Jonathan Langford's Blog

Coming down from intense projects can be quite disorienting. I experienced that yet again this morning, when I suddenly found myself without anything immediate to do after several days of very long hours.

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First, the project:

It’s one I’ve been working on for several  months, as my family can attest from the not-quite-swearing that’s been coming from my direction. Already ambitious task, the scope of the project has been amplified in several ways while deadlines remained more or less immovable. And so it was that I found myself, earlier this week, putting in something like 26 work hours over a 2-day period. That may not sound like much, but in my work conditions, it amounts to more or less constant presence at my computer, with short breaks for napping and brain-soaking, eating in my chair, and that’s pretty much it.

Come this morning (and a decent night’s sleep for the first time in awhile), and one last piece to work on. A short discussion with my chief collaborator, an hour draftingt time (less than I had expected) — and the piece is off to him for his review, to be followed shortly by shipping off to the client.

And I found myself at 10:45 this morning, with nothing immediate to do until my colleague’s review was finished, energy more or less bursting from my skin. What to do? Answer: I went for a walk.

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I’m a fairly lazy sort. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but simply one of those things that I’ve pretty much learned to accept is true, regardless of how I might feel about it.

The flipside of this is what once I actually get my energy up and going on a project, it seems a shame to waste it. I’ve just pulled off one miracle (okay, more an unlikelihood than a miracle); why not try for two? Or three? Why not dive into the other work projects that have been waiting while I worked on this one? Clean the kitchen? Take up spelunking? Tackle my novel? Or maybe read fanfiction for a while?

The answer, grasshopper, is that I have done all of these in my time. (Well, not the spelunking.) And I have learned from my experiences. Specially, I have learned that no matter how much energy I think I have at the end of a work project, my thoughts are in fact delusions. Acting on them will only hasten the inevitable crash.

The effect is not unlike what happens when a hard-working car engine slips out of gear. There’s a roar, a racing of the motor — and a swift deceleration, dwindling down to nothing. The car sounds ready for anything, but very rapidly stops going anywhere.

(And here is where those of you who know more about cars than I do will roll your eyes and explain that I have completely gotten it wrong . To which I respond: it’s, um, a metaphor. Or something like that. Yeah. Oh, wouldn’t you know? I seem to be late for a spot of embarrassment somewhere else right about now. Really, so sorry I have to take off…)

The more rational choice might perhaps be to crash right away. And yet that doesn’t answer well, either. For one thing, there’s all that (albeit temporary) energy that needs doing with. And then there’s the desire to at least land gracefully, suggesting a tapering-off motion as opposed to simply dropping into free fall. (My, I seem to be flirting with quite the variety of metaphors here.) Not to mention that my decisions at such times are sometimes not the smartest, meaning that it could be a good idea to stay away from, you know, anything that could catalyze my mental and emotional focus in pretty much any direction. Hence the walk.

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It’s a beautiful day in western Wisconsin.

We’ve had a wet late summer and fall. Apples and other fruit are scarce due to a late frost earlier this year, and I haven’t had a chance to get outside much. But today the sky is blue, the sun is out (with a few clouds), the air is cool but not cold; leaves are still green but beginning to turn, beginning to fall. Squirrels are busy, and birds.

I put on a light sweater, shoes (including brand-new orthotics to help my feet), and walked up into the neighborhood just north and west of where we live, up above the cemetery. I tried to imagine the lives of the people in the houses that I passed. A couple of houses had been apparently vacated; one held an empty lot with “no trespassing” tape. I wondered what had happened to the house that once had been there.

I walked briskly, for something like a half hour. Slowly my mind cooled, my imagination calmed, and I lost the impulse to fling myself into something new.

I headed back. And then I wrote this.

Summers are an interesting time for the Langford family. Most years — including this one — early in June my wife takes off for Utah to help take care of her mother, who suffered a serious stroke 8 or 9 years ago. From there, typically she teaches a summer class via distance learning. Meanwhile, I’m left here in Wisconsin with whatever children happen to be here during the summer — which right now is all three of them — doing my own work and supervising the children, more or less, up until the point when some or all of us take off for Utah to visit.

