Tag Archives: psychology

Putting the Fun Back in Writing

March 17, 2015Bloginspiration, psychology, The creative neurotic, the creative process, writing, writing and creativityK D Grace

If I’ve promised myself anything this year it’s that I’ll write for fun. It all started out that way, back when I was a kid and wrote my first stories. It was always fun – the writing. It was always magical to sneak away into my head and spend time with the people I made up. Things got more complicated when I began to engage with the world of publishing and, by the time I’d published my first novel, I always had an agenda. There was always at least one novel or story or novella that I was contracted to do ahead of the one I was working on at the time, most often, there were several.

Something about having a full dance card always made me feel like I was a proper writer, like I was legitimate. I never said no. Never! I felt like if I ever once turned anyone down, I’d jinx my success and no one would ever ask me to write for them again. Neurotic much???

Along with my ‘writing legitimacy’ PR, marketing and social media suddenly became essentials. I damn sure wasn’t going to let a book of mine languish after I’d gone to all the effort to write it. But how much is enough PR and marketing? How involved do I need to be in social media? Where and who and how often? And then there were readings and conferences and get-togethers with other writers and readers – all things I enjoyed, all things I tried never to miss. It’s exciting to be able to share my work with other people, and I love that part of promoting.

The thing is, at some point along the line the whole experience became wrapped up in my neuroses. It all became a task I felt I had to do, what I thought was expected of me. It all became wrapped up my fear of what might happen if I said ‘no’, if I chose to take a break. Somewhere along the line there became more and more rules and less and less room for me to play. I’m not blaming anyone. I think this is a struggle all writers have. But once I finished writing Interviewing Wade, I decided that from now on I’d be writing a whole lot more for fun, that I’d be brave enough to experiment again, to play with words and ideas and stories again and to see where those experiments lead me.

If the writing is no longer fun, then it’s not worth the doing. Writing the story has been the passion of my life for as long as I can remember, and I feel extremely lucky to have had some success. I’ve had so many reasons to celebrate because of this writing journey. But success, any success, is a very dangerous threat to fun. After I’ve popped the Champaign corks, after I’ve celebrated with my friends, after I’ve flashed my latest baby all over Facebook and Twitter, when I’m lying in bed in the dark, that’s when I begin to doubt myself, doubt my success, doubt that I’m capable of the next step required to move forward. That’s a real joy-stealer, and one I battle every day, as I’m sure many writers do.

The joy of writing, for me, is in seeing the story unfold and in knowing that I’m the conduit through which it unfolds. Frankly there are times when it feels a whole lot like magic. The fun is in watching the characters surprise me on the written page, the power – my power – comes from the play of it far more than from the work of it. This is a fact, and one I MUST remember at all cost.

Lisabet Sarai wrote a wonderful article for Erotic Readers and Writers Association a couple of months ago called The First Time. The article is about the power of the first novel, and how many first novels became iconic in the body of an authors’ work. Even though those first novels are not the best writing the author will ever produce, even though on the level of the story and the characters they may not be the best, somehow they speak to the readers on a visceral level in ways that later, better crafted novels by that same author just can’t seem to manage. I thought about that for a long time and, as I work to restore the joy and the play in writing, I’ve come up with a possible theory as to why so many of those first novels are so powerful. I think it just might be because those first novels are often writers playing, experimenting, discovering their powers and just trying to see what they’re capable of and what fun they can have with that creative energy. One of my very favourite authors of all time, a goddess in the craft, Diana Gabaldon, says she wrote her stunning first novel, Outlander, for practice never imagining that it would be published!

When I wrote The Initiation of Ms Holly, I wrote it totally as a romp, as a wild raucous joy ride that I absolutely played with and had fun with. At that point I had no intention of writing another erotic romance; I was experimenting. I was having fun. That was nine novels – under two pseudonyms — multiple novellas and a gazillion short stories ago. Though it’s been a fabulous ride, I’ve had to constantly remind myself that I’m a storyteller first and foremost, and I do it for the joy of it. I do it because in my heart, I know I’m not fit to do anything else.

