Tag Archives: dogged writing

Writing Bad & Writing Good

Posted on by
Reply

At first, It’s just writing down words, getting from A to B, a clunky miserable slog that makes me feel miserable and worthless, like an unkempt bug-eyed man who scurries in the room, aimlessly moving around, making loud ignorant comments about whatever he notices.

Poop has few friends

It is minimally better the next go around. Still A to B, still clunky, miserable and worthless, but there with flashes, razor thin, something, an echo, a line across the dull grey sky.

Breathing and forgetting are next, lots of that, drinking too, reflecting and reconsidering. Even this, these words now, are feeling wrong, because I should be doing the sad reflecting. And I’m not. I’m rushing it. That’s the worst, making it the same awful thing at the outset.

Mountain goat skeleton in the Italian Alps

And then – good thing I got out of that – there is the crack, a way in, that meaty spark, a thing I was after, sharp and wonderful, until I reach for it and find it gone, never even there. I was drunk or wish I was.

The animal skulks about in the shadows, on the periphery, until it’s a mania of spinning my head, thinking I have something to say, knowing I’m a degenerate. The words are there but it’s still a morass – mole asses! – too much of that, and the drinking is my friend again, and I realize it’s time to give everything up. It never made sense. The drink was to blame. The repercussions are all there is, living the straight and narrow, facing judgement, crying for meaning, needing and almost finding that clear and consistent moral code, finally done with my childish nonsense.

I will wake up hurting

Gone and almost forgotten, I stupidly think it might be time to return, peak and see if that squirrely thing was ever there. And I do. And it was. It is. There are sparks and flames now, as shitty a metaphor as that might be, because I’ve got better things to do. I race after it and can’t stop until I do and realize I was wrong and that drink is to blame.

Time is the thing now, the breathing and forgetting, the drink, yes, too. Until it’s time again, or well past, and it opens just like that, the clunky thing still there, only needing a structural fix, deleting and editing, that on repeat, until there is something, a character more real than I know, a thing with meaning, not flailing and spouting, but sharp and clear, and not so much of that as to make it copy, but the sheen and wet of heavy footsteps bounding off to an end I know not of.

On the way to a Greenlandic summit

He doesn’t follow Emily up the stairs! He’s too chicken for that. He’s pretending that he will but stops and stares blankly as she vanishes and turns and makes a run for it. He’s free! No, he runs straight into his boss who he has to escort him into the party. He’s doomed and reaches for the first glass of champagne he can lay his hands on.

Anyway, I feel better about the book even if I know it won’t last.

Finding the Write Point of Entry

Posted on by

Writing is all about the entry point, how to get to that nucleoid of inspiration. Is it a memory of being a wide-eyed kid, digging through the rotten green wooden box at the back of the garage? Flipping Ian Potter’s desk in History class after he smashed my plasticine Jaws Boat? Or crying, football helmet still on, when the final cuts were announced? Or the obnoxious young adult demanding white wine at a beer hall in Munich?

Wise thoughts under thick hair

Or is it the slipstream of dreams, late for the train, cutting around wheel chairs, finding a bathroom on a balcony, children hovering over a featherless parakeet, a tortured young woman pitching a documentary about first love, late for dinner with my dead parents who say nothing and leave before they pay the bill?

Beginning to feel regret

Or is it all high fallutin’, how we never got past the tragedies of the Greeks because whatever we’ve got, it’s just keys to a rental car, LPs in the trunk, everything achieved, everyone known, all that zippity nil, remembering those things, throwing up, waiting to die. Yeah, that’s probably the one.

Memories Behind Obstacles

Posted on by

Obstacles block my thinking – what to eat, what to say, what’s the name of that – in the way of what I should remember – the window seat, creosote dark in the joist, her bare leg in the sun and and then down the path, trees bending in the wind, an ideal tucked away.

I’m supposed to be out, doing something, looking at the weather. That will determine the day, that structure. The left turn off Marine Drive was a challenge, the long bend in the road, the short left turn lane, a gas station and tae kwon do studio, another turn after that, streets, trees and cars.

I need a goal. Not just to eat and sleep. I need reason. I’ve convinced myself of this. The obstacles are a problem. I need them removed, a clean strike. I can fix the tire, even explain my anger, but there had better be some light, someone saying something.

It can’t just be this.

Writing Process: No More Speechifying

Posted on by

I have a tendency towards giving my characters speeches, or speechifying, as Tommy calls it. And it’s no good. It slows the narrative and, in the end, offers very little about the character. It’s really just me using them for my soapbox.

“To the mighty and fine Apollo.” Fitz raised his glass. “I look out at that river of ice out your backyard and think about those giants of millennials ago pushed off into the Davis Strait and into the great Atlantic, some of them the size of city blocks, whole towns, buildings and all, tankers, battleships, luxury liners, the works. They’re an impressive fleet, an impenetrable flotilla at the outset, only to gradually break apart, one from the other, going out into the bay, the strait, the ocean, down past Twillin’. But then they all come apart, not just one from the other, but the thing from itself. These mighty giants go out on their quest, out into the great unknown, just to dissolve, become bits and pieces, and then the water, gone like that. Seems to me that they might have a fate more suitable than that.” He opened another beer. “We’ll have another drink with you, and then we’ll be off.”

Writing Process: Knowing the Story

Posted on by

You think you know something and then you don’t. All stories are only that. He wakes up to some party or hands held out and then he has to do something alone not because he believes in life or strength but because he was lost.

It is as simple as sitting on the fire escape or the corner that he knows and remembering that no one was there for him but paid for her mistakes. She tried. Or she didn’t. But he just has to carry on and become something new from that.

Writing Process: At a Loss. And Then What?

Posted on by

I am coming to the end of Anori, Draft #5, a process that has taken ten months. I have had some satisfying moments – tightening up narrative, deleting unnecessary characters and scenes, building the arc and all of that – but it feels almost pointless in the end.

I will be hiring an editor once again. I will see what advice is there to get this thing published. After all, it has been some eight years since I started. It was called The Ark, and it seemed so remarkable to me at that time. It feels more a cage now, with Dee and the others just screaming to get out.

Virile

Posted on by

The thing is that you are here, simply and wildly so, what the beat guys said, that raw repetitive thing. You think you belong here and you do. You came to this place and were ready for it or not at all. On the edge of knowing. That is all there could possibly be. Almost there. Virile. All of that in you. One long impossible note.

And you think there should be more – because in all of that might be ahead and has been seen by you, by you!, the sheer cliffs, the little kids, everything tiny, remembering a mistake, lost, incredibly, delightfully so, and not in a memory, not a precise known thing, cherished, forgotten, that thing so exquisite as it must be known, there, waiting – and it isn’t.

And so there is that, the king of the universe in the hallway, flames coming out like they should, no understanding for the what or why of it, that nightmare you slip into and live in, there, acting like you are half sleep and probably are. And how did you get to that? Meandering, fine and easy. That is what you say and almost think at the end of it.

Bio Tuesday: The Sacred Whore

Posted on by

The Sacred Whore is my first novel, the story of a group of prostitutes who kidnap a college basketball team to air their views on the dismal morality in the United States. It has its moments, mostly characters realizing themselves. But more than that, it was the dogged focus of getting those 446 pages written. And then transcribed to 706 pages, typed, double-spaced. And then edited down to 432. And again down to 365. And then adapted into a screenplay. And to have both rejected again and again. A harbinger of what writing would come to be.