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Showing posts with the label writing about writing

Writing About Writing Vol. 18... A True Story about "True Story©"

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  This was all one big happy-ass accident… On a random Thursday (September 1 nd ) in 2016, at 7:30am, I logged onto The BookFace and made a silly little status about God-knows-what.  I started it with the term True Story©… Doing so forced people’s eyes onto the status, then only a few dozen words long to have them get all the way through the story to realize I was ABSOLUTELY bullshitting.  It was such a hit at the time, with the comment thread lasting for days, that I decided on the next Thursday to do it again.  Rinse, repeat and so on and so-forth.  With practice, the statuses got longer and longer – perhaps at the danger of being too long for social media.   Now y’all know why I am procedurally MARRIED to Thursday morning at 7:30am. After a few weeks of this, I remembered that I do have and had since neglected a blog that I could be using for this… Say Less™…   Natural next step was to UN-neglect the blog.  I could come on back home and make use of all the space I wanted withou

Writing About Writing Vol. 17

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      Before I get started, I will say that I absolutely stuck with the established-for-the-topic image on this post… Okay, let’s boogie.      For the past several years, I have led True Story©… off with an image loosely related to the story, usually related to the very topic of the tale itself but sometimes to the punchline of the story when I was feeling particularly funny.      For the month of March – well, for the three out of five stories in March I made after this was presented to me – I started to employ AI image generators to make those images.  For the YEARS prior, I would simply Google search terms somehow related to the story, then I would scroll and sift through the image search results and simply steal and use whichever one humorously partnered with my story of that week. … and I prayed that the rightful owners of the images never said anything.  Thus far they have not.      The topic today is “stick and move,” as I have now had several weeks of ingress as it r

Writing About Writing vol 16

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“Just talk it out…”      That seems like a simple enough instruction to follow, right? Well let me explain something.   I am a middle child by birth order, a creative weirdo by nature and a bit of a misunderstood outcast due to both of the above. …   I also talk about writing like underground rappers talk about rapping.   It is something I enjoy and I am good at.      You know what I DON’T do a lot and never became particularly good at?   Talking! This isn’t to say I am inarticulate or lack vocabulary, I am just used to “sit down and shut up” as a parenting technique that I tend to silently watch a room until I need to talk.      Unless I am excited. When I am excited, unless the audience is similarly interested in what I am yammering on about then I fully expect to feel the “sit down and shut up” vibe I was raised on.   The only difference is nobody better put their hands on me, lest there will be an expensive lesson taught. The same can be said for topics that I am par

Writing About Writing... A Plan Creates Itself

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       If I told you I noticed what was happening and specifically planned to do so the way it has unfolded, I would be lying… True Story© has created itself as its own host, as a perpetual virtual novel, if you will.   It was “officially” born on September 1, 2016 as an exercise, a place for me to flesh out ideas and keep my pen game up on the chance that one day I might realize my dream to write for a living.   Comments on The Bookface and a push from a then-girlfriend-now-wife and three other friends who I love dearly caused it to become “a thing.”      “A Thing” became, as is my nature, something I became obsessed with the very production and presentation of to present every available Thursday and I did just that for almost two years before a surprise week in the hospital and the resultant fallout in 2018.   I still WANTED to write, but sometimes being benched can throw things askew.      Two years of sitting still does NOT make a creative mind rest.   I still had ideas.   I

For the Love... Writing About Writing

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     When I was 12 and in seventh grade, my aunt came to visit my English class.   She was, unbeknownst to me until that class on that day, a published author and a good friend of my teacher whose name alcohol has erased from my 41 year old memory.   She spoke of a book she had recently written and was on the way to publishing that happened to be stories of my family and her and her siblings (including my own father) during their own upbringing. These were stories I knew first hand, but the way she presented them made it so…   ENTERTAINING.   It was something completely new to me to see something so mundane as a story that every kid knows of what begat them presented in a manner that could hold the attention of 20 twelve year-olds.      I was hooked… As a middle child, also-ran, “who is that guy” kid, I have always been used to things just being whatever they are and cruising through life without any specific dream other than “making it,” whatever that means.      I deci

The Process...

