Back in college I took a creative writing class. I expected it to be a novel writing class that would allow me to really start to hone my craft. I found out on the first day class that the course catalogue was a bit misleading. Yes, it was a creative writing class but we would be writing poetry. All freaking term.
I hate writing poetry.
I really do. Not because I’m bad at it. I’m actually pretty good — and no, I’m not exaggerating my skills. I won a poetry contest in 2013 with a haiku. I simply hate writing poetry. I also hate being forced to listen to poetry that a Vogon would be proud of. One of my classmates, a 40-year-old woman with no grasp for prose, only wrote about one thing the entire term:
It was like being imprisoned in a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.
Now what does this have to do with the dark side of my brain? Well, other than the murderous rage that rose every time this woman read her work aloud in class, if I didn’t I want to inflict the same torture on my readers I needed to make sure that everything wasn’t rainbows and kittens.
There’s nothing wrong with rainbows, or kittens, or unicorns, or even Trapper Keepers, and by themselves none of them are torturous. But when a tale is nothing but fluffy Trapper Keeper unicorns frolicking in a rainbow then there’s a problem. Once the LSD wears off it’s easy to see that this is why the “torture your characters” rule exists. Not only is a story more believable when there’s a major conflict, it’s more palatable too.
However, becoming comfortable doing all sorts of horrible nasty things to your characters can make you feel like a sociopath. That’s normal. And for heaven’s sake don’t shy away from it. Embrace your dark side, your inner Emperor Palpatine. Not only will it help you take your stories to the next level (by amping up the danger in new and interesting ways) but you can also get a better understanding of yourself. It can be a therapy of sorts. And after unicorn poetry we could all use some therapy.
When I was approached to write a guest post about how my life experiences have shaped my writing, I almost said no. Not because I’ve never written a post before (I write fiction, not blog about real stuff—especially not about myself), nor because I don’t have a life…or experiences. It’s because some things are too painful and raw to think about, let alone display for the world. But if I’m going to move people with my writing, I have to be willing to go there.
My current work in progress is about a genetically engineered, genderless sixteen-year-old known only as 31 who struggles to choose a gender and find love. But when 31 breaks the selection process, 31 is forced to decide which of them will be recycled into genetic waste and which will live to become the future leaders of society.
I’ve heard dozens of times that it’s best to write what you know. I’ve never been genderless, but some of my most painful memories relate to my own gender identity struggles. I’ve learned to use those memories and experiences to fuel my writing.
Looking back, I still cannot pinpoint the exact reason I decided to play football–the most male dominated sport there is. It wasn’t because I had a passion for football exactly (though I’ve always had a soft spot for contact sports) or wanted to make a point. Looking back, I think I was trying to understand myself. Understand a side of me I had never explored, something inside me that playing football opened up.
In the late 90s, girls playing football were unheard of—especially in high school, on the varsity team, in a southern town like Norman, OK where football is sacred. My team hated me. Even those that I hung out with and were my “friends” harassed me on the field. In fact, sometimes they were the most verbally abusive. I was even dating one of my teammates for nearly a year before he would outwardly admit it to anyone (months after the season had ended). He was too embarrassed to even hold my hand. Looking back, he was a straight up idiot. They all were.
I wish it stopped there. The team was also physically abusive and NOT ONCE did any of them stand up for me, and tell the others to back off. They had such a problem with a female doing something that in their minds was purely for males that not one of them stood up to be a man. Any chance they had, they would take cheap shots. I don’t mean a punch to the arm. They would get in my blind spot and full out tackle me while I was standing in line or walking to the next station. Slamming me onto the concrete or against the fence must have scored them double points. Recently in the news, there has been a lot of discussion regarding helmet collisions. For me, that was a daily thing. The guys would go out of their way to hit my head. And it’s not like they would do this behind the coaches’ backs. The coaches encouraged it.
It started as headaches. Sometimes the pain was so intense that I thought my head would explode. My neck and back were messed up, too. One time, when one of the guys was going for what I can only guess was a curb stomp, I tried to get out of the way and his cleat scraped everything off my shin down to the bone. Instead of helping, the coaches yelled at me, the trainers refused to help. I couldn’t even stand. Finally, my body recovered from the shock and I wrapped it up myself and finished practice. Not long after, one of the guys cheap-tackled me, aiming his helmet at my face. He caught my chin and split it open. The coaches and trainers wouldn’t help but couldn’t ignore the fact that my white uniform was now a sheet of red. I went to the emergency room. The doctor pressed and I finally divulged my symptoms. After some scans, he told me that I’d had multiple concussions and if I continued playing, I could get paralyzed. I’m not a quitter and getting run off was the last thing I ever wanted. It felt like they won. It still feels that way, sometimes.
