Writing advice is everywhere. The question is finding what works best for your craft. First, there is advice on the physical practice:
Jose Saramago: I do require a certain amount of written work per day, which usually corresponds to two pages. Two pages per day adds up to almost eight hundred per year.
Ernest Hemingway: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
And then there is advice on what you are writing.
Toni Morrison: Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through.
Kurt Vonnegut: Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Ian Fleming: Make sure that you don’t like your protagonist too much – or at all.
Finally, there is the broader advice, how to understand exactly what you are doing.
Joan Didion: Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
Alice Munro: There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I think honest feedback is very important. But it’s also hard to find. Other writers can be useful, also they can not, because they’re doing the same thing, and sometimes they want you to become like them.
I am deep into this blog now (eight years and 1,250 posts) and so this is as good a time as any to finally take a swing at that. What is this blog? Why am I doing this? My writing process! Let’s see if I can narrow that down to a few tips.
ONE: Your process is a personal thing. You can’t just do what people tell you to do. You have to figure out your own process. Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond Series, wrote every morning and then went for a swim. Woody Allen writes longhand. I text myself notes on the fire escape.
It can take forever because I am all thumbs (literally) and the typos and formatting are an issue, but I feels like it works. (That said, whatever you do, don’t email yourself notes from the same account as that confuses Gmail, which then labels all of your emails to yourself as junk.) You just have to figure out routine works best for you.
TWO: Maintain a work ethic. Like my father always said, “Life is work. If you don’t like work, then you’re going to have a tough time in this life.” Writing doesn’t happen by osmosis. You have to do the work. There is just no getting around that.
THREE: Watch what goes on around you in life. Look at the details – how people move their hands, how they walk and scroll, how they look back at you – and write it down. The best characters (read: biggest fuck-ups) are right in front of you.
The only problem is that people are all boring as hell in the end and you’ll have to clean that up – in other words, make it fiction.
FOUR: Move around. Do something. Get outside. A moving brain is a thinking brain. Go for a walk. Take a hike. Go jump in the lake. (More advice from my father.)
The more you move, the more your brain gets going. It’s called kinetic thinking. This is especially important when you’re stuck in the story. When you start to move around and think about that – the moving that is – the narrative solutions tend to pop into your head.
FIVE: Write what you know. Write the exact thing that is in your head. Write it. Name the names. Name the jerks you know. Describe them exactly as they are.
Don’t worry about what anyone might think. Not your partner, not your mother, not your kid, not even you. Nobody. That’s the prime stuff, the lunacy of people. Let yourself go nuts on that. That’s where everything is to be found.
SIX: Review and edit. And then edit it again. And when you’re done that, you guessed it. Edit again! Maybe then you might be ready for an editor.
SEVEN: Do the research, whatever is needed. Read up on the backgrounds of everything that you can. Visit the places. Do it for anything that comes up, the park that’s outside the building, the people walking past, the plane overhead. Read about whatever it is.
The most fulfilling reading will always be non-fiction – even if it is fiction. Biographies, the most fictitious of all, are the most revealing. Tales of exploration too. Those are the fullest.
EIGHT: Don’t listen to any of the experts. Screw them all. They are writing about it because they don’t know any better. Like me. Forget about the plot points. Disregard character arcs. There is no structure to any of this. Let your story unfold as it is. Let the characters live their lives.
Only three days into Phase One of the Great Re-Opening, and I am sentimental for the lock down. Remember when we couldn’t go outside? When the streets looked like a scene from Escape from New York and you could get a train car to yourself on the subway?
Or when the people took to the streets and everything got boarded up and our thoughtful mayor sent us daily notes on who was boss. (It didn’t turn out to be him.)
And, most importantly, how all of this justified my habit of hanging out on the fire escape with a Jamo and Bud. (Peanut butter and jam, we drinking folk call it.)
But that’s all over now. The jack hammers are back. (I actually missed them a bit.) And soon all of those faux New Yorkers will be giving up on their beach walks, soaking in the sublime shades of another perfect fucking sunset, and pretend they never left.
