Here's a picture of that pool, taken from the balcony.I was thinking more about the idea of writing outside your comfort zone, and found something that’s happened recently pretty applicable.
I have never been a good swimmer. It’s quite possible I never will be. When I was a kid, my parents kept enrolling me in swimming lessons, and I kept being a terrible swimmer who refused to put my head under water. Part of it was that I’d learned by then that if I got water in my ears, an ear infection wouldn’t be far behind, so every lesson was a silent battle to avoid putting my head underwater. It wasn’t till high school, when several friends decided I would learn to swim (bless you, Ann, Ann, Anne, and Maureen), that I actually got to the point where I could float long enough to survive a (fairly brief) period if I ever fell off a boat. Couple that with an illness that made me extremely self-conscious in a swimsuit for a long time, and you can see why I just don’t get in the water very much.
So here we are in Costa Rica, with a swimming pool right outside our balcony, and a temperature that makes that pool pretty darn inviting. So I got in and splashed around, and finally decided to do a little swimming. And you know what — I liked it. I liked it a lot. And found myself going back repeatedly. Right now I’m going to finsih up this post and then go do it some more.
It took a while to get over the panicked feeling that I was falling forward, that the water wouldn’t hold me up. I kept insisting on starting on the deeper end and swimming towards the shallower, because that way if I put a foot down, I’d be able to hit the bottom. But with every time I made it all the way, it got easier. I started trusting the water (and myself) more.
I’m not claiming I’m going to become a good swimmer anytime soon, or that I’m ever going to like getting water up my nose. But I’m better at it, and certainly more confident about it. And I’ve found something that I like doing, and that I will be trying to incorporate more in my life.
And that — as with so many things in life — applies to writing. Those first attempts to do something new and scary may well be awkward and uncomfortable. In fact, they probably will. Because that’s how we learn. It’s very hard to get good at something without being pretty bad at it at first. And in doing these things, you learn to trust the universe a little more. Which I see as a pretty good thing.
So it’s a Monday morning. Here’s my challenge for you. By Friday, go write or do something that scares you. And come back and tell me what you did.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
Cat, my father was a swim coach. He loved coaching swim teams. I wasn’t good enough to be on his team. I swam “like a rock” according to my father. When I was 12 or 13 I got his permission to participate in a swim-a-thon fundraiser. The question wasn’t could I swim, I’d had lessons and even though I was a terrible swimmer I loved swimming. The question, in my case, was could I finish what I started. I had a terrible completion rate as a child.
The swim-a-thon challenge was 200 laps or 2 hours swimming, whichever came first. It was a huge deal for me to get sponsors, practice laps, and then get up early on the day of the event. Dad’s swimmers had morning practice and the. The swim-a-thon began. Those kids cranked out their 200 laps in no time; keep in mind that they’d already been swimming for an hour or so!
I swam for 2 hours, there were periods where I was simply on my back kicking, but I was moving the entire time. The other swimmers, and Dad, paced the pool with me calling out encouragement.
As we were walking home, my father rubbed my head, told me he was proud of me, and walked me home with his arm over my shoulders. It was, and is, one of the most amazing experiences of my life. It stills moves me to tears when I remember it. I manage 133 laps in my 2 hour swim.
So, I take up your challenge in the same way. Thanks! You’ll be hearing from me.
I was thinking about this
post since you wrote it, particularly the “So it’s a Monday morning.
Here’s my challenge for you. By Friday, go write or do something that
scares you. And come back and tell me what you did.”
I’m trying to run a bit (Zombies Run, yay), and I decided to do it in public yesterday, rather than on the treadmill. Which is fairly scary, mostly on a “but other people will see me! and assume I am insecure because I am exercising and not good at it! and spot me needing to slow down!” level. But I did it!
And just as I was finishing up, and heading back home, I jogged past someone out walking a couple of dogs, and the big one bit me. Not badly! It was a bleedings-scrapes-and-Polysporin kind of thing, not a hospital thing. But it was unnerving.
Funny thing is, I do feel better, and more comfortable with the idea of doing it again. In the back of my brain, there is a dialogue playing that runs “But other people will see me! and spot me needing to slow down! and–” “Oh SERIOUSLY? I got bitten by a German Shepherd last time and now it’s about people will LOOK at me? Moving on.”
Yikes! But awesome that it short-circuited that “people will see me!” loop.
That’s something I’m trying to conquer in the pool right now, because while I’m feeling more comfortable in the water, there’s also a piece of my head insisting that every time I do it, people are standing on their balconies watching the ungainly gringa trying to swim.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Writing Outside One's Comfort Zone
Outside the comfort zone is where the best art lies.We’ve all got a comfort zone, the place where we can function easily, where we know what to expect. It’s a nice place. It’s…well, it’s COMFORTABLE. Hence the name. It would be easy to stay there all the time.
