The thing about deadlines

We all hate them. At least, that’s how we were trained to view them. They were something that looms over us, as if always threatening, “You better get that project turned in by such-and-such a time, or else!” We suffer debilitating symptoms of stress and fret over our livelihoods because of deadlines.

But then something changes, and somehow we begin to thrive off them.

At least, that’s what a couple of my grad school teachers said about me. And it seems to be true. Most of the time, I am more likely to do the bulk of the work a day or so before it’s due. And that’s not completely caused by procrastination. I will work on copy edits, for example, over the span of a full weekend after receiving the work on a Thursday and still pull an all-nighter in order to turn in everything by Monday morning. If I had chapters due for a class or workshop, they would be written a day before the deadline.

It’s not as if I like doing this, either. I would love to pace myself and work on little bits at a time. But there’s just something about deadlines that forces me to work. Some imperative compulsion that keeps me rooted to the computer and better able to reject distractions. The way it feels earlier in the week, the project is not yet important enough to deny other things in my life, or I feel as if there’s still more time to work on it. And then as the day draws closer, I realize that there is no time left and then try not to panic.

Sometimes I wonder if I work well with deadlines because of my journalism experience. We’re given an assignment that is due that afternoon, the next day, or at the end of the week. We’re forced to get used to deadlines and actually work off them. It almost creates a co-dependency with an abstract concept. When we’re given a project that isn’t due until the end of the month, we look around as if we’re lost and wonder what we’re going to do with our time between now and then. It becomes as if we can only do work if we’re under a deadline. Is that why I thrive under them? Is that why I can’t seem to break the habit of doing most of the work the day before something is due?

Is that why I haven’t been writing in my stories—because I don’t have any more deadlines? Or someone to hold me accountable for my work?

Lack of workshopping environment

First, to my friends. Thank you so much for reading this. Your support, just by glancing through these blogs, means so much.

Today, I met up with Kim and Rosemary for our annual summer EnP run. We started it a couple years ago when I stayed with Kim and her mom during Chatham's summer residency. Because we were all located in the same general vicinity and hadn't seen each other since graduating from SRU, we thought it would be nice to get together again. We sat on the patio of the EnP in the Waterfront, watched the river and talked about writing and our lives since graduating. It was nice enough that we did it again, and then again. This year makes our third year and an official tradition.

We brought up a topic that I also posted about on Facebook. The lack of workshopping or a writing environment. People will argue that anywhere is a writing environment, anywhere we happen to write. But that's not necessarily true.

There is something about being around writers that makes a person want to write. Writing begets writing, I suppose. When we step into a classroom or into a summer workshop, and are greeted by friends who are on the same skill level and who inspire us to write, to make ourselves better. We have teachers who communicate through emails and who are willing to read our work line by line. And it isn't just "Here are your grammatical errors," or "You have a plot gap here." They mold our craft and make us better. Graduate school destroyed me as a writer. It ground me down and then built me back again into something better. It was hard work, emotional turmoil, and yet I stood taller at the end.

And then, a month or so after graduating, we sit at our computers, begin to write, and realize that we have no  mentor anymore. No students with which to work. Our friends have lives, their own stories, and it doesn't feel right to bombard them with requests for edits or comments. What are we to do?

• Message them anyway and hope for the best.
• Join a city workshopping group and hope for the same level of quality, professionalism, and drive, and that they won't steal our work.
• Message professors to see if they can take time out of their insanely busy schedules to continue to help.
• Take the training wheels off, trust our instincts, and work by ourselves.

John Green once said something along the lines of writing being for introverted people who have a story to tell. I've come to find that writing is a very solitary, very lonely practice. Especially when our environment changes. We work through our stories--if we can find the time, energy, and inspiration to write--edit them ourselves, and send them out to lit mags with the hope that they're good enough.

More often than not, they aren't. But sometimes we get that stray acceptance letter that almost seems like a fluke. It bolsters our self-confidence, pushes us to write again and send out more, and makes us feel wanted and appreciated.

That is why my friends, and anyone else who reads this, mean so much to me. They read my words and come back for more. And after a while, I don't know if I'm writing for myself or for them. And yet, I still haven't figured out whether I'll message them and ask for workshopping opportunities, or respect our differing lives and hope for the best. 

