Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “Pig” and “Rising Winds” chapters from Teardrop Road.
Procrastination
They say about procrastination that you’re only hurting yourself. That’s not true. They say about procrastination that it’s easy to handle and you should just do it, whatever the it is. It’s not true. Procrastination is like a drug. You see the task coming. You get a sensation. Kind of a dread thrill. And you continue to put it off.
Then it happens again. You have time to do the task. You put it off. You feel that dread, you feel that thrill. It’s almost like you’re defying authority. That bit of rebellion that’s still left in your adult life. But the authority you’re rebelling against is yourself, and that’s only self-destructive.
So I’m gonna tell you a story, because telling stories is what I do, that perfectly encapsulates everything you need to know about procrastination. And I hope you think about this every time you find yourself in a situation where you’re looking at Robert’s roses.
Robert’s a friend of mine. He’s in the story “Pig”. He’s an alcoholic who got his shit together. He was an Army brat, and when he was 18, his parents got shipped to Germany and the Army wouldn’t pay for him to go. So he had to find a life. He got a job working construction, which doesn’t pay bad, but it’s punishing. He got a job working construction and within two weeks, he had enough for a trailer out in the middle of nowhere. It was furnished, I remember that much. And although the furniture was not the highest quality, it was all comfortable. He had a cat, and I’m allergic to cats, so Dungeons and Dragons nights were pretty terrible.
And when he moved in, sitting on the fake fireplace was a large vase filled with roses. Must have been more than a dozen. A lot of water. There was a note from his landlady welcoming him to the house and the neighborhood. He showed them to me so that I could marvel at how cool his landlord and landlady were. And then he promptly forgot about them.
I remember we played a lot of DnD but we were also playing a game called Vampire the Masquerade. It said that vampires were so evil that when they walked past flowers, the flowers wilted. That’s when I noticed these flowers were drooping. Robert’s roses were starting to go.
I told him he should throw them out, and he ignored me. Next time I was at the house, petals had begun to fall off, and you had curled up little shreds, black and hard. I scooped some of them up in my hand. I was gonna keep them. I don’t know why. It was a hard time in my life. I remember while they were in my hand, running my finger through them like I was looking for change, shifting my fingers through the quarters and pennies. Well I threw them away and told him he needed to throw the flowers out.
This is the difficulty of the chore he had ahead of him. He had to pick up the vase, walk six feet to the door, step out onto the porch. He had to pour it all onto the grass and leaves off the side of the porch, walk inside, rinse the vase, we’re done. But he never did.
So he comes over to my house. There was still water in the vase when it all happened. About three inches of water. Robert came over to the house and he had mosquito bites all over his face and arms. We thought it was from him working outside. Nobody asked any questions. Nobody thought about it. Next time I see him, even more. They were all over his body now.
Bugs are really bad in Missouri, that was what we told ourselves. When I spent the night at his house, I saw what the problem was. Robert’s house was infested with mosquitos. They were everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I killed ten within the first five minutes I was there. And I told him we had to leave.
The mosquitos had laid eggs in the vase. They need water to lay their eggs and they had it. He had procrastinated throwing out the roses so long that now his house was unlivable. It was impossible to do anything in there. I had him take me home immediately. And though I killed ten mosquitos, I still had over five bites I missed.
This is the perfect example of procrastination. Perfect analogy microcosm. The feat can be taken care of at any time very easily. It’s a situation where it’s not at all a burden, but you just don’t do it. You feel dread when you think about it. I said earlier it was a thrill. It’s not really a thrill, a bit of a nervous energy.
Did you know you can become addicted to sleep? Right as you’re drifting off, as the water of sleep covers the last of your body, you get a shot of dopamine. If you find yourself sleeping a lot, taking a lot of naps, with me it was waking up from nightmares and then going back to sleep, you get those dopamine spurts over and over again. Your body becomes addicted to them. Now you’re tired all the time and procrastination is the same way. There is a nervous energy you only get when you procrastinate. It’s filled with dread, self-loathing. And it creates a certain chemical in your body. I don’t know what it is, but you definitely feel it. And now, procrastination gives you a feeling you can’t feel any other way, and we’re off to the races.
