What kind of stories do you want to tell?
The longer I'm off social media, the more I realize I was using it as a numbing strategy, and as a form of fake work.
It filled my day with tasks I didn't really need to do in the first place. The buying of Instagram-advertised mugs or Twitter-recommended teas. I no longer feel obligated to regularly Canva-design posts and upload them strategically. Being on social media somehow made it easier to justify other tasks that are (for me) forms of fake work (that is, writing-avoidance) -- folding laundry, going to the dump, buying plants, shopping for pillows. In my writing shed with my own thoughts, away from the internet, all that's left is time to write. Oh, right. The thing I have been wanting to spend my time doing in the first place. Why was I shopping for pillows?
The real joy in this process has been diving shoulder-deep into stories in a way I haven't since I was a kid. Building writing muscles takes hard work and dedication. It's easy to make excuses not to do it.
I used social media to pretend I was doing something worthwhile. I could pretend that I had to post, for my writing career. It's easier than doing the hard work of building my writing muscle. It's scary to take that numbscrolling away, and be faced with my emotions, and the hard work. Except: emotions are really useful to writing. The work is really useful to writing. So that's something.
I recently listened to Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up, and the thing that has really stuck with me is how long he worked to figure out what he was good at. It took years before he honed his standup act into something where he was being true to himself and being very, very funny. He was strategic about it, and quantified it as much as he could, although a large part of it was gut feelings and luck. And just like a few months ago when we all started thinking about our influences, I think it's worthwhile to think about what makes you the best writer you can be. What kind of writing do you do best? What kind of stories make you feel like you're telling a story only you can tell? What kind of stories do you want to tell? What do you want to accomplish with your books?Â
My answers have always revolved around making people laugh, and writing funny books. I like writing about characters who are surprised to be in the situation they're in. I love books that play around with the form of the book. I love walking that line between heartfelt and relatable emotion and being extremely silly.Â
Being alone in my shed, not thinking about social media, has made all this even clearer. It's made me think about what sort of stories I want to tell, without worrying about what everyone else is trying to do.Â
Here's the quote from the Steve Martin book that is sticking with me: "Through the years, I've learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration." The way this works, so much, is riding the waves of ideas, trying them out, seeing what works, giving myself pep talks about my writing ability, and then being struck with an Actually Good Idea that made all that work worth it. The good writing comes faster when I concentrate on writing and creative thinking. Which you'd think would be obvious, but it's taken me until now to really know.
And I know I've said this before, but every month it gets clearer: I want to be remembered for my books, not for my social media posts. I want to leave a legacy with my writing, not for my ability to browse online until I find the best pillow for my living room. I want to spend time with my family, not spend my time posting photos of me spending time with my family (to...prove they exist? it all feels kind of weird to me now). I've said this before, too: you do you. You may find social media is a great inspiration, that it keeps you on track, that you use it as an online scrapbook. That's fine! But if you have a nagging suspicion that it's keeping you from your work, it's ok to stop looking at it and to stop posting. Really.
In all honesty, sometimes I still pick up my phone or stare at my monitor waiting for something to happen, someone to entertain me, something for me to react to, and then I realize -- oh, right, I'm self-entertaining now. Sometimes it's really, really hard not to run around looking for distractions -- like, physically almost run, picking up magazines, opening emails, ordering books, reading the newspaper, wondering if I need a pair of pants. Phone-free walks are good for this, but a gal can only go on so many walks in a day before she needs to sit down and write. And so, I sit, with a pen in my hand. I stare. I stretch. If I'm really antsy, I'll read something, with the rule that it has to be on paper. Reading on the internet is still feeling too distracting and full of rabbit-hole potential. But mostly I sit, and wait. I free write, or tell my dog what I want the story to be doing. And eventually, I write some sentences.Â
Writing and publishing take time, so I'm still not sure how the writing I've done in the past few months is going to land with the readers outside my little bubble. But I do know it's a product of more clarity about what I want to accomplish with a story, and, from a purely quantifiable standpoint, it's a heck of a lot more words than I had been writing. I don't know that I have the answer for how to get good writing done, mostly because I don't think there is any one answer. All I know is that stepping away from social media and committing to deep work sessions has resulted in more stories that I like, and it makes me want to keep going to see where all this leads.
Thoughts and Links
I got Ramona a customized book embosser for her birthday last month, and she's having a great time stamping the half-title pages in all her books. I honestly wasn't at all sure how well this thing would work, but the design is really clear and detailed. I'm impressed! (I think that might be an embossing pun?)
I am slowly reading and absorbing Matt Bell's terrific new writing craft book Refuse to Be Done, and I while I am working through it, I am enjoying his newsletter, which has short story writing prompts. I am generally not a writing prompt person, at least if it's the "imagine you have wings" variety. But Bell's prompts are broader and often more structured, and I've been having fun playing with them (I've been substituting "picture book" when he says "short story" as per usual).
I read a book this month that I'm not quite ready to put in the "books I loved" section below, because it was frankly PRETTY INTENSE:Â The Teen Interpreter by Terri Apter. It was a lot. Teenagers (and their parents) are complicated. It was also really helpful.
I loved Bo Burnham's Inside, and his newly released hour-long edit of the outtakes is great too -- such a good slice of the creative process, and on how it takes so much playing around, so many revisions, to get to the final product (and how much ends up being cut from the final product).
Kwame Mbalia has a beautiful essay, To Write for Middle Grade Readers is to Write About Elsewhere, on Catapult: "We’re not writing for us as we are now, but us as we were, or could have been, or should have been."
I didn't know that Lena Dunham was adapting Catherine, Called Birdy (one of my all-time favorite books) into a movie! (Which features the priest from Fleabag as Birdy's dad!). I'm super excited.
I got my second COVID booster shot last month, and, not for the first time, I ordered something random off the internet in the dizziness of my booster haze. This time it was a sample set of perfume from Imaginary Authors. How could I not? The sample set is called the "Short Story Collection" and comes in a box that looks like a book, and each perfume comes with a story. The scents are things like "fresh tennis balls" and "burnt match." My favorites so far are Memoirs of a Trespasser and A City on Fire.
I love this story about a woman who, in retirement, travels the country in a mobile bookstore. The name is "inspired by traveling medicine vans, only books were doing the healing."Â
I certainly related to Gwen Hernandez's essay about why not everyone is a plotter. I, too, have tried to plot in the interest of efficiency, and finally realized that trying to plot beforehand isn't the way my brain works, and is a waste of my time.
We got this "Pack of Dogs" deck of cards, and the design of the suits is so inventive and fun.Â
I read Playing Big by Tara Mohr a few years ago (probably time to reread!) and I keep it nearby for its useful list of phrases people (me) put in emails that diminish what we're trying to say, and what we can say instead. Now there's an email extension (works with Gmail and Outlook) that does this automatically. As well as a list of the phrases it checks for, if you're curious.
