How My Crazy Brain and a Terrier Dictate my Workflow, by Josh Stallings

Q: A writer's job involves a lot of sitting - scribbling in a notepad, or hunched over in a chair, typing. Do you have a daily exercise routine? What advice would you offer to other writers, to keep themselves fit and healthy over the longer term?

A Case Study.

2:41 AM PST. My brain alerts my central nervous system, "WAKE UP. I have pages for the new novel. I need the fingers to type them. WAKE UP. I have the essay for Criminal Minds. It starts with “CASE STUDY” and a screen grab of the time.” 

Drifting between a dream and this demand I glance at my wrist. My trusty Tudor Ranger tells me it’s too damn early o’clock for any demands. I try to negotiate. “Hey brain, sweetie, twenty more minutes of sleep and I’ll jump to.” 

“No. Now.”

“Right, how about I get up and make some…” I feel myself slipping into a dream about making coffee so I can write. I feel myself measuring the water. I can smell the grounds as I spoon them into the filter.

“Wake the fuck up you lazy bastard.”

“Hey brain, ease up.”

“NO. Get the fuck up and start typing. I work over-time thinking about stories and essays. Coming up with fixes for chapter twenty-seven — she holds the veil up against her face so Harry can see who she was, lowering it exposes tattooed tribal lines of the warrior she is. She is the widow. She is the warrior. MY only request is that you act on these ideas with some immediacy.” 

Fair-play brain. I roll out of bed trying not to wake Erika or the dogs. Buster isn’t fooled, he follows me into my office. 

2:49 AM PST. I’m up and typing. No coffee, my own fault; I wasted coffee making time arguing with myself, Topo-Chico will have to do until I get enough of this essay written that it won’t crumble if I look away for a few minutes. Ideas are like dreams, real concrete worlds that start turning to mist the moment I wake. For them to survive…

3:35 AM PST. …fairy chimes ring out of my phone, ripping me out of my writing. It’s a family member worrying about Huston power outages. I’m not physically in Huston, or I wasn’t until I checked the text. Who is texting this early? Don’t they know I’m working? Yes it is three hours later on the East Coast, but still. Calming down I breathe. My own damn fault again. I forgot to set my computer to “do not disturb.” I work on a Mac linked to my iPad and iPhone. With one setting I can tell all my devices to “Leave me alone, I’m working.” 

If I don’t respect my writing time, how can I expect my brain to keep churning out ideas and coming up with solutions to my first draft messes?

3:48 AM PST. An hour wasted. 504 words written. 507 if you count these. 513… 

3:51 AM PST.  I hide Word Count. Computers have all these amazing tools, choosing when to use which ones can be tricky. Knowing my current word count tends to lead me into a state of I-need-more-words-to-prove-I-had-a-productive-day. 

Less is always more unless more is needed. My life is full of dichotomies. The only way to gain power over my life is to admit I am powerless over my life. This is as true about my alcoholism as it is about my writing career. 

By accepting I have no control over any outcomes I see what I do have control over, these words I’m typing, this moment. Right here, right now, that I can control. I can control setting the do not disturb switch. I cannot and should not control who sends a family group chat out. I have neither the nuclear launch code nor the formula to cure disease. I’m just not that important. Anyone trying to reach me can wait until the sun has risen and I’ve had some coffee.

PROJECTED AGENDA: Future gazing from 4:00 AM.

6:00 AM ish - I will take the dogs on a pee/poop walk around our property. Give them a chance to investigate the smells left by the wild things of the night. If we’re lucky our neighbor dogs will be up and they can have a quick sniff and chat through the fence. This walk takes between ten and fifteen minutes depending on the length and speed of investigation.

7:00 AM - Feed dogs. Make coffee. My breakfast of oatmeal or smoothie. Chat with Erika and Jared. Maybe do some writing after that. We shall see.

8:00 AM ish - take the dogs to County Park or Nature Center for a long walk. This schedule varies based on weather, summer heat gets us out earlier, winter’s lack of light pushes walks until 10 AM. If we’re walking our friend’s dog Daisy, we go as late as 11:00 AM. The key is to get thirty to forty-five minutes of physical and mental exercise. Buster being a terrier needs this or he becomes an asshole. I need it because as a human if I live entirely in my head I become an asshole.

Today is a writing day so after the tromp in the forest I will write. 

12:00 PM ish - lunch. Usually with Jared and Erika. Food and a show of some kind. Lately Jared and I have been watching Snowpiercer, a dystopian TV series based on a French graphic novel and a Korean film. It is different enough from my creative worlds that it can feed me without taking over what I’m working on.

After this depending on my output so far and the demands of life, I will either go back to typing or get to outside chores, chopping wood and carrying water literally. 

3:30 PM ish - Walk dogs in the neighborhood, visit with their and our friends. These walks are anywhere from twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on how many plants need sniffing, and how many conversations we have.

Afternoon is for finishing the hanging threads of my chores or writing or watching a film.

7:00 PM - dinner for humans and dogs.

8:30 PM ish - a quick last walk with the dogs. Family hang time and bed.

Wake up tomorrow and if I’m lucky enough to have my brain still talking to me I do it all over again.

