a. h.eron

File under: Department of Interesting Trivia.

it’s a bad day. life is full of bad days. life is full of tangled bedsheets and moments between reading and staring at the ceiling. life is full of pauses, of held breaths, of could-haves. life is full of mistakes, of entanglements, of bitter rants.

life is full of. i am empty and collecting dust. but life is full of something, isn’t it. it is full of spiders and halogens and lighters and laughing friends. life is full of wounds and life is full of band-aids. she sleeps half on top of me, curled against my frame. life is full of warm bodies. life is full of cold ends. life is full of getting-out-of-bed. life is full of broken ribs and life is full of fixing them.

this morning, i am okay. the coffee is made right. there’s a free hot chocolate waiting. life is full of free hot chocolates. life is full of expensive drinks. life is full of cars and waiting and music softly playing. life is full of one more chapter, of listen-to-this-podcast, of chewing off my thumbnail. life is full of hands and thighs. life is full of accidental touches and little wild mice.

what if, i realize in her bed. what if. life is just full, and that is the whole thing, and i have never felt full like this before, and it is new and unusual and making me drunk on it. life just is full. and it is full enough, and the hole in me is mostly closed up. life is full, life is full, life is all good clean chess games and all messy kissing rough. life is her skin and your hair and the sun, glorious, creeping up.

The blank page is the arch-nemesis of the writer. But it makes no sense. It’s the only time where we have the ultimate freedom to do anything we want. Shouldn’t we cherish the fresh start? A clean slate?

Well, that’s the theory. In reality, we all want to create something good. And that’s the problem.

At the beginning of a project, it’s really hard to know whether it will end up being worth anything by the end. What’s worse, we start to worry that if whatever we do in the beginning isn’t good enough, it will somehow corrupt the rest of the project, and our efforts will be futile.

The fear of failure strikes us the most when we’re staring at the blank page as if it had a message scribbled for us in the margins. ‘Make sure you don’t fuck this up.’

Once we get going, things become a lot less daunting. Suddenly, there are characters interacting with each other. The possibilities are still endless, but a little less so than when the page was blank. And that makes a huge difference.

Putting something down anchors your thinking. It creates constraints. You no longer have to come up with something perfect. Your task now is to make what you have a little better. You have to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and find new ones to fill the blanks.

The good thing about creative constraints is that you don’t have to wait until you have something to take advantage of them. You can set some constraints for yourself even before you start writing.

I’ve seen a street photographer do this brilliantly. Every time he went out to shoot, he would give himself some constraints. One time, he decided that he would only take pictures of arches – anything that he found on the streets in the shape of an arch. The next day, he would only take photos that had windows or glass in them.

Instead of running around, frantically snapping anything and everything, he would pass on all the other shots that he would’ve normally taken. This really focused his mind and forced him to come up with some incredibly creative shots as opposed to the old-people-squinting-into-the-lens staple of street photography.

Did he miss some great shots like that? Probably. But he would’ve never seen the ones he took if he let himself be distracted by all the possibilities.

Now to the big question: how can you apply this to your writing? Make decisions upfront and stick with them at least until you’ve finished the full first draft.

👉 Think about what genre is your story. Genres have all sorts of tropes and limitations that you’ll need to adhere to. For example, romance readers expect a happy ending. If you decide to write a romance, you no longer have to think about how will it end.

👉 Plunge your characters into a random situation and then work out how they solve the problem.

👉 You can even start by writing fanfic using your favourite characters and then swap them out with your original ones.

👉 Any constraints are better than nothing.

Creative constraints are a fantastic tool if you need to get unblocked or want to come up with something really creative. It may seem that setting up a bunch of constraints will limit your options, but they will set you free.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a massive Writing Analytics feature that I’ve been working on for months. It will come out next week, and I can’t wait for you to try it – it’s changing my writing life as we speak.

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Past Editions

#151: My Favourite Writing Podcasts, July 2020

#150: The Business of Making Art, July 2020

#149: All That Matters Is What You Leave on the Page, July 2020

#148: Keeping a Victory Log, June 2020

“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”

Swimming in a lake, I sense melancholia,                                                      inherent                           to the aqueous surface;                                       its murky depths chant sorrow. I can relate to the                                       loneliness, embracing the water as it embraces my form in return, movements fluid, graceful.

                                                         Telling                       the lake a tale of my heart,                                    how it came to feel apart                                  from everything else.