The story of Robert’s roses encapsulates perfectly the reason why procrastination serves no one. It went from a pleasant surprise greeting from his new landlady to making the house absolutely unlivable. He ended up moving out. There wasn’t a lot of actual moving to do, because the place was furnished, so I wasn’t there hefting furniture and tossing it into a truck, but he had to find another place. And on it goes. Robert found another way to procrastinate in that place, too. I think it was putting his bed together. He just slept on a mattress in the floor. He was scarred by it. He was an addict of it, the procrastination. It was beyond his ability to control.
Finding Time to Write
Finding time to write is, well, it’s an exercise of the mind I guess. That’s how I’ll put it. I don’t know how much you guys write. I write every night. There’s a thing that happens in your mind if you tell yourself the right set of words. There’s a thing that happens in the mind that will begin to create a sensation of joy, quite like the dopamine thing.
First of all, you have to accept that writing is work. If you’re not willing to call it work, then you’re in trouble, because you can’t be proud of it. Let’s say I have a muse. My muse, she would have flaming hair. She’d have a spear, tusks, bronze skin. And she whispers or screams in my ear, every time I’m inspired and I write. If I take that creature into my daily mythology, then what do I have to be proud of? Do you get it? What do I have to be proud of? She gave it to me. I waited until inspiration grabbed me. I was carried away by it. You’re taking credit for gaining pride in a spurt of inspiration. It’s gone and you never know when it’s gonna come back.
That’s the mindset that’s gonna lead to procrastination and just you not getting the assignment done. If you see it as work, you force yourself to do it, whether it’s good or bad. You force yourself to go back to it later and make sure that’s how you want it. If the entire piece was difficult, but you got it done and it’s good, you have something to be proud of.
I guess the biggest problem for me was Forsaken. Never written a book like it. I started it on vacation in Virginia, wrote a really great scene I was very proud of, and I just got started. It was an absolute nightmare. The two people whose opinions matter the most, my alpha reader and my wife, both told me they didn’t like the book. You’ll hear more about that later. Or maybe you’ve already heard about it. I don’t know, I’m skipping around in the creation of the curriculum. Just like I skip around in everything I do.
So Forsaken was the impossible book. It was a book I had to force myself to write. Inspired moments were few and far between. I wasn’t getting the reaction from the people reading it that I wanted. And I had to keep typing, keep slamming the board.
I was absolutely miserable all the way through the book. Life would become unlivable and I would take a couple of weeks off. Forsaken is a little over 800 pages. It’s the third book in the Mountain. It took me seven months to write it. At the pace I set, that’s way too long. I had nothing but doubts and I hated myself while I was working on this book, but I went back every night, forced out another chapter. Went back the next night, forced out another chapter.
This section of the lecture is supposed to be called “Finding Time to Write” and I had a list of activities that there’s always time for. Reading your holy book. You just, once you set the habit, the time always seems to be there. Brushing your teeth. Morning coffee. Working out. I had a whole list of good ones. That’s all bullshit. You can’t look at it like that. Shadow was very proud of his list of things you always have time to do.
But the fact is, this isn’t Shadow’s class. This is Prince’s class. And Prince says, I say, you don’t have time to write. Ever. I’ve never had time to write. I’ve always had something else I could be working on, or I’ve been upset about something. With a mind like mine, there’s nothing but distractions, emotional upheaval. I’m a father. I have two children. They’re complicated. Children are always complicated. My son got his license today. There’s always a meal to make and dishes to do, there’s always some kind of financial problem, there’s always a class you have to get to. You have no time to write. That’s not a good enough excuse.
I got through Forsaken. I wrote it, forced myself to write it. I forced myself to write it. Look at me, all of you, every one of you, look up from your notes. I forced myself to write it. When I was writing it, I was incapable of sex. My body wouldn’t work. I was a bad father. I was not the best husband. When I forced myself to write Forsaken, I was at my worst. I made time for two things. I took a shower every single day that I was writing Forsaken. And every single day that I was writing Forsaken, I wrote Forsaken.
I’m gonna force you to look up from your notes again. I’m gonna pound on the desk again. All that melodrama I told you about earlier. Every day I was writing Forsaken, I. Wrote. Forsaken. I forced it.
I knew it was shit. I knew it was the worst book I’d ever written. I was just trying to push through it, just get through the book. I was rowing upstream, whispering to myself every time I sat down to write, every time I would take a break and come back, no pain.
