Integration

Back in college, I had to take a speech class and it was...fine.

I actually learned not to judge sorority girls, but that's another story.

Anyway, in my speech class, we had to do a speech that explained something about ourselves to people. Despite being into super-music mode at the time, I actually decided to do my speech on my novel - the only one I had completed in its entirety at that point. I was 17 at the time, I wrote that one when I was 15.

The basic structure of the speech was that I went through all of the characters, one by one, and explained how each of them represented a different aspect of my personality. It wasn't something I had intentionally done when I wrote it, and I'm not even sure it's that accurate. Honestly, I probably just thought it was an easy way to organize the speech and keep it interesting and just ret-conned the different pieces of myself into the characters.

I'm bringing this up, though, because I think I've made an important step in my most recent creative block.

Two days ago I was writing an update to the Persona 5 Fanfic (henceforth to be referred to as "P5F"). The basis of P5F is that Nanako, the little girl from Persona 4, is the same age as the rest of the Phantom Thieves in Persona 5, and joins them on that adventure, and all the implications that entails. The way Nanako has panned out, though, is that in many ways she takes the same position on the team as Makoto, one of the original P5 characters, and thus they have had a lot of conflict because they are very similar to one another.

The scene I was writing was basically the two of them trying to smooth things over so they can work as a team. However, from Makoto's perspective, there were still things that Nanako did wrong, and Makoto says that even though she wants to be friends with Nanako, she will continue to call out Nanako when she thinks she's doing the wrong thing.

And when I wrote that sentence...something unlocked. It was a very visceral moment, as if a tension somewhere in my subconscious had finally been resolved. It was so physically resonant that I spent the whole day trying to figure it out. Why had that sentence been so meaningful? Why did I have that reaction?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought about that college speech, about how characters are a reflection of who I am - or at least parts of who I am.

And what I realized is that the reason Makoto's line resonated so well is because it's something I've been working on a lot in my professional life.

See...when you're the leader of anything, it's an uncomfortable truth that part of your job is to call out things when someone else is not doing their job. I do not relish it, but I have become much better at it. Still being kind and humane, but also understanding that I'm not doing anyone any favors by turning a blind eye - the same thing Makoto declared she was going to do in the story.

And that's when I realized I built too much of a wall between my professional life and my creative one.

I have changed a lot in my professional life as an educator, especially over the last three years. But I haven't allowed any of those new changes and new experiences to filter into my creative work. I'm still trying to write and create things like I'm 2019 Chris - the guy who was still teaching in the classroom and who hadn't lived in a pandemic. I haven't addressed any of the topics of my professional life in any creative work - nothing about leadership, about difficult work, about negotiating between people. All of my heroes are always lone rangers, working either outside of the system or bucking it.

But...I am the system in my professional life. I'm the bad guy, "the man." And there's a different kind of story that can be told from that perspective.

I don't really know what it means yet, but this realization has been very encouraging, and I'm working to integrate all sides of my life together again - not just professional into creative, but personal as well. I mean, I have four kids, and not once have I written about being a parent.

Let's go find out where this road leads.

The Meander

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. I think it’s book 2 of his Thursday Murder Club series, but I didn’t read book 1.

(I actually have done this multiple times on accident and I kinda like starting on book 2…?)

(Also I picked it out from the library completely because he was on Taskmaster.)

It was a really fun read, but one of the things I loved about it - and about all novels, really - is “the meander.” Where the characters thoughts just kinda wander around, or even actions in the story happen that don’t really have a major relevance to the plot, but it’s just fun and you learn more about the people and you feel like you’re really connecting with them.

Sometimes I get caught up in the “modern” take of trimming everything down to racecar efficiency. It was good to remind myself that I enjoy the Meander.

Study Question: What do YOU think of “the meander”? Do you read them? Skip them? Are there books that do it too often? Are there genres that don’t do it enough?

Reconnecting

Like many blog posts, this one has been started and stopped many times.

There's always a part of me that looks at blog posts with a sense of "nobody cares about this" or "isn't this just whining" or "a post about excuses for not making content is not content."

