The Dunwannas Strike

I don’t believe in Writer’s Block.

I do, however, believe in something my mom always used to call the “Can’t-Help-Its” and what I like to call the “Dunwannas.”

Writer’s Block is just fancy phrasing for those days when the work is hard to do, or you just don’t feel like doing, well, anything, and writing is part of that anything.  There can be a lot of reasons for it – maybe there are other things you want to be doing instead, or somewhere else you want to be, or the writing is just bad today and you’re ready to throw your hands up in the air and give up.

And then there are the days when the Dunwannas strike, when you don’t want to do anything at all other than lay around, maybe watch TV or game, and let your brain shut off.

You can’t do any of these things, not if you want to be a serious writer. It’s a lesson that was hard learned for me. I had to stop looking at writing as a hobby and start seeing it as a job. As in something I have to do every day, and for a certain amount of time every day.

This also meant giving myself permission to write when I wasn’t feeling inspired, to write even when the words spewing forth from my brain turned into the most foul-smelling sludge, to rival the Bog of Eternal Stench. I had to give myself permission to write badly.  What is important is maintaining that discipline, even if sometimes what you write turns out to be unusable. And sometimes, you have to turn away from your current project and spend that time working on something different. As long as you write something.

Usually, it doesn’t turn out to be quite as unusable as you thought. The Dunwannas tend to be just another word for one of those things we creative sorts are all too prone to: Depression. The kind that makes even getting out of bed feel like a herculean effort. But I’ve noticed that the very thing that this feeling keeps me from doing is the thing that is most likely to break me out of it – my writing. Because even if you end up having to scrap it later, when you sit down to create, you have created something that wasn’t there before. Something came into existence because of you, and you did it in spite of all the things in your brain that were telling you that you couldn’t do it that day.

That’ll show those Dunwannas.

Error.

I started and tossed at least five blog posts last week. One was a humor post about life as a cat lady, which turned out not as funny as I hoped and a little bit repetitive of other similar “lists” I’ve seen elsewhere. Then there was my review of the last season of BBC’s Sherlock, which turned into a rant about slut-shaming within the feminist community (RE: the response to Irene Adler’s characterization), and I didn’t want my review of something I love to be full of rant, so into the trash it went too. The rest were all those sorts  where you start a post, get one sentence in, are forced to go do something else, come back two hours later, and can’t remember what you were writing about in the first place.

Some weeks, you just want to throw your pen in the air and say bugger it.

Fortunately, I did get a lot of proofreading done on This Ain’t No Fairy Story, which I’m actually liking on the first edit. This is an unusual experience for me. Usually I hate everything I write on the first edit and only achieve a minimal satisfaction with it after several rewrites.

This weekend, a water line burst at my house, leaving my entire yard like a swamp and sending my uncle out to dig a pit in the field where my well is, getting covered head to toe in mud, but getting the leak fixed. (I so owe him a cake.) I stayed home in case he needed to get into the house, which meant I didn’t get to see my B, but I did get to clean out my “junk clothes” drawers, which were overflowing.

You know junk clothes right? Those ancient and tattered things you wear when no one’s looking because they’re comfy, or you’re cleaning house and don’t want your good jeans bleach-spotted, or you’re painting or remodeling and don’t want stains on something nice?

By Saturday night I had one pile of clothes that were good enough to be donated and one pile of clothes that were too stained, bleached, or full of holes to give away.

However, it occurred to me that I do need new rugs for the kitchen. And several of the shirts in the unsalvageable pile were in colors that would go with the basic color scheme of my kitchen (which is brown, turquoise, and sage).

If you’ve never made a rag rug before, they’re fairly simple and, depending on the fabric and stitches you use, can be quite pretty. (There’s a good tutorial here.) T-shirts and sweats are really good for this because of the stretch. I wanted two 30 inch rectangular rugs and am practiced enough in crochet to free-hand the rectangles without a pattern, working one up in a sort of  spiral-with-corners and the other in a classic granny rectangle. (It’s like a granny square, but instead of starting in a circle, it starts on a longer chain.) I will post pictures of my rugs here once they’re completed.

It’s a great way to use up old clothes and keep them out of the garbage and landfill. You can use any of the common crochet motifs and stitch patterns for this, just grab a big crochet hook and your t-shirt yarn and go. You may want to make the bottoms of your rugs non-slip, and there’s an easy enough way to do it (I use this on the soles of house-socks too, to make them non-slip). Just get some puffy fabric paint in a corresponding color and paint dots or patterns onto the bottom of your rug, then follow the directions to iron and make the paint puff. Instant non-slip bottom.

So, I suppose I’ve been productive this last week and weekend even if the writing itself hasn’t been working all that well. Sometimes the brain just needs a break from spewing forth words on command.

For today’s Flash Fiction, I’ve decided to participate in Chuck Wendig’s Random Photo Story Challenge.

Here are the three photos I chose for my inspiration: (Links because all are copywritten):

• Piano Apple by zakonslike
• Untitled by Leonardo Amaro Rodrigues 
• Closed Wings by yukiharu

White

She had been told, as a rookie, that there was always one unsolved case that stuck with you, the case that you never forgot, that you were never able to forgive yourself for failing to solve. The older cops, the retired cops at the bar, they said that no matter how long you worked with that hanging over your head, in the end, that case will be the reason that you quit.

It rained the day she came across hers. The weather was almost like the murderer had planned it to be so, like the sky cooperated to make everything look even more muted and grey.

The apartment the victim had been found in was one of those colorless modern numbers, all black and white, metal and glass and hard lines. It was the sort of pristine apartment where you can’t imagine anyone with mud on their boots, a dog on the sofa, toddlers running around, or any of those dirty things that inevitably come with living. It was too sterile for that, for anyone to actually live in. There hadn’t even been any food in the refrigerator.