We’re now (as of early July) about a month into that. And it always makes me feel like I’m juggling one-handed, which is kind of an odd simile considering that I’m not actually a juggler at all in any literal sense. Only metaphorical. But metaphorically, it feels like what I imagine juggling with one hand would feel like. Same number of balls to keep in the air, but only half the hands.

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So here’s what I imagine to be true about one-handed juggling:

Keeping all those balls in the air is possible, but requires more concentration. The hand has to move faster, covering more space. There’s no margin for error. The minute you grab a ball you have fling it out again, because there’s always something else coming at you that needs grabbing. The eyes twitch back and forth constantly, tracking everything. There’s a kind of stiff jerkiness, unlike the effortless-looking smoothness of the usual motions. Balls may not get dropped, but they get flung a little more wildly, requiring wider and faster arm motions. Too often, the hand must travel to where the ball will be, instead of the ball conveniently dropping into the space that the hand occupies.

(By the way, anyone who actually has juggled is more than welcome to correct what I’ve just said. I’ve already admitted my ignorance, so it’s no skin off my nose, or however that saying goes.)

All of which has its corollary in the household-managing arena. There are still just as many items to track, or nearly — just as many people to keep on schedule. Kids to wake up. Breakfasts to make. Medicines to put out. Chores to nag people into doing. Groceries to buy. Dinner to make. And one’s own work to do, interspersed with everything else.

This is actually one of the hardest parts to manage. Sometimes I’ll get into a project (work or otherwise) and not particularly want to stop. But if I don’t stop, the children won’t get up, or get fed, or go to sleep, or whatever.

I get tired of being the only one to make dinner. And yeah, the kids will help with that sometimes, especially my oldest, and my second child usually cooks dinner for herself anyway. But I can never just assume that things will happen if I’m not doing them. There’s no shared responsibility, no backup.

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Which is, of course, not entirely true.

First off, there’s actually not as much to track over the summer. For one (very big) thing, there is no homework to make sure happens, no kids to get off to school. Which is an enormous thing. And yeah, we have some projects that we’re trying to get the kids to do over the summer, but I’m only partly responsible for those. Some my wife helps to track long-distance. (Skype calls are a thing.) Some our kids themselves are responsible for. And many are set up such that the consequences are fairly mild if they don’t actually get done.

Nor am I a paragon of with-it-ness, keeping everyone else on track. Often enough, it’s me who gets off-schedule. I get frustrated because my own eye wandered away from the ball(s). It’s understandable that the kids likewise don’t succeed in managing and monitoring things.

The truth is, I’m less efficient without someone to share the load. Or at least less mentally balanced and sane. And I’m reminded again that plenty of single parents do this all the time, and find myself both amazed and vicariously exhausted when I think about what that means.

I also find myself with a much better understanding of the way things actually are in the lives of my family members. It’s a blessing in that way. I actually wind up talking to our children more, working with them to get things done, and seeing firsthand some of the things that my wife is usually more involved with. I get to see a side of family life that usually I am too busy or too lazy to see. This helps to make me a better father, which is always something I can use help with.

And it makes me appreciate my wife more. Which, you know. Never a bad thing. If that means I get less done and become more forgetful and spend my time running around like a chicken with my head cut off (a perhaps less technically accurate but equally vivid comparison), then, well. At least I can hope it provides some amusement for the spectators.

Note: June 14 saw the release of Let Your Hearts and Minds Expand: Reflections on Faith, Reason, Charity, and Beauty , by Thomas F. Rogers, published by the Maxwell Institute at BYU, which I helped edit. It’s a lovely collection of essays, memoirs, et al., from a retired BYU Russian professor and playwright. Thoughtful, intelligent, reflective, and honest, it provides (in my opinion) an example of genuine, faithful Mormon intellectualism at its best.  

The first thing I do each morning is sit up in bed, then remove the mask on my CPAP machine. And then I tighten my gut and stand up.

