I’m A Writer (No, Really): The Problem with “Aspiring"

by Paul Krueger

One of the cool things about my adopted home of Los Angeles is that everyone here’s got a secret identity. That waitress over there? Right now, she’s waiting to hear from her agent about that Scorsese feature she got called back for. The guy on the other end of your tech support call? He’s been putting short films up on YouTube for years, and in a few months one of them is going to be absolutely everywhere. And me? I’m a writer.

I used to garnish that introduction with a, “No, really,” at parties, when the people I was talking to would barely stop themselves from rolling their eyes. Not that I can blame them; I’m sure by now they’ve met very few writers, but plenty of “writers.” It’s a frustration we all run into: we practice a craft, take it seriously, spend hours a day perfecting our technique, and some jackass with a copy of Word she hasn’t touched in years gets to saunter on up next to us and call us her peer if she feels like it...and there’s nothing we can do to contradict her.

But if you ask me, that’s kind of what’s great about writing.

Back when I first started publicly labeling myself a writer, I attached a label to that label: “aspiring.” It was how I hedged my bets: I could float the writer thing out there in the hope that people would take me seriously, then hide behind my semantics shield when they inevitably didn’t. But looking back on it, I think calling myself an “aspiring” writer was one of the first and most persistent mistakes I made when I was starting out. Fortunately, though, it was also one of the most easily corrected. And my solution is this: if you’re writing--really writing, not just talking about it--you’re not aspiring.

One of the turning points in my relationship with my work was during a phone conversation with my dad. I’d just moved to LA, and was spending my days digging for jobs and writing as fast as my fingers would let me. And that particular afternoon, a spate of fresh rejections had rolled in for the novel I’d been trotting around then. So by the time my dad got to me, I was in a fine, fine mood.

“What the hell has it all been for?” I said to him, except I totally didn’t say ‘hell.’ “All this work I’m doing...it’s not going anywhere. It doesn’t mean anything.”

My dad immediately said, “That’s not true.” When I reacted with characteristic incredulity, he continued: “All the writing you do is work, and you’re not going to get anywhere unless you do it. It matters. It means something.”

I stopped calling myself an aspiring writer after that phone call.

I’ve sat through plenty of charlatans prattling on about the Great American Novel percolating between their ears, if they could just find the time or the inspiration to write the thing. When I was younger, I resented them. They made me feel like I had to apologize for and explain away the thing I loved, and how dare they. Now, though, I’ve come to a new understanding. I write, and I know I write, and that’s enough. I don’t have to prove anything, and neither do you. Your words are all the proof you need. If you’ve got those to offer up, then congratulations. You’re a writer.

And of course, there are still plenty of things you can aspire to be: a professional. A bestseller.

Or perhaps loftiest of all: a good writer.

So what do you think, guys? Am I onto something? Am I full of it? Take to the comments section and vent your spleen!

Paul Krueger wrote the upcoming NA urban fantasy, The Devil's Water Dictionary (Quirk Books, 2016). His short fiction has appeared in the 2014 Sword & Laser Anthology, Noir Riot vol. 1, and in his copy of Microsoft Word. You're most likely to find him on Twitter, where he's probably putting off something important.

Write What You Don't Know: The Art of Literary Cross-Training

by Paul Krueger

[My esteemed colleagues here on FTWA have previously covered the topic of creative cross-training in these informative posts here. Today, I'm offering up my own experience with the phenomenon.]

I’m not purely a novelist. Prose has always been my most comfortable home, but about once a year, I’ll suddenly find myself thinking in terms of scenes or verses instead of chapters. I always end up wandering back into my copy of MS Word (yes, I’m a serf who doesn’t use Scrivener; COME AT ME, BRO), but every sabbatical from prose has actually made me a stronger prose writer.

I studied screenwriting in college. My school didn’t have a screenwriting program, so I MacGyvered one together by taking a Communications major, a Creative Writing minor, and spackling them together with a healthy helping of parental disappointment. For three years, everything I wrote was in present tense, twelve-point Courier New. But one day, I got an idea too big for a screenplay. I realized that for the first time in forever, I had a novel rattling around upstairs. And when you’ve got an Athena sitting pretty up in your head, you’ve got two choices: let her spring out, or try to stop her and immediately fail, because she’s the goddess of war and you are but her feeble mortal shell.

I let her out.

To my surprise, this attempt at novel-ing went far smoother than any of my others. But I was able to pinpoint the reason right away. Screenplays are, by nature, incomplete works of art. They’re skeletons upon which the bones of artistic direction, production design, and unwelcome studio meddling can be hung like California-tanned flesh. So it stands to reason that anyone who wants to write a screenplay worth a damn has to know their story structure cold.

(Which isn’t to say that a novelist shouldn’t, but a novelist also has other tricks they can fall back on. A screenwriter’s main tricks are Joseph Campbell and a bunch of guys who say all the same things he did.)