The crime scene was as sterile as the rest of the place. Not a fingerprint to be found. The victim was naked, of course, but whatever she’d worn to get to that place had disappeared, everything except a silver bracelet around one wrist. She was beautiful and as pristine as the apartment, not a mark on her and nothing to mar her perfect skin. She lay there, white against steel grey sheets, her dark hair spread over the pillow like she was sleeping. There was no blood, no body fluids at all, not on the sheets and not anywhere else. The only two splashes of color in the apartment were the red of her lips and a single granny-smith apple sitting on the piano keys.

She always wondered after that why the murderer would leave that one apple in an apartment with no other food. It hadn’t even been tasted. No fingerprints. No saliva. Just a perfect apple, green against the black and white.  It didn’t make sense why it would be there.

Poison had been the murder weapon. That, the victim’s dark hair, her fair skin, and the apple, well, it always made her think of a fairy tale. They never identified the girl, and they never found any scrap of evidence to point to a suspect. A week after she had been found, the body disappeared from the morgue. The case was filed away – cold from the start.

When the detective retired, that was the one that she couldn’t forget.

As an old woman, she thought she saw the girl once, on the street with a handsome young man on her arm, but when she turned to watch them they were gone. There was only a small bearded man sitting on the street rattling a can. Coins for the poor?

She dropped a few quarters in the can and went on her way.

© 2012 – Jennifer L. Davis

If you haven’t stopped over yet, Chuck’s doing a quite interesting project celebrating the release of his new novel, Blackbirds. It’s a tumblog called “This is How You Die” where folks are submitting stories and artwork detailing their own deaths.  If you haven’t yet, go and submit your death today!

Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Sometimes it seems like I’m a completely different person when communicating with written text instead of verbal. I can be downright witty, as long as it’s in writing. However, it’s often difficult to get me to say anything at all.

This can lead to a bit of a disconnect between people who know me and my voice primarily through text and those who know me primarily through verbal conversation. My best cyber-friend, for instance, once expressed surprise when I described myself as almost paralytically shy.

Well, I am. I feel more confident with the written word no matter what language I am communicating in – this leads me to tell people that I can read and write in five languages, but I can barely speak one.  My wit, whether verbal or written, can vary from dry and sarcastic to downright silly, but either way, I feel more comfortable letting it out in the written word.

I’ve written a lot of serious fiction. I’ve also written quite a bit of humorous fiction, and I prefer to mix comedy into my drama and drama into my comedy.  There is a reason why my current and most-likely-to-be-finalized novel is a satire. When given the right characters to channel it, I have found that apparently my pen can be very funny indeed. It’s all about confidence and where comfort lies – when and where you are more comfortable, it is easier to let certain aspects of yourself out to play.

Humor isn’t, of course, the only thing I feel more comfortable expressing in print.  To be honest, I feel more comfortable expressing almost everything in print, humor just happens to be the thing that other people notice most of all. I’m always surprised when I am told that something I’ve written made someone laugh because I almost never make anyone laugh outside of it. Well . . . except, perhaps, when I run into the wall or trip over my own feet, which has a disturbing tendency to happen on a regular basis.

Do any of you have voices that you feel only get let out to play when you’re writing, that almost never get expressed anywhere else?

The majority of my paid freelance work tends to be copy-editing or copy-writing, which allows for little opportunity for creativity.  The rest of my published work consists almost entirely of short stories or non-fiction articles. I aspire to be a novel writer, yes, but this writer has to eat, and the best way to do so on a regular basis is still short form work.

I hear a lot of writers out there complaining that they can’t write short fiction, that the only thing that feels natural to them is long-form prose. I used to feel the same way, particularly when I was in school, and before selling a story meant the difference between living off of cereal for a month or eating actual food for more than one night a week.

There’s nothing like unpaid bills and an aching bank account for making a writer productive, and breaking their illusions about what they’re willing or able to be paid to write.  And I’m here to tell you that if you can write a novel, you can write a short story.  The trick, of course, is not letting your characters get off track and keeping the plot to one straight path.

Writing can be a lot like braiding hair. A novel might be more like an elaborate and intricate braided bun, consisting of a dozen or more strands woven together and branching in or out and looping around. The trick in this, of course, is to make sure that in your weaving you keep the braids tight, weave in your ends, make sure nothing is introduced that doesn’t come together with the rest and find resolution somewhere – it all needs to get tucked in.  Detail and intricacy are welcome in a novel.

In a short story, sometimes the most meaningful parts of the story are in what doesn’t appear on the page. The short story author must be content to leave stuff out and trust in the reader to understand what is left out, and what it means.  Instead of an elaborate braided updo, you might have just a simple fishtail braid – or not even that – it may just be a ponytail.

With a short story, you rely on your readers to fill in the blanks of what comes before and what comes after in your characters’ lives.  It can be amazing, sometimes, the amount of meaning and detail that can be achieved by leaving things out. Sometimes very important things.  Hemingway, one of the true masters of short fiction, almost always left the most important parts of his stories completely out of the text. The story “Hills like White Elephants”, for instance, is about a couple facing abortion and yet neither abortion nor pregnancy are mentioned in the story at all.

He made his point with the story, and he made it while leaving everything the story was about unmentioned and barely even referenced. It is also a tale told in dialogue with little action or real plot, but this makes the story no less meaningful. As a story, it’s like a kick in the gut. A particularly sharp one.

This seems to be a common thread among many of the best short stories, whether literary in nature or otherwise. They are defined not by what is written in the actual text but by what appears in the negative space around it. It is the purest distillation of what a story can be, and writing short stories can often lead to tighter writing in novels. Practicing the one will always make the other better.