Hashtag Boost My Bio

Hi, Everybody!

If you've found my blog it's probably because you're a writer on Twitter, so I don't need to explain #BoostMyBio to you. I just started this blog last week, and just started taking my prose writing seriously in February, so I'm very new to all of this, and I'm very excited about everything!

How I Got Here

I'm Tom! I live in Chicago, but I grew up in New Jersey, went to college in New York, and lived in Austin for five years before moving to Chicago for grad school. Now I work for a non-profit as a policy analyst. In my free time I train for obstacle course races like Spartan and Ninja Warrior, and take pictures of my cats, Stokely and Rosie.

They're good cats.

My Writing Journey

I've always loved writing, but for various reasons I avoided prose writing. Some highlights:

• In fourth grade, inspired by "Weird" Al Yankovic, I started writing song parodies, and lyric writing has been a passion of mine ever since
• In high school I became obsessed with movies and won a small scholarship for a short screenplay I wrote
• In college I wrote a musical with a friend of mine (I wrote the lyrics and the book, he wrote the music) that was the first original musical produced by my college's student-run musical theater club
• After college I started writing and performing as a rapper, and I still participate in rap battles under the name Thorough Henry

My WIP

Title: The Living

Genre: Adult Literary Speculative Fiction

Premise: Six months after a virus has wiped out almost everyone on earth, Doug Perragrin has nothing left to live for. The only thing keeping him alive is a promise he made to his son. He sets off on foot from Chicago to Philadelphia to find the author of his son's favorite book, a book that ended on a cliffhanger. Along the way he finds Josie, a young mute girl searching for her brother, who might still be alive.

Comps: Station Eleven; Oryx and Crake

Where I Go from Here

I am in the process of writing the second draft of my novel, which I am trying to finish in time for Pitch Wars. I would love a mentor who is able to see which parts of my WIP are working and which aren't, help guide my revision process to make the final product as strong and polished as possible. I am also looking for critique partners and writing friends so that we can be each other's cheerleaders.

Other Things About Me

House: Hufflepuff

Favorite Fiction Books: The Giver; The Grapes of Wrath; The Bell Jar

Favorite Non-Fiction Books: Iron War; Chasing the Scream; Raging Bulls and Easy Riders

Want to know more about me? Follow my blog, or on Twitter, and feel free to reach out and say hi. In the meantime, you can watch this video of me insulting somebody using Disney references:

  

The Best Writing Advice I've Ever Read

Okay, so it's technically not writing advice. Or, at least, it wasn't intended to be.

A couple of years ago I was reading an oral history of Angels in America, Tony Kushner's epic (both in terms of scale and length) two-part play about the AIDS epidemic in the United States 1980s. It is widely considered one of the most important works of theater of the twentieth century, and the fact that it recently received a Broadway revival might be the only thing that could make me regret moving away from New York City.

The story of Kushner writing the script, which he delves into in that oral history, is fascinating. It is also, to put it bluntly, messy. What Kushner makes clear is that he had no idea what story he wanted to tell, or how he wanted to tell it, when he started writing. He would just sit down and write, letting the characters develop and finding new ideas to explore with every turn. At one point he went to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and over the course of ten days wrote 700 pages.

Of course, there is no way that all 700 pages would make their way into the final script, and Kushner knew that. "There was a lot of shit," he admitted. But he saws that what got him through those ten days and 700 pages, was by giving himself a simple message: "Nobody has to know what I've done here."

I have always been a perfectionist when it comes to writing, to an almost literal degree. If what I was writing wasn't perfect, I didn't want to put it down on the page. Having this perspective was, as you can imagine, exhausting and unproductive. The moment I felt a writing project didn't live up to my standards, I abandoned it, jumping to whatever new idea I had that I'm sure I could complete without ruining by writing anything imperfect. If you couldn't guess, I wouldn't end up finishing that new project either, and the cycle would continue.

