Author: Lauren Orsini

Home Author is Lauren Orsini (Page 3)

How to get feedback and stay motivated during long writing projects

Recently, a friend asked me how I managed to stay motivated while writing my two self-published books. She wanted to know how I managed to keep going when I wasn’t even sure if it was going to pay off, especially when I had other, paying work I could do instead.

A major part of my confidence comes from the fact that both times, I polled my audience about which topics they’d most like to read a book about. It was important to start with something I knew readers already cared about. But today I want to tell you about what came after that: getting some semblance of the book into readers’ hands as soon as it was ready.

It’s just like Twitter. It’s so easy to tweet an idea out there and see people’s interactions right away. The instant gratification is addictive. Longform writing projects are the opposite of that. It’s so long until anybody sees what you’re working on that it can feel like you’re writing just for yourself. And no matter how much you care about the topic, that can be a slog—especially when I know I have more immediate work you could do.

But hold on a second. Let’s examine why that other work feels so much more pressing. I think it’s because the other work: blog posts and articles and copywriting, is due to meet its audience very soon. Like Twitter, it’s more of a conversation, and that feeds my dopamine receptors. Unlike a book that might take months or a year to finish, it will get acknowledged right away.

Since I knew I was motivated by a dialogue, I worked that into the initial release of Otaku Journalism. I started by writing just one chapter and releasing it as a downloadable guide. Then another, and another. By the time I announced Otaku Journalism was going to be a full-length book, these guides had been downloaded more than 1,000 times. Readers had told me what they did and didn’t like, and I could keep that in mind while I wrote the rest. It was easy to stay motivated after that, knowing that this was more than a passion project, but a collection of advice that readers wanted and told me would be helpful to them.

Even so, I don’t think of Otaku Journalism as a success since it took me more than a year to break even and start profiting off of sales—I spent too much time and money upfront. But I corrected those mistakes in Build Your Anime Blog. I kept it lean and dense by incorporating 12 interviews with other bloggers in order to give way more advice than I could offer alone. This extra help also made it possible for me to wrap up the project in just two months. Even if it hadn’t made a profit right away (though it did!), I wouldn’t be out as much time or effort.

The one thing these two strategies have in common is that they got me out of my own head and back in front of an audience quickly. Whether it was through a serial chapter format or through a speed-writing sprint, I got to the good part—getting reader feedback—as soon as possible.

The thing is, writing in a vacuum is hard. When it’s just you and your word processor, it’s easy to get caught up in your own anxieties. What if people hate it? Or even worse, what if they don’t care? The thing is, if you did your homework before starting to write (through a poll or another sort of audience research), you know logically that people want this. It’s just that the gap between picking the project and putting it out there is the time that it’s toughest to remember that, because there’s the largest amount of space then between you and your audience.

I’ve been remembering this all over again this NaNoWriMo. This is about the time when the glamour of being a capital “N” Novelist wears off and I face the reality of extended daily writing goals, reevaluating if I still want to finish this. (I mean, last year I ended up in a wrist brace so it’s a huge question of risk vs. reward; a constant struggle of motivation vs. self-preservation.)

Whenever I feel the least motivated, I talk to friends who are also doing NaNo about where I’m stuck. On a few occasions, I have dropped my own manuscript to write a scene or two for a friend’s. It’s so much easier to write when I know what I’m putting down will soon have an audience. Even if my friend doesn’t like my contribution, it feels good to be acknowledged, compared to plugging thousands of words away into a document that might never be ready to publish.

It might be a long time before my work is ready for the world, and I certainly didn’t workshop my NaNoWriMo idea with a test audience. But I can still text a bit of dialogue I’m proud of or talk to people about the process. These moments of outreach remind me I’m not writing this alone.

Continuing from last week, not to mention last year, I’m wrapping up every November blog post with my current word count out of 50,000. Today it’s 16,417—I’ve fallen a few days behind. I’m not sure if I’ll get to the finish line this year, but I still plan to write a little every day!

Write from the baseline

I won’t bore you with the details of how I ended up locking myself out of my house last Thursday morning. Just know that no matter how I try to justify it, it was a pretty stupid mistake.

