Tag: writing like crazy

The Writing Moment

It’s the blurt. This is the fun part of a new writing effort, when imagination spins up and the story rolls out like it’s on a fast-moving conveyor belt. Questions are asked about who and why, but answers are filled in fast. The story unwinds, teaching him what’s going on, and he spills it onto the page, connecting new dots, splicing in realized bits of stuffing about who these people are, why they’re together, their objectives and problems, their story.

He really doesn’t know where it’s going but that doesn’t matter. He’s writing, and it’s going somewhere. He’ll need to sweat some details later.

That’s later. Just enjoy the trip. Drink coffee and enjoy the trip.

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The Writing Moment

He’d become pretty good at the blurt stage of fiction. This was about writing like crazy, inviting the muses in and plying them with drink, food, and drugs, getting them to open up and share. Volumes are written about every aspect of the novel from the concept to setting, characters, plot, and arcs. He needed to become better at the later stages of editing, revising, and developing a novel.

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The Writing Moment

I finished writing a novel the other day. But — there’s often a but inserted into the writing process, but that’s true about a large quantity of life matters, like, I love you, but — this tastes good, but — we can vote for him, but —

This but was about the ending. The first ending didn’t work so I set it aside and developed number two. Here is the but which you know is coming. Ending number two was dissatisfying. Too transparent and expected. Curses. The ending circulated through my mind as I progressed through the routines of the last few days, and then, ah hah! Yes, I’d gone the wrong direction for the ending. With that realized, I established the essence of a new ending, one which seemed like a natural and yet surprising outcome, and one which validated the novel’s underlying theme.

Now I need to take that from sketchy scenes in my head to words in a chapter. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Writing Moment

It’d been an eyeblink. He’d been writing like crazy. He swears that he felt like he just sat down and opened the docs, delving into the novel, picking up the pieces of where he is and where he was going.

Coffee remains in his cup, but it is cold. This is an icy day, and the cold coffee doesn’t entice him. His rear end resents the chair’s hard seat. He has no idea how much he wrote and revised. Three more chapters were added and edited, other sections put under the editing grinder and polished, ensuring these new pieces fit smoothly as possible for this draft.

Time to stand up, stretch, and breathe. Back to life.

Back to reality.

He smiled as The Neurons remembered that song and stuck in his music stream. Fortunately, coffee shop music flowed in and overpowered the Soul II Soul song.

He wondered, though, will it show up in tomorrow’s morning mental music stream?

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The Writing Moment

Waiting to fall asleep, he wrote throughout the night, scribbling in his mind, traversing back and forth over story lines. Now, daylight is here. Time to recall all that he mentally wrote and add it to the manuscript, carving and recurving the previous pieces to make this fit. Daylight has bleached out the night’s confidence that he knew what to do and how to do it.

Even the new book title that arrived as he fell asleep doesn’t seem as perfect as it did then.

But he begins working on it because that’s how it must be.

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The Writing Moment

The muses were busy. A blizzard of epiphanies stormed him. Insights about scenes, connections, story, character development, plot. Now the challenge was to hang onto them, find where they go in the book, and get them written down.

That’s always his fiction writing’s challenge. Discovering what’s to be told and telling it. Many writers agree with him: that’s the challenge. Well, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they?

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The Writing Moment

The best part of writing is when he’s so deeply involved with the work in progress that he goes to sleep thinking about it and awakens with it in his mind. Details inundate him in a joyous way. Reading anything, but especially fiction, is challenging. It feels like everything that he reads drives new insights about what to write.

This is also the worst thing about the writing life because all his energy and attention is directed toward his writing. Others find him unable to engage with them, making him appear absent-minded and anti-social. The truth can’t be explained. Only those wholly absorbed by what they do will understand.

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The Writing Moment

His fingers dance and skate across the keyboard. He talks with the characters, stares at far scenes until focus is found, laughs at a surprising turn. He turns his head, listening for what’s being said, rolling with the tension. Quarreling with the muses, he devotes fierce time trying to tie the story’s ends together and grasp what’s to happen next, hunting for the button that will make it all make sense.

The he stops, stretching his arms, deeply inhaling, blinking his eyes, working out back kinks, shifting so blood can find a way through his ass, and gawks at the coffee shop around him. He swears it was full before.

Now he writes alone.

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The Writing Moment

Two writing moments which he really enjoyed happened today. One was a stimulating story idea. It landed without any warning in his head, blowing his mind in multiple ways. Excited, he wrote it up. Something to do later. Ideas for novels and stories were always landing but this one felt really special. He didn’t want to forget it.

The second moment came as he wrote in the novel in progress. His character’s situation and the character’s thinking resulted in a sentence which made him laugh out loud at the coffee shop table.

Yes, it was a fun writing day. Cold and wet, with rain turning to snow and back again, but terrific fun. Coffee done, it was time to shut down the writing like crazy for the day.

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