But part of the reason I've started and restarted this particular update is because my thinking keeps changing on the matter, so then what I wrote before doesn't make sense.

One of the problems with blogs, tweets, or even personalized podcast posts is that it's just a moment in time. And unless you do it a lot, it doesn't capture the evolution of thought. So then it just feels like "hey look, here's what I was thinking at the time" and then people go back and be like "wow you're a really inconsistent person, you were doing one thing before and now you're not doing it that way."

Which I suppose is an argument for blogging more often, isn't it? To capture the nuance of thought over time...

I'm getting off track.

--

I think I've been depressed since about March.

Well, I knew I was depressed in and around February. Not in any real medical sense of the term, but just felt kinda low and heavy and had a hard time feeling energized and motivated. I got myself out of that really bad low in February, but I don't know that I really "fixed it" in March.

Part of this depression is working in education post-COVID.

I'm not going to get into it in great detail. The only thing you really need to understand about it is that the job is harder - or at the very least a lot different - than it was before.

Pre-COVID, I was a superstar that could make things happen quickly. Post-COVID, everything goes a lot slower, but instead of me looking at the fact that the Post-COVID world is different, I blame myself. I figure that I'm not doing enough, I'm not working fast enough, smart enough, ingenious enough.

Matt once told me I was a perfectionist, and I don't think I ever really saw myself like that. But I do think he was on to something. When it comes to things I care about, like my writing, podcasting, or my work in education, I hold myself to a really high standard.

So in order to handle the fact I wasn't reaching those high standards, I just shut down portions of my personality. I numbed myself, I suppose so I could stay focused on getting the job done, on achieving the goals, on hitting the targets.

I didn't, of course. Because you're never "done" in education.

Nor should you ever want to be, until you retire.

--

Throughout June, I knew I had to reconnect to things. I actually started working on it in May. I knew I had to reconnect to the art part of all this stuff I do - the story telling, the podcasting, the writing. The art part - the part that is expressive as a human, the part that heals the soul, the part that helps you process the other events you're going through.

So much of my art identity, though, is based on the fact that I can do so much at a time. I'm a fast writer, I run the podcast by myself, I do all these things alone and people go "wow, Chris, you do all those things alone you're so amazing" and I bask in that.

But I had burned that part out of me trying to do the education work. I couldn't bear to be efficient, procedural, systems-based any more at home. This meant that, realistically, I couldn't do any projects in-progress, including editing the podcast.

(I actually sat down to edit the most recent episode weeks before it came out and physically said "eugh" then closed it. It had nothing to do with the guest, they were great, but this was one of the warning signs that told me I needed to do something different.)

So the first thing I had to do was new work completely disconnected from what I was doing.

I did three things from May through June to help with this.

MUSIC: I saw this doodad on a TikTok video and knew immediately that I had to get one. It's an Orba 2, and it's the most fun thing I've had in a while. It serves as a physical instrument with all sorts of touch responsive things, but also as a sampler and a 4-track recorder. It's been a lot of fun and a new way for me to interact with music - no computer, no instruments that I know how to play, and it has a limited tonal/chordal/scale range, so I can't even get myself overly hung up on making complicated progressions and complicated melodies. All I can do is make fun grooves and that's all I've been doing with it.

PAPERART: I bought this a bit ago. It's been slow-going, but again it's been something I can work on that is completely unconnected to stuff I've already done. But while I was doing this, I started having ideas about making paper cut-out art. I can't even really describe why I came up with this idea, I just found myself really wanting to do it.

So I did.

I bought paper and a cutting mat and an exacto knife and just...started.

It's fun!

WRITING...SORTA: I have an idea for a story I want to write, but I knew that I had to ease my way back into writing. I couldn't use my normal methods.

So I got a big blank sketchbook and some paint markers and just...started building a story in it.

It's the sloppiest, weirdest, most disorganized thing I've ever created, but it's been really good. This story is a little dark but I think it's helping me process some of the harsh stuff I encounter during my day job, which is not something I've been very good at doing. I need to create more art that's just...processing.

--

So that's been the last two months for me. As you can see, it's working, as I was happily able to edit and then record another podcast episode, and I'm feeling much better as a human being.

