Just Keep Writing

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I joined Across the Board in late 2019, and since then, I’ve written 30 posts on this blog. Once a month, I spent my Sunday morning thinking of approximately 500 words (or in this case, exactly 500) to put in a sequence that I hoped would get across something interesting or meaningful.
 
That’s about 15,000 words total, which adds up to the length of a whole novella, or a good chunk of a novel. All from writing for a few hours a month for a couple of years.
 
Today, I started reading a book called Just Keeping Buying, which is about the magic of regularly investing money, for a long time, and without worrying too much about what you’re investing in or trying to time it. The book’s title was itself inspired by a YouTuber whose secret to millions of subscribers was “just keep uploading.” I think this applies to a lot of things, writing included. Just keep writing, and even with modest effort and not overthinking choices about what to write, it adds up to something. Maybe even something good.
 
I just kept writing here on Across the Board, and I’m proud of most of the things I came up with. I got to document my unfiltered thoughts about the pandemic, from the beginning, to the awkward middle, until more hopeful times. I mixed in my day job as a brain scientist by writing about how to make people remember your content, the appeal of horror, and why you shouldn’t listen to successful people. When I couldn’t think of anything for the month, I posted about miscellaneous stuff like what pretentious scotch reviews taught me about writing, bikes, the sasquatch, and, uh, hands. And speaking of Just Keep Buying, I even wrote about retirement for writers.
 
As you may have guessed by the wistful reminiscing and past tense, I gotta retire. Not from writing or my job, but from ATB. This is my last post here.
 
It’s been wonderful, but I feel like a bit of a fraud, because I’ve barely written anything since I joined this blog that is (mostly) for writers. My lack of writing has primarily been because of life getting busy and pandemic stress, but also, those Sunday mornings are sometimes the only time I have for writing, so over the next few years, I’m hoping 15,000 words go toward an actual novella or novel.
 
Thank you to my fellow writers here on Across the Board. I have been reading every post and will continue doing that, plus I hope we stay in touch on social media because you’re all pretty cool. Thanks especially to Stephen Kozeniewski, who gave me the chance to join this blog and helped make the last two and a half years much better than they would have been otherwise.
 
You can find me on Twitter.com, and Phronk.com will continue to exist as a monument to not blogging.
 
That’s all for now. Have a nice day, and just keep writing. Bye.

I Forgot to Write For a Year

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

A writer friend of mine posted this article, noting that she'd felt like she was alone in her lack of creativity during COVID: Writer’s Blockdown: After a Year Inside, Novelists Are Struggling to Write. It made me realize I wasn't alone!

So I thought I’d pass this gift along to other writers: you are not alone if you haven’t been able to write well, or to write at all.

 

Before COVID, I dreamed about long stretches of staying inside, with endless excuses for cancelling plans to spend more time with my keyboard. Then my dream came true, and I just … didn’t. Other folks here on ATB have recently written about the art of doing nothing and tarot for writer's block, so it's not just me. I’ve already posted here about how, even early in the pandemic, I couldn’t find much motivation to write. It’s almost a year later, and I’ve mostly only written when I absolutely had to.

These candles are real.

Now that the pandemic has gone on for an extended period of time, the reasons for the creative drought are becoming more clear. In addition to the fact that stress and depression are bad for creativity in general, the article above notes some practical blockers, like the difficulty of writing with kids and spouses around all the time, or the lack of inspiration from being in the outside world. Living life on a screen also makes it harder to spend even more time with a screen—perhaps writing by hand would help, if I remembered how.

 

Maybe the creativity is only dormant though. All the unusual experiences of the past year are building up in reservoirs in our brains, so when we finally have the motivation to write, we’ll have more empathy for people in a tough spot, more understanding of how a crisis plays out in the real world, more ideas for how things could have been worse—all excellent tools to make a story better. The world will open back up, and so will a fountain of creative juices. They’ll be everywhere. Creative juices spattered on every surface.

 

Uh, anyway. If you’ve had trouble writing, you’re not alone. That’s all I really wanted to say.