So there I was, knowing my story structure cold. And once I’d opened my brain to the idea that storytelling principles could be refined in one art form and then applied to another, I found myself casting about for every other trick I’d picked up. My semester in a poetry workshop taught me how to make every sentence of my new project shine. My experiments with stage drama keyed me into character voices, which helped me bring even the most incidental spear-carrier to life on the page. Even a radio play I’d once written proved instructive. In that form, I only had a single sense to convey my ideas with. Knowing what it was like to have no sensory information made me that much more thoughtful in how I doled it out to the reader.

There’s no better practice for writing a novel than writing a novel, but writing almost everything else first shifted my mental feng shui for the better. Drafting that project was like being Daniel LaRusso at the moment he realized all his house chores had made him black belt material. I saw small but significant improvements in my technique that I don’t think I could’ve ever achieved if I’d stuck to prose alone. Years of hard-earned wisdom from so many different crafts coalesced into a single work, then calcified from a draft into a manuscript. It was, without a doubt, the single best thing I’d written up until that point.

It was summarily rejected by seventy-eight agents, and cheerfully gathers digital dust on my hard drive today.

But conveniently enough for the purposes of this narrative, right next to it in my trunk folder is another document. That other document is dated to the day I received both my Calls: the one telling me I had an agent, and the one telling me my newest manuscript was going to be a book. It’s the document I created to celebrate those Calls, because I didn’t know how else to celebrate a deal except by writing something.

It’s a TV pilot. And it took me to school.

Are there non-prose pursuits that have given you insight into prose writing? Of course there are! So why don't you share them in the comments below, eh? C'mon. You know you want to.

Paul Krueger wrote the upcoming NA urban fantasy, The Devil's Water Dictionary (Quirk Books, 2016). His short fiction has appeared in the 2014 Sword & Laser Anthology, Noir Riot vol. 1, and in his copy of Microsoft Word. You're most likely to find him on Twitter, where he's probably putting off something important.

PENCILS DOWN: Finding Your Center In A Post-Project World

by Paul Krueger

Last week, I hit SAVE on the last developmental draft of my book and sent it screaming for my editrix’s inbox like the literary cruise missile it is.  It was the third draft I’d completed this year, but that did nothing to diminish the thrill.

So right now, I’m still high on post-draft fumes.  I’ve dived into my Netflix to-do list with gusto, and I’ve begun re-establishing contact with my friends to remind them that I, in fact, exist.  But those fumes are about to run dry, and I’ll be left sitting here and wondering what the hell to do with my hands.

So before my end-of-The Graduate mood sets in, I’m going to take a moment to highlight the best way to keep yourself sane between projects.

Don’t Write Anything.

If you’re like me, your brain’s constantly overflowing with ideas you can’t wait to get on paper.  If we’re being honest, you probably won’t live long enough to use every idea you’ve got now, let alone the ones you’ll get down the line.  So now that this Athena has sprung from your head and onto your copy of Scrivener, you’re probably eager to get to the next one in line.

Yeah, don’t do that.

The fact is, you just ran a freaking marathon.  And you know what happened to the first person who ever ran a marathon?  He died right when he finished, using his last breath to christen a nascent sporting goods corporation.  You, presumably, have lived through your mental marathon, but you know what’s a great way to make yourself keel over and mentally die?  Attempting another, right away.  Don’t be afraid to take a breath.  Or two.  Or however many you take in the span of a month.

Ah, but then the anxiety starts to set in, doesn’t it?  You’ve had this parasite perched in your brainpan for the past however long, and all of a sudden you don’t remember quite how to function without it leeching away your idle thoughts.  You’re used to feeling productive, and every second you’re not making something, you feel a creeping sense of Puritanical guilt over it.  Or you’re busy resenting a stranger on the internet, because he seems to be making an awful lot of assumptions about how your mind works.

But on the off-chance you are, in fact, like me, I have a second piece of advice:

Do Literally Anything Else.

The first time I finished a novel, I took up carpentry.  Last time, I flew to Chicago and spent a weekend in my friend’s basement recording an album.  Right now I’m failing very hard at drawing, and loving every moment of it.  Next time, I might pick up a dead language.  I might get back into fencing.  I might take up traveling from one small town to another, solving mysteries and unmasking “ghosts” that were really just cover-ups of shady land deals.  The point is, I’m doing something other than the thing that just wrung my brain within an inch of its life.

But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t counting down the days until I could dive back in.

Paul Krueger is the author of the NA urban fantasy The Devil's Water Dictionary (Quirk Books, 2015). His short fiction has appeared in the 2013 Sword & Laser Anthology, and also in his copy of Microsoft Word. You're most likely to find him on Twitter, where he's probably putting off something important.