It’s not that I no longer have fun with what I write. There are times when the pure joy of creating a world and characters and throwing them all together to see what will happen is just about as near an ecstatic experience as it’s possible to get on a keyboard. But if there is some truth in the fact that first novels are often so good because their authors are still playing with words, still revelling in the joy of the creative process, then it seems to me that as writers, anything we can do to get ourselves back to that first novel playtime sense of creativity, we most certainly need to do.

What does that mean? What does that even look like? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that it’ll involve taking some risks, letting go of the white knuckle grip of control I’ve had on my work and my time for the past few years and seeing what happens when I’m willing to just play with it, IF I can still be willing to just play with it.

Some of that play, some of that experimentation will be coming out on my blog in the future. I learned when I wrote the serial Demon Interrupted that there were lots of ways of using my blog that were far more interesting than saying ‘here’s this book. You should read it’ – whether it’s my book or someone else’s

But if I want to connect with my readers, if they really want to know who I am, then the best thing I can do is share my words, share my creative process, share my stories. Some of you may have already guessed that I’m playing around a bit with the ‘Morphine Dreams’ and the ‘Alonso Darlington’ writings. There’ll be more playing around, and there’ll be more stories, and more experimenting. There’ll still be some ‘read my stuff’ promos and some blitzes and some really fabulous guests. But I’m reserving the right to play – on my blog as well as in the stories I write. Because play is at the centre of my creativity. It’s the place where the next story waits to unfold itself, and without that sense of fun and play what’s the point?

The Dear Diary Navel Gaze VS the Novels that Keep Me Up all Night

March 1, 2015Blogpsychology, reading, romance and action, writing processK D Grace

A huge part of being a novelist is analysing everything I read, everything I see, everything I watch on television, on YouTube, at the cinema. I do this to make myself a better writer. I do this because I need to know what works, what doesn’t, and why. Of course, what works and what doesn’t is all filtered through my own grey matter and my own life experiences, so it may not be the same for another writer, and certainly not for another reader. I find myself thinking about this analytical writers’ life most often when something really, really works, or really, really doesn’t. That isn’t to say that what doesn’t work is something I hate. That’s pretty obvious. But more often, for me, I find myself analysing the things that I walk away from feeling pretty much unaffected. If I feel meh about something then I want to know why.

I should never walk away from a good story feeling meh. In fact that’s the litmus test for me. A horrible story offers its own petty pleasures, but meh is forgettable, and forgettable is not acceptable for a novelist or a reader. We all want repeat performances of what we love most and we’re all anxious to be led to the next level beyond intimated by that experience.

Being a romance writer, it’s a given that I want chemistry, that I want love, that I want sizzle and sass. But I could have
written those things in my diary when I was a teenager, and probably would have if I hadn’t been afraid someone would find it where I hid it under my mattress and share it with all the world. Heavens, I had so many deep dark secrets at the ripe old age of sixteen, and I wrote about them … ad nauseum, always with me and my feelings at the center. Me, me, me! In essence I could boil down most of my journals as being one long multi-volume navel gaze. Oh for me it was endlessly fascinating to explore my inner workings, my inner feelings, my loves and losses and obsessive crushes, the fleeting glances, the anguished longing. But I’m pretty sure it would have been a real yawner for anyone else to read.

What I’ve discovered is that no matter how fascinating my own might be, someone else’ navel gaze is never as interesting to me. And there are plenty of romance novel navel gazes out there to be read. What I want, what I need is conflict and chaos. For romance in story to be more than a navel gaze there needs to be both. Two people dealing with conflict, two people thrown into a situation that demands something of them, that places them at risk or forces them to take a chance moves beyond the realm of the dear-diary-navel-gaze and into the realm of story.

The situation, the conflict, the action is the very best place to see how people respond to each other, the very best place
to watch them grow beyond themselves. It’s through conflict and action we learn who the characters in story really are. The Happy Ending is just that — an ending. Beyond that there may be endless navel gazing by readers, creators of fanfic, even we writers ourselves. But that’s a different animal. When I wrote my first novel, long after I’d written THE END, in my head, I was still creating new and different opportunities for my characters to gaze into each others’ eyes and to have hot sex. These were scenes that no one but me would ever know about. I still find myself doing that sometimes, and I hope that my readers will find themselves doing the same when they’ve finished one of my novels. I hope they’ll want to hang around with the characters long after THE END. But then that’s their navel gaze, their imaginations encountering my characters in ways that work for them. That means I’ve done my job in creating a story the reader doesn’t want to leave when it’s finished. In fiction, THAT’S the proper place for a navel gaze.