Specifics can vary. Sometimes I may take off the CPAP mask first. Sometimes (especially when running behind), I may leap straight out of bed in a single motion, without sitting up first. But the gut-tightening is always part of the process, for unavoidable physiological reasons that also work nicely on a metaphorical level. Hence this post.

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Facing the day requires an act of will, mental as well as physical. This is something moderately new to me, at least on a physical level. I don’t remember any separate effort of tightening my gut in order to get up when I was younger. Maybe it’s the extra pounds, or the slight stiff soreness that makes me more aware of each bodily effort compared to when I was younger and lither. Maybe it’s simply the fact that I’m more deliberative about motion.

For whatever reason, there’s now an additional step to starting the day — or getting up from the floor, or even a seat — that I wasn’t aware of in earlier years. I tighten my focus — think on what I want to do next that requires me to get up, whether facing the day or going into another room to get a drink of whatever — tighten my gut, and then stand.

One of my ongoing intentions is to live what I think of as a more deliberative life: doing things as a result of choice, as opposed to impulse; pondering what my goals and priorities truly are; thinking about what will lead to long-term happiness as opposed to short-term satisfaction or lack of effort.

It’s a work in progress. I find it remarkable, when I stop to realize it, just how much of my life is spent doing less worthwhile things, either because they are easier or less scary, or because they are what’s in front of me, or because I haven’t taken the time or mental effort to recognize what would be more satisfying.

I suspect I’m not the only one. Observing my children, it seems to me — and I invite (but do not really expect) dissenting views from those involved — that many of their day-to-day decisions, like mine, revolve around avoidance of effort and unpleasantness, more than an expectation of long-term benefits. Which is remarkably short-term thinking, when you stop to think about it. (But then, that’s kind of the point.)

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I said I would get to the metaphorical kind of gut-tightening. Which is: writing. And pretty much everything else I want or need to do but that takes some initial effort to get past my inertia, reluctance, or fear of effort.

Work does not come cheap. Sometimes the cost comes in physical effort. Sometimes it comes in facing emotional challenges. Sometimes it comes in mental or spiritual focus. Typically, it comes as an alternative to some easier but ultimately less rewarding path.

And so I try to think on the rewards, and remember the necessity, and gather my mind together. Tighten my mental and emotional gut, and face the day.

This Memorial Day, I spent most of the day editing a family history for someone while my wife did taxes. (We had filed a deferment, as we usually do these days, since tax time comes right toward the end of her semester and my busiest work time.) And then this evening, we went down to the river that runs through our town to listen to frogs and look at fireflies.

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The first time I saw fireflies, I was 15, staying with my dad in South Carolina for the summer. It was hot and humid, pungent with the odor of honeysuckle and the tiresome green of kudzu; but the fireflies were magic.

I don’t remember how long we’d been in Wisconsin before we realized that this is firefly country. Maybe it was even that first year. In any event, we asked around and found out that the best place to find fireflies is down by the water at dusk, in the grass and tall weeds. Ever since then, we try to make an annual trek to see the fireflies at least once every summer.

It’s not the sort of thing you can plan in advance, at least not in our family. For one thing, around this time of year it seems as if every other day there’s a thunderstorm in the evening. Then too, there are always things to be done. You have to hit just the right combination of I-need-a-break and seize-the-moment, pretty much at just the right time, so that by the time everyone is bundled up (in my case — I wear long sleeves and pants to avoid mosquitoes, and everyone else thinks I’m crazy) and mosquito-repellanted, computers put away and the like, it’s getting close to dark, but still light enough to walk down the path to the river.

This time we got there a few minutes early: time enough to cross via stepping stones to the small island at the mouth of the South Fork and walk up to the other end. There’s a kind of grotto with a waterfall at the head, and a swinging bridge overhead, that would be a fantastic place to get a picture of our family, if we can ever manage it. Tonight was too late (and we didn’t have anyone else along to take the picture), but it was very pretty nonetheless.

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Hiking down to the river and back comes with more effort than it did 10 or 15 years ago — a reminder of age, and the need to lose weight and exercise more.

