“To write you first have to have something to say.”
I don’t remember where I first came across this sage piece of wisdom, but it has held true over the years. It explains the rush of poetry I produced in my youth and even why I stopped writing in my early adulthood.
Seems I always had something I wanted to say when I was a teenager and in my early 20’s and then life evolved and the follies of youth had to be put aside and I stopped having something to say, or more accurately I stopped letting myself have something to say. Now as I’ve travelled through life and age and wisdom have caught a hold of me, I find myself more often with questions to ask or directions to explore than answers or opinions to give.
I’ve let go of the arrogance of youth where I thought I knew everything and embraced knowing that no matter how much I learn I still have so much more I could learn. Life in all its varied shades of gray is a melting pot of answers and I often find myself stewing in the possibilities instead of choosing a direction in which to focus.
This can make it hard to pick something to say. How do you choose what story to tell? How do you pick just one simple truth to impart, or mistake to highlight? How do you separate all the entangled lines of experience to follow a single journey and make your point?
I think in my search to discover life’s mysteries I’ve forgotten that sometimes the simple messages are the most profound and that it also doesn’t always have to be profound. Truth is found in the risks we take and the lessons we learn in the discovery.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Writer's process
My mind can often be a rather temperamental place to live. It requires a constant shifting structure of needs to keep it well fed and balanced so the creative juices flow. When I finally set myself to task in my writing and gave it true focus and attention, I’ve come to learn an amazing amount about my process. Like most creative pursuits it’s not linear. What I find interesting is how hard it can be to write in silence. I’ve found that instead of music, which I read or heard from a bunch of my own favorite authors being their go to background noise, I actually find I need to hear people in conversation. Sometimes its news or talk radio, other times its shows that I like or find thoughtful. There is something so rich and fascinating about human interaction that observing it even in fictional work inspires me to make those left turns where I have to ask what if. What if, the conversation went this way instead of that, what if the circumstances where different, or what if the ripples a particular choice made went further out or stayed closer in.
The thing about human interactions is they aren’t linear either, they resemble fractals: where each choice breaks off into a plethora of possibilities just waiting to be explored. People are constantly in motion because of these choices, never staying the same even when you can revisit the same choice and take a different path. Your perspective won’t be the same, you will never have that same space of unknowable you had when you first perceived the choice.
It’s also endlessly fascinating to me as a writer at how much my own personal growth projects and life experience play into the choices I interpret my characters having, which ones they see or will lean towards based on my perception of the world and people. The lessons I’ve learned through my own flawed interactions translate into needing to understand on a greater level what people want, what they desire, how someone goes about attaining that information and how their approach is interpreted. Is it too direct and seen as brutal or challenging, is it too subtle and seen as passive aggressive or missed entirely. How do you create a charged interaction between two people in a way that leads to the outcome you want?
It’s taken me years to overcome my own social conditioning on this topic to finally be open to exploring these questions and finding answers instead of having an aversion to even the thought of what I perceived as manipulation tactics or game playing. The truth is that what I perceived as game playing wasn’t necessarily the reality of the interaction. We all crave sparks or what most people most commonly refer to as chemistry in the interactions we have with others, and character interactions in a story are no different. They require it on an even more dramatic level in order to demonstrate a journey or inner/emotional struggle, to convey subtext in the written form, when body language would convey it in a visual way.
I’ve also come to realize, thanks to being involved in poly relationships that often times the perception of a thing can be more important than the reality of a thing. Especially in regards to interpersonal relationships, if someone perceives you as wanting something more than you do and it makes them uncomfortable because it exists outside of what they feel they can give or want to give, then it changes their interaction with the other person. It doesn’t matter if the reality was different. The perception is the only thing that mattered. True perceptions can be cleared up with simple communication, but that is often not explored because of the perception. If someone is already feeling uncomfortable about what they think another person wants from them, having a conversation about that only makes that discomfort worse when human nature is driven by a desire to avoid feeling discomfort.
So how does that translate into a story? How do I translate my intrinsic need to understand people and interpersonal relationships into writing dynamic but realistic explorations of the human condition in a way that both conveys profound truths and wisdom and is entertaining? How do I as a writer, write about these topics in a way that makes the reader feel personally involved without creating the perception that it’s based on personal experience from me, that instead of it being seen as my own personal secret desires/thoughts/struggles and have it be seen for the reality that it’s simply me taking an experience and the unexplored possibilities and going down the road not taken in a way that allows me to internalize it so I can make it feel real to the reader?
The thing about human interactions is they aren’t linear either, they resemble fractals: where each choice breaks off into a plethora of possibilities just waiting to be explored. People are constantly in motion because of these choices, never staying the same even when you can revisit the same choice and take a different path. Your perspective won’t be the same, you will never have that same space of unknowable you had when you first perceived the choice.
It’s also endlessly fascinating to me as a writer at how much my own personal growth projects and life experience play into the choices I interpret my characters having, which ones they see or will lean towards based on my perception of the world and people. The lessons I’ve learned through my own flawed interactions translate into needing to understand on a greater level what people want, what they desire, how someone goes about attaining that information and how their approach is interpreted. Is it too direct and seen as brutal or challenging, is it too subtle and seen as passive aggressive or missed entirely. How do you create a charged interaction between two people in a way that leads to the outcome you want?
It’s taken me years to overcome my own social conditioning on this topic to finally be open to exploring these questions and finding answers instead of having an aversion to even the thought of what I perceived as manipulation tactics or game playing. The truth is that what I perceived as game playing wasn’t necessarily the reality of the interaction. We all crave sparks or what most people most commonly refer to as chemistry in the interactions we have with others, and character interactions in a story are no different. They require it on an even more dramatic level in order to demonstrate a journey or inner/emotional struggle, to convey subtext in the written form, when body language would convey it in a visual way.
I’ve also come to realize, thanks to being involved in poly relationships that often times the perception of a thing can be more important than the reality of a thing. Especially in regards to interpersonal relationships, if someone perceives you as wanting something more than you do and it makes them uncomfortable because it exists outside of what they feel they can give or want to give, then it changes their interaction with the other person. It doesn’t matter if the reality was different. The perception is the only thing that mattered. True perceptions can be cleared up with simple communication, but that is often not explored because of the perception. If someone is already feeling uncomfortable about what they think another person wants from them, having a conversation about that only makes that discomfort worse when human nature is driven by a desire to avoid feeling discomfort.
So how does that translate into a story? How do I translate my intrinsic need to understand people and interpersonal relationships into writing dynamic but realistic explorations of the human condition in a way that both conveys profound truths and wisdom and is entertaining? How do I as a writer, write about these topics in a way that makes the reader feel personally involved without creating the perception that it’s based on personal experience from me, that instead of it being seen as my own personal secret desires/thoughts/struggles and have it be seen for the reality that it’s simply me taking an experience and the unexplored possibilities and going down the road not taken in a way that allows me to internalize it so I can make it feel real to the reader?
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