Avoiding Plot Bunnies: NaNoWriMo and the need to be oneself in your writing voice.

Plot Bunnies in their Unnatural Habitat. Fun Fact, I took this picture myself!

It’s NaNoWriMo time and as a result I haven’t been able to post much about anime and manga aside from my glowing promotion of MangaViews. But this article, it’s from the heart. Selling out doesn’t necessarily mean selling out on your ideals, it’s redefining yourself as a person and not letting other people define you for who you are. The greatest act of selling out is to accept who you are yourself, instead of labelling yourself with things in hope that people will like you. This form of selling out is what the rock band KISS have perfected, whether you like them or not, there are legions of fans who like them, and then again there are legions of people who don’t, and while I find KISS has questionable motives and themes in their music, their tenacity to continue what they do no matter what people think of them dressing up in more makeup than the average teen girl does is inspiring.

You see, when I started out my NaNoWriMo career, no wait, my artistic career, I was trying to draw Osamu Tezuka manga style to illustrate a book in two different art styles for a very specific reason I can’t go into right now before that NaNo is revised and published. Heavily influenced by a man who died the exact year before I was born, I failed to realise the uniqueness of my work wasn’t my shameless Osamu Tezuka fanboying but the sheer weirdness in how I expressed myself in my own voice, blending elements of my Scots-Irish heritage into phantasms of urban fantasy novels that dealt with the role of mythology in the modern world.

Instead of trying to have a Japanese sensibility, I discovered, I had to come to terms with the reality that my perception of the world as processed by my autistic spectrum disorder brain was actually affecting the way I wrote and the way I arranged words on the page. The sheer mess that spilled out of my brain into my notebooks I polished into fully fledged ideas, and over time I accepted that it was okay to be wrong about something like dialogue or any other part of writing in the first draft. This is because editing comes later, and editing actually helps develop ideas into comprehensible things that others can understand.

During my teenage years up until now I struggled with my fears and anxiety about whether I had any worth to society as a human being, since my disability prevented me from traditional student employment like a McDonald’s minimum wage shift (the quintessential McJob Douglas Coupland probably got the term from) which other people who didn’t have the disability I had took to make ends meet. I was afraid in my paranoid delusions that were Australia to turn into a fascist state people like me would be rounded up and shot before I got a chance to achieve anything. Of course, recognising which thoughts are too paranoid rather than the apathy of not being paranoid enough is the key in developing a sane political thought in these troubled times. It’s bad enough that I’ve struggled with my Asperger’s Syndrome in interpreting the world which seemed so confusing, but my anxiety disorder distorted small worries of no real consequence from a mouse to a cat, amplifying my fears every time I turned on the news when the reality was that there was a lot of good happening in the world, especially locally in Australia, that just didn’t get covered on the news. Times are indeed tough, but I enjoyed very good health care whereas other writers who aim to be published struggle to even obtain health care in America, as John Scalzi points out. At least I had that to count on. We have dodgy internet bandwidths, censored video games and crowded public transport, but even worrying about these things is nothing compared to my comfort of having health care provided to me by the same government my anxiety sometimes makes me terrified of in paranoid and unrealistic ways.

But applying a decent amount of logic to my own life, it’s become easier to know when to panic, and when not to panic. For example there was one time I only escaped from a Sydney Funnel Web Spider by running sideways to avoid it running directly towards me. I knew this because of all those ridiculously nightmare-fuel unleaded books I read during my childhood in Queensland, you know, the ones my mother told me not to read because it would scare me, but turned out to be life saving because in Australia, no doubt, you’ll come across a situation where you or somebody you know is threatened by our infamous deadly native fauna. And it’s these experiences, reading up on things no matter what your parents say about what you read being not very useful at all, that shape you as a human being and a writer.

Your influences aren’t always as obvious as you imagine them to be. Osamu Tezuka’s a big influence on my creative work, in writing and other art media like my photography of anime figure still life photos, but all the same, I was equally influenced by Andy Griffiths’s Just… series. Let me put it this way. Andy Griffiths is what you would get if Chuck Palahniuk was Australian and wrote children’s books for children of a subversive bent. That’s pretty much how I could describe him in a way that does him justice. Andy Griffiths has gotten into hot water occasionally with whether children won’t try to emulate the crazy antics of his stories (some which are dangerous), but I believe that in this coddled PC age we need to be reminded of the fact that, like with my anxiety disorder, your fears are sometimes greater than the actual danger of something. The spirit of Andy Griffiths is the spirit of an Australia that remembers its larrikin and convict past, not afraid to be itself in all its unwashed glory. If you can find the books in an Australian bookshop, the Just… series of books is worth picking up for this reason. It’s what made me contemplate being a writer myself, back when I was a kid. The first pre-Harry Potter kids books I ever read.

What my writing, I learned, was really about, was wimpy men becoming not so wimpy under extraordinary circumstances. I can’t go into what the content of my novels and short stories are too much at this point, because I need to find a way to preserve the copyright for them in a way that protects my intellectual property as it’s developing. If anybody can tell me if copyright can protect works-in-progress let me know, especially under Australian copyright law. So if anybody knows about that stuff pop me a comment with a link. I try not to post too much of my stuff online because I want to be professionally published, but I aim to provide free downloadable eBooks of each of my works of fiction and non-fiction which exist alongside paper-book form volumes that people may or may not decide to pay for as they please.