Finding the Modern Cabin in the Woods

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I'm currently on vacation in a cabin in the woods. The other night, the power went out for a few hours, and there's no cell service here, so I was literally in the setup for a horror movie. There was no light except flashlights, no Wi-Fi, no calling for help—if a tall, silent dude with a blade was running after me, I couldn't even Google the best way to get rid of him.

It got me thinking about how the horror genre is heavily reliant on lack of technology. For me the other night, it was slightly scary to suddenly not have instant communication with any person in the world, or at least access to the entirety of human knowledge.

Cozy getaway or the place you will most certainly die?

Twenty five years ago, that would be a normal day. Merely walking out of the house was the setup for a modern horror movie. No need to cut the phone lines or slash the tires or summon a storm to block out the LTE; in the 80s and 90s, if I wandered a few blocks from home, I might as well have been in a cabin the woods. Yet, I didn't feel unsafe. 

The feeling of safety changes from decade to decade. That makes horror as dependent on technology and culture as genres that more explicitly need to keep up with modern times, such as science fiction. More and more, horror set in the present day requires tearing down the layers of safety we've built up with technology before any character can be in danger. That can be done in various ways: isolation, sabotage, the technology itself turning insidious, or threats so powerful—or so subtle—that not even Google can save us.

What will happen when technology is even more advanced, and thus even more capable of keeping us safe in any location at any time? The electricity can only go out so many times. We horror authors will have to get more and more creative to set up an atmosphere of danger. We'll have to do our research to keep up with science and technology, and find clever ways of scaring people who may have grown up in a world where it's just not realistic to be scared of anything, because anything scary is taken care of by some android or nanobot or brain upload or whatever.

Alternatively, we can just set every horror story in the 80s. That would work too.

It's Hard to Make Art in a Messed-Up World

A post by P.T. Phronk,
of Forest City Pulp fame

I have a confession: I haven’t finished writing anything in months. During those same months, a pandemic has wreaked havoc across the globe, and marches to protect the lives of Black people have been met with inaction and/or police violence. It’s a bit of a mess out there.

But wait, wait, isn’t turmoil supposed to breed great art? So we should be in the middle of a perfect storm for creativity, right? There is so much to say, and we can say it with insightful art fuelled by the anxiety and dread that keeps every tortured artist going.

I remember when Bush Jr. became president of the U.S. in 2001, musicians explicitly said stuff like “at least there’s an upside, because great music is born out of rebellion.”

Yet I’ve gotten nothing done in the last few months. WTF.

I’m a brain scientist in my day job, so I usually seek answers in science first. A quick review of the literature shows that, actually, happy people tend to be the most creative. Depression, stress, and anxiety either have no effect, or actively harm creativity.

The tortured artist: fake news

More anecdotally, in hindsight we can see that Bush’s reign led to a lot of war and turmoil, but did musicians create their best work? Some of the top songs during the later part of his term:

• Thnks fr th Mmrs
• Buy U a Drank
• SexyBack
• This is Why I’m Hot
• Crank That (Soulja Boy)

All perfectly fine songs, but not exactly a Renaissance for rebellion music that will be remembered for centuries (for centuriiies (sorry, I actually really like Fall Out Boy)).

Even individual artists don’t create their best work when grieving for unique personal reasons, according to this study.

As anyone who has completed a creative pursuit knows, it takes a lot of hard work. Anything that distracts from that work isn't really helping—it's not like complicated, tumultuous emotions can just pop out of your head and take form as a profound work of art. Turmoil may inform art, or inspire art, but you still have to put fingers to keyboard, pick to guitar, brush to canvas, whatever, and it's difficult to do that when you're curled in a ball with tears in your eyes and a pain in your gut from stress-eating another tub of ice cream to briefly distract yourself from the day's latest round of Twitter-fueled fuckery.

Which is to say … we need to keep fighting. Worrying that your mom will die of a horrible respiratory disease won’t create the next Mona Lisa. Continued systemic racism won’t be responsible for the next Prince (after all, George Floyd was a musician). Let’s eradicate this virus and eradicate white supremacy, because there is no artistic upside to this shit.