But for writers, I think it’s very important to go outside it on a regular basis. For one thing, your characters are going to be outside their comfort zones, being challenged, tested, thwarted, more often than not, because one thing about comfort zones is that they can be pretty darn boring to read about. Who wants a character for which everything goes right? (This is, I will argue, why the Richie Rich comic books were pretty darn bland.) How can you write a character outside their comfort zone if you don’t know what it’s like?
And outside our comfort zone is where we learn new things, new skills, new things about ourselves. Here in Costa Rica, my Spanish skill is leaping upward in a way it wouldn’t at home, despite all my best resolutions about daily Duolingo workouts or buying books in Spanish from Amazon. And that in turn has prodded me to try some new things with it, like using one of my stories as a practice piece in translation.
This is why, when I talk to students about going into a workshop like Clarion West or Viable Paradise, I urge them to try to fail. Because you learn so much more from a story where you tried something new and failed than one where you did the same thing you always did. I wrote Zeppelin Follies while at Clarion West as my very first try at a screwball comedy, and I will confess that the first draft was a horrible mishmash of stuff. And boy did I learn a lot from that.
Fortunately, for the vast majority of writers, we like new things. New words, new vistas, new thoughts. And we find them outside that comfort zone, in a place that is frightening and exhilarating all at once. Whizzing along a zipline, diving into waters over our head, talking to strangers. If you doubt that you are brave enough to do such things, remember that you do something braver everyday by putting your writing out there for other people to look at.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
Class Excerpt: On Creating a Story When You Have the Plot
Now that we’re all moved in to the new place, I can find books when I want to refer to them.I’m finishing up the year by trying to wrap up writing the on-demand version of my Moving from Idea to Draft class. This is a tough translation, because the live class depends heavily on what the students have brought: I try to help them go deeper into the idea each has brought to class and show them ways of fleshing it out.
For the on-demand version, what I’m doing is looking at each of the various ways I’ve seen stories develop and doing a section on each, looking at what it is, what it gives you to help with fleshing out the story, possible trouble spots, some ways to proceed with it, and then two or three exercises to refine skills with that, each with a basic and then an overachiever version, a model I used with the Description and Delivering Information class. There’s twenty-three sections altogether, but here’s the section on starting with a plot, minus the exercises.
What It Is:
Some stories begin with a plot. This is a complete story: you know the problem, some basics of the characters and what will happen. Perhaps it’s something you’ve generated or taken from elsewhere. Perhaps it arrives pre-made in your head (and you should glory in it when it does, in my opinion), so all you need to do is sit down at the keyboard and write it out.
If you can describe in a few sentences what will happen in a story, you know the plot. For example:
A little girl takes cookies to her grandmother and encounters a wolf along the way. When she gets to her grandmother’s house, the wolf is waiting to attack. A nearby woodsman comes and kills the wolf. (Little Red Riding Hood)
A man steals the defense plan for a planet that is immensely wealthy. When he tries to use it, he finds out that the defense is constructed out of (because this is a spoiler of an excellent story, you should go read it) and meets a terrible fate. (Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, by Cordwainer Smith)
What it gives you:
You know the overall flow of the action: this happens so this happens so this happens and then it ends this way. You know the basic story pattern: that tension increases until the climax, and then rapidly falls. You know the source of the tension and usually the basic conflict: how the wants of two or more entities are collide in some fashion.
You have some sense of where it begins and a stronger sense of where it ends (although the reverse is not impossible).”‹ Connie Willis says to begin at the moment when the problem becomes a crisis. I don’t know that I agree that you should always do that, but it’s certainly better, in terms of story tension, to start with a moment where the problem is already taking place than to start with an idyllic landscape that slowly goes bad.
You may or may not know the characters involved, but you have some broad basics, and know some of the things about the character that affect it most for you, which will probably include gender and approximate age.
Similarly you have some broad basics of the setting, the overall world of the story, although you may need to think of specifics pertaining to scene locations.
More importantly, often you have an impalpable feel for the story, a sense of the overall tone and emotion that will help you shape the words as you write. To make the most of that, spend a couple of moments thinking about the atmosphere of the story. What movies or books might you compare it to? What is the overall emotion, both yours in writing it and what you want readers to take away?
What you need to think about:
What do you bring to the story that makes it unique? There are only so many plots (opinions of the actual number differ, with some saying seven, others numbers like 3 or 36, but the fact of the matter is that at a certain level you will not be able to do anything genuinely new unless you are more of a genius than I, and so you should look at what you bring to the table: the unique details of your life and experiences, your emotions and understandings, and your sensibilities. What instances of this plot have you witnessed being played out in your own life, perhaps as actor, perhaps as audience, and what of that experience can you draw upon?
