difficult to see it for what it’s actually worth. I need to find a way to step back and look at the idea with a modicum of distance. I started asking it questions and demanding good answers.
Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about the thousand and one ideas that come up when you are writing, like potential costume changes (which, in my WIP, can be changed without causing too many or too large ripples). I’m talking about the ones that feel like, when you are done with them, they will have put your story into a close, but parallel universe: similar but not the same.
My question can be boiled down to three:
These questions target what is important so that I can know if I should move forward with the idea now, or write it down somewhere and revisit it later.
Does it increase the stakes? If the idea is simply a different way to tell the same story, to me this indicates that I’m using the idea to avoid telling this story. I’m probably afraid of something, and getting to the bottom of that will be a far better approach to moving forward than changing my whole story for something that doesn’t, in the end, add anything to what I’ve done.
On the other hand, if it increases the stakes, then continuing to evaluate the idea makes sense. The stakes your characters face are the sustenance of the story, so an idea that will increase this is probably worth the effort to make all of the changes it requires.
Will it vastly improve the story overall? I’ll leave to you what “vastly” means in the context of your story, but for me, I want to know that this idea isn’t going to improve only a scene or two. If that’s the case, I can save it for later and implement in the next round of edits if it still makes sense to make the change. But if it’s going to require story-wide changes that also make the story better, then I’d be willing to break my promise to myself and rework the story now.
Is it in line with the characters I’ve created? This question is my gut check that this idea isn’t for another story. If my idea is going to radically change the “who” of my story, then I’m pretty sure that I’m trying to start a new story in the middle of the one I’m actually working on. New ideas are great! I get so many while I’m writing. They go on a list, and I might play with them for a little every night before I go to bed, but they are not my work in progress. This is another way that my fear can hide in plain sight and pretend to be in service of the story when it’s actually distracting me from it. Like with the stakes question, it will be better for me to address that fear head on now.
For my current work in progress, the answer was yes, to all three. Emphatically yes to the stakes and the characters, and yes but in a gut feeling sort of way for improvement to my story. So I’m probably going to make this change, but first, let’s mind-map!
Okay, so I’ve evaluated and come to the conclusion that the story probably needs to change. But what does that mean? Susan Dennard offers us three potential avenues: write forward as if you’ve already changed it, go back and change everything, or toss out the draft and start again. For me, deciding which way to go was leading to me to a dead end. I needed an anchor. I decided to use a mind-map.
I started using mind-mapping as an adult when I got my first Passion Planner. [Side note: I don’t make any money on links. These are things I use (or have used), and I like sharing resources. If that ever changes, I’ll make that clear.] Mind-maps are a way to capture and connect ideas while letting your mind run wild. You write the idea or the topic or whatever and put it in the center and then write out the ideas that come from that: implications, scene ideas, blurts of thoughts, whatever. They are useful no matter what writer style you have: planner, pantster, plantster, or those of us with stories that want to stay feral as long as possible.
The one thing about mind-mapping by hand, though, is the limitations of the size of your page. You could definitely just add pages and tape them all together and that could be a shit-ton of fun. I would definitely do that, if that felt like the best way to work through the TITPOFIA! But for this, I needed something more flexible (read: editable), so I am using Scapple. If you use Scrivener, you probably know about Scapple. It’s super easy mind-mapping software that, so far, hasn’t limited me on how far from the “center” I can go.
So, I dropped the TITPOFIA! into a mind-map file and started spinning out the implications. I started with characters, connecting notes about how the TITPOFIA! would affect them. From there, plot and subplot changes started to become clear and new scenes have appeared as well as old scenes that still work with some smaller adjustments. The TITPOFIA! has raised a number of questions as well as a number of options of how to answer them, and all of these have all been dropped into the map. I’ve been able to map things that will definitely change as well as things that might change, and I was able to do this over days and weeks, rather than feeling like I had to capture everything right now! It’s a living document that I color code to help me manage the things that I have already decided, things I am considering, and questions that are open. With the mind-map, you don’t have to answer every question now, but it will help you see how the idea could ripple through your story and that will put you in a better place to know how to move forward.
