The Isle of Loathing

Right now I don't just mildly dislike my current WIP, I loathe it with every fibre of my being. I'm about two-thirds through the second (big) round of edits on My Grape Wedding. Every word I have written sounds trite. The dialogue is lifeless. The scenes are pointless. The description (even my beloved food porn) is repetitive. Why did I ever think I could write a book?

My inner critic tells me a million times a day that I should save myself and my readers the agony and just bin the entire project. I have so many other things I want to write besides this tired old WIP. I hear their siren's song...More brilliant things. Easier things. Effortless things.

My writing ship has run aground the Isle of Loathing.

I've been here before. In fact, in the past three and a half years I've been here THREE TIMES before. When I begin a new writing project I always think I can avoid this place, but in fact I had to do my penance here with every book I wrote and published.

I can almost set my watch by it now. I always end up here between half and two thirds of my way through the second edit.

For a decade before I published my first book I never explored what was on or beyond the Isle of Loathing. In those ten years I began eight manuscripts and shortly after being shipwrecked on this ghastly place, I would always alight to a new, shiny story idea, only to be surprised and dismayed when I hit I inevitably hit the Isle of Loathing once again. As a result, despite a regular writing practice I didn't finish or publish anything for ten long years.

Then, I decided to become a finisher.

Being a finisher, as it turns out, means getting out and exploring the Island and figuring out how to get off.

Surviving and escaping the Isle of Loathing isn't complicated. It is comprised of two steps:

1. Embracing the Suck
2. Finishing your current project

Embracing the Suck means that you accept the Isle of Loathing as part of your writing journey, and almost learn to relish its fetid air and polluted beaches. This is the point in your writing when you get up close and personal with one of a writer's most valuable assets - grit. You will have to dig deep, but you will also begin to take a perverse pleasure in knowing that you can dig deep. The Isle of Loathing is going to suck, but it is not going to stop you from writing. No sir.

Finishing your current project is also pretty simple. It means you continue writing, but do not jump ship to another project until you have completely finished (for me this means hitting that "publish" button) your current WIP.

If you just keep doing this every day you will find eventually a kind tide will wash in and free your boat. You will escape (at least until your next WIP). Then, you'll begin to find some bits in your MS that make you laugh out loud. You'll discover that you actually handled a scene quite effectively. Readers will thank you for writing your book.

All of that will make your temporary purgatory on the Isle of Loathing worth it. Feel the loathing, but finish anyway.

On Panic Attacks and Creativity...

I had a humdinger of a panic attack last Wednesday. Many readers ask me after reading My Grape Escape and My Grape Village whether I still get them. Short and honest answer - yes, as last Wednesday proves, I certainly do.

I no longer waste precious time and energy trying to eliminate panic attacks from my life. I have been having them, after all, at random intervals since my mid-teens. They come. They go. They are always epically unpleasant and unwelcome.

I no longer believe they happen for a reason. I have come to the conclusion that searching for triggers or reasons for my panic attacks is a colossal waste of time.

On Wednesday, I was just sitting on the couch talking to a friend on the phone when my heart started beating faster than usual. The anxious part of my brain seized on this and started going, "Why is your heart beating faster? Something must be wrong! Redalertredalertredalert!!!"

Within three minutes my hands were shaking and my mind was spinning in that hellish anxiety vortex, making note of every uncomfortable physical sensation, amplifying it by approximately a million, and creating a logical case for my imminent demise (or worse yet, being trapped in a situation I can't control aka Just Kill Me Now).

Even though I consider myself a writer, I find myself at a loss for words when I try to describe the intensity and sheer terror of a panic attack to anyone who has not experienced one before. Conversely, when I talk about panic attacks with people who have experienced them, words are not necessary. I can just tell by looking in their eyes that they get it.

Even though I hate them I have come to a place of acceptance that they stem from a glitch in the way my brain is wired. I think we ALL have glitches in how our brain is wired. Some people have the depression glitch, some people have the jealousy glitch, some people have the fear-of-intimacy glitch...as for my brain, I suspect my panic attack glitch is the same or closely related to the part of my brain that allows me to imagine and write.

I am no longer ashamed of my anxiety. Indeed I think the stigma around mental health is one of the most corrosive forces in existence. However, I certainly don't want to feed my anxiety by treating it like the most exotic, fascinating animal in my own personal zoo either. I think my creativity, love for Star Wars, and humour are all vastly more interesting than my anxiety. Still, panic attacks are part of my emotional hard-wiring and chances are I will most likely have to co-exist with them for the rest of my life.

Something interesting, though, has been happening in the midst of my panic attacks since I began taking my writing and creativity seriously. In the middle of my Wednesday anxiety roller coaster ride, in the midst of my shaking hands and my pounding heart and my spinning head full of thoughts of certain and imminent doom, another little voice popped up. I like to think of this particular voice as the voice of my creative self.

"Remember Tillly?" it whispered to me (Tilly is the protagonist in my paranormal romance - she doesn't suffer from anxiety disorder but she does experience plenty of well-warranted fear). "You have to remember how you are feeling right now. How exactly is your heart pounding? What muscles are contracting in your chest so it feels like you cannot take a full breath? What is making you so viscerally uncomfortable right now? You have to make note and remember so that you can depict Tilly's fear more effectively."