But the novels that keep me reading into the wee hours, the stories that I remember, that move me, the stories that I keep returning to in my head are the stories in which the hero and heroine are being acted upon by forces greater than themselves. In fact the very best stories are the stories that have a life of their own, a life which affects all that the characters do and who they become. It’s how the characters deal with conflict, and how that conflict brings them to their HEA that keeps me up all night racing toward the end even as I try to slow down to make it last.

I’m a tender critic, in all honesty. I do my best to find the good in whatever it is I read because my hat’s always off to
anyone who has had the discipline and the tenacity to see their story through to the end and get it out there to be read.
BUT I remember stories and respect stories that pull me in with an action greater and more important than two people being attracted to each other. Life is acted out in context of the people with whom we live in relationship. As writers, our characters may be actors upon a stage, but that stage can never be passive. That stage must also act upon our characters. If it doesn’t, then we’re probably really just writing in our diary or playing around inside our own heads. And that’s fine. Everyone needs a little navel-gazing. But navel-gazing is not story. While there’s a place for both, navel-gazing is not likely to keep me up all night.

New Years Resolutions Through the Back Door

January 7, 2015Blog, Inspirationcreativity, New Years resolutions, psychology, writingK D Grace

Well what do you know? Here it is the 7^th of January already! 2015 is well and truly under way, and I’ve revamped this post from the archives because it’s a post that I need to re-read for my own benefit every year, and I hope it will be something to encourage readers as well.

The gym was overflowing with New Years Resolutioners yesterday when I went to Kettle Bells class; all around the world new diets have been begun as soon as the New Year hangover wears off; people stop drinking, stop smoking, begin learning Spanish or French, people promise to take better care of themselves, spend more time with good friends, waste less time in front of the telly, read more, exercise more, write more, and the list goes on. On January 7^th the universal urge to be ‘better’ in the New Year is nearly palpable in the soggy English air.

And I’m behind somehow, as I have been for the last few years. New Years Eve passes me by in a daze and so does New Years Day, and in the midst of it all I have this vague notion that I should do something, or at least think something profound. That urge to reflect on what has been and plan how the New Year will be better is always there, but somehow ends up subsumed in the immediacy of everything else going on as the old year hear hammers down to the wire and the new one barrels down on me. Hope and excitement at new beginnings is so much a part of our human nature that the end of a year and the beginning of another one can’t help but be the time when we anticipate, plan change, and dare to dream of what wonderful things we can bring about in the next year. In fact there’s a heady sense of power in the New Year. I think it’s the time when we’re most confident that we can make changes, that we really do have power over our own lives. It’s the time when we’re most proactive toward those changes, those visions of the people we want to be. I think that’s because it’s the one time of the year when there is a clear delineation between what has been and what will be – even if it is really rather arbitrary.

Before I actually began to sell my writing, back when I dreamed of that first publication, back when there seemed to be a lot more time for navel gazing than is now, I was a consummate journaler. I filled pages and pages, notebooks and notebooks full of my reflections, ruminations and navel gazes. And nothing took more time and energy than the end of the year entry, in which I reflected on how I did on the year’s resolutions and planned my resolutions for the next. This was a process that often began late in November with me reading back through journals, taking notes, tracing down some of what I’d been reading during that year and reflecting on it. Yeah, I know. I needed to get a life!

By the time New Years Day rolled around, I had an extensive list of resolutions, each with a detailed outline of action as to how I was going to achieve it. I found that some of those resolutions simply fell by the wayside almost before the year began — those things that if I’m honest with myself, I know I’m never gonna do, no matter how much I wish I would. Others I achieved in varying degrees-ish. But sadly, for the most part, a month or maybe two into the year, that hard core maniacal urge to be a better me no matter what cooled to tepid indifference as every-day life took the shine off the New Year.