Fortunately, when it happened, my neighbor was home and let me use his phone. I called John and, amid a storm of apologies, asked him to come home from work and let me back in. Then I asked my neighbor for one more favor: could I borrow a pen? After all, this happened on the first day of NaNoWriMo and before the incident, I had been just about to sit down and write.

I settled in on a park bench with my pen and some scrap paper… and proceeded to completely space out instead of getting any writing done.

Some of the stuff I thought about:

  • What time is it? I didn’t have my phone or even my watch. Can I keep track of time with the movement of the sun, maybe? How much time has even passed?
  • What’s going on at work? Right before I locked myself out, I turned in an article on deadline. Was my editor happy, or was she pinging me right now for changes?
  • I’m so stupid. Why didn’t I bring my keys, or double check the door before I closed it? John must hate me right now for interrupting his day.
  • Why am I not writing? I have zero distractions. There’s just this paper in front of me. But for some reason, I still can’t make my brain relax.

It turned out there wasn’t any reason for me to worry so much, as is often the case with these things. My editor had gone to lunch and didn’t notice my absence. John wasn’t upset when he came home, and we made a plan to keep this from happening again.

Even though logically, I knew everything was fine, it took a couple of hours though before I could calm down and get some writing done. I had forgotten the most important truth about writing: the most important prerequisite is a calm mind. Despite, it’s far more difficult to create anything when you’re freaking out.

I love this old quote by Cheryl Strayed that debunks the old stereotype about writers and depression: “You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done. We get the work done on the ground level.”

I think of the “ground level” Strayed describes as a sort of baseline. Everyone’s is different: some are higher or lower than others. But your baseline is your most comfortable mindset, in between more positive or more negative emotions. Positive thoughts don’t get in the way of my work, but negative ones do. If I’m worried about something else those worries occupy my mind, and I can’t give my focus to creation when I’m already fixated on some impending doom.

It’s important to consider during periods of writer’s block or demotivation, it might be something more than laziness to blame. Are you really that undisciplined, or is it something stressful that’s making it tough for you to concentrate? Putting aside physical time for your work isn’t the same as reserving the mental space it requires.

Maybe you know this already. But in a year that’s been tough for everybody, I think it can be easy to blame ourselves for lower productivity when that isn’t always the right reason. If you’re going through something, ditch the self-shaming and take care of yourself, first. When you’re feeling better, your creative projects will still be there.

Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I’m going to continue with last year’s tradition and conclude every November blog post with my current word count out of 50,000. Right now it’s 7,886. I’m just getting started!

In praise of being a fan in private

Most of the time, I love my career. I get to review anime, report on fandom, and write about all kinds of interesting topics for a living. But it’s only during episodes of burnout that I realize there are a lot of expectations that come with enjoying your hobbies in public.

For the past five years, I’ve been getting paid to watch anime. Most of the time, this is also something I do for free, minus the 1,000 words worth of weekly review copy. But over the summer, life happened and I felt burnt out for the second time this year. At the peak of it, I was just watching three shows: my two review shows and Gundam Build Divers, so I could edit and post Tom’s Gunpla 101 series on the show. I was, for the first time in my life, treating anime like a job—if I didn’t absolutely have to watch it, I just didn’t.

Oddly enough, I didn’t stop watching TV. It was almost like watching Terrace House occupied a different part of my brain. And if I’m really honest with myself, the difference is that I’d never use it as essay material for Anime News Network, Anime Feminist, or any of the other sites I write for. Sometimes people ask me: does watching anime for work alter your enjoyment of it? If I’m honest with myself, absolutely. Even if I’m watching a show for fun, I never forget about the possibility that it might turn into a review or a personal essay someday.

In February, I had my first burnout episode the year. I have some theories as to why, but long story short, I had very little motivation for work. Somehow, at the same time, I wrote a 10,000-word Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic under a pseudonym. Even writing articles about current anime felt like a chore, but with my fake name fanfiction the words just poured out.

