Destination Unknown

 by JT Ellison

‘A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.’  ~Lao Tzu

No.

It’s not a pretty word.

It connotes negativity, refusal, rejection.

It is also the working writer’s best friend.

No doesn’t always have to be negative.

No can be healthy. No can mean you’ve made a measured decision that is in your best interest. No can mean you’ve taken control of your life. No can mean you have a solid understanding of your limitations.

So why is it so hard to say no?

I’m a yes girl. I find it difficult to refuse requests, especially when it means helping someone else out. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. There are times, like now, that I’ve said yes to so many things that nothing is getting its fair due. I’m juggling five projects in addition in to launching a book and touring and all that jazz. Nothing is getting done well, thoroughly, mindfully, because I can’t focus completely on any of them.

No is hardest to say when you’re in the midst of promoting a book. No one wants to miss an opportunity, especially when we don’t know what the secret magic sauce is to reach readers. There’s always that little voice in the back of your head niggling at you, saying “If you say no to the wrong thing, a chance could pass you by.” And that chance might have been the one little thing that tips the scales in your favor.

But wow, that kind of thinking can drive a writer mad.

I had to pull out of a project yesterday. It wasn’t one that was earth shattering, but I told someone I’d do something, and I had to write them and withdraw that promise. I hated to do it. But when the email was sent, and I self-flagellated for a few minutes, I looked at my calendar, and suddenly, I found another six things that I could cut from my schedule. And boy, did it feel good. The pressure lifted off my shoulders.

I’ve always been good at telling other people that they need to find balance. That they should weigh their options and choose what makes the most sense for them.

I really need to start taking my own advice.

I read an interesting article last week by Joshua Millburn of The Minimalists teasing an essay he’s written about living three months with no goals. And of course, I immediately set out to read the attendant articles to see if this is something that I could do. 

One of my favorite quotes from one of the articles, from Leo Babauta, who I call a good friend though I've never met him and he has no idea I exist, simply because so much of what he's said over the past few years I've tried to emulate, follows: 

“What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do.”

That complements my all time favorite quote, the one I keep in my email signature line to remind me to stay on the path:

“Do or do not. There is no try.” - Yoda 

That's really a truth worth exploring. I wasn't surprised to hear it echoed by Steven Pressfield, author of the fabulous The War of Art, this week as well.

The addict is the amateur; the artist is the professional.

At its most basic, all three truths say the same thing. You either do the work, or you don't. 

But can you accomplish all you need, and want, to do, without goals?

The whole concept is intriguing to me. I live for goals. I get a great sense of satisfaction by setting, meeting, and exceeding goals. Hell, I’m the one who will add a forgotten task to a to do list post-completion just so I can cross it off.

No goals?

{{{{HIVES}}}}

So that’s exactly what I’m going to try to do.

I set some seriously unrealistic goals for myself this year – 43 of them. Yes, I just went back to my planner and counted them. Some are realistic – finish book 7, write book 8, start book 9 – done, done, done. Some are amorphous – appreciate more, be open to new experiences, try sushi. Some are more concrete – yoga, running, golf twice a week.

But as I look at my list of goals, and realize it’s the end of September, and there are so, so many that I haven’t accomplished -- become fluent in Italian, cut online time in half, carve out ample time to read, write a non-fiction proposal -- nor will manage to master by the end of the year, that I start to get upset with myself.  I am not meeting my goals.

Joshua’s essay made me realize all I’m doing is saying yes, and I’m not getting anything done.

Yes, I wanted to get better at speaking Italian, and cook at home more, and run three times a week. Yes, I wanted to renovate my kitchen and dining room and lose twenty pounds. And… and… and. But so much of my goals list is just wishful thinking.

And if my wishes aren’t getting fulfilled, even if I’m the one in control of them, something is wrong.

I’m striving.

Lao Tzu taught that:

All straining, all striving are not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). But what does this mean? It means not to literally do nothing, but to discern and follow the natural forces -- to follow and shape the flow of events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. First and foremost to be spontaneous in ones actions. 

Just what Leo said, and what Steven said, and what Joshua will say when he posts his essay.

Will mastering my to do list and scratching off the goals I’ve set make me happy? Or will striving to meet so many unattainable goals drive me crazy? I tell you what makes me happy. Writing. When I’m not writing, when I’m so focused on all the things I have to do that aren’t just plain writing, I am not happy.

It’s as simple as that.

The pressure of deadlines, the constant go-go-go that happens when I get online, the striving-all of that is trumped when I sit down to the keyboard and create a new world. When my husband comes home at night and I’m bubbling over with excitement at some random plot twist that happens, and he smiles at my exuberance – that – THAT – makes me happy.

