IWSG – Page 4 – Ecce Signum

IWSG, March 2022

2022-03-022022-03-02 John Winkelman

Riverside Park in Grand Rapids Michigan

Hi everyone. I missed last month’s IWSG post due to a combination of *multiple vague gestures at the state of the world*. I’m sure you can relate.

This month’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is:

Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

Much of what I write is in response to calls for submission to anthologies and themed issues of various literary and genre fiction magazines. I seldom complete those stories in time to meet the deadline, but even when it is obvious that the work will take months longer than originally estimated, I try to keep to the original theme. Constraints, I have heard, breed innovation.

But when writing to a theme, particularly if it is a type of story I have not written before, I sometimes find myself asking the question, “Did I put that thing I wrote into the story because the story demands it, or because the constraints of the theme demand it?” This can be a difficult knot to untangle.

Here is an example:

A few years ago, World Weaver Press put out a call for new interpretations of the Baba Yaga myth, for their anthology Skull and Pestle. My degree is in Russian Studies, and I have been to Russia, and continue to read Russian literature (in translation only; my language skills are quite rusty), so this seemed like a perfect fit.

I set the story in a village of Russian Orthodox Old Believers in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border. The writing went well, with (I thought) good characters, good dialog, and good pacing, but when it came time to include Baba Yaga, I found that I couldn’t quite fit her into the story in a way that felt convincing. I went back and re-wrote the first third of the story (which kept getting longer), and by the time I found a way to transplant Baba Yaga from the forests of western Russia to the plains of the American Midwest, the deadline had long passed, and the short story had become a novella.

The troublesome scene, which would have brought Baba Yaga into prominence, was an act of bigoted violence against the Old Believers which, while all too plausible, felt gratuitous. Yet I couldn’t find a way through to the final act without that scene or something like it. So I left the scene in and re-wrote almost everything before it. Having done that, I found I needed to go a completely different direction with the last part of the story, and that is why it is still not finished.

Skull and Pestle is available here, and is quite good. I think all of the stories in it are better than whatever final form my own story would have taken, had I completed it in time to meet the deadline.

On a side note, I want to thank all of the members of the IWSG for your support and encouragement as I round out my first year in this group. It has been difficult to stay motivated during the pandemic, and being part of this writing group has been a big help. In particular I want to thank Jean Davis for bringing the IWSG to my attention. You rock!

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, January 2022

2022-01-052022-01-04 John Winkelman

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group post for January 2022.

Trying to take advantage of the zeitgeist, I started the new year with specific goals and plans for my writing life for the next six months. I am much more productive and engaged when I have a set routine, though every plan, no matter how flexible or rigorous, is subject to disruption by outside influences.

In 2020 I tried a weekly routine where I would write in the mornings on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then edit on Thursday and submit on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were rest time, and also “open hours” for cleaning up the odds and ends left over from the week.

Note that these three steps were not all the same writing pieces. I was not starting a poem at the beginning of the week and submitting it at the end. The work I edited was from weeks and months prior, and the works I submitted were from months and years prior.

I liked the feeling of continuity of working on writing from now, the recent past, and the more distant past. But three mornings a week is often simply not enough time. Editing, in my experience, takes at least as much time as writing, and submitting stories and poems is a lot more complicated than simply copying a poem into the body of an email and sending out into the world.

So though having discrete chunks of time for each step of the writing process was useful, the schedule I chose was too fine-grained and I found it difficult to get my head into the correct space for the daily tasks.

So this year I am trying a variation on the previous theme. The first full week of the month is set aside for editing and submitting, and the rest of the month is for writing. This way I can be fully immersed in a given (or several) projects, while setting aside time to let those projects evolve and go out into the world.

Since this is the first full week of the month, this is an editing week, and I am using it to organize and catalog the 40+ poems I wrote in 2021, and see which ones have promise. If I finish with the poetry I will knock the dust off of one of my old short stories, and see if I can’t get it to a place where I can send it out for publication.

This month’s IWSG question is:

What’s the one thing about your writing career you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it?

This is an easy one. The thing about my writing career I regret the most is the years between 1999 and 2013 where I produced almost no creative work at all.