There's a lot of other aspects to it, but that's all I feel like writing about right now.

Study Question: What do you do to reconnect to your artistic self when you’re burned out?

A love story in two scenes and the song that (accidentally?) connects them - an essay about Haruhi Suzumiya that nobody asked for

I've been working on editing the first episode of Corsucant is Cracking, and as a result, have been spending a lot of time developing the "sonic palette" of the season. Every season has one - a style of music and sound effects that I try to generate that makes each season unique and subtly identifiable and different to each other. Some of it is obvious - things like the intro/outro music. Some of it is less so.

But this isn't a post about that, this is a post about the greatest two scenes ever written about a man falling in love.

--

Because I've been working on the sonic palette, I've been tinkering around in music again, and chipping away at the "Japanese Royal Road Chord Progression" - the chord progression used in almost all of Japanese popular music and a lot of...well, Japanese music in general. It's a fascinating subject that deserves its own post, but suffice it to say that if you've ever felt a song "sounded anime" or "sounded Japanese" it's because of this chord progression. In any case, it's pretty easy to look up the chord progression, but I was having a really hard time groking it. I finally cracked it tonight, and as a result, I went back to watch one of my favorite songs that uses this progression: God Knows, from the Melancholy of Harui Suzumiya.

Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31aBzZokJMA

I love this song and have for years. But part of it is the scene (which is in the video) that is attached to it. To understand the scene, there's a few basic parts of Haruhi you have to learn:

- Haruhi is a god, though she doesn't know it. Whatever she wills, happens. But since she doesn't know she's a god, her emotions and desires can alter reality at her whim.

- Kyon, the male lead, is an extremely boring person. He's also snarky, an unreliable narrator and a massive male tsundere.

- There are three other members of the SOS Brigade (the group Haruhi founded in order to not be bored) - an alien, a time traveler, and an esper. They have not revealed their identities to Haruhi, but each of them has been sent by their organizations to make sure Haruhi doesn't accidentally wipe out the world (or rewrite reality so they don't exist.)

- Early in the story (in the "official order"), Kyon manages to prevent Haruhi from erasing the world through his feelings for her. It's then that it's clear they care for each other, but Haruhi doesn't remember the event and Kyon won't admit his feelings to himself.

So here we are, in this scene with this song. It's a school festival, and two of the members of the four member female rock group are sick, and the drummer is desperate to try and find someone to sing because she's worked so hard for this moment. Haruhi and one of the other characters agree to go and help her out, even though Haruhi has never shown any musical talent up to this point.

In the scene, Haruhi looks a little nervous. The girl in the witch hat is an alien who downloaded how to play guitar into her mind, so she just starts going. And then Haruhi starts to sing. In the scene, the crowd at first seems a bit surprised at how good she is - and then everyone starts getting into it. By the end, the entire place is going crazy.

Well, the entire place except for Kyon.

Kyon spends the entire time staring at Haruhi, dead still.

Kyon knows through another part of the story that Haruhi's greatest fear is being insignificant - ironic considering she's a god. She creates the SOS Brigade so she can have fun and make the most out of every day, hoping that one day she'll meet an alien or a time traveler or an esper. Haruhi has made herself a bit of an outcast at school because she is so aggressive and so strange - she won't stop talking about all this paranormal stuff.

But here in this moment, Haruhi is everything. The entire school loves her. They don't care she's wearing a bunny suit, or that she's been odd before. She is their rock god, and she can ride this moment to total popularity. Whether or not this talent is a result of Haruhi's god powers is irrelevant - Haruhi is amazing at so many things. If she wanted conventional popularity, acceptance, and success, she could have it.

But she's not singing for them.

She's singing for Kyon.

The lyrics are kind of about them - about two people who can't seem to break down their final walls of communication. And ironically the song asks god to bless them.

And Kyon sees her in this moment, and he knows how deeply she must care for him, love him, even. She could have everything she wanted, but in the end, she literally reshaped the world to be with him - a boring, average, nobody.

And I think he finally admits to himself that he loves her, too.

--

Haruhi has a lot of problems, both in the original novel series (which has gone the George RR Martin path of probably never being finished AND having too many characters) and in the anime adaptation.