I felt similar in September, after dealing with health issues, moving house, and more. I had difficulty doing anything creative without a strict deadline in place. But at the same time, I also started working on my first cosplay in years. I didn’t tweet about it and I only shared my progress with a few trusted friends. I still think that if I had shared everything about my cosplay up front, I would have chickened out before I actually took pictures or anything.

Both times, I wondered if I was burnt out because I was tired of anime. I do watch a lot of it—anywhere from five to ten shows each season! But now I don’t think that’s what’s wrong. Even during episodes of burnout, I still pursue anime-adjacent hobbies. The difference is the pressure to perform. While I may be a professional reporter and reviewer, I’m an amateur cosplayer and everyone is an amateur fanfic writer, so there’s no need to be great at it.

I just read an opinion piece about this in the New York Times called In Praise of Mediocrity: “When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?” Parsing this, I feel like it’s not fandom that is burning me out per se, it’s the demands that come with my public consumption of it.

These days, I try to treat burnout not as a wrench in my schedule, but as a natural part of the creative process. Burnout can be an opportunity to be creative in a way that has nothing to do with work. For example, as October draws to a close, I’m getting revved up to start NaNoWriMo, a creative exercise that I completed for the first time last year. I never shared my novel and I’m sure I never will—at least, not in the version it is in now. But even if I never share it, I’m beginning to realize that wasn’t the point. Writing it was a valuable creative exercise for me. Sure, I’m used to having something to show for my effort, but sometimes that isn’t the end goal. 

Because I want to share my passion for anime with others, there’s always going to be a degree to which my fandom is performative. But I’m beginning to realize that in order to be a happy, healthy creative, it’s OK to not share everything I write or do. 

P.S. If you’d like you can join me on NaNoWriMo as a writing buddy. I won’t be sharing my novel anytime soon, if ever, but you’ll be able to see my word count progress as I go.

Screenshot via Himouto! Umaru-chan, the quintessential anime about enjoying fandom in private.

Five Years of Weekly Anime Streaming Reviews

In the summer of 2014, I became an Anime News Network weekly streaming reviewer. I just finished up my reviews for summer 2018 and realized it’s been five years. Interestingly, one of the summer 2014 shows I reviewed was Free! Eternal Summer and one of the summer 2018 shows I reviewed was Free! Dive to the Future.

I started out reviewing three shows every season, though now I usually cover two. My reviews have a minimum 500-word count, though I end up going over that more often than not because it’s easy to get chatty about a half hour of anime. Last year I calculated that I had written about 300,000 words of reviews in four years and that’s probably close to 380,000 now.

Unlike other work, each write-up is simple enough that I rarely take time off for them. I’ve written my weekly streaming review between panels at Anime Boston and in a hotel room over the Shinjuku skyline. I’ve tested the extent of internet connections everywhere. I watched an episode of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans from John’s grandmother’s house in rural West Virginia in three-minute spurts between buffering (not my favorite viewing format). Another time, at a friend’s forest-enclosed lake house, everyone else agreed to log off their various devices so I could throttle the connection with Luck & Logic.

After my first reviewing season, I wrote up some takeaways about the art and craft of anime criticism. Reading that same post now, all I can think is that I was spending too much time in the comments section, checking out how other people were critiquing my critiques. At the time, I thought the only way to be fair was to write while predicting the comments my reviews would get, but that just made my reviews too cautious. I would read what other fans thought about the show in the forums and try to deliver the median opinion, but it wasn’t genuine. Now I realize people come for my opinion on a show, which gets more nuanced the more experience I get. Five years means I have reviewed 20 seasons of anime, which amounts to a lot of practice!

Ultimately, the main thing I’ve learned is that so much of the anime we watch each season is forgettable. In those 20 seasons, I’ve reviewed something like 40 shows (because of double cours and multiple seasons, otherwise it’d be a lot more), and how many of them do I even recall? Some stick out as winners I’ll inevitably watch again, like Land of the Lustrous and Ushio and Tora. But most of them, I struggle to remember clearly. Remember Clean Freak! Aoyama-kun? What about Gunslinger Stratos? I barely remember Denki-Gai, but the ANN website informs me that I’ve written 6,000 words on the subject.

