I’m working on rebuilding my habits and building a novel. I typed this sentence and heard the ducks fighting1. Are interruptions a habit?
How’s it going with you?
1) Researching Not Writing
I have been in a “must figure out how to plot” first mood off and on for years now because it took eleventy-million years to write All the Bridges Burning. It feels like it’s taking just as long to write a second, but my brain gets very overwhelmed with plot structure books and whatnot. Like, I created a whole Scrivener document merging the Three-Act Structure with Save the Cat! Writes a Novel , but I got caught up in the math of what percentage of the manuscript needed to be where, and labeling which things were supposed to be one scene vs. multiple scenes and a week later realized I’d written nothing and was utterly lost.
Speaking of Scrivener: I have a love-hate relationship with this software. I love the ability to write each chapter in a separate “file” that I can see in a little index tree thing and move around. At the same time, the structure stuff? I kept finding I could either see too many things at once or not enough things at once and it was making me feel insane. (I was explaining to my therapist how I suspect the problem is that whole ADHD thing where object permanence isn’t fully permanent.2 I click from one chapter to another and immediately forget everything I intended to do. I need paper.)
So, I started a whole new notebook to try setting up scenes so I can see one while looking at another onscreen.
Last night I woke up and my brain was working on scenes, so that’s promising.
2) Writing to Remember
That leads me to another thing my therapist and I talked about: The research that suggests people better remember things they write down versus things they’ve typed. This sent me into a whole rabbit hole of research about the “studies” regularly cited by fans of pens and paper. That’ll end up being my blog post on my tutoring website this week.
There’s one study (from 2021 in Japan) that suggest writing down a schedule takes less time and allows the user to remember more of the details than using a digital calendar. Personally, I prefer my analog (Hobonichi) calendar, but I also have a digital one and I have a ton of alarms in my phone to keep me on track. (I set up the digital calendar based off my paper one instead of the other way around.) Husband, on the other hand, keeps his calendar digitally so he can share it with his team, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
He does take notes on meetings and projects on legal pads and keeps the pages in folders standing on the end of his desk. Then, he ends up typing up some of the stuff he’s scribbled into OneNote files on his laptop.
I’ve been experimenting with OneNote as a way to keep some of my teaching/tutoring notes together along with a separate “notebook” for my blog posts that require more research (like this one).
I feel like a lot of people have hybrid systems these days, especially those of us who are “old.”
It is possible, though, those IG aesthetic notes people might be learning more from their pink glitter notes than the people frantically pounding on their MacBook in front of class.
What about you? Do you write things down? Type things up? Some combo?
3) Fiction Reading
In addition to the stack of plotting books I’ve been hoping will help me actually create a plot, I’ve read some more fiction since last time.
Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I started reading this one as an ebook but switched to audiobook while I was cleaning last week and enjoyed the narrator’s lyrical pronunciation of all the Spanish and mythical creature words that sounded less magical in my head. It’s not bad, but I did find I could go way too many days with the book at around 82% without needing to find out how it ended. I’m sure that’s me and not the book. It has vampires hunting vampires in an alternate version of Mexico City. What’s not to like?
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
This one was a quick read and oddly interesting. I jumped in without knowing too much about it (library suggested it), but it was a fun read. The premise is a lady who considers herself a fuck-up who gets hired to watch combustible kids for a summer. Found a few quotes I liked:
“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”
“If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted.”
“[The politician] started to talk, and it was like when he prayed at dinner…just platitudes, like a computer program had written them based on phrases in the Bible and the Constitution mixed together.”
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
This one was very interesting, but it’s sometimes billed as a “thriller” and it’s not quite that. I mean, I did find something scarier than an MLM in it, but there isn’t the typical threat of physical danger, ticking clock, or nail-biting suspense usually associated with “thrillers.” Also, while I enjoyed it, I can say it wasn’t a book for me. I don’t mean that in a “I can’t picture myself in it because I’m not Black” way because that’s ridiculous. I mean it in that (mild spoilers ahead) the ambiguous ending did leave me wondering which side I’d choose, but without the life experience to really understand the consequences and sacrifices of each option.
You can check out an interview with the author here.
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkin Braithwaite
So many people have raved about this one and it was intriguing. Short, to the point, with an intriguing ending.