I see now that crossing goals off a list makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something on the days when writing becomes work. My friends and family tell me I work too hard. To that I truly scoff—if I was really working too hard, I’d have six books a year or more under my belt, like many authors I know. I’d be mothering a child. I’d be answering to a boss. Instead, I float in that netherworld of getting my writing done, sandwiched between hours of doing a bunch of things that really don’t matter. I work hard, yes. I won’t discount that. But I’m not working smart. And that is not a good thing.

So instead of striving to meet all these insane goals, I’m going to try something new. No goals. My weapon with be two little letters, a simple word, that holds great power.

No. 

Tell me, friends, when’s the last time you took control and said no? And did you feel terribly guilty about it, or was it freeing?

Wine of the week - this one is dedicated to the divine Laura Lippman, who I finally met in St. Louis, and was charmed by, not that I expected anything less, but sometimes it's really cool to find out your heroes are rocking cool people, and besides, it fits the whole theme of today's post rather well..... Irony Cabernet

And I would be remiss if I didn't do a tiny plug - the ebook of WHERE ALL THE DEAD LIE goes on sale tomorrow, so if you've been waiting for the digital version, here you are : )

Nook
Kindle 
Google Books

Those Magic Moments...

by JT Ellison

Don’t you love having epiphanies?

Those lightning bolt moments of awareness, enlightenment, insight that alters your consciousness, your actions, even the course of your life?

I’ve been on the road a lot over the past two months. Florida, New York, Florida again, Colorado (where I am now) and then to Florida once more, then on to St. Louis for Bouchercon. Six roundtrips in two months – for me, that’s a lot of on the road time. A lot of out of the groove, snatching time to write, long stretches without Internet access, and even, blessedly, some downtime. I have been writing the whole time, and I’ve also been sick. Those of you who saw me in New York got to witness that first hand, and now I’m catching another little summer chest cold. Ugh.

But along these crazy paths, I’ve gotten time to do some thinking. About my work, and my life. About what I want to be doing, and where I want things to go. And with that kind of Jack Handy deep thoughts come the epiphanies.

The first was along a darkened road in Florida. This one was so hand to forehead smackingly obvious that I felt like a true idiot when I figured it out.

I’ve been blogging for many years now. First weekly, then bi-monthly here, and also infrequently on my own blog, Tao of JT. I’m sure every blogger in the world who also writes novels has the same issue—you tend to think every moment spent away from your novel is a moment lost. But it’s something we need to do. Each and every moment in the real world can be mined for blog material. At least that’s my thinking. I’m always examining moments and situations and wondering, “How can I turn this into my Murderati blog?”

I went through this when I first joined Twitter. I started thinking in 140 character updates – how can I share this experience in 140 characters or less, make it relatable and also funny? Thankfully, I trained my mind away from that, because it’s just too easy to get lost in that kind of thinking.

Blogging, Twitter, Facebook – the sharing of information we find important, but the vast majorities of others don’t.

I’ve always viewed these extraneous activities are relatively unhealthy endeavors. Outside of blogging, which has taught me the discipline of deadlines and getting butt in chair to write, even if it is non-fiction.

My epiphany was thus: I’m a novelist, damn it. I shouldn’t be mining my moments for blog material. I need to be using those little vignettes in my fiction.

Ding. Dingdingdingdingdingdingding!

I think I knew this unconsciously, because so many of my vignettes do get poured into my fiction. But realizing I was thinking in terms of what to blog instead of what to write was revelatory for me. And of course, my first reaction was I must stop blogging.

We at Murderati have seen a rash of authors having this revelation lately. The more we focus on our fiction, the more books we can produce, and in the current environment, which is undeniably rough, the more good books you can write, the better off you are.

Since I’m prone to the drastics sometimes, I forced myself to take a step back, and talked myself off that particular ledge. At least for now. Instead, I have been working very hard to reprogram myself to think in terms of fiction instead of non-fiction. To separate what is story, and what is information. What is narrative, and what is insight.

The second epiphany was during the writing of a book I’m working on. I’ve always said writer’s block is your story’s way of telling you you’re going in the wrong direction. I hit a point in the story that just didn’t feel genuine. Something was very wrong. I started trying to talk it out – to Randy, to my parents. I’d just decided to go ahead and call my agent and get his take when it hit me. The part I was concerned about wasn’t the issue, it was 15,000 words earlier – an action the heroine takes that is … well… I don’t want to be too hard on myself, but the course of events was just plain STUPID. As in stoopid, stupid.

When I saw that, the path to the next act became very clear. Phew.

