Allowing Yourself to Suck

Q. How do you deal with writers’ block?
A. I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90% of my first drafts (the only exception to this rule so far has been Will Grayson, Will Grayson) so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90% chance I’m just gonna delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating.

I also like to remind myself of something my dad said to me once in re. writers’ block: “Coal miners don’t get coal miners’ block.”
-John Green

Oh John Green, Thank you for giving me a motto to live by through all of November and the craziness that is NaNoWriMo. This piece of advice struck me, since I firmly believe that my writing is the suckiest of all suck. It's the Suck Queen of the Suck Empire. But I've never thought about giving myself permission to be a sucky writer.

In the months since discovering the Vlogbrothers, John Green has intrigued me particularly. I've never found an author that communicates with their readers so much. While communicating with his brother through YouTube videos, he also lets his fans know him as a person. I know a lot more about him than I do about some of my all time favorite authors, and it's because of this relationship that he creates with his readers that these books are so amazing. Well that, and John Green is clearly a genius. Or insane.

John Green. Author. Nerdfighter. Youtuber. Person insane enough to sign all first edition copies of his new book The Fault in Our Stars (that you can buy here). Thank you for reminding me that it's okay to allow myself to suck.

(Another thing that is going to get me through NaNoWriMo? This song.)

That all being said, with NaNoWriMo just around the corner, I'm using this piece of advice as my personal motto for the month of November. I may not finish NaNoWriMo, but I'm definitely going to try, and going to give myself permission to suck at it. Which won't be too difficult.

If you want follow my progress, feel free to add me as a writing buddy here.

Audio Books

(Clearly the whole 10 day meme thing didn't work... oh well)

Do you ever have those moments when you're reading/listening to a book, and your suddenly reminded why you love that book?

I had that last week, while listening to my audio copy of the book Stardust. If you've never read Stardust, you need to. Neil Gaiman describes the book perfectly. It's a fairy tale, for adults. Don't worry, its not a 'dirty' fairy tale, just one that hosts a main male and female character over the age of 18.

At the end of the audio book, is an interview with the writer (and narrator in this case) of Stardust, Neil Gaiman.

"For me the big magic of audio books, is the relationship that the listener ends up having with everything. You can't that thing you do in a book, where you read a sentence, realize the entire passage is description and go 'Okay, yeah we get it. The castle was big.' And your eye slides down to the next line of dialogue. You sort of glide over it I think. You don't, you're going to get every word of it. And its a wonderfully different reading experience."

I admit, I'm a person who does this. I tend to skip over paragraphs if I can tell that it's all description (it's especially bad in the Lord of the Rings books). Which is why when it comes to fantasy books, I think I may like them more if I hear them in audio format, before trying pick them up and read them straight.

What I don't like, is people telling me that because I'm listening to them, that I'm not "reading" them. I completely disagree. I'm not saying that you should listen to books rather than reading them. I do, however, think that Neil Gaiman has a point. Because I wasn't able to skip over the highly descriptive paragraphs of Stardust, I was able to absorb more and could probably tell you more about the book.

For me audio books aren't just about having something on as background noise, its about a different way to experience the books. Especially in the case of Stardust. Having this book be read by the author himself, makes it so that when you imagine everything happening in your head, you're doing it with emphasis on the parts that he meant for you to in the book. You're hearing exactly as he has written it.

What it comes down to, is that as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how you're reading, or what you're reading. Just that you're reading.