|
on writing God, this brings things back. I used to have to do these "writing on writing" reflection-type things for an English class way back when. I almost can't believe I'm writing this, but whatever. I kind of want to clarify things even if it's only for myself. I think I need to start out by explaining why I write and go from there. So. The 'why' of my writing is fairly simple: sheer joy. You know how people ask you what you want to be when you grow up? Well, I almost invariably answered that I wanted to write - admittedly I can only really remember back to about 3rd grade with any real accuracy but I think I've always wanted to write, and that I've always been scribbling (since I could scribble) away in some fashion. The desire to be a professional writer has been tempered, somewhat, by my love of a comfortable life and an oddly ingrained sense of inadequacy when it comes to original fiction, but it's still there. What can I say? I just love words. I love the way words work, I love language even when it fails me (or I fail it). I love being able to convey an image through disjointed words. One of my favorite things in world is to sit down with a notebook and a pencil and an eraser and just write little vignettes. My fondest memory is sitting on a little island in the middle of a little stream, my back against a gnarled trunk and a journal on my knee and just letting the world pour into me and through me as the sun burns away the grey clouds of morning. Admittedly I also love the way my handwriting looks, sometimes (yes, I'm egotistical), as it mars the flecked white space of a piece of paper. I write because sometimes I can't sleep for the images that spin through my mind. I'm a bit odd - I put myself to sleep by dreaming. I create a little scene and let it play in my head, rerunning it over and over to get it right and, at some point, the scene stops being a conscious thing and melts away into a dream. And sometimes I wake from a dream with an absolutely amazing story idea that I need to write down before I forget it. I write because I have an over active imagination and the release of the image from my body through words means I can have a bit of breather space and let my mind dwell on something other than the stiff, breathless wanting that can spring up from the bottom of the stomach at the trailing scent of cologne, or the briefest of touches as two hands brush past each other. I write because sometimes I feel like my blood is made up of words. Writing is sometimes a compulsion, an act as necessary as breathing. Sometimes good things come from this compulsion, sometimes bad things come, but it's a good feeling none the less. I write because writing is an adventure and it's always a bit of a mystery as to how things are going to turn out in the end. I write because I read too much and sometimes I feel like I could have written something better than what I've read, and sometimes I'm just so awed by the way a passage is phrased that I want to spread the joy that I felt when I read that particular line or saw that particular image, and sometimes I write because I've just read something in a style I've never even thought about and I want to try it on for size. The how of my writing flows naturally from the why. Now when I say 'how', I'm not talking about the, admittedly, bizarre way I sometimes structure a sentence - that can be explained away by the fact that grammar and I have only a passing acquaintance. No, the 'how' I speak of is more like the...inspiration for my writing. You see I don't have a muse in the traditional sense of the word - that is, there isn't a psychic anthropomorphic manifestation of my creative intellect. True, I do 'share' my head/imagination with a multitude of voices/personalities but they aren't the source of inspiration. Their role is more like...a snarky backseat driver. They have no actual input into what is being written; rather, they create a running MST of what I'm writing. No, the true inspiration for what I write comes from what I see, what I read, what I hear. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by a feeling or the sensation the lyrics of a song creates that I have to express my feelings in some tangible form. Sometimes there's a word or a phrase or a sentence I love so much that I need to write an entire story around it. This is, obviously, where the 'quotes' series comes from. Sometimes a story (or even multiple stories) just springs from a single concept, some idea that I want to explore. The profusion of stories about war, about being a soldier are off-shoots of my bizarre obsession with WWII and an exploration of what it means to be a soldier, to be in combat and to know that you've killed people--an experience that I will never have. The stories with an older Keith and Lance stem from my fetish for post-Voltron fics. Family oriented stories are my way of working out my feelings about settling down, raising a family. I'm sure you've noticed that kids are not my thing. Sometimes stories come from actual experiences; learning to drive, things my friends and family have said and done, events I've observed. More often, though, I get inspiration from a brief image, an ending scene or a middle scene or a beginning. And I can't just write the vignette, I have to write everything that comes before and after that vignette. In Broken Wings, it was the image of Keith finding out he was a slave. For Jiating, it was Lotor finding Keith's locket and realizing that he'd just raped his brother. In Bad Day, it was Keith wearing lopsided plastic devil horns and scowling. And everything just sort of flows from there. Like I said earlier, writing is a mystery for me. Because I don't have a plot outline or a plan or any sort of notion as to what's going to happen next, I find that the act of sitting down and putting words to paper is an enjoyable task. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock, who planned his movies so minutely that he never had to be there for filming to know how they turn out, I often don't even have an idea about where I want the story to go. To refer to Broken Wings again, I knew that I wanted to kill Keith off fairly early on because I'd also had the image of Lance at the beheading, but I didn't know how I was going to get there. The whole Sven/Hunk relationship was a huge shock to me. Writing, for me, is a journey, and a craft. Like Picasso, who went from traditional renaissance style paintings in his youth to the abstract, impressionistic, cubist works that he is most famous for, I find my writing to be continually growing. I find my style changes as I become more comfortable with words and showing the world a little bit of me. I find that I have to work hard to produce something I like, something I want to show the people I have met on vying and whom I have the utmost respect for. Writing is hard work. It's fun, but it's hard and it's frustrating and anybody who says that the finished product hasn't been crafted is lying. A story--a good story--for me can't be written once. Admittedly my editing process is such that I make changes as I write--add phrases here, delete a scene there, tweak plot points--but that's because I don't plan beforehand. But even if I did do plot outlines and drafts and have proof readers and beta readers--especially if I did these things--I would still tell you that the story I present has been carefully crafted, every word chosen with care. Being able to write is an ability that everyone has in them. To be able to write well is something that takes hard work, it's something that is learned. I believe in the craft of writing. Oh, sure, I know that there are those out there who shy violently away from describing writing as a craft, but I really don't know any other way to talk about it. Writing is a craft. It's not the craft, but it is a craft. It takes hard work to perfect your writing style, and lots and lots of polish. It's takes a lot of dedication and time and a natural aptitude to become a great writer, just like it takes dedication and time and a natural aptitude to become great at anything. Right. So that's the last of this rant that actually applies to anybody other than me. Not that it ever really applied to anyone other than me in the first place. Yes, I'm self-absorbed. The thing about writing, for me, is that I have the horrible love/hate relationship. I love writing I really do. I love sitting down at my computer, or grabbing a piece of paper and a pencil, and transcribing into words the thoughts that clutter my mind. I love having a vent for my overactive imagination. I love the journey of a story--I love discovering these characters at exactly the same time as you all are. I love seeing a story form from a single thought, see how one sentence or one idea shapes everything else. I'm not even going to attempt to count how many of the stories I've written which began with me doing something else and thinking, suddenly, 'hey, wouldn't it be fucking cool if x happened to y?' But most of the time I hate writing. It's like an addiction, it really is. Once I've started, I can't stop, even when I'm coming off the high and bored half-way through the story and I think everything I've written is total crap. Because as bad as that feels, it feels even worse when I can't write anything at all. I hate writing because most of the time, I'll read what I've written and be ashamed that I could produce such drivel. I hate most of what I write even as I'm writing it. I feel like it's a laborious, lumbering beast pretending to be a lithe, stalking cat and all it really is, is an improbable construction of glue and wood and canvas that's been slapped together any-which-way and thrown into the air and expected to fly. Most of the time I'm waiting for the crash. And, usually, I'm not disappointed. But sometimes, sometimes it flies and it's beautiful. It's marvelous in a way I can't even begin to comprehend, and I don't know why it works but just seeing it makes me cry because I know I'll never be able to do it again. I know no matter how long I keep writing, no matter how much crap I churn out, I'll never be able to equal that one, perfect moment when everything fit together and the illusion was real. I keep trying though. That, basically, is the crux of my hatred. Seeing that, knowing that I could write something beautiful, and then seeing everything else I write, depresses me to no end. Knowing that I'll have to write a hundred, a thousand, a million, a life time of stories before I get that perfection back--and knowing that I'll do it because I need to see something so perfect come from my hands. There, you see how much my thought process wanders? Here I begin with a rant about how I write and I end up with a rant about the act of writing. So I think I will stop now and let you, dear reader, read something that's actually worthwhile. |