Excuses Excuses Excuses

If I paid any attention whatsoever to whatever is going on in the world, I would probably say that a lot has changed since the last time I posted anything here. But since I'm a scruffy, self-centered hermit, as far as I know there could have been a giant explosion on a deep water oil rig that vomited sticky death into the Gulf for months with no clear idea of how or if it could be remedied...or something.

Crazier things have happened when I'm looking the other way. In fact, one time I was making a right hand turn and looking to the left for oncoming traffic. When I looked back to the right as I was rolling through the crosswalk I spied a very lifelike and human-sized hood ornament wearing a knit cap leaping over my front bumper, Heisman trophy style. It was a deft feat of grace for someone holding a heavy looking paper bag in one hand.

And another time...no. You know what? I'm not going to do this. I'm trying to justify my lack of discipline. Again. It's like every time I gain a stealth 5 pounds I think, "Well, it is the holiday season. Heh-heh." Or, "Well, it is birthday season. Heh-heh." (By the way, in my family birthday season is real. We have like 100 birthdays between October and June.) Or, "Well, it is football season. Heh-heh."

When I don't write for a long time it's because we're remodeling, the children annoy me, there's dusting to do, I'm too drunk, etc., et al infinity. In all fairness, some of these excuses are real. Also, at the moment I don't have an agent or the deadlines that come with them. Surely, they'll be knocking over their Starbucks in a mad rush to represent me if one happens upon this post. Until then, it's up to me to kick my own butt into gear.

What really burns me is this thought flashing bright in my brain: If you don't write, then guess what? YOU ARE NOT A WRITER! Ouch. If I don't finish what I start then I risk being some old guy who says, "Yeah, I've got a terrific idea for a novel but I've never gotten around to finishing it."

You are NOT a writer if you don't write.

If you are a writer, perhaps you can avoid letting yourself down by following my guidelines for successful writing. I don't, but maybe you could give them a try.

• Write Every Day - My buddy, Kevin, writes in a journal every day. What he eats, what he did, how he feels, random thoughts. Plus, he's a prolific writer of fiction. Obviously, this level of dedication to his writing makes him a disturbed individual with nothing better to do. That said, he's an agent's dream because he gets stuff done. So you're not feeling your latest manuscript when you get up that morning? So what. Go sit down and put fingertips to keyboard. I have written my best work on days when I felt wrung out of creative juices. Or maybe it was my worst work, but, whatever, just write every day anyway.
• Admit That your Excuses are Bunk - I recently read Dean Karnazes' "Ultramarathoner: Confessions of an All-Night Runner". The man has two kids, worked a full time job, while running HUNDREDS of miles at a time and he wrote a book while doing it all. If any person had a valid excuse to flake, it would be him. Even if your criteria matches Dean's (you liar) you better get crackin'.
• Know Your Motivation - This seems simple enough, but it's something we need to ask ourselves often. Why do I write? My main motivation for writing is that I have something to say. Is it important? Interesting? Necessary? I don't know. I do know that I enjoy writing. The solo mental Twister-game of writing forces me to organize my thoughts. Believe me when I say, that's a good thing. Finally, I write because I want to be published. Any writer who downplays the importance of being published is not being honest, I think. C'mon, you know you imagine it: the book signings, a stream of checks arriving in the mail for something you hardly consider work, people recognizing you for what you know to be your passion. When you get published, regardless of whether you make the NY Times Bestseller list or sell a couple hundred copies (in which case you'd likely be dropped by your publisher and possibly your agent, of course), you will have accomplished one of your first goals.
• Limit Your Distractions - Do your thumbs ghost-text while you sleep? If you leave the house without your phone does it ruin your day? Does the thought of a broken DVR send chills down your spine? Ever get caught in a cycle of Funny or Die or youtube clips until you physically have to jolt yourself back to reality? Yeah, me too. We live in a world with an unprecedented number of attention-grabbing distractions. It's why teachers have a tough time keeping their students' attention and why office workers accomplished way more in the '50s when their desks only had a typewriter, a stack of papers, and a full ashtray. And it's why we don't do the stuff we're supposed to be doing instead. The Internet, with its "world at your fingertips" appeal is one of the biggest timesucks EVER. Just read my blog and then get the hell off the Web people!