It was only when there stopped being time for such ginormous navel-gazes and micro-planning that I discovered I actually had achieved a lot of those goals that were my resolutions simply by just getting on with it. As I began to think more about how different my approach to all things new in the New Year had become the busier I became, I realised that I had, through no planning on my part, perfected the sneak-in-through-the-back-door method of dealing with the New Year. The big, bright New Year changes I used to spend days plotting and planning no longer got written down, no longer got planned out. Instead, they sort of implemented themselves in a totally unorganised way somewhere between the middle of January and the middle of February. They were easy on me, sort of whispering and smiling unobtrusively from the corners of my life. They came upon me, not in a sneak attack so much as a passing brush with someone who would somehow become my best friend.

All together, I’ve written more that a half a million words this year. Needless to say, I’m my own harsh taskmaster. I’m driven, I’m tunnel-visioned, I’m a pit bull when I grab on to what I want to achieve with my writing. No one is harder on me than I am – no one is even close. And yet from somewhere there’s a gentler voice that sneaks in through the back door of the New Year and through the back doors of my life and reminds me to be kinder to me, to be easier on me, to find ways to rest and recreate and feed my creative self. I’ll never stop being driven. The time I’ve been given, the time we’ve all been given, is finite. And that gentler part of ourselves must somehow be a constant reminder of comfort and forgiveness, of self-betterment that comes, not from brow-beating and berating ourselves, not from forced regimentation, but from easing into it, making ourselves comfortable with it. We, all of us, live in a time when life is snatched away from us one sound-bite, one reality TV show, one advert at a time. Often our time, our precious time is bargained away from us by harsher forces, by ideals and scripts that aren’t our own, and the less time we have to dwell
on the still small voice, the deeper the loss.

So my resolution, my only resolution every year is to listen more carefully to that gentler, quieter part of me, to forgive myself for not being able to be the super-human I think I should be, to settle into the arms of and be comfortable with the quieter me, the wiser me who knows how far I’ve really come, who knows that the shaping of a human being goes way deeper than what’s achieved in the outer world, and every heart that beats needs to find its own refuge in the value of just being who we are, of living in the present and coming quietly and gently and hopefully into 2015.

Sex and Creativity

November 26, 2014Blog, Inspirationmasturbation, my writing process, psychology, sex and creativityK D Grace

Sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities.

Erica Jong

(Archived post)

My husband knows I’m always looking for interesting articles about sex. He sent me one the other day about masturbation as a treatment for restless leg syndrome (It’s orgasm that actually seems to help. The means is optional.) This led us to an impromptu discussion of all of the other benefits of sex. Sex is a good sleep aid, sex can help with weight loss, sex can improve skin, hair and nails, just to name a few. The jury, however, is still out on whether sex is an aid or a deterrent to creativity.

For the nay-sayers, abstinence has long been touted as a way to focus sexual energy for creative purposes. On the other hand, a study at the University of Newcastle-on-Tyne and the Open University showed that professional poets and artists had almost twice as many sex partners as other people. The study also showed that the number of sex partners increased as creative output went up. The conclusion drawn was that the more creative you are, the more sex partners you were likely to have.

I’m sure that’s a simplification, but I wonder which came first the sex or the creativity? Is it the creative force that makes us horny, or is it being horny that makes us creative? My guess is that every writer, poet or artist would answer that question differently. However, I don’t think there’s any denying the close connection between the creative force and sexuality. Nor do I think that’s particularly surprising. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Freud was right. It IS all about sex. But what I’m not sure of is that we really understand just what sex is all about.

Yes, the basic biology of it’s obvious, but we humans haven’t had sex simply to procreate in a very long time now. We’ve evolved to want, to expect, even to need more from the sex act than just the next generation. Perhaps that goes hand in hand with the evolution of what civilizes us, what sets us apart from our animal cousins — at least in our own eyes. For humans, many of our basic needs have evolved two meanings. First there is the concrete realm in which we’re born, nurtured, thrive, pass on our genes and die. But we develop another level of meaning when we no longer have to use all of our energy just to survive. When starvation is no longer an issue, food and its preparation and presentation becomes art. When keeping out the cold is no longer an issue, clothing becomes fashion, and magazines tell us how we can be walking galleries for the art of clothing. When finding shelter from the elements is no longer an issue, the very homes we live in become an artistic expression of ourselves. Artistic expression, for us, has become as important as function.