I went on a bad float trip once when I was a kid, probably ten years old. We took our canoes downstream. It was fun. It was amazing. I was with people I loved. And then we turned the boats around and went back to the car, and it was all upstream. I was too young to row. The people who were rowing were exhausted. It got dark and it got cold. As he switched his oars from one side to the next, he kept splashing the middle of the boat and getting my back. I bent over as much as I could, to cut down on wind resistance because the wind had started up and was blowing against us, and I kept chanting, No Pain, No Pain. Because it was all I could do.
Well, Forsaken was all I could do. One word after the next, one letter after the next, space bar. I think I talk about the space bar later in the class. That was Forsaken. No Pain. I was cold, bent over, working against wind resistance. No Pain. Got it done and I knew it was crap. When I went to write the fourth book in the series, I read them all, everything I had written up to that point, I read them all, and that’s when I reread Forsaken for the first time.
It was the best of the books. It was the best, there goes that fist again, it was the best. Of. The. Books. The other two, the two before it, nothing came close to them. So I don’t believe you. I think you’re a liar. This is where I’m gonna do that thing again and make you all look up at me, look up from your notes, look me in the eye. I think you’re a liar when you tell me you don’t have time to sit down and write. You don’t know when to fit it in.
While I was writing Forsaken, I was averaging 3-5 hours of sleep a night. I would lay in bed for 3-4 hours before I would sleep. Sometimes I wouldn’t lay in bed for those 3-4 hours, I would just slink to bed, get three or two and a half hours of sleep and the book would wake me up. The book had me. It had every moment of my day, even when I took my breaks. The book demanded that I be Forsaken. That I walk it and breathe it. And I hated every moment of writing it. Forsaken was hell.
All of you will have a Forsaken book. Every one of you will have a Forsaken book. And when you do, don’t come crying to me. This story I’m asking you to write might be your Forsaken. Don’t come crying to me, because I have no pity and I have no mercy for you. Because I had to do it. Don’t come crying to me. Come bragging to me.
I fit in another 250 words, Teller.
I wrote four more pages, Teller.
I had the busiest day of my life, my girlfriend broke up with me, my boyfriend cheated on me, but I got another five pages written, Teller.
I had all day to write, Prince. And I sat down and I grabbed my video game controller, loaded a game I was dying to play, and I put it down. Turned off the console. And I wrote. And I finished my story, Prince.
That’s what I want to hear from you, because that’s what you’re capable of. I know you’re capable of it because I’ve heard stories of every writer who has done it, and I’ve done it myself. I don’t care if you keep your laptop in the bathroom and write every time you defecate. You will make time to write this story, and you will make time to write for the rest of your life. I know you can do it. Because my mind is broken. And we talked about all the things that are wrong with me. And I have been through Forsaken. I have written Forsaken.
Mindset of a Writer
How did Hollow’s reading change the way you entered the classroom and the way you began to think about what we do here?
“This is not happening. This is not happening.” She looked at the doors and shook her head. “I can’t do that. I can’t go in there.” She knew there was no one to beg, but still she begged for any other way to go. She looked at the shadows cast by the beings slapping and thudding against the windows and knew any of them would chew off a limb to be where she was right now. She wept and cursed, and when she had no options or other ways to move on, she cursed again and stepped into the door.
The ooze rushed against her body. It sank into her nose, it coated her lungs. She was suffocating as she pushed her way through, and she could feel her heart pounding as she forced her way forward. She pushed on as her skin pulled and her hair was yanked back. She fought her way through as it closed around her back and consumed her completely. She kept pushing until her face broke free, and with it, she could breathe again. Her shoulders, then her chest, her arms, fingers, then her hands. Slowly as she pushed, she freed herself of the nightmare of the door, and when she collapsed on the other side, she realized she had been scrubbed clean.
She looked at the room before her, a dining room table with food on the far end. At the table sat a fiend she had no name for, but she knew him all the same.
You’re gonna have to sit down at a computer. You’re gonna have to look at a white screen. You’re gonna have to stare into the eyes of the fiend at the end of the table.
You have been scrubbed clean. You’re not a mother, you’re not a father, you’re not working at a gas station, you’re not a grad student. You’re a writer now.
The fiend is sitting down to a banquet. There’s food on his table.