I also found that I don’t, apparently, have as much patience for simply standing and looking as some of my other family members do. Partly I think that’s because standing makes my back sore. (Another sign of age and lack of fitness.) It’s also probably because of my ADHD characteristics: never formally diagnosed, but no one who knows me well has ever contested that the designation fits.

There’s talk of doing this again. Maybe going early, so we can take better pictures. Maybe setting things up so we can record a half-hour or so of frogsong. I tell everyone that if I’m coming, I’ll need to bring a fold-up chair. They aren’t surprised.

This coming weekend, our oldest child is having some friends over. Which, for us, means that it’s time to clean the house. Or at least the living room. This time, though, it’s the end of the semester, coming up on summer, and the kitchen and a few other specific areas are really quite unpleasant, and so it’s house-cleaning time.

And so I spent about an hour and a half just now cleaning house, in the middle of the day, with no one keeping me company. Which is a thing I hate. But I think it’s worth it.

Some of you may, perhaps, have entered a marriage where one of you liked house cleaning, or at least was good at doing it pretty much as a matter of course. This was not the marriage I entered, nor (if that was not obvious) the marriage my spouse entered.

There are, as you may have imagined, varying strategies to deal with this kind of situation. We have tried several of them:

It’s my/her job — The time-honored, gender-role-division strategy. Works for some, a horrible idea for us — partly because both of us have actual paid work, but mostly because we find it unutterably depressing to be “the one” whose job is to keep the house clean.
Divide up chores — a fine idea, except that both of us have erratic, boom-and-bust work cycles. Also, I personally don’t react well to “this-is-your-job” pressure, preferring to do things more or less at random (and yes, I actually will do things at random, though not enough to keep our house consistently clean, alas).
Make the kids do it — To our discredit, this is a thing we have tried, and almost entirely failed at. Cleaning the house is hard enough; finding the energy to make someone else do it is considerably worse.
Hire someone else — Believe it or not, we have actually done this from time to time, paying people to come in and clean. But… Aside from the financial cost, I find this doesn’t actually save much time. Supervising, making decisions, preparing for the person to come over, and (in my case) stressing, however illogically, about someone else seeing how dirty my house is eats up as much time and energy as I save by not doing the housework myself. I get a cleaner house, but not much else.
Put up with clutter — A strategy much-practiced by us, but there are limits. One of them comes when a member of the family wants to invite someone over but feels uncomfortable doing so because of how the house looks. Another comes when things start needing to be replaced because you either can’t find them or they keep getting broken because people can’t tell what’s underfoot/underbutt while walking/sitting.
Limp along with some ad-hoc combination of the above — Yes! And we have a winner…

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Underlying the Langford Family Approach to Housecleaning™ are several informal but time-tested principles:

Housework is yucky. Let’s not kid ourselves here, and let’s not try to kid anyone else either.
Learn what works for your marriage. All the expectations I had going into my marriage have been pretty much useless. We have both been happier since I learned to abandon them and try to observe what actually works in our marriage rather than make it follow rules.
You can live with more clutter than you think you can. I take off my hat to those of you who have not had to learn this lesson, but don’t think I can actually bear for you to tell me about it…
He/she who cares the most has the responsibility for making it happen. This is one of those rules of thumb that can easily go wrong, say if one person globally cares more about housework than the other person does. And it totally is not the rule with making children clean. But in a marriage, or at least in our marriage, there are real problems if I assume that because something is important to me but I don’t have the time to do it, I get to put it on my spouse’s to-do list. Maybe that’s a better way to put this one: The only to-do list I own is my own.
It’s more friendly with two. Generally true, and especially if you can talk to each other and thus keep yourselves distracted from the fact that you’re cleaning.
There are worse outcomes than a dirty house. A big one is when one spouse starts to feel abandoned, depressed, or panicky about everything he/she has to get done.
Negotiation can be your friend. “I’ll do this if you do that” is a nice way to get things done without either partner feeling abandoned or like his/her priorities have been trampled.
50-50 is never quite enough. I see the work I do. I don’t tend to see in detail all the work someone else does. So if I think I’m doing half of the work, I’m probably fooling myself.
Self-bribery is a thing. And it’s not a bad thing. Really.
Gratitude is liberating. In contrast, expectations can be depressing and scary. In my case, ridiculously so.
Time invested in making my partner happy pays off. When she is happy, I wind up being happier too. If I could inscribe one of these in gold and never forget it, this would be the one — and only partly because if I take this as my basic rule, I get to the others eventually.