The third epiphany came early last week, when I sat down to a beautiful long clear writing day and got exactly jack shit done.

I was so mortified with myself that I figured I needed a public tongue-lashing. I wrote a blog and detailed all the things I had done instead of creating – and the responses gave me an interesting thought.

Sometimes, I need a little external motivation. I know people think I write fast, but as we’ve discussed, I am a bulimic writer – I gorge on words during marathon writing session instead of doing a good job of the daily grind. Take one look at my travel schedule and you see how that’s playing out for me. It’s cacophonous. My good habits have been broken. I need to reset, majorly.

I used to be able to do the daily grind. Before conferences and promotions and book tours – all the things that have to happen if you want to get your name out there.

I am a writer. My JOB is writing. So damn it, writing is what I’m going to do, even if I have to publicly report in what I’ve done that day to get myself back on track.

So if you’re interested in that daily grind, I’m writing it up on Tao of JT. I’m posting at 5pm each weekday, just a little snippet of what I’ve done that day – the good, the bad, the ugly. I of course have been feeling a little guilty about this – as I went into last week looking at ways to cut back my non-fiction writing, and instead seem to have quadrupled it. But I know myself, and I know what I need.

The fourth epiphany came just this morning, as I was reading through my RSS feeds. It isn’t exactly a revelation to you that I try to follow a minimalist lifestyle. I am working on finding my inner zen, because the more serene I am, the more serene my surroundings, the better I work, and the happier my family is. This journey has been fraught with setbacks, but I finally feel like I’m making progress. This morning, I was re-reading “30 Lessons from 30 Years” by Joshua Millburn of The Minimalists, and his number 10 slapped me across the face.

10. Finding your passion is important. My passion is writing….

My passion is writing.

Ding. Again.

My passion is writing. Writing. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, the manipulation of words to convey meaning, emotion and story is my passion.

I don’t need to feel guilty about blogging. That isn’t necessarily time away from writing. It IS writing. It’s all writing. Every time I put my fingers to the keyboard, I’m creating.

Duh.

Sometimes I feel so new to this game. I imagine my more experienced colleagues are reading this and laughing behind their hands at my naïveté. But hey, we all have to have our own realizations. No one can tell you exactly how to climb the mountains. They can just wave when they climb back down and tell you how exhilarating it is when you reach that zenith.

So, ‘Rati, tell me - Have you had any epiphanies lately?

 Wine of the Week: Layer Cake Primitivo Super yummy!!!

Positive and Negative Spaces

By Toni McGee Causey

When I first went to college, my major was Architecture. (I had not yet realized that I could actually be a writer as an official occupation.) I couldn’t wait to take architecture courses and I perused the curriculum in the student’s catalog and read through the course descriptions with a lust that most kids that age reserved for hot cars or cold beer. (The caveat—I already had a hot car—a 1968 cherry red Mustang,

 

and I had access to plenty of cold beer.) (Hi Dad. I totally did not drink until I was officially 18, the legal age of drinking, because I was a very very good kid who did everything her dad told her.) (You cannot ground me retroactively, don’t even try.)

Anyway, I wanted to be an architect, and I imagined all the sorts of buildings I would design. I endured the first semester of boring classes and looked forward to being able to take Engineering Design, the very first freshman level course that was one of the official architecture courses.

(Frank Lloyd Wright -- Falling Water)

(Craftsman style house)

Turns out? They expect architects to use math much more sophisticated than simple addition and subtraction to formulate all of those pesky things like load bearing walls that will hold the building up.

It is apparently not kosher to make wild-ass guesses, which is how I would frequently solve math problems, and they heavily frowned on the eeny-meeny-miny-moe method. Ironically, I had placed out of every math requirement, including calculus—I had this uncanny ability to guess the right answers on tests, and yet, my professors, picky bastards, would not go with the percentage route that I was going to be correct a good solid 80 to 90% of the time. 10% to 20% of the buildings falling down would be bad.

It was a very short career.

In spite of that, I’ve remained fascinated with architecture over the years, as well as interior design. I pore over magazines and web sites, absorbing new trends. I have dozens of coffee table books with photos of spaces—old plantations, castles, bungalows along an Italian coastline, the white cities of Greece.

Recently, Janet Reid recommended a little book titled: 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. I love this little book. Since I didn’t even get past “2 things I learned…” in my own career, it was like having a crash course in all of the cool terms I’d wanted to study, but hadn’t. Some of these things I had picked up in my journeys, but it’s nice to see them laid out so simply. What I expected when I bought the book: to learn a few more terms, satiate that longing to design by at least sidling up to it and conversing with it a bit.

