A Damn Good Reason To Write

If we don't write today, then when?  We have a few years to record our stories before the infinity of time resumes its inexorable course; eternity stretches out behind and beyond. All our fears, shortcomings, and obligations -- the three most determined enemies of creative work -- amount to nothing at all.  They vanish with our lives.  But our work, if it is good and true, can carry on without us, defiant of time, living on.  Why, then, do we spend our precious hours not writing, but rather in the company of our enemies, hands primly folded, listening attentively to their lies?

I ask you!

Ideas

Where do ideas come from?

It's the age-old question people ask of the creative folk among them.  Nobody has ever answered the question accurately, although many have answered it cleverly.  Because nobody knows.  Ideas, like life itself, come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

I've likened my own ability to come up with story ideas, gags, and so forth to a man standing up to his knees in a fully-stocked trout pond, chucking fish on shore as fast as he can.  It's apt.  I come up with several things a day, most days, which could be worked into entire projects.  Just like fish, they can sometimes stink after a little time in the sun.  But that's okay, because it would take me a decade to work through an average week's idea output, anyway.

This trout-scooping analogy isn't altogether charitable to myself.

It's nothing like that easy to come up with ideas.  Not even if you find it easy, as I do.  Because I've spent my entire life nurturing the ability to generate ideas, like working an obscure, hard-to-isolate muscle.  My son can wiggle his ears, for example.  I cannot.  My ears seem to me to be anchored directly to the layer of fat that surrounds my brain; they do not wiggle.  But there are muscles there, and my son has figured out how to make them work.  I'd prefer he exercised his writing abilities in English class, but we'll discuss that later, young man.

Likewise, I've spent my entire conscious life coming up with ideas, finding them in the shadows and valleys of the world around me.  It's a skill I have worked at, hard, for decades.  The reason it seems easy to me now is because my story-idea muscles are hypertrophic to the point that they don't fit into a regular shirt.

Is coming up with ideas like wiggling your ears or lifting weights?  Of course not.  This is why it's so hard to explain.  In one sense, ideas are just there.  When you hit on a really good idea, it feels inevitable.  It seems like somebody else must already have discovered and exploited it.  As it happens, sometimes this is true.  But that underlines the point.  Ideas seem to exist outside us, something we discover in the aether.  That's part of the ability I've been developing all these years: to see an idea, no matter how well-camouflaged or faint it is, against the disruptive background of existence, and to capture it quickly before it fades into obscurity once more.

This makes ideas sound rather like something from H.P. Lovecraft.

But it's true.  We catch ideas by the tail, most of the time, and it is a frantic effort to secure our grip while pursuing the things through the canebrake.  As often as not, we wind up face-down in the mud with a handful of loose hair, the idea frisking away through the glades to be caught by somebody else.   I keep the tail-hairs as trophies, myself.  However, there's  more to it.

Ideas don't have any life of their own, not really.  Nor do they exist outside our minds until we discover them, floating in the wind.  They come from inside us, amalgamated from our experiences, opinions, fears and appetites.  They come from what interests us, and what we think might interest other people; what we believe, what we wish, what we hope.  In this way, ideas are grown, after a fashion, like cabbages.  There's a seed, and it blossoms into something, or it withers.  Or a rabbit eats it.

My father, who was a children's book author and artist, was often asked about where his ideas came from.  He would always answer in exactly the same way, very gravely:

Every Thursday night, I go into downtown Peterborough [New Hampshire].  There's a lamp post there.  I stand under it for a couple of hours, and then a little green man walks by.  He gives me my ideas.  Then he leaves, and I go home and work on them.

I've just figured out how to be my own little green man.

Write On

Three days of ceaseless searching.  Looked at sixty houses at least.  Not the way anybody wants to go house-hunting.  Landlady set a price on the place we're living in now that would buy a Second Empire mansion in the Mohawk River Valley.  No question of buying it.  Despair.  I wrote three words per day, just to say I was making progress.  Dragged a real estate agent into the mix. 

Then we found a house we loved. 

