The Tale of the LizardBrain

I’m terrifically late on this week’s writing. Things are really busy at work and I’ve been putting in lots of hours, so that’s been a contributor. The commute doesn’t help, leading to days where we get up at 6am (when it’s dark) and getting home at 6-6:30pm (when it’s dark). Then dinner, whatever chores that need to be done and then it’s 8pm and I finally get an hour or maybe two to do what I want and what I want to do is NOT have to think. All that leads to the NOT writing.

I have friends (or at least one friend) participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – http://www.nanowrimo.org). The goal is audacious: Write an entire novel, from scratch, at least 50,000 words, in one month. My friend Duncan will probably write in the neighborhood of 100,000 words in the month. Doing a little math, that’s about 1600 words each and every day of the month. But, say we take off a weekend day for break, that’s 2000 words for 25 days, 2500 if you want to take off the entire weekend. Unless you’re really, really prolific, that’s still a couple of hours of writing, assuming you spend that entire time writing and not editing or thinking or plotting what happens next.

I look at NaNoWriMo and I run aground quickly on two factors:

1. I’m not convinced I have a 50k word story to tell. I know that some novelists have a pretty strong outline in mind capturing what happens in their stories before they ever write. Others have a general notion what the beats are and where they’re going to end up and they just kind of go along for the ride. Both of those paths seem very, very scary for me.
2. I don’t know if I’m disciplined enough to write those 2000 words a day for a month. I would need that clear notion of what I’m writing and I’d need to set aside those two hours (call it one to three hours per day). And, frankly, right now my life doesn’t have three hours every day of the week for an entire month. Part of it is my own lack of discipline, I know, but part of it is that I’m simply brain-tired at the end of the day. That is not the time most conducive to writing anything, let alone anything of quality or complexity.

I did a quick check on how I’m doing in this year of writing and by the time I complete this exercise at the end of the year, I’ll have somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words written. According to my expert (one guy on the Internet), 100k words is ballpark for a novel. Now, that presumes that all 100k words are good words. I have a sense a good editor would chop my 100k words by at least a third for a variety of offenses from simply being boring to rambling or duplications or simply being unnecessary. Still, that’s more than I’ve written before, so that’s an accomplishment.

I was listening to a podcast (my commute affords me a couple hours a day, if I’m not commuting with my wife, to listen to podcasts – but, my wife is better company) and a comedian was talking about how he generates his material and he was making the point that unless you get out and live life, you have nothing to talk about besides, in his case, the minutiae that makes up the life of a comedian – clubs, audiences, laundry, whatever. Not exactly the funniest of stuff. His point was that you have to get out there and live life because that generates material or at least the opportunity for material.

Frankly, for at least half this year, I’ve been so buried in my job that we really haven’t done much to generate real material worth writing about, though I do try to do so when the opportunity presents.

When I started this project at the beginning of the year, I sat down and brainstormed some possible subjects to write about that sounded interesting to me or I thought might be worth writing about. But, I have to be careful because not every story I might tell, either about me or my family or my kids, is something I want out on the Internet. That’s true for me as it’s no doubt true for anyone else in the world.

Another podcast I heard was interviewing columnist Dan Savage. He happens to write a sex column. He was explaining why he thought he was able to keep writing the sex column after so many years when many that started doing similar things around the same time have stopped. He said that the differentiator for him was that very early on he decided he wasn’t going to write about his own sex life because, really, how long could you do that before you came off as forced or artificial. Instead, he uses the letters that are sent to him by readers as fodder for material. That’s a bottomless supply, so long as he has readers. Certainly my life is neither interesting enough nor eventful enough to provide a constant fodder for writing. There are certainly weeks where the most exciting thing might be the wonderfully quiet day I spent with my wife where we did nothing, including me writing. That makes for some pretty boring writing, even for me.

I could write about current events or a news story that caught my attention, but I’m pretty convinced that my opinion is neither unique enough nor interesting enough to share most of the time.

Yet another video podcast by the always worthwhile Ze Frank was about some techniques he’s developed over the years to get “unstuck”. In it he talks about how he starts with an idea and one of his first steps is to determine the “Specificity of the Observation” and one of his first steps is to think about all the things about a subject matter that would be obvious to another person making a video (or writing) about that subject and write them all down and then throws the list away. Clearly, his intent is to eliminate the cliched and the obvious and try to determine a unique and hopefully interesting viewpoint. That’s a lesson I should work on taking to heart. If you don’t have something interesting, something unique, to say on a subject, why bother saying it? So, until I figure out how to do that, I’m unlikely to spend time talking about something like current events. By the same token, I’m self-aware enough to know that a fair bit of my writing is either obvious and/or not particularly deep. That’s something, I would hope, that comes with time and practice and taking advice like Ze’s and figuring out how to incorporate it in to my own practice.

At this moment, I’m writing this at 7:30pm on a Friday evening. To accomplish that, two things happened: first, my wife is out for the evening leaving me and the dogs here at the house and, second, the upper part of my brain told the tired lower part of my brain that there would be no computer or television until and unless I write this. So far the upper part of my brain is winning and I’m still writing, but that LizardBrain, that lower and less evolved part, is sneaky. It comes from the wants and the emotion, not from the reasoning part, not from the part that will accept delayed gratification. LizardBrain says, “You’re tired! It’s okay to take a break! What does it matter if it gets done tonight or tomorrow night? You can just do it tomorrow morning when you’re fresh! It’ll be better then anyway! No one reads these things anyway, so why bother. Wouldn’t it be more fun to play that game or watch that show you’re been wanting to catch up on?” LizardBrain sucks.

According to my calendar, I have seven more weeks that I’ve committed to write something. That’s doable, right? Even if I don’t quite always get it out there by Sunday evening like my goal, maybe it gets out later in the week, it’s okay! Yeah, that’s LizardBrain trying to be lazy and get what it wants. Damn LizardBrain.