Thanks, now go away

            “Just write something,” Tim proclaimed.  This profound bit of advice was all he could offer to my disarray.  I was tempted to respond with the expected dismissiveness, but I realized he actually thought that was useful.  Like I’d never just sat down and wrote.

            Maybe he was right.  Nonetheless, it was dumb advice.  Like telling a cancer patient to “quit being sick” or a depressed person to “just cheer up.”  And yet, people continue to offer this sort of advice to one another, not for the sake of actually solving problems, but to just cap it off and move on to some other, less esoteric topic.  One cannot just pull art out of oneself as a dentist extracts a molar.  There has to be some goal, some truth, which compels it to leave the infinite interior of the soul and onto the language-restricted lines of the page.

            Why do that to a message?  The English language may be vast, but compared to infinity it’s just chicken scratch.  Lest you imagine this is an excuse in the making for not writing anything at all, I consider it an amusing challenge to take the universe and stuff it into a pocket.  And for writing’s sake alone, it can remain in my files forever untouched, or tossed into the trash, and the universe continues to unfold without a flinch.  A slant is placed on the product, however, when one writes for the sake of others.  When I write to entertain, do I approach with my own unfiltered voice, or with an approach I imagine appeals to a wider audience?  Is writing for others as much of a compromise as it is to write anything at all with the limits of language?

            We may read the biographies and writing tips from published, respected authors.  We hear them break down their methods, we hear their tips about going from a blank page to a best seller list placement.  They must know better than us, right?  Well, they have at least reached their goals and perhaps sit in a better place to advise than ourselves.  What seems consistent among them all is to read more.  And to write, always.

            So, Tim’s advice, coming from a non-writer, is both frustrating and correct.  And instead of writing, I spend most of that time just mentally listing all the reasons I can’t write.  I get all kinds of household chores done that I didn’t want to touch otherwise.  I get lots of television watching in.  Curiously, I find the time to advise my writer friend to “just write”.

            The years I spent feeling very inferior to my own life experience like to butt in, and while I appreciate their motive – to keep me from failing at my writing attempt – I have to thank them for accompanying me on the journey… and to leave, for good.  I no longer require their misguided protection.

            

Not murder... a lobotomy will be enough

The old adage - “murder your darlings” - means to take the characters you love and put them through the grinder.  This advice is usually inspired when a writer is having trouble creating interesting conflict for a character and often ends up at a creative brick wall.  You love these characters, you don’t want to hurt them.

Stories without conflict, in the vast majority of cases, are just plain uninteresting.  Taking your protagonist and contrasting them with an impact character is going to bring up conflict in some way, whether tangible, emotional, spiritual, or esoteric.  Whether that impact character is stereotypical evil, cartoonishly so, anti-hero, or misunderstood, they are an impact character because their ideas, presence, fortunes, or fate put them in a position that opposes the main character in some fashion.  Your protagonist is ultimately changed by the impact character, in most cases.

So, there must be some idea or reality your protagonist lives in, and some idea or reality your impact character has that begins to create, force — or fails to change the protagonist.

Detaching myself from my novel’s darlings, I find so many of the characters unmemorable.  The initial impact character, while certainly having an immediate impact on the protagonist, does little work to induce him to change.  Indeed, he is a bit tedious, and no one is likely to care if he changes at all.  What does he have to change?

I like him, and I can’t murder him.

But I can lobotomize him... somewhat.

I need to slice open the frontal lobe and run down the rabbit hole.  What is he?  What is he *really*?  Where are the frayed edges?  The callouses?  The tangled webs?  What switch resides within, waiting for the external person to turn on the light?  And why should anyone care?

So far, the narrative depicts a path that’s far too smooth.  A rumbling of carriage wheels below that lulls the reader to sleep rather than eagerly turning the next page.

The people I created at age 18 were caricatures.  Single-dimensional representations of the person I was still learning to be.  They haven’t grown with me.  I never learned to murder them.

But I must break them.  Put them through Hell.  And see who re-emerges at the end.

Fun City

So, it occurs to me that if I don’t want to vacation in my book’s world, why would anyone want to read about it?

I have to stop looking at it like a Google maps satellite view and switch, instead, to street view.

I have to revisit Greece in my mind.  That sense of how the land invokes the gods.  If I don’t see my world that clearly, it’s still not ready to hold stories. 

Ess Tee Eff You

9-18-18

The coffee is a little strong today.

If I were anything but a writer, that would be that; the coffee’s strong and I just move on.  But, as one can imply from context – and the existence of this text – I am a writer so I can’t just leave it there.  I have to wax poetic on why the coffee being too strong bothers me.