Going in to the mind-map process, I really thought I was going to decide to change some of the recent scenes I had just finished and then write forward to end as if I had already changed everything, but I realized a lot has to change. Not everything, but one plot thread and one of my main characters are so much clearer from doing this, so I’m actually excited to make these changes, even though it means losing or changing a lot of what I’ve already done.
So now I’m ready to draft. I know I’m probably starting mostly over, but instead of starting from the beginning from nearly scratch, I am drafting or editing the scenes that will be most impacted by the TITPOFIA! first. I need to wrestle with these changes to these scenes before I change anything else. This is another check to make sure I’m not using this idea to avoid the really hard shit that I’m afraid of, and by doing those scenes first, I’ll be able to see how the TITPOFIA! pans out for real and make sure it is worth it before I change everything else.
Art is not efficient, but our process can be smart. This process is helping me to know the difference between avoidance ideas and quality ones.
How about you? What do you do when you think of a TITPOFIA!?
30 in 30 is a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (hopefully, in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing comes from an article in the LA Times about a councilman’s efforts for a developer and payments into a PAC connected to his reelection campaign.
What do they tell themselves as the funds flow
to prop up their campaign?
Do they whisper or shout
that it’s for the best?
Compromise
for the greater good
to build a better world
for the little guy?
But the little guy can’t sleep
with the warning lights flashing in his eyes
and the rent coming due
Higher
HIGHER
The landlord eyeing his house
a commodity
a profit
Where the little guy sees
Memory
Home
Did they tell themselves they’ll make it better?
But only if they stay in office
“The other guy, he’ll burn your house down;
I’ll only sell it out from under you.”
Uncork the hole in the dam
that keeps back the flood
and promise the little guy a lifeboat
…tomorrow
Did they notice when all their good intentions
turned to dusty rhetoric?
Did they notice when they bought into the system
and its silent sins?
Did they notice when they started to say, to believe
That’s just the way things are
You gotta play the game to get anything done
But who do they play for?
Because the little guy?
He can’t afford the ticket.
30 in 30 is a series of writing challenges. Over the course of 30 days (hopefully, in a row!), I will draft a post within 30 minutes. This 30-day theme is: News Stories. Today’s writing comes from an article on the adultification of Black girls in the LA Times.
Her childhood could have looked mine
But they pressed her down with
Responsibility
Younger and younger than I’ve ever been
For herself
For her family
For her race
For the world
My own body bloomed too early
drawing attention from men
to the way it curved and took up
SPACE
No matter how small I tried to hide it
Hers too
But that attention came
before the bloom
And painted her roses a sinister red
No patch of land for her innocence
to put down roots
to thrive
This blog space has been very quiet. I’d say I’m sorry, but after finishing law school and starting a job, I found myself with too much to do, too little time, and mounting levels of stress. Something had to give.
So I took a look. The job is necessity at the moment. My book is in (slow) progress. That left the social media and blogging. I made a choice.
And basically I’ve been managing those feelings that tell you that you just have to get it all done and that if you don’t then the rest of everything is basically worthless. I’ve read the blog posts about how important a social media presence is to a writing career. I worry I’m shooting myself in the foot by setting this space aside.
I’ve created more space to work on my book that I wouldn’t have if I were here. It’s going slower than I thought it was (n00b), which then made me fear I’ve been away from here too long. But I put one word in front of another, and one edit after another. It’s going. And at some point time will open up to more.
So this post, written offline during a flight from Budapest to Milan (I don’t write well on planes), is to say, “Hello, friends. I am still here. Thank you for your patience. Here’s a picture of lovely Budapest in the meantime.”
How do you handle an overstuffed schedule?
so i dreamed i got another tattoo
Writing and Work. This is a blogpost for those of us trying to do two careers and just starting out at both. This is to remind us that it is okay to be a beginner. This is to encourage us to experiment, both in those careers and in managing them. This is to say that taking a risk, no matter the outcome, is a worthy endeavor. Continue reading
CJ René 