One of the things that I am trying to learn through my mediation practice is to create some distance between myself and my thoughts and physical sensations that are always, even though they never feel like it at the time, transitory. Meditation encourages us to be curious about our thoughts and feelings without judging them.

Creativity does the same thing. By looking at my panic attack-y feelings and thoughts as a potential writer hoping to harvest them for future use, I create some much-needed space between myself and the deeply uncomfortable sensations my crocodile brain is creating for me.

The sensations are still wretched, but having curiosity about them brings a glimmer of transcendence. And then, when I actually use the material, which I always do sooner or later, the circle is complete. I have used my own misery to do a better job of writing and to hopefully make others who have felt profound visceral fear (and who hasn't?) feel less alone.

In other words, for people who have managed to carve out a creative outlet for themselves, even the really, really bad stuff is useful. Through our creativity we make even the unwanted and the uninvited serve a purpose. As I have said before, IT'S ALL MATERIAL.

I am not a subscriber to the belief that bad things happen for a reason, but I DO believe that we can choose to give even the yuckiest things meaning. This ability, in fact, is one of the things that makes us uniquely human.

Creativity won't make my panic attacks disappear for good (godammit), but it does make them slightly easier to cope with, and remains one of the most best ways for me to render useful something that is inherently useless.

What's With the STAR WARS Nerdgasm?

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Many of my friends, even those close to me, confess from time to time that they find it odd I get so geeky about Star Wars.

I never fail to be surprised by this question because: a) duh. It's STAR WARS! and, b) do I come across as some sort of high brow intellectual or something?

The latter concept makes chuckle because it has always been clear to me that I am a nerd at heart. I get unaccountably excited by odd, random things, I spend so much time in my own head that I usually walk around with demented hair and stains on my clothes, and there is nothing that bores me more than being stranded in the middle of an intellectual circle-jerk discussion about cutting edge literary fiction or cryptic films.

Anyway, suffice to say my love for Star Wars goes very, very deep. My first encounter with Han, Leia, and Luke was one of the most profound spiritual awakenings of my life.

It was 1977. I was five years old. My Dad, who was never one for going to the movies, decreed that he was going to take my older sister Suzanne and me to see this new film that everyone was raving about. It was called "Star Something".

I was immediately suspicious. "Is it a cartoon?" I demanded.

"No. It's a real grown-up movie," he said, as if this was a good thing.

No thanks. Anything that wasn't a cartoon held zero interest for me. Besides, by the wise old age of five I’d already figured out that grown-ups found boring things riveting, such as conversations about mortgages and the optimal shade for shag carpeting.

How exactly my father managed to drag me to the Odeon movie theater in downtown Victoria is now lost in the mists of time, but I do remember feeling put-upon as I flipped down my movie seat. My Dad reached in his coat pockets and pulled out three full size Mars bars, one for each of us.

"Isn't it funny?" he said. "We're going to watch a movie about space and and we're eating MARS bars!"

I knew the chocolate bars were a peace offering, but I was still dreading the movie. Also, it was about space. I hated watching the documentaries about space on PBS with my parents. They never failed to leave me fretful about a meteor falling out of the sky and squashing me. Space. No cartoons. A grown-up movie? I chomped resentfully on my galactic-sized Mars bar.

The lights dimmed and the screen filled with a weird sort of writing that slid backwards instead of side to side the way writing was supposed to. Besides, I couldn't read yet. What if the whole movie was just words on a screen? That would be the kind of useless thing that grown-ups would enjoy, I thought bitterly to myself.

Then the writing disappeared and the screen filled with a battle on a star ship, and R2-D2, and C3-PO, and Princess Leia. Hey...was that beautiful lady really talking back to those evil men dressed in black? Was that a lazer gun she was shooting?

And I was gone.

Me as I knew myself up until that point vanished like the planet of Alderaan. I wasn't just watching this movie, I was living it. I sat motionless, plastered against the back of my seat with the centrifugal force of the story, the half-eaten Mars bar dropped, forgotten, on my lap.

Good vs. Evil. A trio of heroes who were funny, brave, and eventually, friends. Darth Vader who made me want to pee my pants every time he breathed...

I had not know this was possible. I had not known that through a story I could actually live a different life for a while - a life that was more vivid and more real than my own. By the time the Millennium Falcon swooped in with Han at the helm to shoot away Darth Vadar so Luke could take his bull's eye aim at the Death Star exhaust vent, I thought my heart was going to explode.

What was this magic that could transport me to another time and place more effectively than a time machine and a tele-transporter all wrapped up into one?

When the medal award ceremony was over and the movie's credits rolled I stayed glued to my chair, as did Suzanne and my Dad.

Finally the lights came back on. My Dad turned to me. "So? What did you think?"

I shook my head, mute. No words. There were no words.

He looked down at my lap. "You didn't finish your Mars bar."

I hadn't. I actually threw it in the garbage can on our way out of the theater as I was still too deep in my walking Star Wars daydream to do anything as pedestrian as eating.

Up until then I hadn't known such a magic existed, but I knew it was something I wanted and, more than that, needed in my life. 

It wasn't until I was older that I learned the name for The Force that inspires me just as much at age forty-six as it did when I was a five year old sitting in a darkened movie theatre.

That Force is storytelling. Also, I bought myself a laser-gun.