Rejoice!  Within five hours, we instructed the agent we wanted to make an offer on the place.  It had been on the market for 45 days without a nibble, so there wasn't any pressure -- we could even make a low offer.  But we wanted to act, and act right away.

My mind, ever eager to take on new projects, was concocting decorative schemes without relent.  My bride was figuring out the landscape and there was birdsong and honeysuckle in the air.

Then some other peckerwoods decided to make an offer on the place.

So we raised our offer, had a flurry of communications with the bank and our agent, and now we wait around to see if the people with the brand new Jaguar put in a higher offer than we do.  This is the best buyer's market since 1933?  This??

Anyway, in an act of defiance, tonight I sat down and wrote 1200 words of novel.  Pure spite, really.  I'll not have a mere cascade of ever-expanding crises stop me from making progress on this book.  I'd have written more, too, except my wife just called -- she's on the freeway, weeping in the breakdown lane, having run her car over a huge chunk of somebody else's car.  Big accident all over the road.

I guess I'll throw in the towel tonight.

Like Fifty Feet of Greased Yarn Out of a Speeding Cat

So close readers of these missives may recall, if they sit hunched over with chin on fist, brows furrowed, that I mentioned the importance of writing as much as you can, as fast as you can, early in a project.

Here's a useful example of why this is a valuable practice.

On Thursday evening of last week (today is Sunday, for posterity) my bride and I were informed by our landlady that she wishes to sell the house we are living in.  The economy, and all that.  And do we want to buy it?

Now this is all very thrilling, because she also said if we wish to purchase the house, we have about 72 hours to make a decision.  Although the property is nothing particularly interesting, we're already in it, it's adequate, and we're tired of landladies deciding to chuck the houses we rent.  Therefore we spent Friday at the bank, got pre-qualified for a loan, and then spent the entire weekend house-hunting for alternate shelter -- because said landlady paid about $100k more than this property is now worth, and is underwater on the house like the Johnstown flood.  We don't expect she will take kindly to our market-based offer.  Hence it's necessary to find another house at the speed of the yarn mentioned in the title of this post.

A couple of observations: 1. Good decorative taste is rarer than a solid gold rectal thermometer.  2. Everything is still wildly overpriced.

There are a million foreclosures coming this year.  We have by no means seen the bottom of this market.  Expect some excitement along these lines by midsummer.  So we have to find something undervalued, available immediately, and at least as habitable as our present digs.  By tomorrow, or the end of the week if we're lucky.  If the landlady accepts our offer, crisis averted.  If not -- we need somewhere else to go.

I'm writing a novel, remember?

That's why I'm so very glad I made enough progress as possible in the early stages of the process.  Because now, although I haven't had time to write more than this post since Thursday evening, I can go back, read what I wrote previously, and then pick up the story and carry on.  If I didn't have that substantial portion of the story done, I'd be doomed.

As it is, I'm only doomed in a different way.

Over The Hump

The book I'm writing now is intended to be short and sweet.  It's aimed loosely at young adults -- teen- and twenties-age readers; but of course I don't write anything I wouldn't want to read, because of course I'll have to read it fifteen times before it's all over -- and I'm a little over twenty-three.  A score of years over twenty-three, in fact.

Tonight I could sense the sea change in the story that tells me it's going to be easier from here on out.  The nautical metaphor is appropriate -- writing is very much like navigating a particularly unseaworthy craft out of harbor in big swells with a lot of chop.  A craft you have never put in the water before, that isn't finished.  It can even feel like that.  You lose sight of the horizon, certainly, and there's a sinking sensation at times.

But now I'm about 17,000 words into the story, and it's running fairly well.  I might not end up using much of it in the ultimate draft, but as I've said many times before, that doesn't matter.  Draft one is an artifact, the sword in the stone (abandoning watery analogies), and in draft two I will attempt to fetch it out.

At this point I have the "voice," the essential mode of narration, more or less established.  The characters have begun to move around under their own steam, some hesitantly, others well pleased with their roles.  I have a crop of interesting events set down, most of which are open-ended and lead to further developments I believe the reader will find compelling.  All well and good.

