Trust me. I’m a (plot) doctor.

I've been having one of those kind of roadblock weeks with my own creativity (thanks, anxiety-based procrastination!), which is one of the many reasons I was grateful yesterday to get an afternoon text from my good friend J.C. Hay asking if we could meet up for a plot doctoring session.

If you've met me, you know I've essentially got three settings: unconscious, very serious, and ridiculous. Around John, I basically jettison the first two and focus on the third. This is fantastic because then the two of us can basically just act our shoe size for the duration.

Strangely enough, this is ideal for knocking a wayward plot out of shape. It's a happy distraction from those things in writing that can be frightening if you look at them too long, or worry overmuch about anything other than the story. Plus, it leads to gems like last night, in which we hammered out the antagonist's arc by referring to him as Handwringer, Lord of Douchebag.

(The point, of course, being to draw attention to the fact that we were specifically working to prevent the problem of his villain being a one-dimensional, hand-wringing douchebag instead of a rounded, fully-realized character in his own right.)

It always amazes me how much better I feel as a writer coming out of one of these sessions. The act of stepping through a thing in advance -- in essence, blocking out the book for a future writing performance -- is satisfying, and reminds me how good and playful the planning stages of a story should be.

Plus, John bought me a cookie. I am not the sort of man to say no to that kind of action.

~*~

- This piece from the Guardian is the first I've seen in the mainstream media to really acknowledge the existence of masculine women and transmen in the Middle East. The reports of social/cultural crackdown is disturbing, and the difficulties inherent in being LGBTQ in the Arab world fill me with sorrow, but to see it spoken of at all is...well, it gives me a hopeful feeling in the long term.

- T. Thorn Coyle writes about redefining success. I'm a big fan of questioning the core values of the overculture where it does me harm, or at least leads away from my actual happiness. I think the obvious fear with this line of questioning is whether it might sap ambition, but I think I prefer to invest in things which make me more complete rather than more depressed and crazy.

- The LLF has released the list of its 2011 Emerging Writers Retreat Fellows. As you read through this year's fellows -- and I encourage you to if you've got the time and interest -- you might notice that some writers' bios include links that say "Help [name] attend the retreat." Those links are your opportunity to help these writers attend this year's writing retreat in Los Angeles. Every little bit helps!

- Angry Black Bitch -- who is a thoughtful, stupendous badass -- reminds us that slavery still exists, and that there is a ton of work to do, even here in the United States. Especially recommended is the TED talk that she links to.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com