Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Saw this today in passing and love the sentiment. I feel this way, that without writing, reality would reduce me to a blithering idiot (yeah, just stop what you’re thinking right now). I feel that I’m addicted to writing, but that’s okay; I feed it, and it feeds me.
To paraphrase Ray, time again to write like crazy, and get high on words and ideas.
You ever been doing something innocuous, like cleaning the cat box (and thinking, I would be rich if cat crap was worth anything) when writing flashes strike?
Happened to me today. Suddenly, scenes fill me. Gaps are bridged, with the story advancing on multiple fronts, like a creative offensive has been launched in my head.
Everything else is squeezed out for time to make room for dialogue, settings, and action scenes. It’s a struggle to keep up, like I’m in the center of several movies playing simultaneously. An impetus to rush off to write seizes me.
But the creative explosion wasn’t limited to writing and the current WIP. Writing is the largest beneficiary. While scenes for the current work in progress proliferate, so do a multitude of new ideas for other concepts in play, and fresh ideas. Catfinitions, those silly ideas involving cats and weak word play, pour in. Ideas for organizing and cleaning spring up like weeds after a rain. My overall energy levels surge. I feel powerful, confident, excited, and optimistic.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
I enjoy reading about other writers and their processes. I’m primarily reading for ideas that I can incorporate or adapt into my processes, but I’m also curious about others’ takes on their creative processes. I’m often amused when people insist that writers must outline, or something like that. I tried outlining; it didn’t work for me. I felt that outlining drained the fun and creativity from my writing processes.
I was thinking about this today because I reached a pivot point. Writing organically, I’m journeying without a map. I like journeying without a map. I feel like an explorer crossing a new continent. Explorers decide, “There’s the sun; we’re following this river and heading that way for now. Let’s see where it goes.” I adapt that as, “There’s the ending; we’re following this path heading that way for now. Let’s see where it goes.”
Sometimes, as accounts of explorers will tell you, wrong turns are taken. Blind paths that lead to nowhere are followed. Yet, it’s not a loss, because they’ve expanded their body of knowledge.
That happens with me and my characters, too. They take a turn none of us expected. I don’t just follow then, though. I stop and ask, “Wait a moment. Where is this going? Are we sure we want to follow this path?”
As I’m also a non-linear writer, I’ll sometimes take a few days to write about other aspects while I think over the new potential path. By non-linear, I mean that I don’t write the novel in the order that the story is told, nor in the order of its final finish. I’m usually filling in expository bridges between action scenes during these periods. Action scenes, being sharper and more intense, come quickly, like a flash flood. In fact, I call it flash writing. A sudden inspiration strikes. It follows the general sense already created, so I let the flood happen. Other flash floods often occur in sequence as these major points are seen and grasped. After writing down their essentials, I edit and polish them, add details, and make changes for coherency and consistency.
By that point, they’re raw pearls. I want a necklace. Bridge scenes help me strand them together.
Sometimes, I make huge leaps. There’s an epiphany, and I spring forward to write it before I lose it. This is when I most feel like the novel already exists, and I’m just taking dictation.
Meanwhile, I write posts like this to help me understand what I think. As I thought about this little post and wrote it, my subconscious mind thought over the new piece and offered me some tent poles.
That caused a short interlude here as I explored the tent poles. I came to see how this new piece wasn’t all that new, but a latent piece I’d previously ignored. Indeed, I’d made a small reference to it once, back in the first volume’s first quarter. I’d flash-written some scenes without thinking about how to strand them together, but subconsciously, pieces were being put together. I just needed to remain persistent, let my mind work, accept what it gave me, and go for it. That, I think, sums up the whole writing like crazy philosophy.
I’ve got my coffee. Its smell helps me focus, its caffeine stimulates my creative energies, and it’s a component of my writing session routine. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
As a writer, do you ever thing that every day is a new beginning and has a new end? Yes, but isn’t that true for everything? Once you’re done for the day, you start again tomorrow. Problems arise when you don’t start again.
A new month has arrived. Hello? February, already? No way. Time continues to accelerate in an unseemly manner with months passing like weeks and hours flashing by like minutes.
I hypothesize that we each have time particles at a sub-atomic level in ourselves. Their interaction with others’ time particles and those embedded in other matter form how we perceive and use time, and how time treats us. We adhere to agreed standards for simplicity’s sake, but time is more personalized than realized. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it, at least for today. Someday, someone a lot smarter than me will figure all this out, and our thinking about time will undergo a monumental shift. For now, it’s one of those, we can’t make out the forest for the trees sort of perspective.
With the new month comes chores that rotate around the month’s arrival. Besides flipping over calendar pages, reviewing business plans, goals, and dreams, I also back up my writing work on something external that’s placed somewhere safe. While floppies of the five and a quarter and three and a half-inch varieties were used in the past, I moved on to zip drives, CDs, and now, flash drives.