What I had not expected when I bought it is to see an entire book that has as much to do with writing and living as it does architecture. And I hadn’t expected to have a startling revelation about my own life.

Now, to be fair to Mr. Frederick, he did not design the book with the latter in mind—it’s something I simply “saw” in the book. Which is a bit ironic, since the revelation occurred over the architectural term “positive and negative space.”

Mr. Frederick defines these terms thusly:

“We move through negative spaces and dwell in positive spaces.”

It’s a simple concept.

When I thought about this in relation to writing, I had a twofold appreciation for the term. First off, just the physical aspect of the page—the words and paragraphs create positive space and the white space around it is the negative space. If you pick up any manuscript and it’s filled with long, dense paragraph after paragraph, it feels cluttered and heavy, weighted and overwrought, even before you’ve read a single word. A reader brings with her the expectation of balance, and you need white space to achieve that balance. Too much white space, though, feels bereft of weight, of value, of deeper meaning, and so it’s the writer’s job not only to craft the words, but to pay attention to the space those words take up on the page.

Simple enough, right?

The other meaning when applied to writing is the creation of the worlds we hope to evoke. Mr. Frederick goes on to explain:

“The shapes and qualities of architectural spaces greatly influence human experience and behavior, for we inhabit the spaces of our built environment and not the solid walls, roofs, and columns that shape it. Positive spaces are almost always preferred by people for lingering and social interaction. Negative spaces tend to promote movement rather than dwelling in place.”

(a place to dwell--a positive place)

(An example of a city street--a corridor--a negative space.)

Again, simple.

In writing a book, we’re attempting to create a world. We want to do such a fine job, that the readers feel as if they’ve inhabited that world and that they’ve met the people who live there, and know them well.

One time, a long time ago, my husband and I were house shopping. In the course of a random conversation with a man we’d met, he mentioned that he and his wife were about to put their house up for sale. When he described the location, it piqued our interest, because it was very close to where we’d been previously looking, and this house happened to be on a small lake with a decent view. It was the exact size we were looking for and, miracle of miracles, it was in our price range. We made an appointment to go view the home and double-checked with the owner prior to arriving to make sure the time was still convenient, since, obviously, they were still living in the home and it wasn’t yet listed.

We wound through the neighborhood of unique homes and arrived at his address to see a beautiful Craftsman styled house set against big oaks and a few pine trees. The landscaping was impeccable—and lush. They’d eschewed the boxy, regimented style of an English garden look and had, instead, created a free-flowing design that invited you to move through a winding walkway through a wonderland of color until you reached the front door. We had a hard time keeping our mouths from gaping open with awe and lust. I didn’t want them to add another $20K just from the look on our faces.

(similar to this)

Crossing through the threshold, however, was a shock. Though the home was beautifully designed, you couldn’t tell it for the clutter. Now, I have two sons and a husband, all of whom could easily be celebrated on the poster for “Packrats Unlimited,” so I’m not unfamiliar with the challenges of digging out from under the constant influx of junk. But this? This house was piled with detritus beyond my wildest imagination. Every level surface had piles and piles of paperwork. In the dining room, the table (which could have seated eight) had a pile so high, that the chandelier above it (and these were ten foot ceilings) was actually skewed at an angle, resting on the top of the pile. Every countertop, every sink, toilet, bed, side table: junk. We couldn’t enter the spare bedroom, though they opened the door to show us the room; there was junk piled from floor to ceiling, spanning the entire room. It looked as if someone had routinely just opened the door and tossed items in, for years.

(And waaaaaay worse than this...) 

When we left there, my husband wondered if they were moving because they wanted a bigger house. I predicted that they weren’t going to even get the house officially listed and that within a year, they’d be divorced and battling over the house in a lawsuit. It didn’t surprise me in the least to see it for sale a year later with an “Owner recently divorced, highly motivated” notation on the listing.

They had not created for themselves a positive space to dwell; instead, they’d created a negative space that they could only move through. Disconnected, they became apathetic to their needs—each others’ and their own—and the family dissolved.

I’ve had people hand me novels in the past for critique and they spend a couple of chapters (or more) “building the world” – telling the reading about the political and economic machinations which have brought this world into being, into the state we find it in at this moment in time. It’s a huge mistake to do this. For one thing, the story hasn’t started yet until the characters are moving through that world and experience conflict within it. For another, the writer isn’t trusting the reader to extrapolate the positive and negative spaces from a select few examples.