But to me, another scene brings the whole story full circle.

There was a movie made for Haruhi: the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. The movie is basically as it sounds like - one day Kyon wakes up and Haruhi and the others are just gone. None of them are at his school. And no matter what he does, he can't find them. He still has all of his memories, but he wonders if he's been abandoned by Haruhi, and the world has been rewritten. He's not even sure she exists anymore.

And then this scene happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=splPOCJZZUg

When Kyon finds out that Haruhi exists, and finally knows where she is, he goes ballistic. He can't control his feelings so he acts out against his friends. He leaves school and runs right to where she's supposed to be. It's the final acceptance of his love for her, now that he's lived this world where she wasn't in it, and he's finally able to externalize how much she has meant to him in his life, even though there's a long ways to go in solving the problem.

It's kind of a long scene and I won't blame you if you don't watch past the part where Kyon goes running out of the building. But if you have an ear for music, I want you to listen carefully to the background score.

This is probably a coincidence - as I said, this is the Japanese Royal Road chord progression, it's used everywhere. But the music sounds like an orchestrated callback to God Knows - as if now that he's finally found her, the music itself is drawing him to her, to that moment when he realized he loved her.

--

I get that I am taking liberties with this. I don't care. These two scenes have been so important to me throughout most of my creative life. Hell, one of the books I wrote early on was basically me trying to recreate Haruhi and Kyon's relationship, and I think it echoes in a lot of the relationships I write.

There's just something about that deep, deep emotional connection left unspoken that rings so powerful to me.

Study Questions:

1. Did you watch the scenes? What do you think of my analysis? Do you agree or disagree?

2. What is the best portrayal of love, in your opinion?

January 2023 Updates

Update time! I still plan on going through the essays from NOVELIST AS A VOCATION. I'm still going through the the book, actually! But I figure it was time to check in again.

One of the things about blogging, and recording your process in general, is that when you have a lot of things going on that it can turn into just another thing that takes away from the time you could be using to create. So lately, I've been prioritizing actually creating stuff in the time I have available, which has resulted in some pretty great results.

First, my current novel project is at 36,395 words and moving steadily along. I'll go more into detail about this when I get to the relevant essay from NOVELIST AS A VOCATION, but treating my writing time as a more physical act that has to be accomplished every day has been very effective in keeping my numbers flowing.

One takeaway I'll share now, though, is something I'm tentatively naming "READER/WRITER TIME DILATION."

One of the things I struggle with in the writing process is chugging along and wondering if something is dragging on too long or is taking too much time. I don't want to bore the reader, and pacing is very important to me.

In the past, I've often struggled in continuing on in a project when I feel like I hit a lull in the story and what I'm writing is super boring. So then I pause and think about it, and hope that I can figure out why it's so boring and what I can do to change it. If I'm unable to do this within a certain amount of time, though, I end up dropping the project or letting it sit around until I can figure out the problem with it again.

With my new method, though, which helps me push the words out even though I may not be feeling it at a particular moment, I started to realize that there's a dilation of time in how I'm experiencing the events and vs how the reader will.

My current write speed is about 1,600 words per hour.

The average adult reads about 250-300 words per minute, which equates to 15,000 to 18,000 words per hour.

That means I'm experiencing the story TEN TIMES SLOWER than the reader will!

That means realistically when I'm laboring over what I'm writing and going "good grief, is someone really going to want to read this for an hour", I shouldn't be. They'll be through it in about 6 minutes.

So now I don't worry about how long it takes to write something.

--

"Ayo, where's all the audio stuff though?"

It's coming. I've actually been working on another audio project on the side, something I don't think I've mentioned publicly. The only reason I've even mentioning it here is that it's almost ready to launch. So that's been cutting into podcast editing speed and scheduling recordings with guests etc.

I used to tear myself up about not being able to focus on one project at a time, feeling like I was letting people down because I wasn't treating one project or another like a job. But I'm just one person working on all this stuff. And if I start trying to change who I am, none of this is fun anymore.