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     I’m spaced out in the car. I’m sitting in front of the coffee table, hands on my chin staring into nothingness. I am in the middle of a workout mumbling to myself. I randomly chuckle while I am in the shower. I take the long way home or circle the block one or five more times.      “Babe, what’s wrong?” my wife asks.  Every time, I tell her nothing is wrong, I’m just thinking.  When she (inevitably) asks “about what?” I can only shift my eyes and shake my head.  She is beginning to get it.      This is my creative process.  By the time I put my fingers to the keyboard, my map is already drawn and my hands are already driven to what must be done.  I have thought it through, I have planned where I want to go and how I will get there.  My mind is an EVER active place.  While this usually manifests itself in a cavalcade of memes on my FB timeline or in a weird dance of nervous energy that manifests in me doing, fixing or cleaning something in the house (we will talk

Writing About Writing Vol 12

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“The Elements” Back on September 1 , I explained – err, shared Will Smith’s explanation of – the relationship of talent and skill. Those are not the elements I intend to speak on this month. February 5 th was my, unbeknownst to either of you, official end to my holiday malaise.  I had been thinking and brainstorming on shit I would write when I sat down and put myself to it, but had not typed a damn thing in weeks.  The last place I had left off in the moment was my ongoing beef with Santa Claus . That morning, I sat down at work after dropping the princess off at school, and I started typing.  Pt II was born in less than an hour.  A little later, III was real.  As of when you read this, I am done through at LEAST part VI and have plans for the series. Focusing still on that same week, I wrote my Hotep Wednesday post THE morning it was to be posted.  I wrote The Bakery later on that afternoon at the end of my lunch break.  Friday morning, I wrote the two most recent Ma

Writing About Writing, Vol 11

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     Sometimes you don’t know what the fuck you want to write, you just know you want to write when you sit down to do so. My trick when I find myself in this spot?  A key word or phrase… What do I mean? Come back to August and September with me. Work Spouse : ALL I knew I wanted to include in that story was the “Pennsylvania into her Virginia” line and had been thinking about it for THREE WEEKS before the scribe. Quaaludes : I was talking about The Get Down with someone the day before I wrote this story and the only thing I could think of was “boogie oogie Disco Biscuits.” I wrapped ENTIRE stories around getting those words/phrases into the mix.      Sometimes, that is about all the spark you should need.  A “why” to your “what.”  Having one goal to write toward is what it took to get you typing, the real fun is making it JUST there. To me, that is the fun part; sitting down with NOTHING to go on and remembering some silly shit that happened in a text

Writing About Writing, Vol 10

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Be a "Volume Shooter"… This guy, he was a volume shooter: What does that even mean? A lot of people saw Kobe Bryant as a ballhog of sorts.  What people were missing is that sometimes overachieving will come from an outpouring of effort.  Putting up a ton of points on a bunch of shots might be the easiest way to it.      If you write, then write .  Every time your smartphone comes out, your notes app should be available within two taps of your screen.  MS Word (or whatever word processing application you use) should be on your frequently-used or shortcutted on your computers. EVERYTHING can be written about.  Writing should be a constant process.      Stick to it, stick to it constantly.  Throw a million things at the wall in hopes that a thousand stick, and fine tune the whole FUCK out of that thousand.  Write until you're tired, but not until you're burnt out. You will write some things you hate.  You will write some STUPID, bitter or

Writing about Writing, Vol 9

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     Today’s theme: Don’t Overthink it. As simple a concept as this may seem to be, it is DIFFICULT in a creative process that is constant to actually do.  The work done toward constant improvement is more in constant practice and willing acceptance of what comes back.  But that is a concept we have already dabbled in, so no need to repeat ourselves.      This is more about trusting yourself and your instincts.  You sat down to write, let that bitch fly!  What I mean by this is that your first gut feeling is usually the best.  Back over the summer, while I was in and out of vacation and away from both my home AND work computers, I was in a pinch to get things up and I kind of felt my work suffered some for it.  I would never let anyone know this shit as it is happening, but as I sit and type this, I see EXACTLY why that was. I was too obsessed with things like word count and a multitude of other shit that really didn’t matter that I neglected my time-honored approach of “

Writing About Writing Vol 8

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     “Stick and Move.” Every day I have been near a desktop computer for about the last 16 months, I make a point of opening my blog dashboard and looking around.  I make sure of the traffic numbers, I look at comments that might have found themselves in the Moderation Queue, I look back over previous posts and make small changes I may have missed on the way through the first time. Most importantly, I open my drafts queue.  In it there is usually one to three posts I am actively working on, one I am purposely never posting and FIVE I can best describe as a “false start.”      My archive goes like this: 2009 – 204 posts.  I was new and excited. 2010 – 178 posts.  I was still into what I was doing but busy in the real world. 2011 – 110 posts.  Ava showed up in July and my time was strained. 2012 – 35 posts I was slowly being dragged somewhere I wound up not liking. 2013 – 8 posts…  see above, I was actually there now. 2014 – Took a whole YEAR off and apparently started