But somehow, that is not the only way that this demand for perfection would negatively impact my writing. Because every once in a while I would actually finish a project I was working on. Or, at least, I would finish a first draft. And then I knew that I was supposed to edit my project to make it better. But here's the thing: when you only let yourself write when you think your writing is perfect, it makes it really hard to edit what you've written, because you think that what you've written is perfect! I would justify every idea, every sentence, every word, by telling myself that it must be what I mean to write, and therefore I shouldn't change it. If I changed it, I was essentially admitting failure. My inability to edit my work held me back as a writer more than anything else.

I have always written for myself, but I have also always written with the audience in mind. When I write I am thinking about what the reader or viewer or listener will be thinking and feeling, and how my writing will affect them. So when I read what Kushner told himself, "nobody has to know what I've done here," I found it incredibly freeing. I realized that the process of writing, particularly writing the first draft of a story, is just about getting my ideas down on paper in a moderately coherent fashion. It's not meant for general consumption.

Once those ideas have been written down, editing is about refining them. Restructuring, cutting out anything that doesn't make the story better or reinforce the main idea, and adding in what was missing in the first draft. Editing is about turning something that I wrote for me into something for other people, so that hopefully they can understand my ideas and feel the full effect of the story I am trying to tell. The first draft isn't even really a story yet; it becomes one in the editing process.

I am very close to finishing the first draft of my first novel, the most ambitious writing project I have undertaken besides my college thesis. When I started writing it all I had in my head was two characters and an ending. As I wrote I invented ways to develop the story, to find new conflicts and obstacles, and in the process I learned about the characters and the world they are inhabiting. About three-quarters of the way through the drafting process I realized that I would need to completely restructure most of the beginning of the story. Not only that, but the changes I planned to make would mean that everything I would write continuing the original narrative would also need to be rewritten. Essentially, if I kept writing, rather than starting over from the beginning, I would have to throw out almost everything that I wrote when I started editing.

I'm still writing it, though, for a few reasons. First, it's because this is my first novel, and I really want to finish it, just to say I have. Second, considering my aforementioned history of abandoning projects, I want to prove to myself that I can finish this one, otherwise I am afraid I will end up in an endless cycle of restarting it and never actually finishing it. It will be good for me, for both of those reasons, to have a completed rough draft, no matter how rough it is.

But also, I think it will be good for my story. Part of the process of writing this draft is to understand my characters as deeply as possible and to develop of the flow of the narrative. Putting these characters into different situations will help me with both of those. Even if I don't use anything that I wrote in my last few chapters, the work that I do will make future revisions easier and the end result better. All of the work matters, even if it doesn't show up in the final product.

I'll be finishing my first draft in the next few days, and starting my second draft pretty soon after that. I'm so excited about all of the new ideas I'll get to explore as I start rewriting. Who knows, a few of them might even show up in my final draft.

What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten, whether it was meant to be writing advice or not?

The Thirty Day Yoga Challenge

I am not a flexible person, at least not physically. Being able to do a split, or even touch my toes without bending my knees to nearly a ninety degree angle, has never been something I've been able to accomplish. Being flexible is the sort of thing that, like being able to play piano or speak Spanish, is the sort of thing I'd like to be able to do, but not enough to actually put in the effort.

Lately, however, my lack of flexibility has become more and more irksome. I have been diving deeper into my training for various ambitious athletic endeavors, including triathlons, obstacle course races, and hopefully someday being on American Ninja Warrior. One thing that has been holding me back is how tight and stiff my muscles are all time. I've tweaked both a calf and a hamstring, injuries that slowed my progress as I had to ease off the gas pedal in order to recover.

As a result, I've come to the conclusion that I need to take my flexibility as seriously as I take my strength and my endurance. The best way to do that, I've concluded, is through yoga.

I still remember the first time I went to a yoga class. My sister dragged me to a class she took, promising that if I wasn't enjoying myself I could leave early. This, apparently, was a baldfaced lie, as I left halfway through the class and she got mad at me afterward. Not the most auspicious start to my practice.

Over the years, however, I have come to appreciate yoga, both for how good it feels to stretch my muscles and the calm, centered feeling it instills in me. The one thing my practice has never been, however, is consistent. I would take a yoga class, enjoy it immensely, promise myself I would go more often, and then not take another one for months. As a result, the impact on my flexibility has been virtually nonexistent. 