And there's a real solid benefit for me, creatively, to jumping around a bit. The other day I was coming in from work and suddenly the problems in Jane 3 clicked into place. While working on other things, my creative subconscious apparently worked out what now seems to be a very obvious solution. So I'm excited to go back and work on that once this novel project is at least done its first draft.

I think that's all for now. Or at least that's all I can think of since my 4 year old is poking me in the back of the head asking me to pour her milk.

L8r sk8trs.

REVIEW AND THOUGHTS: Novelist as a Vocation - "Are Novelists Broad-minded?"

This is my blog post series on NOVELIST AS A VOCATION by Haruki Murakami. I'm documenting my thoughts on each of the essays and the things I've learned about myself and my process.

--

"Are Novelists Broad-minded?"

Murakami's first essay opens up with the idea that he does not have any fear about new novelists entering the field, that he welcomes them with open arms because he feels that novels are not a zero-sum game, and ultimately writing a novel is a difficult thing and deserves his respect. And at this point in the essay, I'm following along pretty well.

And then it takes a turn I wasn't expecting (sasuga, Murakami-sensei). He writes:

"The way I see it, people with brilliant minds are not particularly well suited to writing novels."

I'm sorry, what? I mean, "brilliant mind" is one of those terms that is thrown about with all the great novelists. But Murakami continues to explain that one does need a certain level of intelligence and education, but, he says:

"[...] anyone with a quick mind or an inordinately rich store of knowledge is unlikely to become a novelist. That is because the writing of a novel, or the telling of a story, is an activity that takes place at a slow pace. "

"[...] Someone whose message is clearly formed has no need to go through the many steps it would take to transpose that message into a story. All he has to do is put it directly into words - it's much faster and can be easily communicated to an audience. [...]The listener will slap his knee and marvel, "Why didn't I think of that?" In the final analysis, that's what being smart is really about.

In the same vein, it is unnecessary for someone with a wealth of knowledge to drag out a fuzzy, dubious container like the novel for his purpose."

This. Hit me. So. So. Hard.

--

I have a lot going on in my life. I know I'm not alone in that, but I have to list it all out so you can understand where I'm coming from.

I have four kids and a wife, all with their own needs from me. I want to be a good husband and a good father, so I won't ignore them. I spend time with them. More importantly, I spend time thinking about how I can fulfill those roles better for each of them.

I work as an administrator in public education. It's a stressful job, but it's also one I care about. I spend time doing the job, but I also spend a lot of time thinking about the job, even when I'm not there.

I have to take care of the dog, because I'm the only one who will walk her consistently.

I have a podcast to schedule, record, edit, and maintain.

And there's other aspects of my life (like anyone's) that are complex and time consuming and generally a hindrance to doing creative work.

There's not a lot of time in my day to write. In fact, time management and time optimization is kind of obsessive for me. You only have to go look at blog posts from July and August of 2022 to see that.

But I'm also able to keep all these things (and more) balanced because I'm a really fast thinker. I can process information and accomplish stuff, generally speaking, faster than most people I work with or know. If I couldn't, I would've given up all this stuff a long time ago by necessity.

But because this is such a valuable skill in my day-to-day life, I somehow concluded that I needed to do all my creative work the same way - faster, better, more brilliant, more efficient. And I was seduced by some ideas and some writing communities - from the generally harmless NaNoWriMo to groups like 20 book to 50K, which said that if you can write and publish 20 books you could generate 50,000 in passive income. This was a group that used phrases like "lowest viable product" - meaning "what's the crappiest novel you can write and still get away with it."

So I trained, and copied, and outlined, and regimented and tried to get my brain to churn out the highest quality story I could in the shortest possible amount of time.

I was trying to do what Murakami is saying is impossible.

--

Murakami concludes his observations that novels are a bad way to communicate ideas by writing:

"An extreme way of putting it is that the novelists might be defined as a breed who feel the need, in spite of everything, to do that which is unnecessary."

I've talked about this before, but I've tried to quit writing. Twice. It didn't stick. I have to do it. And, it turns out, I have to do it the way I've always done it. By the seat of my pants, in a meandering, inefficient way where I barely know what's going to happen next. And then I will rewrite it. And rewrite it. And rewrite it. And then eventually there might be something worthwhile at the end.