But all of these necessities are concrete. Sex is not. In the days of our ancestor, sex was the magic by which two people become three. Today sex is the magic by which two people become one, or by which one person becomes more herself or himself. Procreation has given way to re-creation, on the one hand, but on the other hand, how can an act that has evolved from the very need to create the next generation be rooted in anything but creativity?

How can the process of creating not be sexual in nature? Writing a story is a penetrative act resulting in something larger, something much more alive than the words on the page, than the idea conceived. That’s heady stuff. That’s the writer in full rut. It’s intimate, it’s messy, it’s rough and tumble, it’s voyeurism and exhibitionism and full-on heat. If it isn’t, then there hardly seems to be a point.

That being said, anyone who has had good sex, lingering sex, or even remembers a good teenage feel-up when time wasn’t an issue, and suddenly seemed no longer to exist, will recall that the end was subsumed in the means, the wonder of the act itself, the amazing intimacy with the other. Any writer or artist knows that experience up close and personal. At some point the creative act itself becomes the sum total of existence. The writer’s world shrinks to and expands out from that act, and the end no longer matters.

So how did I get from masturbation for restless leg syndrome to once more worshiping at the altar of the Divine Creative Sexual Force? Well I suppose it’s all just a part of the journey isn’t it? And besides, where else would I be expected to go with it?

The Alternate Universe of Tight Deadlines

November 23, 2014Blog, Inspirationdeadlines, grace marshall, psychology, writingK D Grace

It’s hard to think in the midst of writing for a tight deadline. Some days it’s even hard to breathe. Having my head down means I often forget which day it is and what time it is. These days my mind works way faster than my body does, and I run out of stamina and need to sleep long before I run out of words to write or ideas for more words to write.

Tight deadlines have a way of stripping me bare and, believe me, I don’t mean in a sexy way, urgh! What I mean is that my world gets stripped down to write … eat and sleep when I must, force myself into a couple of workouts – as much as anything because that keeps my brain sharp. Then I do it all over again. My head’s always buzzing from lack of sleep, and each day the deadline closes in, I become less and less social, more and more reclusive and less and less aware of everything else around me. Every time I’m faced with a tight deadline I swear I won’t do it again. Every time I wonder how the hell I’m going to get through it this time, and every time I promise myself I’ll go easier on me next time. But I never do.

In some ways it’s like being in an alternate universe in which everything revolves around writing and story … er … wait a minute. I always live in that universe. In some ways it’s like living in an alternate alternate universe – one that fits a little tighter, with edges that are a little rougher and a whole lot more intense.

Tight deadline as the year closes in around me seem to be a place in which I find myself every year. I suppose it’s the shape of my life, the unconscious ebb and flow of who I am as a person and the desperate race to crowd just one more thing in before the year runs out and becomes history, one more thing that will broaden the definition of me just a little bit more.

The thing that truly drives me crazy about tight deadlines at the end of the year is that there’s so much more I wanted to get done before the year runs out on me. I know all writers suffer from having way more ideas that they ever have time to write, but the suffering seems worse as the year draws to a close.

Nothing feels quite right, the world around me is completely out of focus, and I only feel truly myself when I’m working on the story. I do whatever else I have to do in a fog of self-doubt, while thoughts linger on the WIP and what I wish I still had time to write.

I’m excited that it’s Wade’s story that will close out 2014. And as is always the case, the unfolding of the story is an adventure and an experience
that leaves me wanting to see what happens next. I don’t think any character has surprised me quite as much as Wade has, and as I press on to finish before the end of the year, I find myself once again tunnel-visioned and oblivious to almost everything else around me.

I apologise for the abundance of posts from the archives at the moment, though I’ve done my best to pick out some of the best. I apologise for being somewhere else, even when I’m here. I’m happily writing away in Wade’s Dungeon, and if you were there with me, you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else either. I promise to invite you all in early next year, and you can hang out there as long as you want. But for now, it’s just me and Wade and Carla ordering pizza and drinking way more coffee than we probably should.

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