Now, shoo! Go write. Go wriot. It's what you really want to be doing anyway. At the end of the day when you lay your head down on your fluffy synthetic goose-down organic pillow, what will make you feel the most satisfied with your day? The fact that you watched "Top Cat Kitty" on youtube 50 times, or that you had a damn productive day of writing?

Keep wrioting!

What to Expect When You're Expecting

Don't expect anything from anything.  Doing so creates a false idea of what something or someone should be, which distorts the true qualities of said person, place, or thing.  What an unwieldy practice to constantly expect things, good or bad.     Expectations ruin experience.  Maybe I'm being pessimistic.  Perhaps keeping an open mind at all times would be good enough, I'm not sure.

OK, so here's my thing:

I know two people who read the last page of a book first so they can know if the entire book is worth reading.  If you are disgusted, friend, you are not alone.  This makes me want to barf.  It's like fast-forwarding through movies to see the juicy bits.  I was the kind of sick child who would threaten his sister with death if she told him what Mom got him for Christmas.  I rather enjoy unopened gifts to this day; oh, the possibilities!  

Or maybe you know someone (or ARE someone) who whispers in the theater, "I know what's going to happen, blah blah blah."Well congratulations.  Me, I want to be taken for a ride.  I'm not looking for the end of the track while it dips and corkscrews and loop-de-loops.   Say that one day you met God and he (or she) said, "Ask me a question about anything, and I will  tell you the answer."  And you think about it for a minute and ask, "When will I die?"  I am certain that God, in his (her) infinite wisdom, would kill you on the spot to save you the anticipation.  

Life and experience should be about the journey, never the destination.  And on that journey if your mind is occupied with what will be or what has happened, then you are missing what is happening RIGHT NOW.  

I recently returned from a trip to Albuquerque.  I often accompany my wife on her business trips while the kids stay with my mom.  Yes, I know I'm a lucky bastard.  I didn't have any expectations of Albuquerque because I know better.  I researched, yes.  I planned, minimally.  I packed, accordingly.  Like everything, I approached this experience with an open mind.  The only thing I kept thinking was Bugs Bunny tunneling endlessly all over America, getting lost, and saying,"I shoulda made a left turn at Albuquerque."  We rode horses, drank many a margarita, and watched the watermelon sunset from the crest of the Sandia Mountains.  I wrote, drank coffee, wrote, drank coffee, wrote, and drank coffee.  I got so hyped up about ABQ I went to Dan's Boots and Saddles for my first pair of cowboy boots.  I'm cursing the onset of summer now because if you wear boots with shorts you'll look like a crazy person.  Got me a pair of handmade Rod Patricks.  W-o-oee.  It ended up being a hundred times better than our recent vacation to Disneyland which, admittedly, I thought would be enjoyable.  At least the kids had fun, right?

If you never expect anything, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

As crazy as it all sounds, this goes hand-in-hand with writing fiction.  Why let the burden of a genre or audience drag down your story?  I always hear advice given to writers that say, "You must know who your audience is."  I will respectfully disagree with that.  I WRIOT.  I wriot because I have something to say, not because I think someone wants to hear it.  When I wriot I'm not quite sure where the story is going.  I let the characters drive my stories, not the plot.  I don't know where the story will end.  Frankly, it's not my decision.  And it could take 100 words or 100,000 to tell it.  I have no expectations.  I do not desire to figure out how things are going to turn out.  They always turn out in the end anyway, don't they?

And finally, my disclaimer:  I write unconventional picture books and dark middle-grade to YA novels.  I am not an expert on writing, only on wrioting.  I have never been published and am currently unrepresented.  I don't expect to  be published or represented anytime soon, but I don't expect NOT to be either.  Wriot on!