I dreamed a dream

The other night, I dreamed a dream that was real life. It was mundane, boring, and each second slowly ticked into the next with such consistent regularity that I was not aware I was dreaming. Normally, I am aware.

It was another of those 30-second dreams that I don't remember upon waking. It returns only in flashes, and even then I have to peer at the memory in order to understand. In the dream, I walked to pick up an object from the ground. I stood over it, held out my hand, and concentrated. I do this in real life sometimes. It is an attempt to force The Force to work, an exercise in telekinesis that always fails but still I try again. In the dream, the object rose into my hand.

For a second, I became confused. The dream was real life. I felt time slip past, every small sensation. Events were organized in a linear fashion with no skipping scenes. I remember looking around me, near a school bus, and wondering if this was a dream, when it would begin to feel like a dream, and if I would wake up.

It brought about an interesting thought afterward. If magic exists in the world and we find ways to harness it, how will we know we aren't dreaming? If Jesus Christ is reborn and walks the world, preaching his song of peace, would Christians (or everyone else) believe and welcome him? Or would they deem him to be a raving lunatic and shut him away for the rest of his life, pouring medicine down his throat and electricity into his brain until his divinity is stamped out? How would he prove himself? By performing a miracle--an act of magic that is irrefutable by science.

And even then, would we believe we are dreaming?

I must ponder this and see if I can incorporate it into a story. Granted, something like this has been done. Freakin' Inception. Perhaps a psychological piece--though this topic of what is a dream and what is real, what is real and what is insanity, has probably been exhausted by now.

Most of my fresh ideas come from dreams, but they still have a basis for inspiration because our subconscious takes what we see and registers it through symbols. This process helps to turn short-term memory into long-term memory. That means that even dreams are not really fresh ideas...

My broken elevator is a long, dark tunnel

I think Neil Gaiman once said that dreams cannot give us a story. Perhaps he meant that dreams cannot present an entire story to us and that we won't remember it all upon waking up and long afterward. I can almost argue this, but he still wins in the end. A few years ago, I experienced a dream that presented a story. It was like watching a movie with a bunch of different subplots and intriguing elements. It was as if I was separate from it all and wondering how it would end, what it would do next, and how it all worked together. I could feel that it was weaving together to form something spectacular. Upon waking, I tried to get up to type it all down, then woke up again and had to rush to the computer to remember everything.

Sometimes when we try to remember dreams and write them down, we discover that we have yet to actually wake up and we lose everything we had been trying to remember. It's as if the act of trying is the very thing that erases the memories as we work through them. I was able to get a lot down, though, and the idea tugs at me to this day. It is the mark of a good story when it sticks with you for years and you feel compelled to finish it. However, there were elements that I couldn't remember properly, like a twisted nursery rhyme that is the key to everything. It took a couple years until I realized that I should give a character the same hassle of a faulty memory. Did he hear one word or another? Did he misinterpret? Of course he did, because he's not perfect. And yet the dream ended before everything came together, so I have to figure out everything that happened in between, all the side characters, and how it all ends. That is probably why Gaiman said that dreams cannot hand us a story; they can give us ideas, but not a full story.

That said, this afternoon I had a dream that was like... the first page or so of a story. Nothing was explained. It was as if I was just living this character's life for about 30 seconds. I was a girl who usually goes out running with a set of headphones and an ipod/mp3 player. I was in a neighborhood park, somewhere around the early evening on a partly cloudy day (the sky looked to be yellowish-orange). In order to get back to my apartment, I had to travel through a pedestrian tunnel that went along the ground through a massive brick wall. An upbeat song started to play that set my body jumping like I wanted to take off running and let the rest of the world fall away, but I couldn't do that because a woman was walking her baby in a stroller ahead of me on the narrow paved pathway. I had to slow down and wait, like I used to do when stuck behind a slow walker in a school hallway. The woman veered to the side and took the baby out of the stroller, and I swerved around them and up the stairwell, pulling at keys that were hooked to one of my belt loops. The woman was a few paces behind me. I unlocked a large arched door, as if I was unlocking the main door to an apartment complex, and inside was a long, dark tunnel. We needed to turn on lights before entering. It was pitch black because the door on the other side was also shut and locked. The woman held the door for me with her free hand. The dream ended as I reached to turn on the lights.

