Tag Archives: writing process

The Banal Evil of Going Down the Middle

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We live in a mess of a world. Nothing whatsoever points to anything working out for any of us. And, truth be known, we deserve come what may. That’s because we lie and cheat and steal and destroy. Each and every one of us do this, not in an occasional mistaken manner, but in a purposeful self-centered way.

We like to distract ourselves with food and drink, music and books, and even go on to think that there is hope as we look at the beauty in the words of Aeschylus or the brilliance of Hawking, and even think that we just have to get rid of this Trump fellow and it will be better .

The answer to that stupid idea is no, a hard no. It isn’t Trump to blame, as shitty as he is, nor even Putin nor Bolsonaro. These psycho-loons are just a symptom of what the real problem is: us, me and you, the ones who allowed it to be. It’s the evil of the middle road, making decisions to eke out a little bit for ourselves, convinced that no real harm is done by a trip somewhere nice or buying another bag of chips. That’s how the Nazis rose up. And it is how they will do it again.

I feel like I’m 10 years old. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. That’s my shitty excuse. I’m always looking to get away, avoid responsibility. I move from one thing to the next with no genuine aspiration, nothing true or wise. I like to write. That’s it. I like to live in that pretend world so that I can think that I know things. Yeah, I’m a stupid kid.

Anyway, the point is that we won’t make the right decisions just because we don’t really want to, not in our hearts, not in our genes. We want to go to Disney Land. And we feel good about that because anyone can do that. What else could there be?

Pandemic Accomplishments: Week 18

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I can now walk on my two new knees. There’s a long way to go, but rehab is in full swing and I’ve been able to get up the two flights of stairs to the roof.

I read John Elder Robinson’s Look Me in the Eye, an autobiography of someone living with Asperger’s Syndrome when there was such diagnosis. I knew I was some kind of misfit, but it was becoming apparent that some of the grown-ups who smiled sweetly and told me how terrible and fucked up I was were complete fuck-ups themselves.

I gained momentum on the writing front, mostly with these blogs, and plan to re-work Baller and Wave That Flag next week. Part three of The Cx Trilogy, Mina, awaits.

I reached Level 1208 of Fishdom, which means that I got through Level 1193, a level where bonus bombs, lightning and dynamite basically offer no help at all. 30+ attempts and I was finally moving on.

The Five Basics of Novel Writing

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Basic #1 You need something gnawing at you, some sort of singular understanding of the key to existence or just a character in panda jammies.

The first book which I wrote was inspired by the image of a group of prostitutes being driven across the country in a tractor trailer. Don’t ask why, but that was the idea that came into my head late at night in a Parisian apartment. It developed into my first novel The Sacred Whore.

My second book was based on the impossible idea of a landowner refusing to mine a rich deposit of gold to keep his land pristine, which evolved into Manitou Island.

My latest work, a speculative trilogy about a generational journey to another planet, was borne out of an image of a serval by a watering hole.

Photo credit: Micheal Nichols, National Geographic

This image was the impetus for four books and some fifteen years of writing.

One thing to be careful of in your inspiration mode is the issue of the moment. Avoid delving into a topic that has recently impacted you. In other words, you need at least a couple more years before writing your Covid-19 piece.

Basic #2 Manage your work as it comes out of you, bit by bit. You need to write what needs to be written, which could be anything from a full outline to a character description or snippets of dialogue. Whatever it is, build out from there.

The key to this step is patience. You have to wait for the moment and/or characters to reveal themselves. I came to understand this when writing The Sacred Whore, I was stuck in the middle of the book and realized I had way too many characters (something like 20) and decided to eliminate half of them. The funny thing was that one of the characters I tried to eliminate – Chantal Deschampes – immediately wanted back in the story. It wasn’t my idea. It was hers. That’s when I knew I had something.

Basic #3 When you’re stuck, go back to the beginning and go through it again. Get the momentum you need to continue and just plow ahead. You have to face the simple fact that a lot of what you have already written is junk and will eventually be deleted.

It’s like being stuck in the snow or mud in your car. You’ve got to go back, dig out the rear wheels, clean the path, and get a little space to move ahead. You have to do this again and again, so much so that your first page gets rewritten a hundred times, which can be a good thing. Or not. But don’t worry about that now.

Basic #4 Leave the work alone for a long period of time, at least half a year. If not more. Let it ruminate. Your eyes need to be new. Let go of everything you held tight and see if it still works without you wishing it along.

This is probably the area that I personally need to work on the most. I can be impatient and move ahead when I should be waiting. I have only recently learned to enlist the work of a professional editor. Hopefully that helps me turn the corner at long last.

Basic #5 It’s time to share, to submit to agents, to attend conferences and workshops, to do that over and over again. You need a tanker load of luck with this. I’ve had the equivalent of a toy tugboat. I’ve tried for many years now and have even had a few decent conversations and follow-up emails. But then it ends.

Leaving me with the pictures of sunsets and goody bags of pens and paper. And so I take the hint and start all over again.

Writing Tips from Great Writers

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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.

Raymond Carver: Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.

Ernest Hemingway: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

Writing Tips from Great Writers

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.

Writing Tips from Great Writers

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.

Writing Tips from Great Writers

Nine Tips for Your Writing Process

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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.

writing process

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.)

best content writing process

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.

tips for content writing process

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.

top 9 content writing process

NINE: Write a blog. And then blog about this. Or not. How did I get here again?

The Good Old Lock Down Days

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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.

We might even let them in.

Facebook Surveillance Van #3

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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 Fear I: The Wizard of Oz

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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.

Before I Start to Write

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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.

I just got to start. As simple as that.

Writing Advice From Patricia Highsmith

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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.