Specifics of the action may be lacking in your broad overview, in which case you will need to flesh them out. Your burglar steals something – what? Who owns it and what defenses against thieves do they have? Your bounty hunter is chasing her prey, but what crime has that prey committed? Specifics of the location are something that you may well need to flesh out, in which case try to think of aspects that are particularly engaging and use those as interesting backgrounds to add interest to a scene: make that important conversation take place while the two are racing on ice skates through a city’s lower levels or at a party whose main entertainment are levitating performers who are half-dragon, half-human. What can you use?
Things to watch out for:
Sometimes when you go to put these stories down on paper, they are not the well-fleshed entities we hoped, but incomplete things, hints of lines that don’t tell us the entire picture, whispers instead of words, a sense of brushing up against one side of the story in the dark rather than holding it in its entirety. In such cases, I usually build a mind-map, writing down the details that I know and expanding from that. I’ll build on how to do that in the next section, Possible Next Steps.
Be careful of the generic. We all have a set of flimsy and unconvincing stage sets in our heads that, when examined with care, can probably be traced back to specific television shows or movies. My desert island will always have Gilligan lurking in the underbrush, for example, and any Victorian London scenes have to be forcibly wrenched out of the black and white of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.
Possible next steps:
Take your two or three sentence description and expand on it, stretching it to five hundred words by expanding on generic details with specifics and figuring out the overall timeline.
Write out list of scenes then develop the basics of what happens in each scene: they go to the movies, see a clue in the opening, and try to rush out of the theater only to find a bunch of lamias in the parking lot ready to brawl; they fight with the lamias and defeat them by throwing soap bombs at them, but Ellen’s arm gets broken in the process. You will probably tell it in chronological order, but it’s not too early to think about mixing it up if you think it would accomplish something in the story, like provide additional pleasure for the reader by allowing them to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.
5 Responses
Cat, my father was a swim coach. He loved coaching swim teams. I wasn’t good enough to be on his team. I swam “like a rock” according to my father. When I was 12 or 13 I got his permission to participate in a swim-a-thon fundraiser. The question wasn’t could I swim, I’d had lessons and even though I was a terrible swimmer I loved swimming. The question, in my case, was could I finish what I started. I had a terrible completion rate as a child.
The swim-a-thon challenge was 200 laps or 2 hours swimming, whichever came first. It was a huge deal for me to get sponsors, practice laps, and then get up early on the day of the event. Dad’s swimmers had morning practice and the. The swim-a-thon began. Those kids cranked out their 200 laps in no time; keep in mind that they’d already been swimming for an hour or so!
I swam for 2 hours, there were periods where I was simply on my back kicking, but I was moving the entire time. The other swimmers, and Dad, paced the pool with me calling out encouragement.
As we were walking home, my father rubbed my head, told me he was proud of me, and walked me home with his arm over my shoulders. It was, and is, one of the most amazing experiences of my life. It stills moves me to tears when I remember it. I manage 133 laps in my 2 hour swim.
So, I take up your challenge in the same way. Thanks! You’ll be hearing from me.
What an awesome story! Thank you for sharing that.
So. Funny story. (I swear it’s funny to me!)
I was thinking about this
post since you wrote it, particularly the “So it’s a Monday morning.
Here’s my challenge for you. By Friday, go write or do something that
scares you. And come back and tell me what you did.”
I’m trying to run a bit (Zombies Run, yay), and I decided to do it in public yesterday, rather than on the treadmill. Which is fairly scary, mostly on a “but other people will see me! and assume I am insecure because I am exercising and not good at it! and spot me needing to slow down!” level. But I did it!
And just as I was finishing up, and heading back home, I jogged past someone out walking a couple of dogs, and the big one bit me. Not badly! It was a bleedings-scrapes-and-Polysporin kind of thing, not a hospital thing. But it was unnerving.
Funny thing is, I do feel better, and more comfortable with the idea of doing it again. In the back of my brain, there is a dialogue playing that runs “But other people will see me! and spot me needing to slow down! and–” “Oh SERIOUSLY? I got bitten by a German Shepherd last time and now it’s about people will LOOK at me? Moving on.”
Moving on. 🙂
Yikes! But awesome that it short-circuited that “people will see me!” loop.
That’s something I’m trying to conquer in the pool right now, because while I’m feeling more comfortable in the water, there’s also a piece of my head insisting that every time I do it, people are standing on their balconies watching the ungainly gringa trying to swim.
I do not recommend pikes (I was going to say piranhas, but really, that overstates the parallel). 🙂
At the same time, I know the feeling. I hope it’s getting better.