Because that's the only way I've ever really finished something and felt very proud of it. And it was the only way I've had the most fun.

--

This essay really made me have to go back and have a hard look at myself, and to realize that the parts of my brain that make me effective in so many arenas is not the same one that will make me effective in novel writing. It made me accept what I had been trying to reject and reform.

I got the book on December 1. I read this somewhere between the 2nd and the 4th.

By December 13th, I was already back at writing my newest novel.

These essays have been gold, but if nothing else, this first one would have been worth the cost.

—

Study Questions: Do you agree with Murakami’s assertion that a novel is an inefficient container for ideas?

How do the quoted lines make you feel about your own work?

December Updates - Blog and Podcast

I am shocked at how quickly this month has moved along. I have had a lot of things working in the background - including a bunch of blog posts - and even though I FEEL like everything is moving at a good pace, time just...keeps going!

So there is more promised blog writing coming up, in particular my review of the essays found in NOVELIST AS VOCATION by Haruki Murakami. Murakami has been an inspiration of mine for years, his fiction is surreal and beautiful and makes me feel weird in a way that nobody else can, like I've woken from a dream that feels somehow very important.

But more importantly, his book WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING was one of my favorite pieces of non-fiction, so to have him dedicate a whole book to talking about writing as a career was really exciting. Thankfully, Nick was on the ball and told me about it (thanks Nick!).

I've gotten about halfway through it, and it was my intention to write a blog post about each essay after I finished reading it and dissecting it. The problem is, the first half has been so amazingly transformational for me that I started WRITING A NOVEL and that has taken a lot of time I would've normally been doing blog posts.

Also, if you're a frequent blog post reader, you'll note that a lot of my posts are drafted while I'm walking the dog. It has been too cold (for me, a Californian) to walk the dog some days (she's not a cold weather dog so anything below 45F (7C) is out of the question), and even if I do walk I don't have the willpower to dictate a blog post, since I'm spending most of my time thinking "wow it's so cold out here when do I get to go inside again."

--

"Ah, a novel!" you say to yourself. It is not Jane 3. It's something else entirely, though it's composed of pieces of things I had been working on over 2021 when we were still mostly in lockdown (and some things from like 2010). I don't want to talk more about it. I'm very superstitious about my novel writing process, and one of my rules is that I can't talk about it until it's done.

I think it has to do with something about the mental satisfaction of the task. There was research about something one time that said that if you tell someone a cool idea you have for a creative work and they say "wow that's so cool!" that part of your brain has checked it off as "oh, okay, that's done then." Because you got the positive feedback you were craving as a creative, even though you didn't actually do any of the work.

I'm very easily influenced by that sort of thing, so I need to keep my mouth shut.

--

PODCAST UPDATE!

If you're not a Discord member, then you don't yet know that Matt had COVID through November, and thus we ran out of episodes. I have some guest stuff cooking up and had planned on releasing it throughout December, but again December has sort of ambushed me. One of the guest episodes (it'll be two, actually) is already recorded and will be up for the yearly December 23rd release to help those of you who are travelling or need a distraction from all the other holiday chaos.

The second will probably drop in Jan, then I will need to record the other guest episode, and then hopefully regular recordings with Matt will resume.

ALSO, the first recording of STAR WARS BOOK CLUB will probably happen in January. I'm not sure if that'll be Patreon or main feed (probably start on Patreon and then eventually go to main feed) but I'm excited about that. Leslie, Nick, Seamus and I are reading the classic ROGUE SQUADRON by Michael A. Stackpole. I've been listening to the audio version, which is VERY GOOD. It has music and sound effects!

--

That's it for now. Only one more day of work and then hopefully some breathing room for everything else.

Intentional Practice, (Part 2!)

A brief history.

Bored and inspired, I wrote my first novel when I was 15. It was Final Fantasy VII smashed together with Legend of Zelda and Star Wars. It was pretty bad.

I wrote a bunch of fanfiction and RP posts after that.

In 2007, I decided to write for real. I wrote another novel. I wrote it again. I wrote it again. I knew I had to get better, but I didn't know how, and I knew I wasn't using any of the intentional practice methods I had become so familiar with when I was in music and martial arts.