Fortunately, in addition to pictures of cats and terrible political opinions, the internet is full of yoga instructional videos. I have found several 20-30 minute videos focused on stretching and flexibility, including ones specifically designed to be done after a run. With all of these resources at my disposal, and with my desperate need to increase my flexibility becoming more and more obvious, I have no excuse not to do yoga.

That's why I'm challenging myself to do yoga for at least twenty minutes, every day, for the next thirty days. I already started today, doing a video after my morning run that felt so good on my sore legs it was practically orgasmic. One day down, twenty-nine to go.

This might not be the best time to do this challenge, since I'm moving in a week and visiting family in Austin a few weeks after that. Still, considering that all I need to do yoga is twenty minutes, a carpeted floor, and internet access, it should be pretty manageable. Hopefully by the end of the thirty days I'll be, if not as flexible as Mr. Fantastic, at least a little more flexible than I am right now.

Are there any yoga videos that you use? If so, let me know!

I Don't Even Know 100,000 Words

Throughout my childhood there were several books that I reread so often I’m sure my mother would still cringe at the sight of them. Whether they involved the Berenstain Bears eating too much junk food or Sam I Am’s offers of green eggs and ham being rebuffed, I pored over their pages so often I practically had them memorized. One of those books, not my favorite, but still one that I adored, involved a lovable anteater named Arthur and his quest to win the school’s spelling bee. This story is going somewhere, I promise.

In all honesty, I remember very little about the book or its plot, and I couldn’t even tell you who won the spelling bee in question, although I assume that Arthur came out on top, as he often did, like a slightly luckier and more optimistic Charlie Brown. For some reason, the only line of the book that I can recall comes shortly after the teacher announces to his class that the spelling bee will be schoolwide, compulsory, and test them on one-hundred different words.

One girl in Arthur’s class, both dismayed at the challenge before her and resigned to her inevitable failure, uttered a line that I have never forgotten: “I don’t even know a hundred words!” I don’t know why I found that line so funny, or why it has clung to the lobes of my brain for nearly two decades, but it still wanders across my mind every now and then, always eliciting a chuckle.

When I started writing a novel in February, I understood just how ambitious a task I was undertaking. The first thing I did, of course, was try to find out exactly how many words I was expected to produce. I knew from friends that NaNoWriMo--which I have never and almost certainly will never attempt--required works to be at least 50,000 words in order to qualify as a novel, but that seemed short to me. Having read books as short as The Road and The Catcher in the Rye, and as long as Crime and Punishment, I knew that there was a very broad range of what could be considered novel-length. Still, I hoped that being given a rough estimate would put what I was about to attempt into context.

Gleaning information from various different articles on the subject, I learned that a novel was expected to be at least 70,000 words long, and most authors less verbose than Tolkien clocked in their work at between 90,000 and 110,000 words. Splitting the difference, I told myself that 100,000 seemed like a reasonable goal towards which to strive. At the same time, the very idea of writing a story comprising that many words sounded so insane I might as well be staring at a windmill and declaring it a giant. At that moment I asked myself, half in jest, do I even know 100,000 words?

Fortunately, when writing a novel you’re allowed to use words more than once, although hopefully not too often. And the mantra I repeated almost every day was encouraging: “It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.” If I could produced 100,000 words that told some sort of coherent story, I would be satisfied. Making them good could wait for editing.

Tonight, I stumbled past that threshold. It was, fittingly, a very rough day of writing, where I struggled to write every sentence and immediately hated every word I put down on paper. But I hit 100,000 words and then a few more, and I am immensely proud of myself for doing so.

This is not a victory lap, although I did celebrate with sushi and chocolate. I’m not yet finished with my novel, although I’m hoping to complete it within another 10,000. Still, I am somewhat in awe that I have managed to see this project through even as far as I’ve gotten. Having given up on more writing projects than I can remember, this is an accomplishment that I do not take lightly. Just like Arthur beat the odds to win the spelling bee (probably), I beat the odds to type out 100,000 words. To quote another jovial fictional youngster, Bart Simpson: “that ain’t not bad.”