BACK TO REAL TIME

4:46 AM PST - wrapping this up before emailing it to Erika for her first pass edit.

I come from a long line of farmers and peasant folk who aspire to be artists and intellectuals. My body is built for labor while my brain is built to muse and mumble. When I forget to honor both sides of my DNA I wobble wildly out of balance. That doesn’t mean exact equal amounts of physical and mental tasks every day. Creative work like outdoor chores have seasons. Early in the writing process I need a lot of staring into space think time. Chopping and stacking logs give me something to do while I think. Deep into a project my brain becomes a taskmaster, I honor this by spending less time outside and typing more. 

Owning dogs makes sure I never completely disappear into my office. Those big eyes and a hereditary willingness to turn boredom into acts of destruction are great motivators.

4:47 AM PST - Heading back to bed. Catch an hour of sleep before reading this over to see how crazy I am.

9:30 AM PST - Words fixed as best as my dyslexic self can. Emailed to Erika. She’ll let me know if I’ve strayed completely off the page. She hasn’t said so yet. I’m beginning to think she likes me a wee bit crazy. And so do I. It’s important to have an editor who likes the same things about your work as you do.

Hoping a grand and productive day to you all.

****

What I’m Reading now:

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. 

Finished it, and it only got more astute, ingenious, insightful, and crazy good. One of the most brilliant books I’ve read since We Begin at the End.

The Mars Room: A Novel by Rachel Kushner

I fell in love with her The Flame Throwers. This is very different but equally wonderful.

I’m listening to The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel.

 ****

Todays word count for those counting is, drum roll… 1,439 so far.

Orphan Thoughts and Great Openings, by Josh Stallings

Q: Have you had success taking an old, perhaps previously abandoned, manuscript and breathed in new life before selling it?

A: No… That is true, but maybe I can dig a little deeper. I was talking to my son Jared about his song writing. His current project is a band called Sprinkler Boiz. The process is working with a fellow musician who is creating instrumental tracks. Jared then creates lyrics and vocal tracks and they bounce back and forth until a song emerges. He said he scours his notebooks for orphan lines and thoughts, using them to build a song. It feels like his mind has built a wonderful pile of building blocks for him to play with. 

Back in my typewriter and pen days I saved every scrap of writing in an army surplus sailor’s chest that I dragged with me whenever we moved. Because of the basic disorganized nature of my brain, finding anything of value in ten-thousand scraps was daunting if not impossible. With the advent of computers I saved floppy discs of every draft, thinking I might go back and find gold. Problem was, I saved to obsolete formats.  

I ditched that real and virtual pile of orphan thoughts when we moved to the mountains. And I feel much lighter for it. I have come to see that my taste and world view is ever evolving. No matter how brilliant an idea was (and I doubt they were) I no longer live in that time. 

This isn't to say I don’t sometimes toy with an idea for a long time before it becomes a book. I worked on Tricky off and on for years before I became evolved enough as a person and skilled enough as a writer to turn those thoughts into a book. 

I have a book out on submission right now that I am writing a new opening chapter for. This has led me to think a lot about where a story should start. I cut trailers for a ton of 1980’s action films. They mostly start with a bang, and if they could they tossed into it the hero “saving a cat” so we knew they were good people even if they killed a mountain of nameless baddies. With books, the wisdom is you have less than twenty pages to hook a reader. But what will hook them is nebulous. 

Here is the opening paragraph from Lou Berney’s Dark Ride,

I’m lost, wandering, and somewhat stoned. This parking lot, when you’re in the middle of it, seems much vaster and more expansive than it does from the street. Or do I just seem much less consequential? That’s the question. One for the ages. It’s July, hot as balls. I stare up. The sky, pale and papery, looks like it’s about to burst into flame. How would you describe the sky to someone who has never seen a sky? You’d have to explain how it’s different every day. So many shades of blue, of gray. And we’re not even talking about sunrise or sunset. Plus the clouds! How would you describe clouds?

I’m hooked by the character's voice. I know from the book jacket that it’s a thriller, this character feels absolutely fresh in that context. He’s not a macho man or tough as nails woman, not a smart every-man, not even a petty criminal in over is head. Just a stoned dude who is content to be who he is, who is dragged into a moral dilemma and a dangerous world. 

Another fine opening is from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss,

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Now that sets a tone and tells me exactly the kind of writer Crumley is.

Emily St. John Mandel starts Station Eleven this way

No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Apocalyptic, and smart. Speaks of a huge event, but also locks me into the writer’s voice. 

Here is the opening line from my latest WP, 

The worst day of your life never begins on that day. It is the culmination of events. Some good. Some bad. Spend your life as a cop and you’ll recognize the connections between time, actions, and pain. A survivor’s pain is proportionate to how much they loved the victim. On July 21st 1984 Detective Hem Madsen sat in an unmarked police car unaware he was ten days away from the worst day of his life.

Will it make it to the final version of the book, or will it be a darling that needs killing? I guess I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Point is, where we start and how we write that opening sets the reader up for the rest of the book. It gives them an expectation we must fulfill. If it is done correctly it will pull in the readers that will enjoy the book, and might repel those who wouldn’t find it to their liking anyway. 

I personally am sucked in by character, and originality. What pulls you in?