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Cleaning for this Saturday is nowhere near done. There still the kitchen floor and some counters to clean, bathroom to clean, living room to pick up and vacuum. But we’ll tackle it with a cheerier heart for knowing that part is already done, and that neither one of us has to do it alone.

One of the things that makes reading more of an effort than it used to be is my sense that when I read something, there’s usually something I’m trying to do with the text. I’m reading to pick up information, or edit something. I’m reading to give feedback to the author, or because my book club is going to be meeting and I want to be able to say something.

Or, sometimes, I’m reading to write a review: a self-imposed duty that comes with being friends with someone, or part of a community, or having taken it on as a commitment in some moment of insanity. Or simply because it’s become an impulse, part of my way of reacting to and processing a book: part of coming to know what I think, and then (let’s be honest here) using it as a chance to speak up and say something. Start a conversation. Because, hey, what’s a better topic of conversation than talking about a book you’ve read?

(Much insight into my character is revealed by the fact that I’m not actually joking about this last. Those with a disposition like mine, I anticipate, will see nothing odd about this: what can be a better topic of conversation than a book? Nothing, obviously.)

Judging strictly by numbers, I don’t actually write that many reviews. But each of them is, for me, a way of grappling with and trying to understand something about writing, about ideas, about myself. A review is an act of cultural and intellectual as well as literary criticism — at its best, in my view at least.

In the spirit of which, I offer up the following small list of books I’ve reviewed in the last year:

The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith , by Terryl and Fiona Givens, review posted at A Motley Vision, a follow-up to my earlier review of their book The God Who Weeps
The Agitated Heart , a Mormon short novel by Scott Bronson, review posted at A Motley Vision
Wandering Realities: The (Mormonish) Short Fiction of Steven L. Peck , with a review cross-posted on this blog and over at A Motley Vision
Dark Watch and Other Mormon-American Stories , by William Morris; review forthcoming from Dialogue

There was another book that I had agreed to review, but partway through, I determined that I was not part of the book’s target audience and couldn’t really do the book justice, so I begged off on that one. Getting that off my plate was a surprising relief: not just a matter of one fewer thing to do, but something I had come to dread doing, partly because I didn’t think I could do it well.

It’s not a coincidence that all of these are in the realm of Mormon literature, three about works of fiction, two about collections that include sf&f stories. I’m part of a fairly small community of Mormon letters; there’s a need, I feel, for feedback, for the sense that someone out there is actually reading what you write, as well as for promoting titles people might enjoy. (I’ve been known to print out my book reviews and share them with people from my Mormon congregation, in the spirit of trying to entice them into reading the book in turn.) And there’s a vague sense that in so doing, I might be contributing as well to the development of a conversation not just about literary works but about literature in general within the Mormon sphere.

It’s a small output — smaller than I feel it ought to be, especially when the work I put into the review is nothing compared to what the author put into the writing. But if a review of mine puts one or two more readers onto a specific title, or makes a writer feel that he or she has been engaged with on a meaningful level, or provides me with a new insight or two into life and/or writing, then the effort has paid for itself.

Every now and then I have literary thoughts, which I feel I should credit myself for here even if they’re published elsewhere. So yesterday I posted an essay titled “The Appeal of Science Fiction for (Some) Mormons” over at A Motley Vision blog. If the topic interests you, I invite you to read and respond either there or here.

Below is an excerpt from an email I sent to a writing friend last night. It then occurred to me that this might interest my various readers on this blog…

As part of my worldbuilding for my fantasy novel, I’m trying to wrap my mind around river freight traffic in an inland area prior to steam power. (By “inland” I mean not near coastlines, outside the influence of tides and estuaries, etc.)

