Another Harlan Said
One Typo
I was writing several days ago, working on the novel in progress, April Showers 1921. I’d dream the novel, seeing the cover and knowing the main characters and a lot of story. Yet I was struggling to find and fulfill the potential the dream had shown the novel to have.
I plugged on, though, searching, testing, writing, and then tossing some of it away, trying to find the right path. Completing a scene, I went back over it, making minor changes. I uncovered a typo, an ess attached to a word, changing the noun from singular to plural. While laughing at the images that plural conjured, I deleted the letter, but then reconsidered what the plural could mean to the story. Within a few seconds, that extra letter and the shift from singular to plural opened up a new range of ideas. I went with it.
Results surprised me. That typo bloomed like algae, taking over that scene, but also illuminating masses of the underlying concept. The typo changed the main character’s interactions with others and shifted the entire story by several degrees. The typo opened unexpected mind streams. I surfed into new directions again and again, reacting with surprise, but also with satisfaction that this novel was becoming something different than how it’d been going. All of this is what causes fiction writing to be so engaging and entertaining for me.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Cliffhanger
I worry, is there too much dialogue? Is the story too obtuse? Is it too, is it too…arg.
I try to follow the muses as they flash their lights and urge me forward into the foggy writing night and a cocoon of dark imagery. Anxiety ripples through my torso. I want to ask the muses if they’re sure that this is the way, but you know that you dare not question the muses.
Peeking to either side to see what else could be there can’t be resisted but the muses have led me into a precarious wasteland. I feel like cliffs abut the path, and the path is growing narrow and precarious. I follow but I struggle with the catch the muses have clamped on me, a catch almost as beautiful as Catch-22‘s catch. My catch (for the characters) is that they need to remember to know what to do but if they remember, they can be tracked and dusted. (Dusted will be explained at another time, but use your imagination.)
Now all those characters are remembering and the protagonist, Anders, is freaking out, because he’s starting to remember, despite efforts not to remember, what happens when you’re dusted, and what this is all about. The others are coming, the trap is closing, and then, ‘lo, here’s a new fucking group running toward him from the opposite direction.
The muses gave no warning about them. In a panic, I wonder, who are they? What’s Anders going to do now? He was trying to ditch Jazmine and Petty because he remembers with growing certainty that remembering in one person is reinforced in another — memories beget memories — and that’s not good for here and now.
Pooh-poohing my worries, the muses wave their dainty fingers, dismissing my concerns. “We’re stopping for today,” they inform me. I picture them nibbling chocolate truffles. “We’ll pick up here tomorrow.”
It feels like, you know, I watched Avengers: Endgame, and here I am, waiting to see what happens. It feels like I’m watching Game of Thrones, waiting to be see the next death, the next twist.
Cliffhangers. Fun to watch, harder to write when the muses are guiding you on an organic writing trip.
Good day of writing like crazy in one sense, cause, hey, progress. We cheer progress. Mystifying day in another sense because of the questions created by this cliffhanger and the writer’s angst that it enjoins.
What happens next? Well, I go home to wait and see.
Wobble Like Crazy
I’m back in the writing space following some unpleasant medical issues. In the last three days, I’ve averaged two thousand words each. It’s delicious to feel like I’m moving forward, no matter how word counts fall upon the writing spectrum in regards to their importance. I didn’t plan any word counts but they’re proof of something happening, a minor validation that I’ve been doing more than daydreaming.
After some arguing with the muses, me interrogating them to explain every thread, decision, and insight, and them laughing at me, I followed their instructions to, “Just write.” Some of the writing could be permanent but some of it might be delicately sculpted away or blown away with heavy explosives. Doesn’t matter. What I’ve written before during other writing projects may not help me this time. Each time that I write another novel, it’s a new adventure in learning how to be a better writer. I must write to have the material to shape, an interesting cycle. Write, edit, write, re-write, write, revise…where am I?
Well, I’m on the novel-writing spectrum. I slide along, following paths, retracing, forging new paths, falling off cliffs, and climbing back up. So it goes until there’s finally enough coherency for a novel to take shape, and then, finally, enough satisfying story in a reasonable order arrives, and then, at last, I pick a place where it can be comfortably ended with reasonable reward for readers who ventured through my thicket of words.
Can you say run-on?
I’m permitted a cup of coffee a day. I apply my allowance to my writing.
Illness is depressing, not because I have it, but because of its limitations. Bending down to pick up a piece of paper, scratch a cat’s chin, or put on my shoes and socks is slow and tedious and brings a measure of stinging discomfort. Walking remains uncomfortable and difficult, but not impossible. Of course, I have a history of rushing the healing processes. Press on, regardless, right? When I had a broken neck on Okinawa and wore a halo device, I pushed to go back to work and ended up dislodging that metal mother twice, sending me back into hospital. Anyway, I wobble around at a slow and careful pace, watching the ground to find the threads and seeds that the muses leave, then trying to parse their guidance.
Yeah, just write, baby. Stop critiquing, doubting, wondering, fearing, worrying, and questioning. Just get ‘er done. Pitter-patter.
Done writing like crazy for at least one more day. Sloshy, my drain-collection bag resting against my calf, is filled. Time to wobble on and empty him.
A Modified Process
I live now with a catheter in my bladder, draining my urine into a bag that I drain several times a day. I have a night bag and a leg bag. The holding bags and their tubes offer their own challenges about swapping and draining them. Given the catheter’s retention location on my upper thigh, it also makes bowel movements an interesting exercise. Bending and walking are also problematic.
Getting the catheter in was an experience. Living with it is another. Having it helps me respect the medical events and treatments that people endure. I’ve had it good as such things go. Although they sound like they’re something — broken and displaced wrist, broken neck, stitches in my skull, ear lobe stitched back on, hernia, toe-tip cut off by a lawnmower, bronchitis, mono, broken ankles, broken teeth, etc. — they’re small things in the greater order of existence and endurance. Better, they’re temporary, with end dates.
Our warfare kills on large, constant scales, and the warfare results in people without limbs, scarred by burns, and shattered by trauma. Many people endure chronic or terminal diseases, relentless illnesses that erode their strength and energy, chipping away from who they were and what they could do, haunting them until they’re dead. Others are abused and betrayed, resulting in destroyed mental and emotional faculties. Others are born with handicaps and genetic deficiencies. I’m fortunate. My afflictions are short-lived and allow me to observe and learn from them.
This catheter is expected to be in me seven to ten days. It impacts my writing process because I can’t walk as I’ve done for lo these several years. Yet, I have to write. I must find a way to sit down and put words into the computer. I’ve not written in four days. The need doesn’t go away. It builds as the muses feed ideas that I explore. Scenes explode into my mindscape. Dialogue is heard.
I originally developed the write and walk process to enable my writing efforts in my military career’s final year. I expanded on it when I was working for startups, and then for Tyco and IBM, the companies that swallowed the startups, carving out time for myself and putting writing as a higher priority in my daily to-do list. I needed a process to remove me from sales, marketing, and product development, and put me in a frame of thinking to create fiction.
A new process is needed because the dream and desire to write remains. Got my hot tea. I’m in my home office. A cat is snoring nearby. Another is asleep on my feet. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
