I have a little issue with the phrase, “tugging on the sleeves in your heart”, but I like the quote’s underlying sentiment.
Next
You’ve slip into another life, putting on their skins. You pick up on their words. Their thoughts and feelings float into you. You begin to appreciate who they are.
Surroundings emerge. The plot rises. Events become clearer with a sudden squirt. You’ve followed paths that you didn’t know existed. They twist into surprising turns. The characters become deeper than you’d known. Sharper edges develop on their worlds. Their love and pain quickens as their direction grows crisper.
You walk with them, feeling it all, wanting to cry, and sometimes laughing, standing aside as you witness their existence and embrace them. Insights into their relationships develop stronger pulses. Typing and thinking, picking through words, you strive to keep up the best that you can. Their lives and times overpowers yours, and then, you stop for the day and think with a soft, private sigh, I miss them.
And you wonder, will they be okay? What’s going to happen to them?
What’s going to happen?
You think you should know because you’re the writer, the artist behind these ideas, but really, you’re just transcribing. It’s all going on whether you write it down or not.
That’s what happens when you write like crazy.
The Process
He had his talismans, his gold-plated 2001 quarter, the pen with which he’d written the first short story he’d ever sold, once lost, but then found in a box of memorabilia, and his tumbled and polished lapis lazuli. With those in his pockets, he processed his mental checklist. Keys, money, wallet, computer, backpack, sunglasses. Donning his coat, he gloved up and left the warm house for the cold, sunny day.
Squirrelly grey clouds marbled the sky’s blue arena. Sidewalks squished with remnants of last night’s rain. He walked fast, shifting from thoughts of cats, wife, social engagements, and news to his stories, drawing up where’d he stopped, what he’d planned since then, and where else he might go, considering the scenes and words like they were night stars.
One mile he walked, warming up over the twenty minutes, two as the land dried out under the sun, reaching the coffee shop in less than thirty-eight minutes. Warmth, conversation, and music percolated inside the small, modern, glassy place. Weird, it didn’t smell like coffee.
He knew many faces but spoke to no one but those needed to get coffee. After ordering it, he set up his computer at a table and powered up. Documents were opened. Internet connections were made.
Hot, black coffee was sipped. Words and ideas were contemplated again. Setting the coffee down, he raised his fingers over his keyboard.
Time to write like crazy, at lease one more time.
I know exactly what he means.
A Day Without Writing
I didn’t write write yesterday. I had a full schedule of other activities planned. Yes, it’s rare that I take a day off writing. I think there are usually six days a year that I don’t write, and they’re usually sick days, travel days, or holidays. Might as well face it, I’m addicted to writing.
When I say that I didn’t write, I mean that I didn’t sit down with computer, crayon, or paper and pen. I wrote, but it was all in my head. I’ve noticed before that not writing and breaking out of my routine to do other things stimulates my writing. Same thing happened yesterday. I was writing fast in my head.
After getting home close to midnight last night (and with over twenty-six thousand steps on the Fitbit), I had a lot to write this morning. The writing session was one of those intense, fast-paced, and focused affairs that I so love, one where I take one or two gulps of hot black coffee as prelude to the process, and then unleash the muses. An hour or two later, butt sore and with half a cup of cold coffee still available, I stop, spent like a marathon runner.
It’s been an excellent writing week. Having discovered that simultaneous submissions to agents are now considered normal (yeah, you probably all knew that already, didn’t you?), I’ve submitted Four on Kyrios to six agents. I’ve taken my writing approach to procuring an agent. With writing, I write and press on, and with agents, I submit and press on.
Meanwhile, I’ve jumped into a new novel-writing project, April Showers 1921. As always, it’s great fun here in the beginning, when ideas spin like polished, multi-faceted gem stones, letting me think about all the possibilities. Often, though, as I contemplate the facets, the muses say, “Here, we’re going this way. Come on.”
That’s how it’s been. I’m not arguing with them. Fools argue with muses, because mortals always lose any argument with a muse. That’s just fact. I looked it up on the Innertubes, and found a Youtube interview with Shakespeare about it, so you know it’s true.
Now, though, I’m at the après writing juncture that requires me to stop. Don’t really want to stop because it’s been great but I know that I’m finished for the day. Other things remain to be done, my energy is shifting, and my body is saying, “Excuse me, but can we move? Would it be possible to bend and stretch, reach for the sky, stand on tippy toes, and all that?”
Sure, body. We’ll go do some of that. Time to stop writing like crazy, for at least one more day. Just let me gulp down this cold coffee and we’ll get out of here.
Waste not, want not, right?
Michael Seidel, writer 