So far, I’ve worked out that barges are probably the central means of transportation, which will work only when rivers are relatively flat. Obviously, locks are important. While boats might float down a river, when going upriver some means of propulsion will be needed: e.g., towpaths. Sources mentioned use of poles and oars as well, but the former doesn’t seem powerful enough for upriver traffic, and the latter seems too manpower-intensive to be economical. Sails seem right out as a source of power in most river travel circumstances.

I’ve also been thinking about how all this would impact trade patterns, regulation, etc. Obviously, you will always have commerce of some kind. It seems to me though that it would be much more supervised, if that makes sense. River travel is, in a sense, a partnership between those on the boat and those on the shore — and thus much more easily regulated by local officials. For that matter, I wonder how many people will be on the boat versus those on the shore. I also read something about the need to stop each night. So inns along the way? Or at least periodic slips and landings. (And anytime you have a landing you have the potential for a service, and a fee…)

Overall, river commerce seems much more like a business and less like a venture, compared to ocean travel.

I’m used to thinking of ships’ captains as important figures in commerce, even if they are hauling cargo for other merchants. I’m not sure that pattern holds for river traffic. Is there even a need for a “captain” in the traditional sense, or just a pilot? Crew of 2? Whatever?

Smuggling, I’m going to assume, is a universal human constant. But it seems to me that it would be trickier in a situation where you can’t just slip away to a secluded landing somewhere. Smuggling would be a matter of unauthorized cargo rather than unauthorized routes or ports.

And of course there is the question of just what the boats/barges/whatever would look like, how much they could haul, what traffic they could take.

Thoughts? Sources I could/should consult?

(On other topics: I have finally bitten the bullet and joined Facebook. Only about 10 years behind the times… I kept thinking that if I just dragged my feet long enough, Facebook would go the way of Myspace. But alas…)

Last Saturday, I had the rare opportunity of being interviewed about a topic people more often are attempting to shut me up about: that is, J. R. R. Tolkien and his influence on the modern world. (Requirement for someone’s college course paper, I believe.) No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that I had a lot to say, even in cases where I didn’t necessarily know a lot. But then, isn’t that’s what interviews are all about?

Toward the end, I was asked a question that went something like this: what impact I thought Tolkien had on the modern world, outside of the purely literary realm. I responded by citing what I think of as common tropes: that is, his expression of a nascent spirit of environmentalism and dissatisfaction with the modern world. I may have also talked about the search for meaning in general in modern life — something I touch on in my master’s thesis.

And then I said something I don’t think I had thought about before, at least not in quite this way. I talked about how Tolkien represents an outstanding example of the power of amateurism, which I define in this context not as a lack of quality or even of professional-level skill, but rather as the spirit of doing something first and foremost out of a love for the thing itself. In that sense, Tolkien was very much an amateur: not only as a writer of fantasy, but also as a student of language, a linguist. Philologist, to use the term that probably best describes his professional focus — not merely the study but also the love of language, literature, and “the word.”

More than perhaps any other famous author of the twentieth century, Tolkien manifestly wrote stories out of love. Certainly it wasn’t out of any rational plan to make a living as a writer. People who plan to become bestselling authors don’t take ten years to write a sequel — one that turns out to be of an entirely different character from the book it followed. They don’t write books that are terrifyingly long, from the perspective of conventional publishing wisdom. They don’t invent languages as a side effect of (or perhaps motivation for) their storytelling.

And they don’t write The Lord of the Rings.

I suspect that a true history of humankind would find that many of the best things our species has to offer have been products of love. Certainly in our time, with Wikipedia and TV Tropes and publishing on demand, there’s a lot that people are doing that has, at best, only a small chance of paying off in economic terms. But the example of Tolkien demonstrates the kinds of astonishingly worthwhile and beautiful things that may result when people do things in a spirit of true amateurism.

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I went for a walk this morning. It’s a brilliant day: sky blue with puffy white clouds, no breeze, temperature astonishingly warm. Leaves, brown, yellow, and red, linger on many of the trees and litter the ground with that rich smell I associate with leather. (Tannic acid perhaps?)

