Fill the box

Art has this funny way of being really hard on beginners. I think most people have heard the quote from Ira Glass about how a lot of artists get into the creative business but drop out when what we envision isn’t something we can manifest into reality. This is the most frustrating thing.

With drawings, if you take every sketch you’ve made, and you put it in a box, once you’ve filled the box, you’ll have improved your drawing skills. It’s simple, the more sketches you do, the better you will be at making sketches.

On some levels, we think this should work for writing, but it isn’t that simple. With visual arts, it’s sometimes easier to judge it because you have this sort of third eye in your mind. You can see it in your mind and compare it to the thing you make in reality. When you start making the paintings look the way they look in your mind, you know you’re close. But how do you do that with a novel?

 Encompassing an entire novel in your mind isn’t an easy thing to do. There are parts, ideas, feels, but the whole thing? Not so much. With a sketch, the whole thing can be judged in one moment, but it takes hours to read a novel. Even though they don’t compare to paintings or drawings, one thing remains the same: the more novels you write, the better you will be at writing novels.

Does this make them good? Being competent at an art form does not make a person good at it. For instance, I’ve been watching Bob Ross painting shows. That man is amazing at how he takes shapes and boils them down quickly into things that can be put together into a painting. He’s got composition, and the colors go together very nicely. I have enough craft that I could probably reproduce his tutorial pieces by following along and being stubborn.

I could do that with novels, too.

I could (and have!) sit and diagram out my favorite novels. I’ve studied the way the plot unfolds, the way the characters are presented, and I could reproduce them if I were to go painstakingly through them. Bit by bit they could be remade. But you know what that makes? It makes a sort of puppet novel.

And that’s why paint by numbers offends some people. You can do what Brandon Sanderson calls the cook method, “Oh, I need a mentor and he needs to die so the main character can grow his wings and fly.” Those are perfectly acceptable forms of novels. Some of them even do very well, but if you’re in writing because you had a vision about the kinds of stories you wanted to tell, making your book according to a recipe isn’t going to work out.

Which brings us to the problem of going from competent to great. I am certain that anyone with enough dedication can reproduce something they love in the same way that a photograph reproduces the view from the top of half dome. But the view just doesn’t compare to the way the wind slips up the cliff like it’s going to suck you off into the void. I doubt the photograph makes you feel as if your life is in danger by standing on that razor edge between two feet firmly on the ground and the better part of mile drop to the valley below. The picture is beautiful, but being there will change your soul.

With novels it’s harder to know if we’ve lost someone in the woods, or the path took a wrong turn until we’ve gotten to the end of the novel and had others read it. They didn’t get to the mountain top, or they felt like it was more of a mole hill. Always so vexing when our vision isn’t understood, but those attempts have given us something. At least the reader felt the rise. Maybe they saw bits of the view between the forest of melodramatic metaphor (such as this bit here). The point is, you have to put in the effort. You have to fill the boxes with your art.

Oh but Rena, my best friends, sister’s ex-girlfriend wrote her first and only book and it sold a bajillion copies. She had ten agents offer her representation—the only ten agents she sent her query letter to!—and she now lives in Scotland with a castle and a staff to see to her mandatory hiking breaks.

Wow. Welp, that’s super awesome for your best friend’s sister’s ex-girlfriend, but I also heard about this guy who got struck by lightning 19 times. I don’t use that as a reason to assume the first rumble of thunder is going to nail me in the back of the head (though, to be clear, I definitely practice lightning safety as I am a coward!). My point is, yes, some people are really lucky and everything falls into place perfectly. For the rest of us mere mortals, the way to making the art we envision is through practice.

You will have to write more than you ever dreamed, and before you think about how you’re done with that nicely polished novel and its three major edits, just wait until you get an editor and they ask you to rewrite most of the end… and most of the beginning… and maybe we could do something different with that middle bit?—but that’s a discussion for another day.

Winning, not what I expected.

Right, so this is going to sound like a cross between a public service announcement and an after school special. Feel free to check out if you aren’t interested.