Remember that I’m the fiend. From the first class, I’ve always been the fiend. When you sit at the computer screen, I will give you my chair. The meal that was set before me as a writer is now set before you. Feast as you write on the meat of point of view, and there is something else on the table, something small. Let’s say a bowl of figs. That’s your inspiration. Bite into one and write. You’re sitting down to write now. Take a drink of wine. You’ll need it. (Let’s try to remember this is symbolism. This is not Teller telling you to get drunk before you write. Let’s try to remember I have never been drunk before I write, except one time. And the melodrama was so bad the fist went right through the table.)
Write sober. Don’t be high, don’t be drunk. You need every bit of your sharp mind to create real art. You can trust me. I’m bipolar.
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
—Gustave Flaubert
Mania (any stimulant besides maybe coffee, maybe)
When I was manic, I would write three or four pages in the span of seven hours and be extremely proud of myself.
We’re talking about a composition book which has wide lines. We’re talking about handwritten. Word count, no more than 300 words. That’s when I was manic.
Depressed (any depressants, weed, opiates, liquor)
Cut myself off from all communication and all people. Suffered physically. Starved myself, denied myself water and sleep. Created six pages in a week, again composition pages.
Medicated and Sober
3,000 words a day. Three hundred page book in a month and a half. Twenty-five books in eight years.
What do we do here?
This is a multimedia class. We’re looking for inspiration and instruction from many sources, not all reading.
Fact is, nothing inspires me more than the written word. But sometimes I just don’t have time. I don’t have time to sit down and read a book before I write. I have a very small window with which to get my 3,000 words done. It wouldn’t feel small to you. It’s six hours to write 3,000 words. This is how it goes:
Distraction from the day I just had, usually about 24-minute television show of some kind. Washes me of dinner and husband and father.
Then there’s about 15-20 minute discussion, sometimes 45, an hour, with my alters to try to explain and make sense out of what’s about to go down on the page.
Then I study what I have to write. I go over to the magnetic wall in my office, look at the cards that are hung up there so I can get an idea of where I’m going.
Gotta choose a video. The last video that really took hold of me was “Worldwide Choppers” by Tech N9ne. There’s an insane blast straight to the vein of amazing writing. It’s international, some of the sections can’t even, they’re not even in English and I don’t speak any other language. It’s just impossible work.
When I’m looking at some of the things I’m going to be doing, I get to thinking about what’s possible and what’s impossible. Last time, “Worldwide Choppers” did it for me. I was writing a short story. It was about two time traveling wizards. Basically every event that takes place in my world is decided, influenced, or nudged by these two warring bodies.
I’m going to play you the video now. When I write this collection of short stories about these wizards, I have to think about the one conversation, the one murder, the one dagger stab that changed the face of the entire world. And during the course of the story, I have to show more. And then the great thing they are trying to accomplish. So I watch “Worldwide Choppers.” We’re going to watch it now. Think about what it takes to write this kind of song. Think about what it takes to perform it. When I was writing the short story “Crease,” for the collection The Silent War of the Sour Eye, this is what I was listening to.
I’ll play it four or five times. Now if you’re really paying attention, you can see that two hours have gone by now, maybe a little more. So I have four hours. Hopefully I can get started writing at this point. If not, I have to find a different video.
Let’s say another half hour has gone by if I have to choose another video. Now I have three and a half hours, and usually I can get started and it takes me about an hour and a half to write 3,000 words.
So now I have to find normal again in another hour and a half. I have to find a way to get my mind to stop creating and thinking about this, because if I walk out into the world after all this, then the hallucinations are so much worse. The shifting from alter to alter is so much worse. I have to find a normal.
This is the every day, day to day. Takes place between the hours of 2 o’clock in the morning and 10 o’clock in the morning. My goal is to get one 3,000 word section finished. Sometimes I’m able to get two, depending on how the conversation with my alters goes. Depending on whether me (Prince), can get everybody to shut up and do the work.
When I sit down to write, I’m…
1) Excited
2) Scared
3) Overwhelmed
I have so far left to go. I haven’t even written a word yet. This was especially true when I wrote my epics. They averaged about 800 pages and it was just, sitting down to write an 800-page book from a blank document is just, it’s horrifying.
The Shining by Stephen King, room 237, when I saw this as a kid on the screen, I saw the rotting corpse of the lady walking toward me and I screamed (this is in the 80s, when we let six-year-olds watch horror movies.)
