C.A. Jacobs

A couple months ago, I returned from an extended research trip. I thought I was going to have a lot more time to write on that trip than I did, but I came back with some great story ideas. A lot of stuff happened in my life in the last year and it’s taken quite a bit for me to feel like I was getting my feet back under me enough for me to put my research and story ideas to good use. So now it’s oh-dark-early and I can’t sleep so I decided to finally start typing out some of my notes for my next book.

One of the hard parts for me as a writer is actually getting started. I have a couple key scenes that are usually burned into my mind that pretty much write themselves once I get there, but I somehow have to get there first. Getting started is always the hardest part of actually writing for me because I spend so much time thinking and over thinking the opening lines. I think about how editors and publishers will view the first opening scene and whether or not what I’m writing is marketable, how potential readers in a bookstore will see what I’m writing and react to it, and a whole bunch of other stuff that doesn’t really affect the story at all. But these are the things I get stuck and focused on. Instead of focusing on the story, the characters, the world, and the conflict, I get caught up in the details. Details that don’t particularly matter at this time because I’m putting the cart before the horse. In fact, I’d say I put the cart so far in front of the horse that they aren’t even in the same town anymore.

The book that I’ve been meaning to start for the past nine months or more is now around 1,000 words strong and this story looks like one that I might be able to tell fairly well. I’m hoping to be able to write between 5,000 and 7,000 words a week which is a lot more realistic now that I’ve actually started the writing process again. It feels good to be writing again and I hope that this book will move a lot faster and clearer than my first book did.

I think some of my most amusing interactions with people come from those who are wannabes. As I will eventually be a fully published author, writers are those I tend to pick on the most. I was thinking about some of my experiences in deserts lately and how much I dislike those environments, but how rich miserable places are for creative stories. Probably one of my favorite personal experiences involved a cameraman in one of the beat up cities out in the middle of nowhere. So here goes the story.

The city sits in the middle of a sea of sand and fine dirt, and all the power comes from a variety of generators strategically located throughout the area. Some sections have power, some don’t. Some only have power at certain times of the day and the only means of transportation are trucks designed to take a beating. Most are either really expensive or really beat up. Mine was somewhat of a mixture between the two, stripped down with no doors or windows and only a tarp strung across what passed for a windshield as a relief from the sun. The bed of my truck was completely empty, with the exception of a few tough boxes strapped down with bungy cords, a set of pretty crappy speakers mounted to hook and loop fasteners across the dashboard, and a word processor known as an Alphasmart so that I could do some writing in my free time in a case attached to a mounting bracket between the driver and passenger seat.

I had a couple hours before I needed to check on my guys in the city again, so I was typing out the next scene for my work in progress, pretty thoroughly engrossed in the task at hand when a shadow fell across my keyboard. I looked up and saw a man with a scraggly beard and a video camera with one of those tripods that are taller than I am braced along his shoulder. As is typical, he asked me what I was doing and what that thing was that I was typing on. Being a proponent of writing on the go, I explained the Alphasmart to him, showed it off a little, then launched into some of the cool parts about Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction Program and how much fun I was having learning how to write horror. He starts talking about how he has these great ideas for this entire series of books plans and the conversation begins.

The conversation goes really well for a while. We talk about plot and world building and are having a really great time. Until we start getting around to characters. That’s where I start seeing some rather entertaining holes in his entire concept. His story seemed to revolve around a very studly action hero. Very old-school James Bond-ish Alpha male who would be able to kick butt and solve all sorts of problems, kill bad guys, and have sex with different hot chicks every single night. I brought up to him that action, adventure, and spy books were doing very well these days and then I asked him something of a key question which involved studies about book sales. I asked him about who his intended target audience was going to be for this series and who he expected to be purchasing his books. He was overly excited about how his books would appeal to a wide audience, male and female, because his main character is someone guys would want to be and chicks would want to sleep with.

Wow.

Really?