The Wrioting Fool

An Inspirational Message

My fans often ask me where I get the inspiration for what I write. They ask things like: "Where exactly do you get your wacky ideas?  Can't you write about normal stuff?  What's for dinner?"  And: "Where are you hiding the psychotropic drugs?"  So I respond to my mom and my wife's probing questions with this answer: I get my inspiration from everywhere and everything.  Uh, plus some really, really specific stuff I can't talk to non-writers about. So after my morning bowl of Mescaline Crunchies, washed down with a pot of the world's blackest coffee, I simply open my senses to the world around me and interpret it through my personal filter to be written down later as entertainment.  

Now, if you're a non-fiction writer, this won't appeal to you so much.  This is really wrioters only territory.  This is no knock to the truth-tellers, but a how-to dissection of a wrioter's creative process.  Fiction writers: we are all liars, after all.  Made-up worlds spring forth from our minds, complete with characters who do not do not exist speaking dialogue that has not really been spoken and doing things that may or may not be possible in real life.  That's pretty awesome.  

Of course, every wrioter, being of unsound mind and questionable judgment, will create in different ways.  As I've already said, simple mindfulness can give inspiration, but I subscribe equally to the idea that mindlessness may yield an even more plentiful word crop.  

Below, I'm going to list some methods -- the ones that work for ME--  that may give other wrioters an edge in creating their next new world.

• Always have something to write on:  I can't even count how many times I've had a brilliant idea while I'm not writing and then had no way to record it.  I believed I could remember such a clever thing.  Um, no, I couldn't.  You shouldn't try either.  It could be your iPhone, Blackberry, or a pencil and notebook.   I've even called my house, knowing that there was nobody home, and left a rambling message to retrieve later.  You never know when creative diarrhea will strike, so it's best to be prepared and have a receptacle handy.  That is, until the Pepto-Bismol of real life (making dinner, helping the kids with homework, going to work, etc.) puts a tourniquet on the flow of your creative juices.  (Sorry about all this.  It turned out much grosser than I intended.)
• Keep a file of titles:   I have a file on my Mac titled "Loose Stories".  It's a grab bag of workable ideas for stories I've had over the years.  You simply record your story title alone, or you include notes on it you can easily add to as they come to you.  Don't judge your loose stories!  Even if an idea or title seems stupid it could develop into something unexpected later.  And the beauty is this: say you've just completed a story and you want to put it away for a while so you can revise it with fresh eyes at a later date.  What are you going to write now?  Check out your "Loose Stories" file!  You will feel as though you've unearthed buried treasure that you hid in a drunken fit and forgot about...until now!
• Keep your muse on a short leash:   We can't all go on absinthe-fueled writing benders a la Poe and Baudelaire, but fiction writers must be able to summon their muse to remain in good form nonetheless.  If you have never read , "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft" by Stephen King, I suggest you stop reading this now and go read his book.  In it, King reveals his best-selling methodology to us mere mortals, so that we can be successful in our own creative quest.  I am paraphrasing him here for my purposes: Have a place to write, a door to close, and a ritual to get you to "that place" your mind needs to go to write.  I'm lucky because I have my own study at my house and a proven ritual.  1.  The kids must be taken care of and out of my realm of responsibility.   I'm a stay-at-home dad with two kids 5 and under, so this must be done with careful planning.  (Thanks, Mom.)  2.  I like my study door closed and the shutters shut tight.  I have a little USB keyboard light for my laptop when it's really black in there.  3.  The right music: blasting.  This is key.  It's seals the cracks in my consciousness and provides an awesome soundtrack for my story.  Mood, suspense, setting: they're all enhanced with music.  
• The Right Music:   I admit I'm a music snob and that I'm pickier about what I let enter my ears than what I let enter my mouth.  The right music, for me, has to be largely without lyrics, slow to develop, and unconventionally structured.  That eliminates radio completely.  I have a special playlist on iTunes called "Just Writing" for exactly that.  Here's some of the artists who free my brain:  Animal Collective, Aphex Twin, Broken Social Scene, Mogwai, Eluvium, Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You, Stars of the Lid, Isis.  There are many more, but check out these artists to see what I mean and to figure our what's right for you.  More on this in a future posting.
• Read, Read, Read!:   Read the genre you write for and all the others in between.  Creativity begets creativity.  All of us wrioters are drinking from the same collective word hole so, yes, you can be as good (and better) than what you read.  If you want to be absolutely sure of this, just read the junkiest of trashy novels and throwaway children's books that come out every month.  
• Wriot! Wriot! Wriot!:   Wriot every day, break the rules a little, have fun.  Keep a journal and put anything you want in it.  I sometimes clip a picture from the newspaper, glue it on a journal page, and write whatever comes to mind about it.  Heck, sometimes I - gasp! - draw a picture!  This is all supposed to be fun, right?  Writing is the loneliest of activities.  Which is weird because in the end all we want is for everyone else to read what we have written.  Sorry, BUY what we have written.

