I feel like skipping out on writing this post today and just watching old episodes of Star Trek or reading the Kierkegaard my girlfriend convinced me to buy yesterday. So that’s exactly why I am sitting on my bed with my laptop typing up this post. Putting off writing a piece because you don’t hear the f*cking muse speaking to you is the coward’s way out. Sit down and write anyway. Having read more Star Wars novels than I care to admit, I can guarantee you that whatever words you smash together will not form the worst writing ever. (Yes, the bile is seeping into my bloodstream again, but my reward for finishing this post will be a double shot of the firewater necessary to burn it back into submission so anyone who encounters me later can expect me to be as friendly as normal.)
I wasn’t planning on it, but judging by that thing up there I call a paragraph, I think the long delayed post on my writing process is coming out. So what the hell was it I had told you people I was going to say? Something about making the leap from pre-writing to writing. If it does look like a leap, if there’s a chasm yawning between you and words on paper, you’ve done something wrong. That is, I’ve done something wrong. I’m not that great a writer that I can speak in generalities about the subject so let me take two steps back for that one step forward and begin again.
My writing usually begins with a character or a vague idea for a plot. Either way, it’s with the character, the protagonist usually, that I force myself to begin. As George Lucas has proven to the world several times now, a plot without characters that feel honest and real won’t earn you any praise. (Unfortunately he’s also proven that a plot without real characters but with bombastic set pieces will earn you more than enough money in which to swim Scrooge McDuck style.) So I focus my initial brain work on the character. I’ve also taken recently to writing down every thought or fragment of a thought I have regarding the character. I don’t do it for later reference, but because the physical act of writing lodges the thought almost as far into my brain as those childhood memories of saturday morning cartoons and old cereal jingles. The work I do is to slice open the character, expose his guts to the wind and the wolves. What does he want? What does he want to avoid? What does he know about himself? More importantly, what does he not know? And the key question, how could he be a better or, depending on the nature of the tale, worse person?
For me that is the key question because what I want to write about, what makes the best story in my not so humble opinion, is a character going through a change. The story may occur either before, during, or after the change, but still the change happens. The change could even be external to the character, though even in that case I’d look for the internal change which mirrors the external one. Once I have the change, the rest is just a matter of flying.
I pick the point where the change is. I then pick a point before and a point after the change and fly from one to the other, noting the contours of the route between the points, between the beginning and end of the character’s story (which may differ from the story). I use a metaphor of flying because if I get too much into the detail of the story during pre-writing I strangle the life from it. The story needs room to breath, opportunities to surprise me by heading off in a direction I didn’t expect. If you’ve written and had that latter experience happen, you know what a rush it is. It’s the creation of life, it’s the ultimate promethean act of fire stealing. I’ve felt it before and have never found anything else in life to rival the sheer ecstasy of it. Once I have the rough idea of how the character must proceed, with open spaces to allow him to live on his own, the rest, the writing, is just a matter of fill in the blank. Well, not entirely.
There is the matter of deciding where to start. One thing George Lucas did get right was that you don’t always want to start your story at the beginning of the character’s journey. The inital portion can be more boring than reading the psalms (seriously, David, we get the idea, you love God, your enemies hate you, and God should protect you from them). One story I’m working on now kicks off with the protagonist within spitting distance of the change point and several miles beyond the start point. His own mental review will provide the neccessary background, but to make the reader trudge through all of that detail would be downright mean.
At that point I sit down with a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper and start writing sh*t. The first draft is, with the rarest of exceptions, going to the pure sh*t straight from the horse’s arse. That’s the point of the first draft though, to pressure wash all of the gunk and rotted apple cores from my mind. I constantly have to remind myself of that too or else I’ll get caught up in revising the first draft as I write it and I’d never finish it. Sometimes I won’t even look at it when I write the second draft because I won’t want any of it to pollute the story. But that step is beyond the scope of what I’m here to say. I’m also now past the 1000 word mark so it’s time to wrap this spewage up.
I don’t know that it will really be a benefit to any of those who seemed interested. If it does prove to be, let me know where you get whatever you must be high on because I could use some of it. If not, well, f*ck, you should at least take note fo the fact that by forcing myself to sit down and write when I didn’t feel the creative urge, I still managed to crank out over 1000 words so stop being afraid of the glaring emptiness of the screen or page, sit your ass down and write.