The Geico Gecko giving a 20-second pitch is today’s version of an epic poem.
Cat cucumber videos are the standard for narrative and character development.
The Matrix isn’t red-eyed octopus machines. It’s this.
Fiction Inside The Matrix
Tag Archives: Writing steps
Writing Process: The Damnable Story
You must create story moments where the body reacts to something on the page – EKG machine response.
It’s the modulation of distance that makes a story work, moving in and out.
Writing Process: Opening It Up
The key to writing is finding the way into it. It isn’t a question of discipline – although it is – nor Hemingway’s leaving something for the next day – although it is. The route needs to be found. The thing has to open up.
Otherwise, it is just copy and you’re selling jeans with freedom catchphrases – not that I’m knocking it if they’re giving out the pay check. The access point can be as easy as remembering what an ass I was for doing something awful. Not to be obtuse.
Writing Sex
The feeling came into Dee, a distant tremor, hardly there, and then deep and she held it long, making it straight, more fully inside, her truth in this raw pleasure. She dug into the bull-man’s shoulders, pulled on his arms, incredibly, childishly on that.
She held on and then didn’t, succumbing, sliding off, her chin jutting into her chest, all of that streaming out of her, jerking her hips up, thinking if she stayed still, she might climb back into that perfectness again
The Mother of All Writing Advice
A story can’t be self on self. Avoid the Uber Voice. Seeing someone else through another’s eyes just might be the highest level of interiority.
Omniscient first person, that’s the thing. Whatever you decide, modern literary theory states that it’s all about what your mother says you didn’t write.
No One is Lazier Than a Writer
The writer is lazy simply they will do anything – organize drawers, clean the bathroom, write a blog – just to get out of work.
Writing Process: The Almighty Opening
Every time that I open Anori – something I have done a couple of thousand times – and wait as the document slowly loads, my always eye fastens on the opening line. And it’s never what I want, which has led me to change it some fifty or sixty times.
Dee watched the police car turn down the empty street and vanish on the other side of the park.
The keys to this sentence are a. the police car, b. the viewpoint (from a penthouse apartment) and c. the winds of Hurricane Sandy.
Jostled by the winds, the police car vanished on the other side of the park, as Dee slid the balcony door closed.
And then I think it’s all too much and that I only need the bare bones: The police car vanished on the other side of the park. But, that doesn’t work. Neither does: Dee braced herself as the gusts of wind came up again.
I want to communicate an isolated and brooding tone in the opening, something like Dee stood alone watching the police car as it went from sight on the far side of the park. But not that either.
Editing the Gangly Bits: Writing Process
I had a scene with some real problems. The background information was heavily front-loaded, and it was repetitious and awkward and gangly and sputtering and bad.
And so I hacked it up, rendered it down, patched it to another equally sputtering bad thing, did some cauterizing and cutting again and thought I was on the way to something new.
But it had become a bald thing, nothing in it, the description and progression and dialogue trimmed to nothing, the conclusion non-existent. And so I started to write it all over again.
Anori Extract: Apollo Kills a Galapagos Hawk
They were down from the mountain, the sun hazy through the low trees, so much hotter here, already past the conservancy camp, walking along the rocky edge, when Apollo ran ahead through the tidal pools and leapt at a hawk on the rocks.
Everything else scattered – cormorants, boobies, sea lions and crabs – as Apollo pinned the bird, the frantic brown bird fighting back, catching Apollo with its beak and talons in rapid succession.
“Apollo! No!” Dee stumbled down the rock face.
Apollo held hard to the bird as it flopped around, reared up, spasmed and shrieked.
“Let it go!” Dee yelled at him. “Drop it!”
Apollo hunched away from Dee, gripping the bird firmly.
“Apollo! I said drop it!”
“What the fuck, man.” Pax arrived from the other side of the pool. “Seriously, what the fuck.”
“Galapagos Hawk.” Dee sighed. “It’s a threatened species.”
“Apollo just killed an endangered species?”
“Not endangered.” Dee replied. “Threatened.”
“Well, this one’s fucking extinct.”
Arguing The Arc: Writing Process
While there are many aspects of the story arc that make sense in terms of pacing and development – like good old hamartia – the arc is a dated idea, limiting our understanding of who are to exacting plot points that only satisfy writing coaches and network executives.
Stream of consciousness is not the answer nor is it supposed to be all higgledy piggledy, but a style that reflects a understanding for ourselves. Reality television is the bald ugly version of this or the latest insanity of Trump’s dying days.
An amalgamation is needed of the two, an arc that that follow a path and yet simmers and U-turns with significance. That is my aim in The Cx Trilogy, to guide readers into a world and leave them there to look around.