Gertrude Said
Dreams and Writing
My dreams and writing seem to be part of my creative and imagination mind system. I figure, as worlds and space has weather, so do our minds. When a high-powered dream system moves in, it always brings a strong imagination ridge, and writing levels rise.
I wish I could track it and forecast it. Imagine us having an app on our phones or computers that can bring up radar imagery of our mind systems, with some prognosticator telling us what it all means.
“You have an emotional front moving in. It’s going to settle on you for a few days beginning Monday, with Tuesday seeing the strongest activity before it begins to move back out of the area on Thursday, so watch out for those swing moods and crankiness. The front will decrease your physical energy, and increase your maudlin memories. This activity will probably call for some comfort food on Wednesday, which will wreck your diet, and a few glasses of wine or beer, but a strong will system will arrive on Friday, enabling you to get back into healthy eating routines. The ten day outlook calls for rising optimism in the following week, with some periods of intense exuberance.”
The Drive
I’ve been watching a show on Netflix called “The Fastest Car”. I like speed. It’s my one weakness. This show plays on the challenge, are sleeper vehicles faster than exotic machines like Lamborghinis, Ferraris, McLarens, Ford GTs and Vipers?
The sleeper vehicles are home-built machines. They frequently look like junk but are fast vehicles. You can’t call them cars. Cars are included, but so are trucks (including a diesel) and vans. There’s been a huge variety of machines. While presenting the challengers, the people talk about cars and their relationships with speed, racing, and the vehicle they’ll be using. Family is often a large thumb on the scales about what they’re doing and why.
With four cars racing, all can’t win. The defeated are usually philosophical about it, although some get hissy, challenging the fairness of something that happened. What is really interesting, however, is their absolute belief that they can and will win in the lead up to the race. They express doubts, but typically circle back and say, “I think I’ll win.” It’s that attitude that draws me to the show. As everything is considered and the cars are prepared, the men and women say, “I think I can win. I’m ready. We’re going to win.”
I like that attitude. That’s the sort of fire that writers struggling to make it need to exhibit. “I think I can win, and I’m going to do everything to prove it. It’s not for me as much as it is for xxx.” Xxx is the blank to fill it. They don’t want to win for themselves, but for those who believe and back them.
Isn’t that like a writer. We want to be published, and we’re driven to write. People often lurk in our lives, and we’re seeking to validate their belief in our talent, creativity, determination, and dreams. It’s a fuel that keeps us putting our ass in a chair with paper and pen or pencil, or at a computer keyboard or typewriter.
It isn’t just about me, we tell ourselves. It’s for everyone else. Remove them, though, and I think most writers will still be writing. I suspect those drivers trying to win would also still be going, even without trying to prove themselves to friends and family.
Tying Up
I finished another chapter. Serving like a flare in the night, it lit more of the final stages of the novel, Good-bye, Hello, and the Incomplete States series. Seeing those pieces, I re-arranged one chapter and wrote the beginning of another. As I wrote that, the segue off a previous chapter appeared. This was the opening to the final final piece. I laughed at the phrase even while I juggled pieces in my mind and saw it all come together with the ending already written. A chill thrilled me as I read the pieces. So satisfying and fun, visiting this world and these peoples, and all their myths, technology, travels, and adventures. They move into this last phase with hope, but I write with bittersweet inevitability.
It’s been a fun journey with these concepts, and narrowing the focus of the concepts into a tighter and tighter frame. Once again, revelations and realizations surprised me. These mostly involved Kything, Kything, who began as Professor Kything, named in honor of the term from A Wrinkle In Time. Kything was not who they thought.
Kything was not who I thought.
There’s more of him still to be revealed to me. The revelations and patterns remind me of a difficult Sudoku. After wrestling with logic and patterns, hunting for the final solution, a key square was just completed. With it came the insights to finish the puzzle.
Even as I think that it was a wonderful day of writing like crazy, I’m beginning to grow sad, because I see this marvelous journey coming to an end. Yes, a lot of writing remains, and then the the editing and revising marathon begins, but those are different skills, with a separate satisfaction to them, than the unbridled creative flow of raw writing.
I feel a quiet chuckle as I realize, this feeling I have is just like how I feel when I’m finishing reading a good book.
P.G. Said
Damn, I have the same attitude.
Franz Said
Interesting to find this quote today as I question my paths and obsessions. Went right to it. Did I see it before and subconsciously return myself to it?
Michael Seidel, writer 