I read books because the guy is hot and I want to sleep with him? I had no idea that’s why I’ve been reading all these books! Of course that’s exactly it! I absolutely want to be with a guy who has sex with a different chick every night! Or even multiple chicks in the same day! That’s exactly my dream guy! How did this cameraman capture my dream man so precisely? How did he know? What kind of research must he have done to come to this startling and unbelievable understanding of relationship insight?

I tried to nicely explain to this gentleman that, according to the last research I had read, approximately 80% of all books are purchased by women. I also tried to explain that women might be a little bit more complicated than just wanting some random guy to have sex with every now and again. I’m not really sure he understood. Turns out the guy was single, never married, and didn’t have a steady girlfriend. I wonder if society is giving men the same unrealistic expectations to live up to that it seems to continue to push on women. It still made me amused and I couldn’t believe that he actually thought his series would appeal to women at all. Men, sure. Well, maybe. His plot seemed to have a bunch of holes in it and seemed way too simple for the modern world and modern technology, but if writing is something he truly believes in, I’m sure he’ll find a way to make it work.

The problem is, I don’t think writing is something he really believes in. I think a lot of people have dreams they don’t really believe in, or they’re just jumping in on other people’s dreams to start a conversation. If you see someone working on something or doing something, you hop in on whatever it is you see them doing and hope that if you seem interested, maybe you can get lucky and learn more about them instead of being honest about yourself. The trouble with doing it that way, though, is that I did learn more about him. I learned that he’s not someone I would ever want to date if the character he created is really the kind of guy he would want to be or look up to. It was still a very amusing encounter and I continue to be impressed by the way other people’s brains work. Or maybe I should be amused by the way my own brain works.

Hm. Maybe I should be worried about the way my own brain works. My brain is a very strange place.

Several years ago, I fully accepted that I am a tangible person. I like having proof that I accomplished something during my day, instead of just saying that I showed up to my life and did the same things everyone else does. This became a bigger source of frustration as I realized more and more that I really do want to spend my time being involved in books. I enjoy reading and I have a lot of stories that I want to share with the world. But if your goal is to make a living at writing, how do you prove to yourself every day that you actually went to work and accomplished something? Sure, it’s super easy during the days when you’re just working to crank out that first draft because then it’s all about producing and not necessarily about the product itself. Once you have that first draft in your hand, that’s when the real trouble starts.

So I started making lists. Not just a random selection of lists that would be stored on whatever napkin or piece of paper I happened to have nearby when I thought of something I needed to do, but a genuine and dedicated list. I went out and found a great spiral notebook on clearance and now that notebook is home to the ongoing “To Do” list that helps me make progress in all aspects of my life. As a writer, I can add things that are tangible to me, especially during the revision phase. During the first draft phase of writing, all I have to do is jot down something I need to look at later so that I can see that it’s something I’ll need to take care of, but I won’t have to stop my forward momentum in order to stop and fix that one section, which could then turn into problems for a different section. Instead, I put a line on the list that says, “insert appropriate wounds into Chapter 10″ or “research mythological legends closer for more authentic back story during the trial in Chapter 6.” I even put in what books I’m reading and that way, I can put a check next to something I read and wrote a review about, which helps me prove that I did something useful with my day.

The spiral notebook that lives on my desk has many pages of lines with check boxes, since I started this notebook back on 28 February 2009. It’s kind of gratifying to be able to flip back that far and see how much I’ve accomplished. Some of the check boxes have marks in the box and a completed date at the end, and some whole pages have been crossed through with a single diagonal line which indicates that I have completed every task on that one page. There are still pages that have just that one unmarked line left that shows that I still haven’t shredded my old and unneeded CDs from September of 2009 or made a backup of one of my laptops that I intended to create in February of 2010, but the things marked off far outweigh those things I have not checked off.

It seems a bit weird, I suppose, to keep such a dedicated and thorough log of my life, but I truly do find that it’s helping me to make tremendous progress with keeping track of my life, as well as with improving my word count, revision capabilities, motivation to keep moving forward on so many ongoing projects, and generally just making sure I feel like I can prove that I did something worthwhile at the end of my day. Which now means that I can cross off “update blog for week of 09-13 April.”