For those who follow my blog, you know that my focus tends to whirl about, citing random words, places and ideas, all in service of the “writing process”. Occasionally I get political, such as my blogs on the horrifying carnage at Sandy Hook and the election of Trump. I wandered into that realm last week with a fake magazine interview with Donald Trump. Swordsmen: Drawn & Quarterly.
The following day, my computer had been disconnected from our wifi service, and when I logged back on, I found the following options:
I was surprised that, first, the FBI were in the neighborhood; second, that they would actually name their wifi “FBI Surveillance Van”, and third that they were monitoring my blog. The third thought didn’t really coalesce until the next day when Facebook rejected my attempt to promote the post on their platform because it “violated their policy on promoting social issues.”
Promoting social issues? Isn’t that what writers are supposed to do? Or is it all code for them being pissed that the Russian hackers breached their sincerity? Whatever it may be, I have another Swordsmen Issue coming up, hopefully as much on point with my writing process as it is with our oxymoronic world, bitted up with bots and lies.
The very first time The Fear hit me was when I was six or seven years old. We were having Sunday supper and were watching The Wizard of Oz. Everything seemed to be normal. Nothing of note, to the best of my memory, happened that day. This was probably the fourth or fifth time I had seen the film. And then, right when the witch appeared in a cloud of orange smoke in Munchkin Land I got this horrible feeling. I wasn’t afraid of the witch; it wasn’t anything like that. It was a much more general feeling. Everything just seemed wrong, bad, evil. I couldn’t sit still. I had to stand up and move.
I walked across the room – nobody, not my sister, brother, father or mother, seemed to take any particular notice – and sat in a chair in the corner. I figured that if I didn’t watch the movie the feeling would go away. But it didn’t. I walked out of the room, down the hall and around the quiet, empty house. I paced up and down the stairs, went room to room, floor to floor. It took some time, but it did eventually fade away. I never directly associated the feeling with anything, but the movie certainly did seem to have brought it on. I didn’t watch any more of the film that night, nor did I see it for another fifteen years.
For the next few years I had two consistent nightmares. One where a witch lived in the basement and another where I would be sucked in between the walls and into the pipes by some sort of foreboding evil. I saw The Wizard of Oz again sometime later. It was incredible; no horrible feelings. I laughed all the way through. It is one of the best films ever made.
There are couple of things I have shed – bits of writer’s block – before I get into the real first draft of Mina, the final installment of the Cx Trilogy.
First of all, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a surprise. I am not a fan of his work, especially his depictions of violence and tedious storytelling methods; however the second half of the film worked well. That said, Tarantino’s misogyny comes through with a vengeance in the end. His hate for women is terrifying not only in its graphic nature, but more worrying, how it is embraced by the public.
Second, I don’t think writer’s block really exists. It’s just hard getting going at times. That’s called inertia. All I have to do is move the rock forward. That’s it. Once I get going, there will be no stopping it.
Highsmith revealed that in order to get herself in a different frame of mind, by pretending she was not herself, moving herself into a state of innocence, free of the day-to-day worries and anxieties of life. Her favorite technique to ease herself into the right frame of mind for work was to sit on her bed surrounded by cigarettes, ashtray, matches, a mug of coffee, a doughnut and an accompanying saucer of sugar. She had to avoid any sense of discipline and make the act of writing as pleasurable as possible.
…where we leave our guarded understanding to break free from that containment to find the universe that lives within all of us.
Val drove the truck hard, the corner coming too fast, how she wanted it. Dee was with her,not Dee but an Ethi of her, the idea of her when they had first met. She was screaming and laughing as she tried to change the channel on the radio. And then it was a song that Val remembered from when she was a kid. She had listened to that song on a tiny radio and the truck’s radio turned exactly to that too. But then Dee changed the channel again, and the tiny radio was gone.
“Leave it,” Val implored.
There was a stream of trucks ahead of them, heavy traffic, and she passed them all on the shoulder, over the gravel and rocks, wildly through the potholes, the axles getting slammed, and then the road was open again, a distant city on a hill.The music got louder as Dee leaned further back into the dark, and a car veered in front of her, crashed into the blackness, and another one veered to miss that and crashed with a thud. She looked around and stared at the accident to see if it had really happened.