With five years on the books, I’m not planning on slowing down. I’ve already begun my Fall 2018 reviews for Run With The Wind and Tsurune. While 2018 has been kind of a bust for me as a fandom writer, as health and other personal issues have slowed me down a bunch, anime reviews keep me grounded in a routine while contributing to the conversation. Thanks to so many of you for reading my reviews of shows great, awful, and middling, and I’ll see you around for the next five years at least, if ANN will continue to have me.

(Screenshot from Tsurune.) 

How cosplay helped me find my confidence again

Styling a wig in my kitchen. This thing is 50% hairspray.

2018 is the year my body betrayed me. I’ve had some health problems, lost hair, lost weight. After a lifetime of clear skin, I’ve had acne so bad I sometimes dread leaving the house.

My recurring feeling in 2018 has been that I’ve wanted to put things off until I look like myself again. Until I feel like myself again. But of course, that’s impossible. So I got better at makeup and arranging my hair around bald spots and did the things I signed up to do. I went to Japan, spoke at the Japan America Society, gave panels at AnimeNEXT and Otakon. I retouched photos or didn’t take any, trying to just forget about the way I look.

I’m focusing on just physical symptoms, but I also have been dealing with insomnia, anxiety, and (obvious to blog readers) a lack of motivation. One of the things that has brought me a lot of joy this year though, is the Danganronpa franchise, and more specifically, exchanging lengthy email chains full of theories about it with my friends.

Having played them all now, my favorite character is Kokichi Oma, the deceptively childlike liar-manipulator from the third game. (Please don’t google him if you’re planning on playing; here’s a spoiler-free picture.) Kokichi is a trickster who makes enemies quickly, but what’s incredible to me is that he doesn’t seem to care if people hate him (and they certainly do). It made me realize my concerns about how I look, how I act, and what I do or don’t write all come from an overabundance of worry about what other people think of me. For once, I’d like to be someone who doesn’t care about things like that.

One day, while looking up the character on the game wiki, I noticed that Kokichi’s physical measurements almost exactly matched my own. While I definitely don’t believe you need to look like a character to cosplay as them, it made me think for the first time that maybe this body I’ve grown to dislike so much could give me an advantage. I don’t like myself much right now, but I like Kokichi, and if I could be him, maybe I could like myself a little more. And so, even though it’s been ten years since I last cosplayed, I decided to give it a try.

Did you know that with contouring makeup and medical tape, you can change the shape of your face?

Because I wrote a book about cosplay, I knew that you can put as much or as little work into cosplay as you want. I decided that if I was going to do this, I was going to go all in. I ended up spending a lot of time on cosplay forums. I bought a wig on Amazon and watched YouTube tutorials to style it. In the end, I used heat, hairspray, and hair curlers I made myself to give it Kokichi’s long flips. I shampooed the wig twice while going through this trial and error.

I went to Sephora and nervously asked an understanding makeup artist to help me look like a 2D character. “That’s actually a pretty common request,” he told me. Cosplay really is becoming mainstream. He helped me find a full coverage concealer and later, showed me how to change the shape and color of my eyebrows to an expressive deep purple.

This whole time, I didn’t share my progress on social media. I was still afraid I would chicken out. I’ve spent this entire year trying to ignore my physical appearance, and suddenly I was, ridiculously, doing something that would draw attention to it. But when my purple contacts arrived and I decided to do a wig and makeup test, I was so happy with the results that I decided to share it. For the first time all year, I actually liked the way I looked.

This is eyebrow attempt #1 with wig attempt #2 and no costume yet, so definitely a WIP.

Now I’m getting my cosplay together to debut at Magfest in January. I keep wanting to self-degrade and joke about how I’m pretty old to be doing cosplay, but then I remember I wrote in a book and said on international radio that “anyone can cosplay.” That applies to me, too.

Obviously, cosplay hasn’t made all my problems go away. But it has reminded me that when things suck, our fandom can be healing. I’m not the first person to turn to a fictional character when I’m confronted with my own weaknesses. Chances are you, too, are drawn to certain characters because they seem to possess something you lack. Cosplay is perhaps an unusual way of “borrowing” a character’s confidence, but I’m enjoying it so much.