Back in the mid to late 1990s when I was working at Schuler Books and Music, the majority of my cow-orkers were writers, and we were all full of the kind of creative energy which comes from being part of a close-knit group of over-educated, underpaid creative types at loose ends. We created and attended reading groups, writing groups, book clubs, poetry and music events, plays, and the monthly POT (philosophical, ontological, theological) group meetings where we would stay up until the wee hours discussing topics like love, creativity, responsibility, religion, the past, the future, and the present in all its wondrous and terrible facets. We were (mostly) in our twenties. We had energy for that sort of thing.

Then I started my career as a web developer and programmer, and abruptly all my energy (and time) went to learning how to make things look good and work correctly in a web browser. This was in 1999, at the peak of the DotCom boom and I would regularly work 50-80 hour weeks, and my creative writing output dropped off to practically zero. When I look through my personal journals from that time, there are multiple gaps of several months where I didn’t write at all. And what I did write was mostly short entries complaining about being burned out and exhausted. All of my energy was going into my career, such as it was.

Then in late 2013, fresh off of the end of an extremely toxic relationship and a hellish work project where I was writing code for twelve hour days for weeks at a time without a break, I discovered National Novel Writing Month. I immediately joined a writing group made up of people from the local NaNoWriMo community, and from this experience blossomed Caffeinated Press and The 3288 Review. So as abruptly as my writing career had stalled back in September 1999, it restarted just as abruptly on November 1, 2013.

Those are fourteen years I can never get back, and in my bad moments I resent the hell out of the jobs, employers and managers who demanded so much of my time and creative energy in return for so little compensation. But I do have a stable career now, which allows me sufficient (if not exactly ample) time to write, edit and submit my work. I regret all that wasted time, but what’s past is past and I am writing now. That’s all that matters.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, December 2021

2021-12-012021-12-01 John Winkelman

Welcome to the Insecure writer’s Support Group post for December 2021.

Well here we are, the day after the end of NaNoWriMo 2021, and I am actually feeling…good? Hyped? Pumped? I reached 50,000 words on Thanksgiving Day, which was fortunate because the rest of the holiday weekend was fraught and full of family drama.

But I won NaNoWriMo 2021, in one of the most stressful years of my life. It provided for me a distraction and an escape from all the [gestures at everything], and I made good progress on the sequel to the book I didn’t finish last year, which means I am now in a good place to go back and finish my book from 2020.

This month’s IWSG question is the following:

In your writing, what stresses you the most? What delights you?

The stresses in my writing life vary over time, depending on many outside factors. But the stress factor which pops up most consistently is when the words just…don’t…work. I don’t mean writer’s block, or any kind of general malaise which prevents me from getting my head in the proper space to put words to paper. I mean the disconnect between the thing I am trying to say and what ends up on the surface in front of me. I have a great idea for a poem or a story, and I sit down to get it out of my head and onto the screen, and the words just kind of…sit there. Whatever energy went into transcribing the multidimensional multimedia images from my imagination down onto the page is now gone. The words are stagnant, uninteresting, completely lost in translation.

Riffing on Michelangelo’s quote about finding the piece of art inside the stone, this particular stone, if I hacked away at it, would only contain a slightly smaller stone. This is the state of mind where I can easily slip into the impostor syndrome mindset, which is difficult to overcome, as it provides its own sort of self-sustaining energy.

In contrast, what delights me the most is when I get some words written and they are exactly what I was trying to convey, and instead of sitting there like a lump of rock, they glow in all their myriad facets of wonder. And even if (to abuse the metaphor) they sit there like a lump of rock, this time they are the rock which contains within it a sculpture of sublime beauty and detail. These are the drafts within which you can already see the story in its final, perfect form, and all you need to do is remove the extraneous and polish the remaining.

The process of writing which results in such a feeling tends to provide its own sustaining energy; the groove or flow or zone where time seems to disappear and I feel like I am writing in an eternal now, though in the mundane world that eternity may only last for a few minutes.

I couldn’t say which I feel more often while writing – stress or delight – but since I am still writing, thirty-plus years after I first started, I would say that a single moment of writing success makes up for almost any amount of writing stress.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, November 2021

2021-11-032021-11-02 John Winkelman

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group post for the month of November, 2021.