Writing for Dummies.

No, I didn't actually use "Writing for Dummies." I used "The Secrets" by Michael A. Stackpole.

Yeah, that one. The one that wrote all the Rogue Squadron books.

Back in the 00s, he had a newsletter called "The Secrets" that was all of his writing advice. I bought the back catalogs and then subscribed to the newer issues. I think the last one I got was volume 121. I don't know if he still makes them or not.

I read all 121 one of these things. It was great! It had all of the basics down on how to think of constructing a book, how to construct chapters and characters and worldbuilding. I still use his "blitzkrieg characterization" method and still adhere to his rule that a chapter should be between 2,500 and 3,000 words long (though sometimes I fudge it and go to 2,000.)

But as Uncle Iroh says, wisdom from only one source becomes stale. It was a great introduction to having an orderly way of approaching writing, but I knew I had to grow past it.

I can't remember the exact order, but I know after that I read The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, On Writing by Steven King, and then a bunch of articles by Ray Bradbury which had particular generalizations on how to write (read one essay, one short story, and one poem a day and write one short story a week.) I read the advice from Vonnegut (the 8 rules and his 6 story shapes.) I read a book about NaNoWriMo written by the creator(s?) of NaNoWriMo. I read portions of Hero of a Thousand Faces, but honestly that thing is DENSE.

I read pretty much every blog post I could find on writing advice back in the day. I absorbed all that was out there in the world and tried it all out. I tried the Snowflake Method. I tried the 30 Day Method. I tried the 5 Step Method.

But all this stuff is general. They're broadstrokes of how to do things, or ways to organize your thoughts. It doesn't really teach you how to directly improve on particular skills.

So I just started making my own up.

Practice in Front of An Audience

Andy J. Pizza's Creative Pep Talk talks a lot about practicing your craft in front of an audience. Of course, he didn't exist in that format back in the 00s, so I kinda stumbled into it. I found a place to practice.

A Naruto RP board.

Yep. Naruto.

It's been deleted, which is too bad because I had a lot of stuff written on there, but it was a good place to write a lot and have fun. It was prose-based, so no rules, no stats, etc. If there was a "real" battle, a judge would be assigned to determine if someone went too far in their writing of damage, etc.

As far as I know, though, I was the only one on there that was trying to write and publish books. Most were on there for fun, so I was a lot better than a lot of people. That meant I never had a shortage of people that wanted to write with me, but it also meant I had a lot of people asking me how to improve. But they didn't want Vonnegut's 8 rules, they wanted to know how to write their combat sequences more vividly or how to make more interesting characters. I didn't really know how, I just sort of did it.

So I had to systemize what I was doing so I could teach it to other people.

Teaching someone else is the best way to refine what you do. I wasn't even thinking of going into teaching yet, but I really enjoyed the process.

I did a video/stream a while back on Obvious + Anti-Obvious. This was invented from this time period, when I was trying to explain how to come up with more interesting RP characters.

I went through my Dropbox and I found a bunch of graphics I made to help people improve. I had a battle chart on how to write a battle when the enemy is stronger, weaker, or the same strength as you AND how to write it if the enemy is taking the battle seriously vs non-seriously.

I found a flow-chart I made on how to backwards plot.

I had a rule called "Always the Third Option" where whatever I was thinking of a particular plot options that the third one I made was the best one.

I also did the "52 week project," which is based on Bradbury's advice. I challenged everyone to write a short story based on a prompt every week. I can't remember how far I got - I think I got into the 30s? For some reason, my old Dropbox only has three saved on it. I wonder why I saved those three.

Concluding the Past

I've been working on this post for a few days now, going through all of my old notebooks, trying to find other drills I did. I can remember some, but I didn't keep very good records of stuff. Some of that is probably for the best - I need to be working on new things, not rehashing old ones. I will say that one of the biggest constants in my notebooks is the use of freewriting, which is probably something that merits its own post at some point.

In the meantime, though, I'm grateful for all the work I did in the past, and I all the work I've done to get here. I'm excited to see what my newest methods produce.