The connector to Dee Pod was empty, the infinitesimal vibrations somehow building out here with the view out the oblong windows of the deep blackness. Calli stared out into it, looking for something to move, the stars to move past, a planet to appear as a fleeting shadow, but she only had a vague sense of motion, moving forward maybe, and then not, just still again, going nowhere, hovering. And then as suddenly, forward again, something there and then gone, a planet, moon or fragment of something like that, thrusting forward, and then suddenly back, hard, twisting around, the thing coming past the other way, falling backwards now, thinking she might vanish like that, her heart in the back of her head, plunging, a real sense of going down that rabbit hole, in that thing, going forward and back at the same time, not in the same place, but around and around, up and down, all at once. And then spat out of that, lurching ahead, really forward at Hawking 4X, At that speed so close to light, feeling that, getting somewhere, the glare and things in the blackness really moving past, leaving those for the next, exploding ahead into the darkness, as fast she was she was moving still, on into nothing.
*Hawking 4X: four time Hawking Speed which, at .21 light speed, is the fastest speed Stephen Hawking believes humans will ever be able to travel.
…where we leave our guarded understanding to break free from that containment to find the universe that lives within all of us.
“We sat on the rocks. All of us we were naked, stark naked. It wasn’t a sex thing, none of that. It was just being naked by the lake.” Liyuan’s mouth was too big for his head, his hairline a straight line on his forehead; he wasn’t as old as he felt, moving his hands slowly over his knees as he spoke. “We saw the storm at the far end of the lake, billowing up, thick and black, rich, swirling over the tops of the trees. The trees were lush green in that light. And the thunder, the way it rolled down from the heavens, the lightning echoing behind it, that was the magic. The rain came racing up the lake, that pristine darkness suddenly a tumult with it hammering down. The drops splattered on our skin and the rocks, so cool and wonderful. And we slipped into the water, pushed out from the shore, our bodies wavering beneath the surface, and drifted out into the downpour. It was the most natural thing on earth, swimming into that glorious darkness, so warm, out into the middle of the lake.”
Ashe knew all of this. She had experienced these very thoughts, floated in this exact dream, but it had vanished. She could not hold it.
“We were in the middle of the lake, the rain coming down in sheets, just sheets and sheets of it. That’s what I remember the most, the rain, the lightning a mile away, the quiet, the sound of the rain against the lake, the black clouds and the still water, so dark and pure. And I’m afraid of that. I’ve always been afraid of the dark water. Always afraid. But not this. Not this.”
Po appeared on the shore, floating just above the lake, indiscernible for the woman, not Ashe, who tried to will her away. It never worked.
“We stayed in the lake, our faces looking back at each other, turning around, spitting out water, little streams of it, the impression of our fluttering arms and hands beneath the surface, just a hint of those. This was it. A moment of divine existence. Yes. Exactly that.” He closed his eyes as he rocked slowly forward and back, his hands out for balance. “And then the lightning was right there, a streak of it across the black sky and into the water, the thunder ripping through us, the storm right on top of us. We knew we had to leave. It was dangerous. And we didn’t. We stayed, thinking we might die like this, struck dead, floating belly up, and we were good with that. I was overjoyed. Overjoyed.” He stared at her, wide-eyed.
“The program makes you get out of the water.”
“Out of the water?” His face suddenly became creased, his eyebrows moving sharply down, his mouth pulled tight. The light had gone out of his eyes; he was going to cry.
Ashe pulled his hands together and cupped them in hers. “None of that. You hear me?”
He held her eyes, staring back, dark, his mouth a sharp line, and then reached out and touched her chin. “That’s an error. That was the purpose of creating it, that lightning shearing the air, terrifying blasts every second moment. And yet never have I been so without fear. I belonged there.” He sighed and sat up straight again. “Sometimes I think that I might still be there, still in that water.” “The program needs to be rewritten.”
“Yes.” He nodded back firmly and let out some tears.