Hmm. What am I feeling insecure about this month? What could it be. Could it be…

SATAN*?!?!

No! Not Satan. Just NaNoWriMo. It’s always NaNoWriMo.

My confidence took a big hit last year when I failed to complete my 50,000 words worse than in any previous NaNo. I blame burnout, family stress, COVID stress, and attempting to continue a partially-completed work, rather than starting something new. For me, NaNoWriMo works best when whatever I work on is completely contained within the month. This is why I do so well with short stories at this time of year.

So for 2021 I am trying a different approach. I plan to write a book, so nothing new there, but instead of writing in chapters, I have created 30 documents in Google Docs, one for each day of the month. Whatever I write on a given day, no matter what it is, where it starts or where it ends, goes in the doc for the day. I’ll take notes about where chapters should start and end, but rather than worry about chapter (or short story) length, this year will be all about the writing. Just get it down and get it done. The editing will happen in December. Or January. Or never. Anywhere but in November.

Therefore I am cautiously optimistic that this month I will be able to get the 50,000. And so far, two days in, I have averaged about 5,000 words a day. So it may actually happen.

If you are participating in NaNoWriMo, here is my profile page at nanowrimo.org. Hit me up with a buddy request!

Anyway.

This month’s IWSG question is the following:

What’s harder to do, coming up with your book title or writing the blurb?

That’s an easy one: The title. I say this simply because I have not yet had to come up with a blurb for a book, because I have not yet worked a book the point where it requires a blurb. Maybe this year. Or maybe next.

I suppose that makes it another thing to feel insecure about.

*If you didn’t get the Satan reference, do a google search for “SNL Church Lady”.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, October 2021

2021-10-062021-10-06 John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

The question: In your writing, where do you draw the line, with either topics or language?

Back when Caffeinated Press and The 3288 Review were first starting up, the bunch of us met to discuss editorial policy. As I was heading up the journal, and intended it to include reviews of West Michigan arts and letters, the first points I introduced were “No poison pens. No punching down.” In other words, the performative sadism of the Hot Take and the Gleefully Nasty Review had no place in any publication to which I would contribute my time and effort.

That being said, I found this to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer with specifics. After much consideration, I think the line I draw is here:

No exploitation of, or punching down at, minority or marginalized or vulnerable persons or groups.

I say this as a middle-aged, straight, white, middle-class, cisgender, progressive, sort-of-Buddhist man whose political sensibilities have moved steadily leftward for the past thirty years. Any art which depends on stepping on necks in order to elevate itself is art which is on the wrong side of history.

While the stories I write may include instances of cruelty and People Doing Bad Things, those scenes will be in service of the story and not merely as gratuitous filler for increased views and sales. And, spoiler alert, those people will probably receive karmic justice by the end of the story.

There are many artists and writers who believe that there is nothing which is out of bounds, and while I do not state my position as a Rule Which Should Be Followed By All, the things I won’t write tend to also be things I won’t read. Write what you want. I ain’t the boss a’ you.

I will not turn this post into a detailed examination of “punching down” as it relates to dominant social structures here in the United States, though I think such a post would be useful for teasing apart the multiple threads of of privilege and power which permeate every facet of modern life. Perhaps I will write it to pad my word count during NaNoWriMo next month.

In closing, note the tagline for this blog.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, September 2021

2021-09-012021-09-01 John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

The question: How do you define success as a writer? Is it holding your book in your hand? Having a short story published? Making a certain amount of income from your writing?

“Success” has had many definitions over the course of my writing life, depending on a wide and constantly changing variety of circumstances, and also my experiences in life (generally) and with the literary world (specifically).

“Make a living as a writer” was probably my first goal, and likely the one most popular with beginning writers.

“Become a famous author” was the next goal, and it is not at all the same as the first definition.

“Publish a book” was next, and by now you can probably see a trend in the targets at which I have aimed.

“Complete a final draft” could have been a goal, but it must necessarily follow “complete a first draft,” which I have yet to do. And no, I don’t consider my output from NaNoWriMo to be first draft material.