4) Forest Bathing and Creek Paddling
We got ourselves “lost3” in the woods of Fort Lauderdale at Hugh Taylor Birch State Park and went paddleboarding at Whiskey Creek in Mizell Johnson State Park. I was super-excited to see the sea turtle again. This time, I finally got a (not great) picture of it!
It’s been so hot lately, but I feel like we can’t really complain because it’s been so much hotter in other places that aren’t really equipped to deal with a “suddenly Florida” situation. It’s been oddly dry for a lot of the summer, too, but we did get several inches of rain in the past two weeks, so can’t really complain there either.
Heat be damned, it’s great to get outside and enjoy nature.
We’ve been wildlife watching in the yard, too. At the moment, there’s a bald blue jay4 stealing duck food from the back patio. Watching wildlife from the back deck is delightful. If you stop and pay attention, it’s incredible how many species you can find in one tree.
My new favorite thing is showering outdoors after a sweaty adventure or workout or yard task. The hose-water is quite warm here because the water pipes are so close to the surface and the ground is warm year-round. It’s still cool enough to feel refreshing after being so hot. Husband set up an outdoor shower area with a shiny new hose attachment and a platform to stand on. At night, it’s surrounded by twinkle lights. Magical.
5) Microsoft OneNote
Remember how I said I bought a paper notebook to track plot in?
Yep, totally doing that. I have Act 1 pretty much figured out with a few minor adjustments that may happen as I hammer out the other two.
On the other hand, I also “discovered” OneNote because Husband’s been raving about it and it might just be a plotting solution for me. (We’ll see.)
I’ve tried Scrivener, as mentioned, but I’ve also tried the notecard method (I’ve lost so many notecards); the Plottr software; Jess Lourey’s Book in a Bag (It’s great in theory, but I was too afraid to mess it up, so it’s still in the bag); mindmapping apps; French-ruled notebook paper; Excel; old planner pages; whiteboards; Post-it notes; and something called Scapple. Which means, there’s a good chance OneNote won’t work for plotting either, but it’s good for keeping track of blog post ideas and research, so it’s good for something. It also feels like the “right amount” of organized chaos to potentially work.
What do I mean by organized chaos? Well, you can type in little windows, kind of like the sticky notes feature and you can slide them all around. You can put different sections in your “notebooks” like tabs in a physical one and you can add infinite pages to a tab. But you don’t have to. And you can easily scribble right on the screen (which works for my modified “flow” notes sort of thinking.5
Bonus Thing
Comparison. Writers do it all the time. Hell, people do it all the time. Thing is, that way lies madness. We know it, and yet we seem to do it anyway. Everyone has different paths, different strengths, different weaknesses, different circumstances, and different obstacles.
It’s easy to see the surface and think we have it all figured out. It’s easy to think the grass is greener, but sometimes we have to think about the things we have and the things we’d have to give up to have that greener grass. A person who travels might long for their own bed and more time with loved ones. A person who doesn’t travel might long for adventures. A writer under contract might long for the freedom of writing what they want or revisiting characters that didn’t sell well. A writer without an agent might think having one would solve all their problems.
I guess what I’m saying is that the past few years have been rough on a lot of people. Take it easy on yourself. Enjoy the little things, especially when the big things seem out of reach right now. Big things can happen for you – they might even happen sooner than expected.
Yeah, I know, that gratitude stuff feels hard and woo-woo and lame, but it can actually work6.
Drakes will fight over pretty girls, but these two also seem to talk trash and scuffle out of boredom like human boys or cats.
When ADHDers talk about things like open storage and their piles of papers and shoes and how putting things away causes them to “disappear,” it sounds a bit like infants who haven’t figured out object permanence. It’s related, but it’s not the same. We know the things in the other room exist. We just forget about them. The whole “out of sight, out of mind” thing. It’s quite common for ADHDers to own more than one of the same thing either because they keep losing it, replacing it, and then finding the first or because they know this is likely to happen and just buy more than one at the start.
Not really. There’s a trail.
Apparently, blue jays and cardinals will molt their whole heads at once causing them to look like they’re going through a messy breakup.
I make no promises even if something is promising.
This is not a substitute for therapy or medication to treat any mental or physical illness. Please consult a doctor (if possible) if you suspect your “wishful thinking” is more serious or is leading to dangerous thoughts.
I liked My Sister the Serial Killer, and I remember wanting to read Nothing to See Here. Good stuff.