Me with my camera. Self-portrait.

Anyway, what I’m saying here is, in finding myself as a writer, especially when doing NaNoWriMo, I had to go back to my roots and explore my hopes and fears, what really inspires me and what really scares me. It was the turning point where I had to tell myself “Yes, you are Jacob Martin, and you write your own stuff, and make your own art your own way!” – but at the same time taking account of my influences that made me who I am. It’s no secret I’m influenced by anime and manga, but I’m also inspired by some of the most obscure Japanese light novels and Internet Literature you’ve never heard of. Welcome to the NHK by Tatsuhiko Takimoto and Train Man by Hitori Nakano aren’t just inspiring to me because they’re Japanese and I come off as a bit of a weaboo, but they inspire me because Welcome to the NHK really captures the mundane terror of a man with an anxiety disorder (even if it’s different, and worse, than my own anxiety disorder), and Train Man inspires me because it really gets into the bones of how a story can be told through the transcribed forum post concept. Even more obscure books like The E Before Christmas inspired me because The E Before Christmas is one of the earliest Western world examples of internet literature told through emails, and Twitterature allowed me to see “Gee, how do I transcribe Twitter posts into written text in an actual book?”.

Your influences embed in you without you having to deliberately copy somebody else’s style. Understanding what your own voice is, is the most important thing you need to figure out. If your writing flows out onto your keyboard or notepad really naturally and you can really feel that yes, this is the kind of style you write in, instead of feeling like it’s a copy of something else – that’s how it probably should flow like. Remember, it’s okay to be wrong, because we are human beings. Because we are human beings we don’t like being reminded we are wrong, because television and movies and rap and rock music tell us that all of us are geniuses all of the time, when in reality we are defined by our abilities to recognise when to turn our ego off. It’s times when you decide to help somebody else along with a problem they are having, instead of grumbling you could be doing something you want to do, that really develop your personality.

The Big Merino: the Concrete Sheep in the Family.

Something helpful to remind yourself of is to be spontaneous, but remember to edit and revise things as a writer. It’s like how I don’t upload every photo I take to Flickr: because I don’t have a Pro account, at this point I can only upload so many images, so I have to choose them carefully. Like words, photograph images you take have to be chosen carefully, the shot considered, but if you don’t have enough spontaneity and impulse in deciding to take a photo at the right moment, maybe the opportunity to preserve that idea in its true and most beautiful form is lost, like a snapshot taken six seconds after the subject of the photo has moved on, most often with animal photos. This is why I feel frustrated with people who say “I hate having to keep everything in my head but when I write down ideas they never amount to anything.” – it’s just incongruous to how my brain function works – when I get an idea for a story or an opportunity to take a photo, if I feel like I must write it down NOW (or NAO in LOLcat speak) or take the photograph NOW, that’s what I do. It’s the reason why so much of my early works exist, I developed them and wrote them down, documented them on the page or my camera’s hard drive.

As an artist/writer I feel (in my personal opinion at least) that it is my job to document interesting things, or things that just I find interesting, which I can talk about hopefully at a level and skill which will make other people find what I talk/write about/photograph interesting. I know I can’t have immortality on Earth and I’ll get old and die, but my faith in God takes care of the after-effects of that stuff for me. You might think my attempts to convert to Catholicism are misguided and superstitious, but as long as I can get forgiveness from God and I can forgive you none of that really matters if I can respect other human beings no matter what they believe in. However, I do find it my duty as an artist and writer to document ideas, cultural concepts, thoughts, stories, images and feelings. That’s my job. I write everything down as it comes to me, and if I’m not near a notebook or keyboard I keep it in my head and meditate on it constantly on a bus, but I never forget to write any of it down. It is important when you are either a writer or an artist, to never forget to write ideas down. You may call me a romanticist hack who believes in the eternal Romantic idea of Author, but you won’t be laughing when I’ve written down at least fifteen ideas I have in any one day (sometimes I have more, or less, it doesn’t matter because I write it all down) and you will have forgotten all your ideas, like the grasshopper begging the ant for shelter and food when you have lost all your idea stock for the winter.

Goulburn Courthouse: The First City outside Sydney

I guess I got a few plot bunnies while writing this post, because I was originally going to write just about finding my own voice when I developed over NaNoWriMo. My original point was going to be that in crafting my stories I learned to not just write anime and manga inspired stories in my novels and short stories, but to attempt to tell the stories of my own nation, my own surroundings, in the context of the world around it. This is because I am not Japanese and don’t live in Japan – so trying to write in a completely Japanese style would betray my own identity of being a Scots-Irish Australian with autism spectrum disorder. That’s who I am and as I get older I discover more layers of  being myself, and am always learning. more.

Further Reading:

Usagijen: The Woman In The Mirror

Happenchance: Who is Your Audience?

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Copyright © Jacob Martin 2009. All Rights Reserved.