The movie Ghost Story, this is a movie about a group of old rich men who get together to tell ghost stories, drink, and smoke cigars. A younger man joins them and finds out that they’re all being haunted by the same woman, a woman they all helped kill. There’s a scene in here, again a dead woman gets up and charges a man. I screamed. I was horrified. I was eight. C’mon, give me a break, I was eight years old.
These two images were the scariest things I’ve ever seen. To this day they bother me. Maybe somewhere in my past I’ve been charged by a rotting dead lady. (Anything is possible. In this class you’ll learn, anything is possible.)
I suffer from hallucinations every day. Maybe it was a charging dead lady. However, I was six at the time, seven, when I watched the movies. I didn’t start hallucinating until I was in fifth grade. But, I’m going to sit here and tell myself that it was a hallucination that scared me so bad I nearly peed my pants. We’ll call it a hallucination, because if I had never hallucinated a rotting woman coming at me, and it’s never been a hallucination, then why is it my greatest fear?
Right now, as you’re watching me, my heart’s pounding. I can barely breathe. To a lot of writers, the blank page, and the 800-page book is the same thing.
Too Much Prewriting
Sometimes the outlines, the character bios, the character sketches, you’d not believe how much time I could spend explaining to you all the things writers go through in prewriting. And then you’re sitting down to write the book. You know everything about the book already. And writing the first paragraph is just impossible. The writer has to know things about the book the reader never needs to know. These things get in the way of the plot.
- Worldbuilding, economics, histories, rumors, the reader doesn’t need to know all these things.
- Maps, city-on-city conflicts, gods, the reader doesn’t have to know all these things.
- With excessive prewriting the author knows so much about the world, they don’t know what the reader needs to know and what the author need to know.
Amount of Time
I write 3,000 words a day. That takes an hour and a half. It takes me a month and a half on average to finish a 350-page book. Don’t check my math. I go crazy at the end. But at a workshop, I met a woman who had been working on her 200-page book for 23 years. I didn’t ask much about it because I knew that after 23 years, she had gone through so many maybes and even thoughs, that she was as confused about the book as I would be. It’s a delicate balance between giving a book time to grow and being caught in the undergrowth of a book.
Rushing a book is a 9-lane highway. Sterile, thick, heavy, no passion.
Too much time is an overgrown jungle with a dull machete.
There’s a way to find a path when it comes to the pace of writing a book that is a paved road, windy and twisting, with dips and blind hills, surrounded by woods, forests, and creatures, that does not take too long and does not go too fast.
There’s a diner on that road. I would tell you its name, but its name is different for me than it will be for you. Go in, have a seat. The coffee’s terrible, get the Dr. Pepper.
There’s a waitress. Her name is Mags. Ignore the bad dye job. Ignore the attitude as she asks for your order. She has to deal with star-struck, struggling, overwhelmed writers like yourself all the time. Don’t touch the menu. It’s sticky anyway. Just ask her what’s good. Mags will smile at you. She’ll tell you, “Wait here, sugar, I’ll bring you something you’ve never had before.”
You might have to wait for awhile. The short order cook is a slow one. But Mags’ll bring you a meal the likes of which you’ve never had before. Look around the diner. You’re gonna see faces like those around you. They’ll all be eating different meals. Somehow Mags always knows. When she comes to give you a refill, tell her Jesse Teller sent you. Tip well.
Writing Assignment
Write me out ten excuses. Make me believe you. Give me ten excuses why you can’t write and you don’t have time.
I don’t want a list. I want at least a paragraph explaining each excuse to me. Tell me why it’s unreasonable for me to ask you as a writer to write the short story you have due in three class periods. You tell me in your point of view, the max grade you can reach is a B. Put passion in it.
Now if I was going to make this difficult, I would tell you to put those excuses in your main character’s words. The main character of your story would explain to me why you don’t have time to write the story due in three class periods. From your main character’s point of view, best you can get is an A.
If I was really being challenging, I would tell you to have your villain explain to me the ten reasons why you just don’t have time. There’s too many things going on. You just don’t have time. Maybe they could explain it to me in a way I would understand. I am Prince, after all. From your villain’s point of view, best you can get is 100%, and three minutes to introduce your story.
Reading Assignment
Reading Assignment for next class: “Liechen’s War Part 1”, “Liechen’s War Part 2” and “Malice” chapters from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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