Perhaps an inordinate amount of my conscious time is spent in the past, particularly street cafes of Rome or Paris or Venice.  Ignoring the tried-and-true habits of the locals, I order my cappuccino after 11 am and marvel how much stronger its flavor is than the “robust” coffee of my hometown convenience store’s offering.  Real coffee has a delightful bitterness and I, as a “cultural chameleon” (Rick Steves’ words) enjoy the local delights easily when I am here.  At home, they’re not calling to me.  Yet here I am in this coffeehouse, trying once more to enjoy a good strong coffee, and it tastes *too* strong.  It bothers me this time, for some reason.

Part of the bitterness is the tides of life that have conspired to keep me from traveling so far anytime in the foreseeable future.  Part of that daydreaming I do is the freedom to move between this, the “rat race”, and the pseudo-exotica of Europe.  Not like a rich traveler, in the most modern of chain hotels and the fanciest dinner halls, buying countless unnecessary baubles and taking photographs of my bare feet in front of cartoonishly blue shores.  That’s cool for some, but it’s not the travel I want.

What I want, however, is a back burner concern – what I *need* to get to that place is at hand.  I fell (or rather, jumped headfirst) into the debt trap that cripples most average folk in this country.  Debt is reserved for the insignificant, who toil under unsatisfying professions and reap meager benefits to help finance the wealthy and the sociopathic.  Sucks, right?  Anyway, pondering what it takes to extract oneself from this pattern requires a worthy endgame.  My endgame is to have the option to visit this magical, mystical land of AnywhereElseville when I desire.  Nothing more.

What can a peasant like myself do toward this end?  A quick survey of my skills paints a damned miserable picture.  Oh, there’s some encouragement coming in from various directions.  Pep talks never did much for me, as most (though I appreciate their good intentions) are fairly generic in nature, akin to “you’re in my thoughts and prayers”.  They’re like a cry of “freedom” which is, supposedly by its nature, self-evident and requires no further explanation.  When someone tells me “You can do it!” I always reply (at least internally) that “yeah, I knew that.  But HOW?”  Positive affirmations, without meaningful context, are like the pennies of a dragon’s treasury.  They fill up space, but aren’t worth much.

I know I can do it.  But how?

I’ve had conversations that consisted of my asking questions about technique, where the repeated response is some rewording of “just do it.”  “You just have to sit down and do it.”  “Just…”. Just.  Just.  *Just* means that it is self-evident and I need merely to Ess Tee Eff You and watch as the magic flows.  Hate to break it to you, but this occurs to me as well.

I get quality advice about the process from people who do quality work – in the particular outlet that I choose.  Visual artists tell stories, but in a different method.  I would take the advice of those who make compelling stories.  The two talents don’t always come together, and I do not do fan-fiction (just not an area of interest).  Audio artists speak a whole other language, but their process is perhaps more akin to fiction writing than the visual artist.  And music has the same “slow burn” effect – you can’t take it all in quickly.  You have to let it build.  (Except, say, Mona Lisa who is a fairly simple painting that people continue to witness in awe centuries later). Just as one must hear the whole song for the whole picture, a book or story has to be taken in its full form to convey its whole message. So I feel that much more compelled to craft the narrative in such a way that a person reaching the end doesn’t regret the time they wasted.

Before the visual artists throw their angry words and hashtags at me, I am not saying that visual arts are somehow inferior or easier.  It is a meticulous process as well. In most cases, the work is taken in in a very immediate sense.  People often know very quickly if they like something they see.  There’s a very visceral effect that either inspires further study or a dismayed turn away.  Music, to some degree, has that same effect, but it often takes longer to decide if one likes it or not.  Movies are a mix of visuals and writing, and poor visuals can rob the effect of decent writing, just as poor writing can sabotage visuals.  My point, I suppose, is that the months or years I may put in to a story may hit all the wrong notes for a reader, but as the cliche goes… one (shouldn’t) judge it by the cover.  They have to invest a good deal of time to decide their opinion, and I have to appreciate that and work to ensure they don’t lose too many hours on a bad story.

The point to this ramble is that I want quality advice when I’m stuck, not a pep talk.  I know things will be okay.  I want to know *how* to speed that process along.  And people who know you best can offer this advice if they’re interested more in being legitimately helpful vs. offering a mere pick-me-up.

Actually, the coffee is pretty good.  As I vent, I float back to those coffee bars and reclaim my chameleonic nature, at least in spirit, while I plot my return to those well-worn streets.  Advice or not.