Sometimes, my work environment forces me as a writer to look at a lot of the things that make us who we are. A person, just like a character in a novel or story, isn’t just hatched. We’re built by thousands of tiny details created through the course of our entire lives, most of which we’re probably not even aware exist.

I came in to work and two men were discussing their children, which is normal for just about any work environment. I was a bit tired and cranky, and I only came in at what appeared to be the last part of their conversation. They both have young children under the ages of 7 and both have at least one son and one daughter. They discussed how they wanted their children to participate in other activities, which I applaud, but one of them made the comment about how he would probably put his daughter into gymnastics and his son into martial arts. Being tired and cranky, I mentioned to him that he was being remarkably sexist. He replied with a comment about how it’s his choice what his kids do and I snapped back that maybe it ought to be their choice.

The whole conversation got me thinking about the little attitudes that we as a society perpetuate that only increase our behavior, and how you would have to take every small nuance of what makes us who we are into account when creating characters for stories. Character is in the details, the sense that you can build something major with a bunch of little parts. If you go to the ice rink in Minnesota, you’ll see most of the little boys wearing hockey skates and most of the little girls wearing figure skates. You walk down the toy isles in any retail stores and you find each aisle is themed, especially the dreaded “pink” aisle. Sometimes, there’s more than one pink isle, but these are the aisles I avoid because I’ve never been a fan of pink and also because it’s filled with society’s unrealistic expectations of the behavior we want our young daughters to emulate. But then there’s more of a “dark blue” isle where you’ll find the action figures, which are really just dolls designed for boys.

It’s probably a good idea for me to mention at this time that I don’t have any children, nor do I ever intend on having children. I brought up the conversation with the two guys I work with to another woman at work and I expressed my thoughts that it would probably be beneficial for young children, regardless of gender, to participate in both gymnastics and martial arts. Her response was that if you let your daughter do martial arts when she is little, that she’ll be more butch and she wanted her daughters to be princesses. I would think, given all that I know about the world around me, that you would want to prepare any and all of your children to actually deal with the real world as they grow up, not just be a victim of someone else’s whims.

It seems to me that by teaching our daughters to be princesses, we’re really just teaching them how to be attractive to other people, and how to be spoiled and entitled. The historic role of a princess is to look beautiful to attract the eye of a handsome, charming, dashing, and courageous prince so that the princess and prince can get married so she could bear him male heirs. And this is what we as a society are still instilling in our next generations. Instead of wanting our daughters to not wind up in a human trafficking ring, we are encouraging them to believe that if they are pretty enough, a nice man will come along, marry them, and they’ll never have to do anything again.

I write horror. The real world and the world of my stories is not a very nice place. I sometimes describe my job by saying that I have seen the best and worst that humanity has to offer – usually at the same time. I have seen men who treat everyone in their family as property and abuse them all, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I have seen true families in the same land with the same hardships love each other dearly and sacrifice everything, including their lives, to save their spouses and children. I would think that any advantage you could give to your children to provide them the physical skills, mental discipline, and moral courage would be sought after to give your children the best advantages.

I have to admit that I don’t really understand this behavior at all. I guess I was just remarkably lucky that my parents raised me to be me and have always been supportive of me no matter what kind of crazy stuff captured my interest. I think my parents worked hard to make sure that my brothers and I were allowed to follow our hearts instead of attempting to make us into a mold decided by them.

When creating characters for novels or other stories, we as writers must know every detail about how our characters were raised and how the unspoken details would affect their ability to function inside the society in the worlds we create. Most of the heroes and heroines in the stories I tend to read for enjoyment do not function well within the boundaries of societies such as ours, which is perhaps what makes them into the heroes of the story. Behavioral and societal disagreements are part of what creates interesting conflict in a story, but is frustrating when presented in our actual world. I would have hoped we would be beyond these perpetual behaviors by now, but that’s just not how the world really works. I guess that’s just another reason I’m a writer so that I can create different societies and then prove the faults of those as well, because no system is perfect.