Category: writing

Wickedly Aggressive

You ever been writing and catch fire? The words blaze through you and onto the page, forcing you to do your best to keep up. It’s an exhausting but exuberant process, oddly like scoring a touchdown or do something else that requires focus, attention, and energy.

Then you stop writing to attend to the mundane requirements of life, but the writing doesn’t stop. It keeps flowing. Changing metaphors, it’s like rivers overflowing its banks, flooding you with more of the story that you’re writing. Great, but so damn distracting, because it’s consuming your energy, removing you from normal conversations and interactions. You become short-tempered and irritated with others because your energy is pouring into the writing pouring into you.

And then, it won’t stop at the day’s end. Your body and brain are ready for sleep, but the writing continues in your mind, refusing to be stopped.

I’m not complaining, though, just pointing out that sometimes, those muses can be wickedly aggressive.

Okay, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Uncertainty

You ever get involved with writing and thinking about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and observer bias in quantum mechanics, and become uncertain about what you’re thinking?

It’s almost as complicated as trying to explain everything that’s happened on Game of Thrones.

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No Panic

I’d resumed writing this week after returning home, completing a ten day road trip. It’d been a sad period, beginning with a red-eye flights across the United States and a five hour drive to a hospital. Eighteen hours of hope and optimism followed, and then, with startling realization, it was over. After that came calls and emails, mourning, memories, and planning. Then there was a service.

Next were visits to my side of the family, and a short, intense, fun reunion with them, the fun and intensity waning under the mourning that continued for my wife’s mother.

Finally, there were return flights.

Routines slowly resumed. Walking, cleaning, writing, etc. Notes and work-in-progress were reviewed, and story lines picked up. But…I seemed disconnected from the work. It seemed remote to me. I understood all the reasons that could account for that distance and my attendant lethargy. I didn’t try to rush myself or berate myself. I took up my routines with the anticipation that I’d catch fire again.

Fire caught this morning as I emerged from the shower and began toweling off. First, there was a chapter title, “Ebb and Flow.” Setting dropped into place. The opening paragraph was written across my mind. Other lines followed.

Suddenly I had the rush. Had to get to it. It’s a beautiful, familiar rush of having something to say about the story I’m telling.

I’m at the coffee shop. Set up is complete and coffee is at hand. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Tone

“They wanted to go to the movies,” she said, “but I told them you said, “I want to see that movie, too.””

Her impression of him sounded like Disney’s Goofy talking. “That’s not how I said it,” he said.

“It was in the way I told it,” she said.

He knew she was right. The story-teller always sets the tone.

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Wally Said

I hold to Wally’s words, but they trouble me. I write for myself, so the book has an audience. I’d like my novels to have more than an audience of one.

Know what I mean?

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Trick Question

You ever read something that you wrote and think, “Wow, this is terrible,” and then read something else you wrote, and are astonished to discover that you wrote because it seems so amazing?

Yeah, trick question, isn’t it?

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The Writing Purge

I was out of the writing slot this past ten days, venturing in but once. Life business demanded my attention.

As I traveled, I read The Watchers (Jon Steele, first book in the Angelis Trilogy) and Ready Player One (Ernst Cline). While writing, I often reflected on how my style and material compared to the two books, and what I liked and disliked about each novel.

Then I required a purge. Are you familiar with this? The purge is needed when others’ fiction is enjoyed, and I begin thinking that I need to do things in my novel to make it more like them.

Bad idea? No, terrible idea, worse idea in the bloody world. Almost inevitable, too. I’ve gone through this before. In early years, I tried changing my stories to be more like something just read.

The results sucked, but they were helpful. I learned, and I know, trying to write my book with inflections and concepts found in something recently read ends up torturing my story lines and prose, and dilutes my concept and originality.

That’s why the purge is needed.

Several steps are required for me to purge. I’ve been through this before. I know what to do. One, I need to recognize that I’m about to throw untested code to what I’m writing. Two, I need to understand why it’s so damn tempting.

The latter point is easier to cope with, and best for me to first approach, because the first point is so nebulous, harder to grasp, and is a challenge and affront to my confidence as a writer. Basically all of my writing is untested code. I’m an organic writer. I write it, modify it, and test it until it fits. So, naturally, I think, well, damn, can’t I make other things fit, too?

Yes, probably, but it’s pricey. I may end up muddying my developed story lines, something dangerous to do twelve hundred words and four books into a series, right?

This is why understanding why I want to change my books to incorporate what I’ve read is important. What I read entertained me. I admired their talent and skill. They’d developed concepts, characters, plots and sub-plots, and story lines in novel manners. Their books allowed me to escape.

That’s what I’m shooting to do, too: write stuff that entertains others and lets them escape. Steele and Cline’s books “win” over mine because I still offer a work-in-progress. It’s harder to pick my novel up to compare with their books. But once I stopped to review my WIP, I was surprised anew how entertaining it is. Yes, similarities with other novels and my novels exist, and will be spotted when mine are done, no matter what and how I write. I try to minimize these things but it’ll happen because I’m a product of my environment. Books and other authors fill that environment. Hell, they’re the foundation of what prompts my desire to write and publish.

With that thinking processed, the purge was completed.

Another day of writing like crazy done. Time for other things, like, umm…lunch.

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