After waking, I thought of Beth's personal challenge. Her story-a-day goal. Then I started to deconstruct the dream. Why was there a tunnel? Was the park private and somehow separated from people who did not live in the neighborhood, as if the sheltered park was a perk for residents only? Were there apartments in the wall that housed the tunnel, or was it just a wall? And why did its doors have to be locked? Why was the tunnel (and thus the wall) so tall, wide, and long? It was easily a quarter of a mile long and the wall itself stretched far past the limits of my periphery vision. So there must have been more tunnels along it, or there was a corner of the wall/enclosure that was just past the treeline. My dream self imagined/remembered what the tunnel looked like with the lights on, which is not too different from a tunnel we drive through in the real world. And where was the dream going? The characters would go in one side and out the other and that was it? For such an uncommon structure, nothing happens? Surely my subconscious had something planned before someone accidentally rang my shrill doorbell and yanked me from sleep so quickly that by body barely had time to register proper movement while I tottered to the intercom.

Then I realized that this is a classic scenario. Not my waking, but the tunnel. This is no different from the setup and exercise of "place a couple characters in an elevator and have it break down, thus forcing the people to interact." My elevator was the tunnel. Much longer, much darker. Would my dream characters be locked in somehow? Is the other door barred or broken and thus won't open? What would prevent the characters from turning around and going back into the park? Would they come upon a scene on the other side that would require remaining in the tunnel for safety? Would the power go out? Is it a survival story or a waiting-for-help story?

Remember, the woman had a baby. That alone presents numerous possibilities. If they need to hide from someone, the baby cannot be trusted to remain quiet; it would reveal their presence. And what about feeding? If the mother took the baby out for a run, she might not have provisions for a few hours. What then? The baby looked to be less than a year old, so is it teething or weened from breast milk? What about food, diapers, entertainment, somewhere to nap? How does the main character, the girl with the ipod, feel about and react to babies? How would the mother react to being stuck in a tunnel with a stranger? How many "mother" instincts would surface, if any? Would she remain calm and placate the baby as best as she could, or would she turn into a cornered mama bear?

So much to think about, and it all leaves me with the question of whether I sit down and sketch the beginning scene, or ponder the overall story to figure out what happens and why.

Lately, I've felt like someone took the training wheels off my bike and I'm setting off for the first time without them. This will be the first year that I won't restart school in the fall, the first year without professors as impromptu mentors. The first year without workshops or the environment that pushes me to write. A few days ago, I finished a revision of a travel narrative (creative nonfiction) that I wrote for a class. I contacted my professor, with whom I'm on decent terms, and asked if she'd be willing to workshop the story with me. She's insanely busy and hasn't responded yet. So today, I researched lit mags deeper, chose four, and submitted the story anyway. It's time that I trust myself and work on my own. My pedal has made a complete revolution and I'm still balanced on the bike. Only if each one rejects me will I totter or fall. But what if one doesn't? What if I encounter another magazine like Separate Worlds (which recently accepted a fantasy short story; my very first acceptance for fiction) that gives me a chance? Then I remain upright and my pedals make another revolution.

Yesterday a friend, Beth, posted on FB about a personal challenge she's undertaken. She wants to write a new short story every day. She intends to experiment to see how many she tosses, and how many she keeps for future expansion. It's more like an experiment in worth rather than quality or completeness. She gave herself 1,000 words with which to work, and then invited her friends to do the same. I started thinking about the itch I experience sometimes, the one that makes my fingers want to type or hold a pen to scribble across a page. The one that doesn't care that I don't have an idea; it just wants me to write. I could use an experiment like Beth's. But then I really thought about it and realized that if I have nothing to write, then first lines (which are killers in and of themselves) would not appear. I have a couple concepts I've been meaning to toy with, but they're not enough to begin a story. I need characters and a plot, and they don't seem to accompany the concept.

Then I thought about cheating, which Beth condoned. I have a couple stories that I've toyed with in the past but never fleshed out. Flash fiction attempts, sketches, ideas... And yet, for each one I'd have to be in a particular frame of mind. Predatory and beguiling, scarred and resentful, mysterious and horny. And then some ideas might better fit a larger novel. So, I have a feeling that it will tug at me but, in the end, nothing will come of it because I couldn't let my mind settle on something, couldn't manifest the idea into something greater. And when I set about writing something just for the sake of writing, the endeavor resulted in this post.