Reviewing the month, I’m pleased with my writing progress, but I’m astonished that it’s taking so long to finish this quadrilogy, Incomplete States. I seem to be adding a new volume every few months; this week I was contemplating a fifth book in the series. Reining myself in, I sought ways to incorporate these new ideas into the fourth book being written. We’ll see how it goes. It’s not like the series is a raised garden bed, where everything must be contained. My motto is generally, write like crazy, and let the words go where they flow. I’m a trifled concerned; if I keep adding volumes like this, I’ll end up with something that rivals the Wheel of Time for the series’ length.
Now it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Writing from multiple personal points of view as I like to do is a fascinating exercise. Each character has a different interior voice and private agenda. Less than putting them on, I marinate in them.
It’s engaging to explore them as their personalities emerge and these voices and agendas become stronger. The longer I marinate (write from their POV), the move they develop.
I have broad strokes about each. Kanrin is quiet, patient, and thoughtful. He likes to wait for more information before saying anything, and is careful about what he says. Richard is verbal, veers toward narcissism, and often becomes petulant, childish, and jealous, characteristics that make him unpredictable. Pram has less complexity and is action oriented. Not being able to act drives irritation and anger in him, facets that the others know about him, which cause them to worry about Pram and distrust him. (He knows it, and that angers him more.) Handley is younger and more mellow, with simpler needs, and Brett is a weary, older human who just wants to have a beer, chill out, and let the universe pass by.
Then we have Philea.
Philea is a scientist. Today’s writing unexpectedly took me through Philea’s thinking about chi-particles, qubits, unitary transformation, and quantum superpositions. Philea, a character that I supposedly created, is far more intelligent than me. I struggle to follow her thinking and put it into words.
I say I supposedly created Philea because it’s possible that she exists elsewhere (in another time or dimension), and what I’m writing as fiction is being channeled from another life elsewhere. That’s one possibility; another is that I’m just crazy. A third is that I have created Philea, and trying to think like her forces me into deeper focus and thinking, which can be done for a short period, but is ultimately unsustainable for me.
I’m agnostic about which of these are the truth. Perhaps they all are, in that I created her, which actually generated another universe of existence (sound familiar?), which then evolved, and is now feeding my thinking from her through a channel from that universe. Pondering it is fun, challenging, and harrowing.
Philea’s thinking has worn me out. Enough writing like crazy for today.
Yes, that’s me; I’m a bad writer.
I indulge myself when I write. My characters take long journeys of exploration. Thousands of words are spent as they kick around space, time, and memories, plot and vacillate over moral decisions and relationships, renege on their promises to themselves and others, and forget shit. Good writers (and editors, and hell, probably readers) will ask, “Well, what’s the point of all of that?”
Well, the point is, I enjoy it. It’s probably unhealthy, but my characters live alternative lives on my behalf doing all this. They help me engage in hyperbole. None of the characters are good or evil. Good and evil is a sliding scale, pushed around by situation, relevance, and perspective. That doesn’t mean they like what they’re doing; they often regret it. Hard choices are imposed on them. They forget what they learn, and are forced to learn it again, or learn their lesson, but can’t apply their lessons learned. Sometimes, it feels like they’re addicted to errors.
The characters are probably too much like me, regretting decisions and ruing choices, frustrated that they can’t control their lives, that their dreams are pushed aside by others’ agendas. Some of my characters are bitter and angry about it; others are blasé or fatalistic. Apathy sets in on some, but some forge ahead with determination, racing along even after it turns out they’ve made a bad decision. “Follow me,” they gleefully urge. Hundreds of pages later, they ask, “Where am I? What happened?”
It’s hell keeping up with them. Some days, they’ll like a drunken dysfunctional family gathering. Other times, they’re as boring and tedious as an later afternoon office meeting where everyone is waiting to leave so they can get on with other things.
I love keeping up with them and the laborious labyrinths of their lives as they struggle to find how much they can trust one another and cope with mysteries, betrayals, and setbacks, and find new goals as old goals are overcome by events.
Yes, I’m a bad writer, writing to mend my life and peer past the horizons imposed by reality. It’s probably not healthy, and I won’t bet any money that I’ll win awards or become wealthy, or critically successful, but I do have a helluva good time doing it.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Have you ever been writing and have to pause to take a roll call about which characters are where and what they’re doing during a scene?
“Let’s see, Kanrin, Richard, Handley, Forus Ker, and Brett are in here (the lounge on Wrinkle). It’s Richard’s POV. Handley (burger and tots) and Kanrin (chicken sandwich and coffee bulb) are eating. Forus Ker is standing and staying mute. Brett is sitting and drinking beer. Philea is in the command section (next chapter). Pram is in the cargo area (about to go Hulk) (two chapters away). Anyone missing? Nope, that’s the seven. The rest are all elsewhere.”
Okay, now that I have that straight….