Here in September 2021, well into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and with a significant uptick in cases thanks to the Delta variant and the nihilistic arrogance of people who think it Won’t Happen To Them, I define success as writing for at least a few minutes every day, no matter what form that writing takes.

To that end, I have been moderately, well, successful. Eight months into 2021, I have written about three dozen poems, created rough outlines for half a dozen short stories, and jotted down rudimentary notes for three novels. I write in my journals every day. I update this blog at least once a week. And yesterday I started planning out what I am going to work on during NaNoWriMo, which starts two months from today (egads!)

Success as a writer depends on prior successes, whether or not you define them as such. Effect follows cause. You can’t have a final draft without first having a first draft. And in order to do that, you need to, you know, write.

As we like to say in tai chi class, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

And a side note, because we are 20 months into a pandemic with no end in sight: It’s okay to be exhausted. It’s okay to be burned out and frustrated, and to not be able to focus on your writing. The world is a stressful place in the best of times, and these are far from the best of times. Be gentle with yourself.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, April 2021

2021-04-072021-04-06 John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work?

I don’t know if I am a risk taker, as such. I like to play around with forms and styles. I have written stories in first and third person, past and present tense. Some styles work for certain stories; others do not. In the past I have written fantasy, science fiction, horror, westerns, and literary fiction. Again, some worked better than others. In particular, I went through a phase of writing literary short stories where around 2,000 words in Cthulhu would show up, despite my best efforts to keep the story from heading in that direction.

For me, memoir involves more risk because in order to be effective it must dig into places which I am not always willing to uncover. For example, a few years ago, for NaNoWriMo I set out to write a series of short stories, and as a warm-up exercise I wrote a short piece about the toxic people in my life. That short piece turned into 18,000 words, all written on November 1. I was an angry, bitter emotional wreck for days after. On a positive note, I was far enough ahead in my word count that I could take a couple of days off of writing in order to recover from the experience.

I don’t touch much on controversial topics, other than possibly equity, empathy and compassion, which are controversial topics in a society where sadism seems to be the national pastime.

So I suppose the risk-taking lies in trying something new which may or may not work. Either way, I have broadened my horizons and (hopefully) improved my craft.

Thank you for reading this answer, and thank you (and hello!) to the members of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group who find their way to my humble blog.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, March 2021

2021-03-032021-03-03 John Winkelman

I have recently joined the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, which I discovered through the excellent blog of author Jean Davis.

And as a newly active member of the group, this is my first IWSG monthly first-Wednesday question:

Everyone has a favorite genre or genres to write. But what about your reading preferences? Do you read widely or only within the genre(s) you create stories for? What motivates your reading choice?

That is a very good question. Two things motivate my reading choices: a diversity of reading, and that one book I just gotta read right now. And there are secondary concerns, such as books which have been sitting around forever, and when my mind is in a particular space in which it will only be satisfied by e.g. poetry or Russian literature. Or Russian poetry.

I take as my guiding star Karen Lord‘s advice to “read well”. Find the books which are good examples of the kind of book I would like to write and, well, read them!

That doesn’t mean everything I read is practice for something I hope to write. I am motivated more than anything by curiosity. In my library I have scores of anthologies covering a great many subjects and styles of writing. My day job is mentally demanding and I am happy to indulge in purely escapist reading as time and opportunity allow. For example, last summer I did a deep dive into the Forgotten Realms novels and read the first twenty or so Drizzt Do’Urden novels by R.A. Salvatore.

Then again this past October I participated in the Sealey Challenge and read 31 books of poetry in 31 days. And a couple of weeks ago, after almost three decades of attempting it and failing, I finally read the entirety of The Brothers Karamazov.

So what motivates my reading? Ultimately I think I read whatever it feels important that I read next. And that could be anything.

And on a tangent, this wide and varied reading habit helps me through bouts of writing block and imposter syndrome. Usually if I am reading something which is too close to what I am writing I start to compare the one with the other, and therefore reading something outside of that channel is a good way to reset myself, mentally and emotionally, so I can get return to the writing practice with a clear mind.

What motivates your reading? Let me know in the comments!

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.