But as I've said, I don't mind if this is all delusional and it's no good.  What matters is that I get those words down.  I'm chucking them onto the page as fast as I can, despite all the confusion of travel, work, bullet wounds in friends, and so forth that conspire to sink the narrative (back to seafaring).  Even if I had to walk away from the story for a month or two, I could return to it and successfully pick up where I left off, because I have sufficient material so it's more or less self-propelling.  In order to write, I have to be as interested as the reader in what happens next. 

There's enough story here that I'm interested.  I'll keep writing just to find out, if not exactly what happens next -- which I already know -- then how it happens.  It's a matter of what language will express the ideas, what images will come along that best reveal them, and to an increasing degree, how the characters will surprise me as they respond to their circumstances and venture off-script to show me what really needs to be done.

I can't tell you what a relief this is.  And of course, I say all this in full awareness that anything from a squall to a hurricane can come along yet and capsize this frail vessel.  It's just good to know it won't sink under its own weight.

The Writer's Ear Never Blinks

I just got what are probably the last, mopping-up type editorial suggestions from my editor on Rise Again.  Took me a couple of hours to reflect them.

This wouldn't be news, except I was supposed to be at a wedding in Connecticut today -- only a close friend of mine was shot in the shoulder, so I had to fly back to California.  And while I'm here, why not slip a little writing in?

My friend is doing well, in the circumstances; it was a hold-up gone wrong, with one member of the victimized party making an aggressive move on the criminal, causing him to fire wildly, hitting my friend.  They call challenging a criminal "escalation" in the policing trade, and it's generally considered a dumbass move.  The perpetrator is still at large, and because this is Los Angeles, will probably remain that way.

Of course, as a concerned chum, I listened to what happened, offered what counsel I could, and generally tried to be a decent human being.  As a writer...  Sigh.  I stored away all details of the incident for use in some future project.

Priming The Brain Pump

Today I didn't get a whole lot written.  One of the problems with writing -- the way I do it, anyway -- is it's essentially self-induced manic depression.  Sometimes I'm flying along writing 10,000 words a day, and then I crash, and I'm lucky to write a couple of sentences.

Between the writing and the rather unpredictable day job, both awesome insomnia triggers, I am guaranteed to cycle from excitement to exhaustion every few days.  Which is where I am now.  The book is in reasonably good shape, and I am not.

I have a fiendish system for dealing with this exigency.  It's so obvious it took me fifteen years to figure it out.

When, in the course of a project, I get all worn out and groggy and sitting at the desk (especially after an interminable day of sitting at a different desk) seems too loathsome to contemplate, I write precisely one half of one sentence.  Then I walk away.

Here's my sentence for the day:

He ate breakfast with appetite, not just shoveling fuel into his body, but enjoying the food,

One of two things will happen now that I've done this.

1.  I'll have a fit of energy later, because I can't stand leaving a sentence unfinished, and write a couple of pages after all. 

2. Tomorrow, the task of completing the sentence will allow me a nice, easy start to the writing session.  Heck, anybody could finish that sentence.

Or, to be honest: 3.  I'll write an entire blog post on the subject.

Writing My Little Antlers Off

Anybody that writes horror knows how awesome it is to reach that scene in which things get ugly.  It's the pry-open-the-coffin-discover-the-secret-in-the-attic-hey-where-did-Bobby-go-he-was-right-behind-us-oh-God-what's-that-noise scene.

I got to that scene tonight.

There's only one problem.  I told myself this was going to be a short book.  230 pages was my bold estimate.  Now we all know page counts have no meaning.  It's word counts that matter.  I'm 13,000 words in.  So far, no worries.  But I'm essentially writing from a marked-up copy of the screenplay on which the novel is based.  And I'm 25 pages into the script, or one quarter of its length.  The novel is tracking fairly consistently at 150% the length of the script, in terms of page count.  So translating that into word count, that would mean my finished book will be around 50,000 words long.*

That's a pretty darn short novel.

I usually write long, when it's prose I'm working with.  So now I'm worried this thing is too superficial, too much like the screenplay, all images and no interior.  The good news here is that it doesn't make any difference.  This is the first draft.  It's supposed to suck.   