I ended up at a park a few blocks from our house, where I sat several minutes watching a squirrel. I’ve read about the chittering noises that squirrels make, but this was the first time I think I ever heard such a sound, or at least recognized it as something other than birdcall: a kind of chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk sequence interspersed every now and then with a higher kaa! exclamation. Or something like that. (I’m no good at replicating animal vocalizations, in either written or sonic form.) I also noticed for the first time how a squirrel’s tail works in and out when it is running and shudders every few seconds in a kind of rippling motion when it is standing still — almost a spasm. Who knew? And there was the brilliant molten orange (green to the rest of you) of moss on the low wall behind me, and my wonderings about why one tree’s leaves were all curled up and silvery brown, while another almost identical tree about 30 feet away looked still largely green (but perhaps wasn’t, given my issues with color). An experience of pure delight.

All too seldom do I take the time to walk and sit and observe the natural and human environments around me, for all that I love doing so. I lack the patience. I want to be off and doing, like the character in John Myer Myers’s Silverlock whose mind (as I recall; I can’t seem to find my copy of the book) is so dazzled by poetic inspirations and flights of fancy from his first two drinks from the spring of Hippocrene that he fails to take the critical third drink. But today was a splendid exception.

Every now and then, something happens to remind me that I had said I was going to post regularly to this blog. While I think the number of those currently following the blog is probably in the low single digits, I nonetheless feel a certain obligation to keep my commitment, for no entirely clear reason. And so…

A little over three weeks ago, I got feedback from my online writing group on the prologue and first two chapters of what is now projected to be a five-novel series.

This, in case you were wondering, is serious progress. I mean, seriously. And yeah, the feedback I got (which was excellent, by the way; I have the greatest writing group ever) immediately made me set aside what I had written and start reconceptualizing the plan for my first novel, which I’m sure was not what they had been hoping for. But it’s what I needed, and even (kind of) what I had wanted. And I have, in fact, been working on that reconceptualization, and hope to be ready to resume drafting again relatively soon. “Relatively” being, you know, a relative term. Whatever.

My first novel, I’ve become increasingly aware, happened largely by accident. I didn’t know the things I had done right, let alone how to make them happen again. Heck, I didn’t even know that I needed to make them happen again.

After the publication of No Going Back in the fall of 2009 and my following year’s sabbatical from serious creative writing, I spent about the next three years in a variety of failed attempts to make the magic happen again. Failed — but hardly valueless, as I think they taught me several methods that don’t work for me as a writer, and may have now helped me find an approach with the potential to actually get me somewhere. (Notice all the qualifications in that last sentence?)

I’ll start with the accumulated negative lessons of my writing career to date. So here they are, in no particular order — Jonathan’s recipes for writing failure™:

Writing without knowing where the story is going, who the characters are, and what incidents I want to include
Writing from a rigid outline
Pushing myself to draft before I feel ready
Writing poorly and then planning to improve it later
Working backward from a schedule with due dates
Writing a story with insufficient conflict, in the hope that readers will overlook the absence
Not doing any writing at all (i.e., “waiting for the muse to strike”)

And now for the positive practices — the things I think/hope may lead to writing succcess for me:

Thinking ahead while planning for flexibility during the actual writing
“Stocking the pantry” by spending time in advance on worldbuilding, cool details, incidents, character background, etc.
Doing the best job I can during the initial drafting, and going back to fix things as needed when I decide that I got something wrong
Mixing it up by moving flexibly between drafting, brainstorming, worldbuilding, and research, and by jumping around to other scenes when I get tired of working on one scene
Backing off on when it feels like I’m starting to force things. This may mean switching to a different writing, going on a walk, or doing something completely different for a while.
Trusting my instincts on story elements and details where I think more work is needed
Putting in time every day, ideally several times a day — in preference to planning on getting a lot done during big chunks of time

So far, it seems to be working. The chapters I produced for my writing group were good — and I have some ideas about how they can be made better. Meanwhile, it feels like my pantry for slowly filling up, so that I have more of an idea of where the story is going and can make informed strategic decisions about what to put where. My goal: to be back to drafting again before Christmas.