We’ve all heard the adage “Winning isn’t everything.” Growing up, I always assumed this was one of those annoying things adults tell children to make them feel better about coming in second place at nationals. It’s what we always try to tell ourselves when we play on the team that loses Every. Single. Game. I can just imagine poor Charlie Brown sitting in his bathtub after a baseball game.

I’ve been on the team that only scored two goals in a season (one of the goals was because the goaltender was laughing too hard to mind the net), and got mercied every single game. I thought I knew what that stupid saying meant. I thought it was a reminder to spend my time enjoying the game, not focusing on the score, but now I’ve seen the other side. Last night my beer league hockey team won our championship game. In fact, we’ve won every game this season, except our first which ended in a tie. 

Since January, we’ve done nothing but win. This team was like a force of nature. They were, in fact, so good that it didn’t matter what I did. I spent weeks where I worked hard all week long and brought my A game. There were weeks I was so sick that I barely managed to skate. Still we won. My performance didn’t matter at all. So when we won our championship game, I didn’t feel like I’d earned it. I felt like a fraud. 

Undeserved praise is much worse than getting none when it’s due. It feels hollow, and it eats your insides. It’s more soul crushing than stacks of rejection letters.

In those moments where I fraudulently accepted praise for a “well played game,” I realized something important. This unearned-trophy toting feeling was bad when it was tied to hockey, but how bad would it have been if I’d felt that way about my writing? 

With hockey you show up and the outcome is delivered: either you win or you lose and the time and personal investment is much smaller than even a short story. I could see what it would be like to have written a novel that was sometimes my A game, but mostly my pass/no pass game. What if that phoned in novel went on to do great. It would be the worst feeling ever. I could barely face the five fans at the hockey game, how would it feel if droves of fans came out for a book signing in a book that I felt didn’t deserve praise? Yikes. 

So yeah, winning isn’t everything, especially in writing. 

Failure has brought me a lot. Yeah, I know, this is just the sort of thinking espoused by losers, but seriously, failure has taught me more than if I’d landed a hole in one with my first query letter, got an agent and a book deal right out of the gates. From “losing,” I’ve spent more time researching the publishing industry. I know what a query letter needs to do. I’ve made a much better list of agents to query for the future. I understand what real revising means. I understand voice. Yes, I know my blog sounds like me, but my query bait sounds like a casual version of my academic writing: dry. When I wrote it, I thought my job was to get out of the way of the story, but I can see that was a mistake. I made a lot of mistakes. I think I’ll post about that pretty soon. Failure has challenged me to dig deeper, find my voice and pull stories out of myself when I didn’t know I could. 

I won’t lie, my WIP has been hard. I never saw this story as well as my query bait, but I’m out of the saggy middle. I know how it’ll finish. If it had been easy, I wouldn’t have learned anything. But when I finish this WIP, I’ll feel like I earned it—good, bad or otherwise—I’ll own it. It’ll be mine in a way that stupid hockey trophy never will be.

Right, public service announcement/afterschool special is over now.

Irony

Right, so there are a number of things in the world that make people say something like “huh, really?” Somewhere along the line a really smart, crafty person decided they had a great, toxic-free way to bring air conditioning to the masses and thus the swamp cooler was born. 

For those of you who don’t know how this works, here’s the process in a nutshell (I know, I’m all sciency every now and then, just hang in there). It takes energy to evaporate water. It sounds simple, but it’s a big deal. In a swamp cooler, the water evaporates, and the energy needed to evaporate the water comes from the air which then cools, having lost some energy to evaporate the water. 

Swamp coolers work best in deserts, and other arid climates. Basically, if the ambient humidity is lower than 40% they work great, chilling the air by as much as 15 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Except for one little problem: the monsoon. 

See, in Albuquerque, we have nine months of the year with a humidity that hovers between 15 and 5%. In short, perfect for a swamp cooler. But those nine months of great swamp cooler humidity? September-May.

So, in Albuquerque, the only time we use our swamp coolers are also the only months where the humidity can regularly spike into the 90% range, effectively disarming all air conditioning. 

Huh, really? Who came up with this idea?

At least we usually get an awesome lightning storm to go along with the suddenly sweltering in our houses effect.