π out of e Doctors Agree

If you’ve been trolling for writing advice for any length of time, you’ve no doubt heard of the butt-in-chair approach to writing productivity. If you haven’t heard basically the advice runs thusly:

First you need a butt. Any size will do. Many human bodies come preequipped with butts for this very purpose. Consult your owners manual to determine if you are one of them. If you do not possess a butt, then strap a pillow to the back of your legs. That will work almost as well.

Second. Sit your but down in a chair. Any chair will do, but perhaps your butt has a special chair that it likes to sit in. This is fine provided the relationship does not go too far. My butt has become particularly friendly with a big red recliner that used to belong to my father.

Third. You write. I’m not sure what you write on since neither of the previous two steps said anything about getting any writing materials. Maybe you’re supposed to scratch the words into your skin with your fingernails. Personally I use a computer type device designed to sit on top of my lap. If you do not have a lap you may have to sit at a table or something.

So that’s the process. Basically it’s saying forget about inspiration and dive into your work. Those words ain’t gonna write themselves. I mean they might but that last time that happened…well I think it’s best not to talk about that.

COMPLETELY RANDOM PICTURE!!!

But you know what? Sometimes I kinda hate this process. I’m not talking about the persevering even though you don’t feel like writing part. I’m talking about the sitting down part.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can only take so many sedentary hours before I start to come down with the dreaded disease I like to call the Sittin’ Around Blues. The Sittin’ Around Blues start in your lower back and move up your spine toward your head. Once they reach the head you’ll start to feel morose and lackadaisical. And if you let them go on for long enough, depression sets in.

So what do you do?

Well when I start to feel the Sittin’ Around Blues creep up on me I get up and take a health dose of Doing Something Else for a Change. Doing Something Else for a Change comes in a variety of handy shapes and sizes. There’s the Get Up and Clean the House for an Hour pill, and the Take the Dog for a Walk lozenge, as well as the Go Outside and Pull Some Weeds in the Garden suppository.

“But Albert,” you say, “what if Doing Something Else for a Change causes my ideas to evaporate into the aether?”

Never fret dear reader, for the side effects for Doing Something Else for a Change, include increased creativity, greater energy and enhanced inspiration, so that when you come back to your story it will seem new and interesting again.

But don’t take my work for it. If the Butt in Chair method is giving you the Sittin’ Around Blues, then try Doing Something Else for a Change and see if it doesn’t work for you.

[This blog post sponsored by Action Corp. the makers of Do Something Else for a Change as well as many other fine products. Do Something Else for a Change is sold in fine stores everywhere. Also crappy stores in some places. They're really not that selective about who sells it.]

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A Prairie Home Apocalypse or What the Dog saw is still on sale for Kindle and is available for other devices from Smashwords (I suppose I should specify that it is available for other ereader devices. It is not yet available for your vaccuum. We’re still working on the formatting there.) And for those of you Nook people out there who have been hounding me about this, I swear its coming soon. Also the book has gotten some lovely reviews over at Amazon, and I want to thank those of you who took the time out of your day to say nice things about the book. You all mean the world to me.

The Write Way to Love

It seems like every year I learn a little more about what it takes to be a successful writer.   You’d think they could put all this information into  a book somewhere, and for all I know, maybe someone already has. But for me some things have to be learned gradually.  And some things, no matter how often you explain them to me, I have to learn for myself.

I remember how badly this phenomenon used to frustrate my dad.  I come home and share some bit of newly minted wisdom with him, and he’d say, “I’ve been telling you that for your whole life.”  And he had.  But on some level hearing it wasn’t enough.  I needed to figure it out for myself.

That last bit was a tangent which I’m leaving in, because frankly I love talking about my dad.  In fact, in most of my fiction you’ll find a father figure that make some tremendous impact on the story for either good or bad, or even through his absence.  I think this is a reflection of the impact I feel my dad has had on my life.  And now we’re in another tangent.  So, back to the point.

What I wanted to talk about was the realization I had just a few weeks ago, that if I wanted to succeed as a writer, I was going to have to start treating my writing like a second job.  Now please don’t read that and think I’m trying to remove all of the fun from writing, because I’m not.  I write because I love it, and I believe I always will.  But sometimes I don’t feel like I love it.  Some times I’ll sit in front of a blank screen, and say, “Nope, not happening today,” and in the past I would get up and walk away.  But you can’t get up and walk away from your job.

Kristen Lamb said something fantastic in her recent blog about reaching your potential in the new year.  She said, “Feelings, LIE.”

There are times when all of us are not going to feel like writing.  The solution?

Write anyway.

Give yourself a small goal to accomplish.  Say, “I’ll just write two hundred words, and if things don’t get better by then, then I’ll come back to it later.”  More often than not, by the time two hundred words have planted themselves on the page, you’ll feel the creative juices flowing a little better.

But today’s blog isn’t really about writing at all.  See, I’ve been getting all gung-ho about this new philosophy of writing: getting up far too early in the morning, spending hours writing blog posts, and overall just getting serious about the whole thing.  So yesterday, when my wife asked if I wanted to go and do something with her, there was a split second where I thought, “But I have so much work to do on my writing.”

Except then it hit me.  Writing isn’t the only job I have to do.  I also have to be a husband.  And just like writing, sometimes I don’t feel like being a husband.  Sometimes I’ll stop and think, “What happened to that gurgley sweet feeling I had back when we were dating?  Am I doing something wrong?  Did I make a mistake?”

But love is like writing.  It may be fueled by passion, but it is perfected by hard work.  And just because I may not feel the passion every moment of the day doesn’t give me an excuse to stop working to be a better husband.  The relationship between me and my wife needs care and attention and most of all, time if it’s going to be successful.

Because feelings do lie.  And marriage, just like writing, is a job.  If I don’t feel like being married today, it shouldn’t matter.  Because this is my job.  And at it’s very foundation, love isn’t just a feeling.  It’s a commitment.

So if I’m tired or cranky and just don’t feel like doing the work to make it work, I’m going to remind myself that this is my commitment.  This is my job.

Otherwise I’ll just end up being the marital version of a bad fan fiction writer.