Rule of thumb: never trust a good first draft. 

I cut a cumulative 40,000 words out of my first novel, and then joked about how har har har I cut enough out of my book to make a second book, scoff scoff chortle I'm so prolific har har.

So I guess I'm writing that book now.


* Word and page counts are absolute rubbish, but I keep returning to them.  It's because I'm neurotic, not because it matters.  Repeat after me: How long should my novel be?  Exactly the length of the story!

Alcoholism And Writers

In honor of today's earthquake, which felt uncannily like trying to stand up in a canoe, I've invented a cocktail.

"Standing in a Canoe:" combine a couple of fingers of vodka, a cup of orange juice, a dash of bitters, and a stiff dose of champagne in a 16-oz tumbler, over ice. Garnish with mint. Then lie down.

If I make it through two of these, I might write The Great Gatsby.

An Easter Sermon

Today being the commemorative holiday celebrating Christ Yeshua's ascent from among the dead to take his place at the right hand of Y__h,* a few words on faith might be in order.  Then  I really must get back to my novel.

I'm a Buddhist, and have been for a couple of decades now.  It's a religion, sure, but it doesn't require faith.  You can follow Buddha's teachings as an atheist and be closer to him in spirit than the most fervent saffron-clad worshiper.†  That said, recently I've come to understand faith better than I care to admit.

It's not faith in a guy that died and came back to life a couple of millennia ago (as impressive as that is), but faith in the act of creation.  Especially writing.  Me and my artwork are pals.  We fun around a lot and do crafts together.  Writing is different.  It requires a real belief that transcends what's actually going on in one's life.  It is sometimes grueling and dispiriting work.  I write no matter what, and if I don't write, I suffer for it.  And why?  There's no penalty, no opprobrium attached to not-writing, as there is in religion with not-believing.

To tell a story, we must sit down and transcribe a flow of ideas and impressions, dialogue and language, all of which together create a reality that is tangible in the mind.  This reader might be someone we know, or a stranger in a faraway land 500 years in the future.  That is an extraordinary task to assign oneself.  All writing, done with sincerity and skill, is like this. 

1600 years ago, speaking of magic books, somebody compiled Apicius, also known as Ars Magica, a book of recipes.  A cookbook over a thousand years old is pretty cool.  But dig this -- the recipes are based in the Imperial Roman tradition, so they generally predate Christ!  Okay, groovy, but why is this cookbook noteworthy, besides its age?

I've made a couple of the dishes described in Apicius.  Think about the implications of that.  I've assembled a meal, the preparation of which was first codified one thousand, six hundred years ago.  Only through a book could such a thing be transmitted.  We can't taste excavated remains of Roman feasts.  Were it not for this book, the method of Roman cooking would be lost, leaving us only superficial descriptions in other narratives (Flaccus's Satirarum Liber, for example) that don't tell us how it's done.

That's how the act of faith which is writing can pay off.  Thousands of years after the original feast was prepared, we may duplicate it.  And this is just a cookbook I'm talking about.  Look at what the Bible has done.   Or the plays of that upstart crow, Shakespeare.  Geoff Chaucer can still make me laugh, and he's been dead since October of the year 1400.  For that matter, the written language of music allows us to hear songs from centuries before recording existed.  The oldest reproducible ditty is over 3100 years old -- a hymn to Nikkal discovered on a Sumerian tablet, with words and music!

When I'm writing, it's not for the sake of somebody reading my stuff in 2,000 years.  But that's the power of writing.  So this act of faith -- that I can somehow communicate a thing into being, in the mind of a stranger, regardless of how removed that person is from my own experience -- is a mighty one.  Every writer does it, every time they write, whether it's a poem, a recipe, an essay, a novel, or the instructions for assembling a bookshelf.  It's faith in one's own ability to communicate, faith in the reader, faith in the durability of the matter to be communicated.  It can be difficult or impossible -- what is writer's block, but a crisis of faith -- and yet, as with religion, we keep on believing.