If you look at the paragraph above describing the clutter, I’d be willing to bet you mentally filled in those rooms, though I didn’t describe a single stick of furniture, or the style of the interior. You filled every nook and cranny with junk in your image, though I didn’t get very specific about the junk. What’s more, if you thought about the couple, I’d be willing to be you saw them both in rather rumpled, dragged from the laundry basket wrinkled clothes, though I never described them.

We don’t have to give pages and pages of details—we just need to give a select few that show not only the space the characters are in, but how they’re interacting with that space. Some of our own choices are determined by economics which can be beyond our control, but some of the choices we make in our surroundings communicate who we are and what we think of ourselves. Same with our characters and their worlds: how do they dwell? What do they move through? Why? What does their surroundings say about them? What does yours say about you?

While I was thinking about this application of the architectural terms of negative and positive space, and simultaneously reading JT’s blog about the clutter of the online media and the expectations of what we have to do to create a writing career and maintain it, along with marketing it, I had an abrupt-but-fine appreciation for the connotations of positive and negative spaces and how they impact our lives. With regard to the social media/marketing aspect, I think the online world—particularly Twitter and Facebook—create the illusion of positive space, a space to dwell. Only, there is no “space” there, there is no permanent peace or interaction with tangible walls and windows, living areas and social areas. It’s all hallways and moving, traffic and business with the veneer of being social, and at its most fundamental sociological construct, it’s in disharmony with our need to dwell, because in social media, we’re always moving through. Targeting something—more interaction, more movement, more recognition, more awareness (both of each other, of marketing needs and trends, of products, not necessarily just of our own products).

It makes sense, then, that these sorts of venues create a sense of discord over time. I think it’s ironic, but I think that while it gives the illusion of greater intimacy and friendship, it also emphasizes the disconnect we have in our lives because we’re not interacting with a space or with a person, but with a computer screen. I enjoy Twitter, and, tangentially, Facebook, but I have felt far less stress in this last month since I have cut back my interaction at both places to just a few minutes a day.

Aside from that, though, is another fundamental truth of space, and it’s the fact that we build our environment. We choose where we’re going to dwell (or, at least, what we surround ourselves with in our dwelling place). The epiphany I had when reading Mr. Frederick’s book was that the positive and negative spaces were a part of our philosophy of life, not just our physicality in life. (I know this is not a new concept. It just opened up something for me.)

I’ve always been the type of person who was an overachiever. I’d accomplish something, check it off as done and move on to the next thing. It felt lazy, almost, to just… be. To be in a place and time without some sort of pressing item that needed to be achieved next. The problem with this was that I was dwelling in the corridors of my life. If something was done, it was over and I passed on through to the next challenge, and there was no space to just enjoy.

In the world of publishing, there is always the next hurdle. Always.

As soon as you finish a book, you have to try to get an agent. As soon as you get an agent, you have to try to sell it. As soon as you sell it, you have to start worrying about what changes they’re going to want and whether you can deliver that. As soon as you deliver that, there are marketing decisions that are made (often without your input) and marketing decisions you make (which increases the pressure), because now there is a goal: sell the books. While all of this is going on, you’re trying to either write the next book on a contract (and you are worrying whether or not you can hit the bar you’ve set for yourself again, whether you even remember how to write a book, and why on earth did you think you could do it again?) or you’re trying your dead level best to convince someone that yes, you can write another one and here it is, or here is the proposal. As soon as your first book goes on sale, all sorts of goals will crop up—will it do well enough, will it further your career, will it die a stone cold death and stop your career. If the former, the bar is set higher. If the latter, that’s a whole set of other problems / goals / fears. People will tell you to stop and enjoy the moment, but you’re generally so frantic to accomplish all of the stuff you need to accomplish in the short window that your book will be on the shelf that by the time you think you have time to stop and enjoy it, it’s long past gone and is probably buried under the last three goals you were striving for.

It is very difficult to just “be” and dwell.

But positive space—not just positive thinking, but positive space—is as necessary to our mental health and our survival as that negative space—that moving, ever onward. We need the connections around us, the grounding in the here and now, the raft of joy in the midst of a chaotic world, to replenish the soul and the well of creativity. You can go a lot of years without doing this, and still function. I can attest to that. But you’ll be missing so much.

So beyond just the writing applications of space and how it’s relevant to character development, my own personal philosophy has shifted in priorities: take the time to enjoy the people around you. Take the time to look at the things you have done and enjoy them. Dwell. Be. Replenish. The world and the race will still be there when you’re ready to re-join. There is no one final race anyway, but millions of races. If you don’t join this day’s race, you can join tomorrow’s.

Questions:

What is one thing you’d change about your physical environment that would make it a more pleasant place to dwell? Does your environment reflect the real you? If not, why not?