It wasn’t like I was a total butch or anything. The same year I played football, I won Miss Teenage Oklahoma, was a national finalist and won Miss National Congeniality—very accepted by the girls. You’d think that having Miss Oklahoma in the school would turn some heads but I’d already been labeled as an outcast. I won national dance and cheer titles and went on to be a cheerleader in college. Nothing mattered. To them, I was forever the freak who played football.
In college, I was still drawn to understand myself. I took honor’s gender studies and discovered that while I was female on the outside, I was more like a male on the inside. It made sense and I was relieved, but I didn’t know what to do with the information, didn’t know there was anything I could do. Gender fluidity wasn’t openly discussed back then.
Today, going against the norm is more acceptable. Being “different” can sometimes be “in.” Though being different for different sake is about as bad as people who conform to match everyone else’s desires until they’re unrecognizable even to themselves. With empathy comes truth that isn’t always what we want or like and it may not be what’s accepted. It’s about you being true to you.
If I help even one person to not be afraid, to be stronger, to see who they truly are, to not have to go through even a fraction of what I did, everything I’ve been through would be worth it. I’m not telling my personal story in my young adult Sci-fi novel, Smooth. Smooth is about it being okay to be different. It’s about acceptance and being open, even when you don’t understand, because you never know when you might need someone to be there for you. But most of all, it’s about being true to yourself.
It’s hard digging down to the very core of who we are, to get close enough to painful memories to use them in our writing. Find the courage to connect with the emotion of those experiences and tell your story, in your own way. I hold onto knowing that the more I can tap into that scared, determined girl and let her tell her tale, the more it makes everything worth it.
Joy Johnson bio:
Shortly after receiving her BFA and MBA, Joy Dawn Johnson worked as a project manager for more than ten years, including a stint in Baghdad, Iraq, as a government contractor. She is a member if the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and was the 2015 recipient of the Superstars Writing scholarship. Joy typically writes middle grade and young adult Sci-fi and fantasy. She will begin to query agents later this year with her current work in progress, Smooth.
Your inner muse is the voice of your experiences – both real and desired.
I think my muse went this way….
That inner muse can be elusive. It is who we blame for our writer’s block.
But there is a secret to keeping that muse away from the straight jacket of silence. That secret is understanding the two truths of the inner muse which no one talks about.
Those two truths, once realized, will forever unfetter your inner muse. This month’s theme is about how life’s experiences shape what we write. We know that our experiences shape our perception and hence what we write. Experience also shapes what our inner muse reveals. But, did you know that there is a way to tap into those experiences while letting the muse do its sorting and compiling to create those aha! moments?
Tapping into our experiences happens when we’re aware of the two truths about the inner muse that no one talks about:
1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious; and
2) You may not realize what you know.
It seems that I’m stating the obvious. But without conscious awareness of these two truths, your inner muse doesn’t have permission to stay away from the straight jacket of silence.
What these two truths mean is that what inspires you to create a world and to write the story can be hidden somewhere deep inside and you don’t even know it.
Can you dig it out? Find it? Use it? Of course you can. The best way to do that is to not go looking for it. Sometimes, you’ve just got to let it happen. Sometimes you just have to be literal about being inspired. Here’s what I mean:
To be inspired means to be in spirit. That means giving your muse permission to access all that information in your head, all those observations and the situations you’ve experienced. It means letting your muse make the associations it needs to and to draw from the library of your inner knowing.
All you have to do to succeed is to trust it. Yes, trust your muse, trust what you know even if you’re not aware of it. Why? Because:
1) Inspiration isn’t always obvious
Sometimes we have an aha! moment which inspires a scene, a story even or a moment in the book. More often it comes from somewhere deep within. How often have you read what you’ve written and wondered how you knew to write that, or to word it that way, or your character has surprised you? Those are the moments when inspiration isn’t obvious and you may never figure out what inspired you to write what you did, but aren’t you glad your inner muse was working for you?
Our brain likes to make associations, find familiar in the unfamiliar, and find patterns. It sees shapes in clouds, a face in a whorl of wood, that phone number is all primes and if I add the first two numbers together…
The trick is to trust the inner muse and to trust that it’s working for you. Forcing the writing, forcing a scene, rarely works. It has to come from the characters and the situations we created and from the inner muse which understands those creations at a much more profound level than what we are sometimes aware of.
2) You may not realize what you know I’m a kid from the farm. It took a little while for me to realize that most of my stories happen in rural settings in whichever genre I’m writing. I have detail which I take for granted and other people have to research. I understand the relationship people have with the land and animals. I have planted, harvested and marketed, I have prepared and stored food for the winter and have experienced limited access to store bought foods,.
It’s the same thing with the characters we create. We tend toward the familiar, especially when it comes to relationships. That’s when patterns in our writing occur. Strong female, weak male characters or vice versa. Female characters who hate their fathers. Male characters who are emotionally deprived heroes. There are countless patterns and stereotypes we fall into because it’s subconsciously familiar in some way. It’s the material the muse has to work with.