As always, all this is my foolish interpretation of what we do and I'm certain you have your own.  So please, share you methods with me so that I can partake of your knowledge and experience as well.  Keep wrioting and good luck!

The Wrioting Fool

Wrioting: This is not a tyypo

What is wrioting?  How do you say it?  Who are you and why do ask so many questions? 

 Hi.  My name is Ted Perrone and I'm: The Wrioting Fool.  If you are a writer and are curious about wrioting, subscribe to my blog.  If you're a serial blogger and find all this somewhat tolerable, subscribe now!

Wrioting is writing gone berserk.  Composition run amok making a maelstrom of mayhem.  (Sorry, much too many ms)  I coined the term in a college writing class.  I was keeping a journal and had one of those unconscious moments of clarity during which time I made a strange entry.  Strange even for ME.  I wrote the word, "WRIOTING" , across the blue lines on the page.  I had a image of breaking through bars and barriers with this word.  It was like literarily  hurling a flaming garbage can through a plate glass window at Radio Shack.  It was a defining moment in my life as a writer... and one I recall every single time I put pen to paper.  

I'm no pioneer.  Mark Twain? Yes.  Ellen Hopkins? Yes. Edward Gorey?  Duh.  But, what I do is try to channel their genius: intellectually powerful, yet insane in their ambition to channel the whole of their character and personality so that every page drips with it uniquely.  This is a helluva tall order, but also the simplest of things when you think about it.  Write who you are.  If you don't, we'll all know it.  

Here's my challenge to all you writers.  Become a wrioter.  It's nothing I don't ask of myself.  If we all wriot, the literary world will only get better for it.  Pick up that flaming garbage can and hurl it through your own plate glass window.  C'mon now.  Don't pretend that the sound of glass shattering doesn't get you all fired up.

Oh, last thing.  Here's a quick preview of what you can expect of my blog.  

1. I won't be blogging every day. (Thank God, huh?) 

2.  I will never post musings or use that word to describe what I'm writing.  To me, this is the one of the world's most boring words...and I love words.  Please, if I ever post anything that seems like a musing, let me know IMMEDIATELY.  I will break my wireless keyboard over my head and flog myself mercilessly with a USB cord.  And then blog about it.

3. I'll likely never be profane or political.  I save my barrage of four-letter words for dinner table conversation and no-holds-barred games of Scrabble.

4. I don't have any pets, so I won't ever post cutesy-poo pictures of my cat and dog cuddling.  I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old who required similar housebreaking and regularly produce just as offending odors.  

5. I may blog about my kids and my life as a writer-seeking-agent-&-stay-at-home-dad-deadbeat. 

6. Right now my blog looks really plain so give me a break, I'm just getting started.  

7. If you'd like even more non-stop wittiness and read about what I had for lunch, follow me on Twitter.  I go by the name firescribe.

8. Don't expect anything specific, because I may just mix it up.  One day: A funny anecdote about running a car off the road.  Next day: BAM!  A blog in verse.  Day after that:  BAM!  Best music to write by blog.  Seriously, don't miss that, it will be awesome.  Then: BAM!  I'm not sure.  All in a day's work for a wrioter.

9. If you've read this far you have way too much time on your hands.  Come back soon!

The Wrioting Fool