writing process – Page 132 – Michael Seidel, writer

One movement has ended. Another is to begin.

I pause here to consider the movement that’s finished, reviewing the highlights. There are many. Look for flaws and shortcomings. Relieved to find nothing niggles. Worry that I’m blind to the faults. Sigh and dismiss it. Hope I’m wrong.

I sit in the space between the movements, looking back, looking forward. Back draws me with pleasure. It’s a job done, a project accomplished, an achievement – a novel written, revised, edited, polished – and I felt fulfilled while working on it. No matter whether others read and enjoy it, I have read and enjoyed it. More, I’m always amazed by the process of turning over points, asking what if and why, and planning a move.

But writing a novel, like many things, twists in unexpected ways. Characters take over and lead down surprising paths. Reaching the end, asking now what, I ask what if and why, plan the next move, and something happens and the writing train speeds on.

I’m bemused sometimes when people tell me they’ve attempted to write a novel and reached a point where they weren’t sure what to do next. Don’t know what the characters will do. So they’ve stopped.

Well, of course. That happens all the time to me, probably once a week. That kind of road block must be navigated. I do so in multiple ways. Read, edit and revise what’s already written. Think about the ending and what’s been unresolved, what’s blossoming. Walk and consider my life and how the character(s) would behave if my life was their life. Put myself into their life (in the novel) and consider what I would do, if I were them, and why that’s not what they would do. I read other books. Something recommended to me by others. Or mind candy, a page turner without much depth. Or an award winner. Or a new finding by a favorite author. Or blogs and articles. I walk, eat, think, sleep. Whatever. What I don’t do is worry about being paused. That’s all the roadblock is, a pause. If I think of it like taking a road trip, this is heavy traffic, or construction, just something that must take place and be passed before the trip resumes.

Ahead, after this interlude, I see the challenge of re-engaging the next book, because this is the editing phase for it (although it’s been edited, revised and polished before), and the insecurities and worries that always accompany re-visiting my writing, that the visit will reveal all the flaws and shortcomings, that the characters will be flat, the settings empty, the story silly and the novel will be a mess. That’s not how I remember it, but I was reading the other day that memories aren’t actually that efficient, that small details are recalled and we build the rest into something that works for us.

Funny to read and reflect on that item about memory. The book to be edited is all about memory (and, naturally, perceptions, and competing, conflicting perceptions, and how reality is constructed and maintained). Most of my books are about these things. Memories inform characters and readers, shaping experiences and expectations. My characters are like me, flawed and searching, struggling to grasp what happened and what’s going on, trying to forge a way forward. Their odds against them are always much larger than my odds, and their risks are greater – life, death, reality….

So I’ll go as usual to my writing place, the physical one first, the coffee shop. Find a table and get my drink. Then I’ll go to my writing place, the mental one, and move into the editing department. Then I’ll open the manuscript on my computer.

Then I’ll play games. Surf the net. Post to FB. Read the news. Think about other things. Twenty, thirty minutes will pass. Then I’ll say, okay. Enough. Let’s go. Get to work. Do what needs to be done.

And then I’ll begin.

But right now, I’m just going to sit in the moment.

The writing like crazy is structured and unstructured, crazy and sane. Really, it just is. Such tautalogy is extremely helpful, isn’t it?

But it is what it is (there’s that help again). Originally structured to shift me from the real world’s insanity to the pleasurable world of writing and editing fiction, the process was all about release. Let me go, job, wife, cats, house, bills, stress, frustration, whatever. Take me away, writing.

The early days began as an after work period. Go somewhere in the house and write. That didn’t work too well, and I blame me. I couldn’t stop myself from falling into normal home routines and thoughts. I initiated a program to go somewhere else and write. Armed with a Z4 pen (my preference) and black and white marble composition notebooks (I was always alert for notebook sales), I usually ended up in a coffee shop, where I would have coffee. Coffee shops were tested like bath water until the ones that worked just right emerged. I was traveling for business often in those years, so I would often write in airplanes and airports.

But my hours and routine were iffy. When home, I often ended up writing only on weekends (at Printers Inc), by getting up early. That wasn’t enough, so the program was expanded to an extended lunch hour at work. Testing the process, I discovered that walking improved my writing mood, so I parked about a mile from the coffee shop and walked. In 1999-2000, I could be spotted in San Mateo, California, walking to a Starbucks. As my company moved its office to Shoreline in Mountain View, I drove to downtown Mountain View and used that Starbucks. Meanwhile, I lived in Half Moon Bay and walked each Saturday and Sunday morning to La Di Da. After moving to Ashland, Oregon, in 2005, I began walking the town to coffee shops. The marble composition books were replaced by laptops.

In those days, I set a word count target, and I tracked it meticulously. There was no pay it forward, no credits and debits. 1,000 words needed to be reached each day, every day. Even if I did 2,000 one day, 1,000 was required the next day. I never let myself off that hook.

With each refinement, I learned more about myself and my writing process. I discovered I was an organic writer, writing with scant mapping or outlining. I found that writing like crazy was critical. Writing like crazy meant that I shoved aside thoughts of grammar, facts, punctuation, and sometimes even point of view and character, and just rode a wave of words rushing into my mind. Then I’d go back and fix it all. When I stalled, I learned to create snapshots to find direction. Snapshots were just exploratory summaries to help me find understanding of the character(s), setting(s), plot, concept, story line, whatever. They were generally not meant for reader consumption, except for my reading.

Learning and evolving fortunately continued. I learned to ask, why, why, why did this character do this or that, or this or that happened, along with the corollary matters of when, what and how. I saw how I told and then showed the same thing, how I tended toward passive writing, how I enjoyed run on sentences and became more mindful of them – when editing – but how, becoming aware of them, fixing them were folded into my writing like crazy process. I learned what I really enjoyed reading by critiquing others, good and bad, for my own enjoyment, and then shaping my voice to be what I most enjoyed in those books, and I threw the reading doors open to all genres and authors.

I’ve always ‘written in my head’, phantom writing, where I see or hear a scene or the developing story. I found how to harvest the essence of those moments and pick them up and put them into the story. I taught myself to be unafraid to revise and edit as I wrote, discovering that fiction writing was much more like creating a painting then it was like writing an essay. And I encouraged myself to have fun.

I no longer have a daily word count. They’re not needed and I often find myself writing several thousand words. The shift to writing mind is much easier now. I can pick up the story line and where I was quickly in my mind and typically pick up where I was with just a few moments of thought.

I’ve written a number of novels, but haven’t published but two. They’re both recent after wearying myself with the agent/publisher route. Each agent had different requirements, and that tedious process drained my joy and optimism, as well as savaging my writing time. So, fuck it, I’ve gone the ebook self-publishing route. I don’t have great expectations, but I won’t be a fraud and claim it doesn’t matter; it does. But, just as with the writing process, and most of everything else I’ve done in life, I’ll keep trying, keep working on it, and I’m confident, I’ll continue progressing.

Now…time to write like crazy, one more time.

Tag: writing process

The Interlude

The Writing Like Crazy Process

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