* You kids were asking Uncle all about why how come the Easter Bunny and with the eggs and whatnot.  Easter used to be known as Eostre, and celebrated a rather vengeful pagan goddess (Eostre, Oestra, Ostara, suit yourself) known for being in charge of -- you guessed it -- spring, fertility... and rebirth.  Clever, clever early Church guys!  Hey look, it's Jesus resurrected!  Forget about that powerful female deity, we're entering the age of all-male gods.
Eostre has a magical companion, a rabbit formed from a bird, who consequently can crap out colorful eggs.  These eggs symbolize rebirth of the world, which if you're from Northern Europe in the 2nd century BC right around the beginning of April, is something you're very much hoping will happen.  So Easter is one of the most thinly disguised Christian/ pagan crossover holidays, second only to good old Halloween.  In fact, the enduring symbol of the cross was originally associated with Ms. Eostre, hence hot crossed buns, which predate Christianity.
Legend has it the word "estrogen" comes from this goddess as well, although etymologists will tell you it comes from the Greek oistros, meaning "frenzy," which is pretty funny, too.  I prefer the hat tip to Eostre, myself.


† Worshiper looks completely wrong, but that's how it's spelled, apparently.

Back In Seattle Again

When I was a kid, Aerosmith released a song I loved: Back In Seattle Again.   It took me quite a while to discover it was in fact Back in the saddle.

I'm happy to say I'm back there, whether on the horse or in the Pacific Northwest.  Seven pages written today, probably another page or two left in me before I retreat from the keyboard.  Whether they're good pages is immaterial, because this is the first draft.  They only have to be pages.  Tomorrow, Easter Sunday, I'll see if I can get as many more pages done.

Which brings me to the subject of get 'er done.

I get emails or Facebook messages from people occasionally, reacting to my page counts with mock-curses; a lot of my friends are writers, and they struggle to get the stuff on the page.  I try to be supportive, having been there myself on many occasions.  The fact is, though, there's not much more than sympathy anybody can offer.  There are as many pieces of advice on getting the work done as there are writers.  We all go it alone, ultimately.*

So my advice, described in other posts, is what works for me.  It may not work for anybody else, although several people who have tried this approach have enjoyed positive results.  So I think it might apply to a lot of people.  The short form is this:

• First, figure out what you want to write, and write an outline.  The form of the outline doesn't matter, whether it's a synopsis, a list of bullet points, or a collection of 3x5 cards.

• Second, catch the wave.  As soon as you feel like you have a handle on your material -- even if the outline isn't finished -- start writing.  Write like a maniac.  Write like your life depended on it.  It probably does.  Write 80-100 pages this way if it's a novel, act 1 and part of act two if it's a screenplay, and so on.  Print as you go.

• Keep writing.  Once you have that first stack of pages, the rest gets easier, because now there's a something in the world, pushing back on all that nothingness that surrounds every story, threatening to engulf it.  Write until you're done.  It doesn't matter if it takes you three months or thirty years, just keep at it.  

Right?  That makes a lot of sense, and it's gotten me through mountains of writing over the years.  But I'm just as screwed as anybody else if I lose that first fire of inspiration before I've made any progress.  My last novel project stalled out completely, and I had to turn to this one instead.  If this one were to do the same, I'd have to scramble to figure out what to write then, and my confidence would be shakier than a Parkinson's sufferer operating a jackhammer.†  That's why I'm a believer in that initial rush.  It means more work in subsequent drafts to get it right, but hey -- every draft is just a revelation of the next.

So here's hoping I can get 'er done.


*Although one of my dear writer friends has suggested a mutual support system that is of great interest to me -- more on this, presumably, soon.

†Parkinson's runs in my family and destroyed my father, so I can totally get away with saying this.  I could not get away with saying "shakier than the Japanese schoolgirl padlocked in my basement freezer," for example, or "shakier than the Bush administration's case for the war in Iraq that destroyed a nation and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings," because they interrupt the flow of the reader's concentration. 

Works Every Time

Not just exercise, but the mere threat of exercise, and I'm writing again.  Works like a charm.  But I'm not letting myself off the hook that easily.  One of these days, I'm going to get some physical activity.  Only a couple of pages written today, because it was a long shift at the day job.  But those pages are golden, baby.