Whether it’s settings or characters, relationships or values and ethics, our inner muse has the information of who and what we are and uses it, even if we don’t realize that’s what is happening.
So we don’t always realize what we know and even what we don’t know. But when we consciously let the muse do its work, when we become consciously aware of the work it is doing, then we can form a relationship with it that changes what we write. We can give the muse permission to explore new situations, characters and relationships. This awareness allows us to ask for help to change the pool of information the muse has to work with. In a critique group I’m in, a well published author informed us that she had become aware that she always wrote a specific father-daughter relationship into her stories and she understood why. Now she wanted to change it up.
The two truths contradict each other:
“Trust inspiration” versus “Don’t trust what it’s telling you”.
Or, so it seems at first glance. But the real axiom is:
Trust Inspiration. Understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.
We found our muse!
We, and our inner muse, are the sum total of our experiences. As writers, we’re not always aware of what we know and what we don’t know. The more we write, the more opportunity we have to understand what informs our writing and to change and expand upon that.
You know that the writing myth that says you’ve got to write a million words before you’ve got a chance to be successful? It’s not about the word count, it’s about understanding your inner muse and developing a comfortable, trustworthy relationship with it. Sometimes, it takes a million words before you realize you’re basically writing the same story, the same themes albeit in different settings and milieus. Once you realize that, you’ve hear your inner muse. Now, you can give it new fodder, inform it with new information and experiences. You can give it permission to shake it up a bit.
Will you need a million words to do this? Maybe yes. Maybe no. And remember, I used the word ‘myth’ for a reason.
Inspiration isn’t always obvious and you may not realize what you know – once these two unspoken truths are understood, your life experiences will shape your writing in ways you never imagined it could! So, trust Inspiration and understand what it’s telling you so that you can change it up – if you wish.
U.S. Soldiers assigned to 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division and Iraqi soldiers assigned to 8th Division Iraqi Army stage their vehicles to depart from Camp Diwaniyah, Iraq, Nov. 30, 2008, to conduct a cordon and knock operation. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Eric Harris/Released) I’ve written about my time in the U.S. Air Force a coupletimes before, and for good reason. Even one tour in a combat zone can give you more life experiences than most would really care to have. The quick recap is that I was sent to Iraq in 2004 for Operation Iraqi Freedom with the 2632 AEFTC. We were basically on loan from the Air Force to the Army and drove the guntrucks that protected the convoys. During my time over there, I was witness to danger, destruction, and death. I’ve seen the aftermath of battles, watched as mortars fell around me, and lived through experiences that could of easily taken my life.
These days the most dangerous thing I experience is driving through San Francisco on my motorcycle. While stressful in it’s own right, it’s a far cry from my time overseas. There is one thing that the experience has taught me that still holds true today. Stress is a part of life, a necessary element even. It’s stress that makes us strive to become better. It’s stress that keeps us moving when we just want to stop. Perhaps it’s the fear of failure or the need to finish a blog post before a deadline. Stress doesn’t have to be bad, it’s can just be another part of being alive. As writers, stress is another material to be molded into our work. We use it as someone does an IV of adrenaline. We turn the knob and the readers pulse starts to speed up. Turn it a little more, and they’re sweating.
Stress is powerful, yet just like the adrenaline, you have to be careful about the dosage. We’ve all heard about the soldiers who return with PTSD. I’ve personally watched friends and family deal with traumatic stress in different ways. Some pull away from the world, while others fight against it. The stories aren’t pleasant, and neither is the experience. Our readers have one benefit over the soldiers in that they can put the book down and walk away. When I was driving convoys, I was in action and alert for 10-12 hours a day. I know how draining it is. I also know the pure bliss of just being able to decompress and relax after these drives. I was lucky in that I was able to balance the stress and the joy pretty reliably. I was never truly burned out as some of my brothers at arms were. I still learned the lessons and am here with a story, and hopefully some advice, to tell.
Stress is a powerful tool in our arsenal. We can use it to keep the pages turning and the tension high. We can also abuse it and draw it out far too long and lose readers if we’re not careful. We need to provide those small moments of blissful respite from the action. The line between high tension and reward is a thin one, and should be walked carefully. The more you can build the stress in a sequence may give a larger payoff, but you risk burning people out.
My time in the military has shaped me into who I am and what I write. I draw upon that tension and discipline I learned to try to write exciting and fulfilling stories. Hopefully you haven’t had to deal with anything as stressful as this, but I think you can probably relate it to your own experiences. It’s our special power, after all. Take stories of others and elaborate. Imagine and create the future. Keep the tension high, and relax when needed.
It’s the beat of the drum that mimics the heartbeat of the reader. We write, and roar with that thunder!
