Has it really been THREE WEEKS since I blogged last?

But soft . . . I should explain where I have been. Or rather, where I AM, for I am still there, in the place where I am. I am in England. I’ve been here since the 24th of June. I come here a lot, as you may know if you have read this blog over time.

What have I been doing on this particular trip? Well, seeing a lot of people. There was the London Gathering. I’ve also been working on the SEQUEL TO 13 LITTLE BLUE ENVELOPES, and another project for AFTER that. I’ve been spending a lot of time doing research around London. And I will be going to Ireland later this week, if I ever get around to making the arrangements. I’ve also been watching Torchwood and have eaten some cookies and had some tea and got a tan in the hot English sun.

But I wasn’t always busy, friends. Which brings me to today’s question.

Kira902k asks: How do I survive this entire summer doing NOTHING?

Kira, I know your pain. When I was in high school, I had a few summers of such excruciating boredom that when I even think about them, my teeth begin to strike together and my shoes get too tight. It was horrible.

The reason for this was a complicated matrix of badness. Thusly:

- I went to school in the city, and thus, lived kind of far from my friends. (And I went to a girls’ school in a convent for the rest of the year.)

- I didn’t drive in high school. This was partially because I was kind of young, and because car insurance was expensive, and I generally wasn’t allowed to get it even though I wanted it more than I wanted anything. This was a great divide at Chez Johnson, one we don’t even talk about TO THIS DAY, and I am totally grown up and everything. Bottom line: I was never allowed to do ANYTHING.

- So I was totally stuck in my podunk suburb. This, remember, was BACK BEFORE THE INTERNET . . . or, at least, it was back before there was anything good to do on the internet. I am sure it was AROUND. So all I had was the phone and friends with cars who would rescue me as often as they could. Which wasn’t often enough.

- Compounding the problem was the fact that for my junior and senior years (from when I was 15 until I was 17), my father’s job transferred him around the country, first to Louisville, Kentucky (where we knew no one) to Houston, Texas (where we knew no one).

I will never forget my 15th summer, simply because it was so excruciatingly boring that it seemed to warp time and space. I sometimes wonder if that summer isn’t the reason I tend to write books about summers. Suite Scarlett, for instance, is about Scarlett’s 15th summer. Perhaps I am on permanent redo on that one.

That was the summer my dad was in Kentucky, and it was about 105 degrees every single day, with a heat index (that was the summer I learned what a “heat index” was—it means “how much you will actually suffer”) of about 115. We had to go visit my dad for six weeks, so I couldn’t plan to do anything else that summer, like get a job, or give myself up for medical research, or sell myself as a child bride. We flew to Kentucky, and we spent SIX WEEKS sitting around in my dad’s apartment. SIX WEEKS.

I could have been doing so many other, more useful things.

It was too hot to spend any time outside. Seriously. Your lungs would just explode. Not that we knew where to go, or had anyone to see. We were Philadelphia people, and this was a new, strange place. We had my dad’s car during the day, so my mom and I just went to bookstores, often used, where we would buy up huge piles of books, crank through them, and then resell them at the end of the week. I know I read a lot that summer . . . but for some reason the only books I clearly remember reading are the entire Fletch series up to Fletch and the Man Who. Somewhere in there, I also remember reading The Great Gatsby for the first of what would be about 200 times. So that was a summer romance that LASTED. And I think that’s probably when I read Roughing It by Mark Twain, to try to give my westward journey some exciting context. There were a lot of books, but a strange proportion of them seemed to be Fletch-related.

And I wrote. There was that.

When not reading, we baked cakes. One week, we baked a cake every day. We didn’t even want the cakes. We just baked them because it was something to do. I remember my mom saying, “I have never been so bored.” And my mom has 105 Cat’s Meow decorative houses, if this gives you any idea of what she can withstand.

Throughout it all, I missed my friends. To quell the pain, I would bake YET ANOTHER cake and put it with the others, which we lined up on the kitchen bar, using the same display method used in olden times, when countries used to line their architecture with the severed heads of their enemies to send a message. Our message was: we are bored.

What I’m saying, Kira, is that you have come to the right person. I understand. But you know what? It’s almost impossible to do NOTHING. I feel I came pretty much as close as I am (hopefully) ever going to come to doing nothing during that summer, and in retrospect, I was doing things. They just weren’t the things I necessarily wanted to be doing at the time. But all of that reading and writing . . . it paid off! There is something to be said for dealing with this nothing. Creative acts come out of the quiet—when you simply must make something.

What I am saying is, if you spend the summer doing nothing, you will end up EXACTLY LIKE ME! Think about that!

Badhandwroter asks: I have a lot of ideas for stories that I’m currently working on but I can’t seem to buckle down and work on just one and fully develop it. What are some ways to keep my focus on just one idea?

We writers have a saying, Badhandwroter. Well, not a saying. More of a commonly accepted idea that has yet to be assembled into an easy-to-carry quote. I will attempt to correct this now: “There is nothing so appealing as the next thing you want to write.”

When you first start writing something, it is all sweetness and joy, because you are skimming those awesome ideas of the top of your brain—that delicious sweet cream. Sometimes it’s an idea for a first scene. Sometimes just one character. Sometimes you get a cluster of ideas: a location, a bit of dialogue. Some people ride high on just a title and a mental image of a cover.

Oh, it is a fine drug, this “first idea” stuff. The unwritten story or book is always SO GOOD. Sure, when you flip the pages in your mind, you can’t actually SEE ANY WORDS, but you know when you fill them in, they will be like NECTAR.

Thing is . . . once you actually start writing, you have to live up to that Shangri-La in your brain. So you sit down and start working, trying to produce that wonderful, shimmering stuff. And while it may go well for a while, you are probably going to reach a point where it DOES NOT, and you have NO IDEA what is supposed to come next, and you take a DIM VIEW of what you’ve done so far, and it’s all HOPELESS and you are TERRIBLE.

This is usually when the new shiny thing comes into your mind . . .

Your innner LOLcat comes out.

This is also where the writing BEGINS. This is precisely the point where you press on. You can jot down the note about the other shiny thing, but if you want to write, you keep going.

Now, you may ask, “But mj, don’t some ideas just die because they have no legs?”

Some ideas are maybe a little shaky. That’s true. But stories are like Cootie. Ever play Cootie? That game where you get the plastic body of a Cootie bug, and you have to keep playing until the thing has eyes and a mouth and antennae and legs to stand on? The more you work on a story—the more you press on—the more you’ll find that you get new parts. New ideas will grow.

Cootie.

But your question is: HOW? HOW do you keep focus and press forward?

My friend, I feel your pain. It’s hard. But the only way is JUST TO DO IT. The most useful technique, aside from flat-out discipline, is to be accountable to someone. Joining a writing group, for instance, where you have to produce a chapter by a certain date for the others to read. More hardcore people might chain themselves to their desk using a time lock or deny themselves showers or food until they have met their daily writing quota. These are also very effective methods.

And then, when you are done your story or book, you get to TAKE IT APART and MAKE IT COOLER. Because now that you’ve made it once, you can get a good look at the thing and see where improvements and changes are necessary. Then you enter into another time-honored writerly period, the opposite of your first problem: namely, the endless revision . . . which is sort of the literary equivalent of projectile barfing.

Trouble ahead and trouble behind, Badhandwroter! Happy writing!

Posted: Sunday, July 12th, 2009 @ 11:16 pm
Categories: ask mj, boredom, cooties, summer, writing.
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