Writing about Writing Vol. 7

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Short post today y’all… “Fearlessness”      Not everything is for everybody.  Don’t let fear of catching a brick keep you from trying .  Some days, you will do something and present it to the world and at the end of the day, the only hits you’ll register are the ones that came when you visited the post to share it…  In your head you will hear the cartoon “whomp whomp whomp…” Fuck that, you stand learn more from having it happen than you EVER will from pussing out to avoid it.      Don’t be afraid to be the only one laughing.  Of course, when you find yourself in that position you should be working on what got you there to stop it.  Do. NOT. Shy. from being taken there from time to time. Don’t get comfortable BEING in that spot, by no means am I suggesting that being unfunny is a desirable place to reside.      Back to the leading thought.  You can NOT please everyone.  More importantly, you shouldn’t try to.  Do what works for you and let the chips fall where th

Writing about Writing Vol. 6

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“Controlled Chaos”      Ask me where anything in my house is, I will take you right to it.  You’d never know that to SEE it though.  It looks like some slapdash assemblage of stuff, but it really does make sense when I can explain it. My creative process is quite similar…      Imagine you sit down at your computer every morning, open FIVE instances of MS Word, then come back to each every time an idea strikes you, and scribble some notes on it.  Now imagine if you will you could somehow do this without having to necessarily sit down to the computer and type these things out. I do this shit in my head. Back in late July/early August, I had an idea for True Story© that I had been actively working on for a couple of weeks.  That idea is STILL in my drafts box.  I cut my grass one Monday and thought up, from start to finish, the Marlon story .  I went out into the yard with the first story in my mind and repeated lines to it as I worked on my grass, but the Cheaters/Marlon/d

Writing about Writing Vol. 5

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Two words that it took me a 3-years-plus hiatus to learn the importance of were “support system.” Surround people who have something invested in your passion.  No, not (necessarily) a financial investment, but someone who cares that you care.  They can know their lane and understand that to mean to stand aside and let you be busy at it, they can accept an active role if one is to be had, an advisory role if one is solicited or if nothing else, someone to pat you on the back and tell you you’re doing a good job when you’ve done one in their opinion. My mother : NEVER has she ever thought I was funny, and she has never been shy about telling me so.  More frequently, of late she has been letting me know at Sunday dinner that I am doing a wonderful job of getting her laughs out of her. Hotep Wednesdays are her favorite. My sisters :  Avid readers, the both of them.  One is mostly non-respondent to everything on the planet until there is an actual affront or something to be c

Writing About Writing Vol 4

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“Voice” As I learned – or, more accurately, willed myself – to write, I used to hear/read things about “voice” in writing. As I look back over my old writing, I think I understand more clearly what was meant by "voice." [ Phlip note : I HATE some of my old work] What I have observed over the past year or so, though, I have watched my work evolve.  What started as a 150-300 word blurb on my FaceBook wall has grown to an every-Thursday event that both of you VERY much look forward to. The growth has come with some evolution in my presentation and not just with the addition of a leading picture to each of the posts.  I had to learn to structure them physically to help each reader make their own adventure of it. What does that even mean? It means that I use indentation to start certain paragraphs, and not in others.  The indentation is to begin a new though, the lack of it means I have not finished that last idea yet but need the separation that simply putt

True Story©-versary

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Last September, I took a shit that would change my life. No, the shit itself wasn’t so epic or one that felt like it was leaving my body sideways or anything.  The thing is that while on the crapper, I sat with my phone and typed out a very short story.  There were elements of truth to it, but embellished upon for comedic effect.  I posted that story to my FB wall and people enjoyed it.  The next Thursday, I happened to do the same thing. So on and so forth, I did this every Thursday morning until someone suggested “dude, you should start a blog with these!” Me, ever the dumbass, thought “shit, I DO have a blog!” and I was onto something.      Prior to True Story©, I REALLY hadn’t felt like writing for the three years prior for reasons those close to me are already aware of.  The attention the posts on FB garnered and the suggestion to start a blog reminded me to use the one I already had.  I back-posted the previously FB-only stories on their respective dates, and be