COB Journal: My Writing Process

This is my first but hopefully not last blog hop slash whirlwind spin into the creative process.  I've read an entire bookcase of tomes about the writing process, some good, some meh, but all have helped orient me to the details of the craft.  Many thanks must go to fellow writer, Twitter colleague, and maven of cutting wit, Susan Kicklighter, for sending you crashing through my front window.

Susan's excellent and very entertaining insider view of her writing synthesis can be found at this Tumblr post.  Thank you, Suzie K!

1.  What are you working on right now?

Right right now, I'm finishing the last couple of scenes of a short story called Dead Air, Dying Sky, and if this was a Hollywood schmooze-fest in the back room of the Viper Pit, the high-concept pitch would be Zombie Pilots Over Tulsa.  Which was, in fact, its original title before I hijacked the narrative and took the whole thing in a different direction so that it became less Sharknado and more Jaws.  The title had to go, it was just too tonally inconsistent, and the last thing you want to do as a writer is mislead the audience, violate that implied contract.

My Own Private Oklahoma...

The story itself should be ready for prime time in about another week as I write this, fingers crossed.  The project began just a couple of weeks ago after two fellow writers, Teresa Hawk (her website is found here) and Eric Keys (his website here), basically Twitter-dared me to do it after hearing the title.  It was just one of those zombie-story brainstorms that took on a life of its own, no pun intended.  Sometimes you just have to follow that flash of inspiration down into the rabbit hole.  It can lead you to some pleasantly surprising places.

I'm really proud of this particular little number because I have never written at such a fast writing pace and come up with what I think are a very effective set of scenes which form a prequel to my upcoming novel whose title I am still mulling.

Besides that, I'm also in the middle of another short story and two novels which I am aiming to finish by the end of September or early October, in time for Halloween.  At my age, I have to push myself to keep writing and finish because the ideas just keep coming, and if I don't commit them to their digital homes, they'll go out into the street and start mugging people for cash and recreational weed.

2.  How does your work differ from others in the genre?

Funny thing.  Some time back I picked up a copy of The Secret History of Science Fiction, which is an anthology of authors whom people don't normally associate with sci fi, and one of the contributing writers, T. C. Boyle (who penned the excellent Descent of Man), said art "is supposed to be unconventional" and he wants "to be taken to a different place every time."  Now, in that same blurb, T. C. was kind of an asshole because he called genre readers "morons."  And I certainly don't mind calling him an asshole if he is not going to mind calling me a moron.  (Laughs).

I find it laughable that he didn't seem to realize, or didn't care, that he was being included in a book specifically marketed for genre readers.  But more seriously, he was addressing the general issue of predictability in fiction, which I don't think is a failing exclusive to any genre or literary work in the first place.  We've all sat on that couch staring at a plot twist on a TV show or reading a key exchange in a scene and said, "Oh come on, there was a better way to do that!"  It's that impulse to do it better which drives me and fuels that creative engine.  All of us have it.  We are all born with that instinct to improve ourselves and what we see and hear.  And when it comes to creative writing, some of us just want to actually put that baby out on the highway and drive it, and see where it will take us.  Because we know there is a better way to do that.

3.  Why do you write?

Wow, this one is tricky.  I used to write because I wanted to tell stories.  But the stories were very poor quality, maudlin in many cases, and the narrative was making all those fundamental errors that rookie writers make.  Shifting points of view within a single scene, collapsing and summarizing important scenes while dragging out minor ones, dialogue that meandered and didn't accomplish much of anything.  By all indications, I should have never been that creative sperm which found that egg called Writer's Digest.  But that magazine opened up my mind to my mistakes, made me read books about the craft of writing, excellent and everlasting-truth books like Gary Provost's Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing.  I did so much reading back then.

The first rule is we don't talk about writer's block.

But back then, I wanted to write in order to make money and become famous.  Which are still perfectly valid goals.  They just aren't mine anymore.  I highly recommend to any writer who will listen to me, go out and download a free copy of Michael Allen's The Truth About Writing (or I can e-mail the free PDF copy that the author himself provided to anyone who wants it).  It is a sobering look at not just the publishing industry, but one's chances of becoming rich and famous in that industry.  His special dose of reality took the pressure off my mind of becoming rich or famous, and to just concentrate on that bottom truth which was the essence of my creative impulse: I write for a sense of self-satisfaction.

And you know what?  My writing improved; my ideas improved.  I didn't care if a particular story would sell in a chosen category at the Barnes & Noble Superstore.  I don't care if anyone ever reads my stuff.  I want to feel that I was able to write what I wanted, when I wanted, and how I wanted.  And I feel that I've actually reached that point, the tip of that hierarchy of need that Abraham Maslow started calling "self-actualization."  Creatively, it is the most liberating feeling in the world, so Maslow must have been on to something.

And that's why I write.

4.  How does your writing process work?

These days the creative seizures are happening so often I've started timing them to see how far apart they are.  Everything is inspiring me and I am literally near my laptop as often as possible, and when I feel a flash of something, the germ of an idea, the notion of a narrative, the spinning web of language and imagery, I commit it to its digital realm.  It may be nothing more than one sentence or it may be several scenes of a story.  But if you are serious about writing, you absolutely positively cannot afford to ignore that creative voice, because if you do, it will start to go silent.  You don't lose it, you can never lose something like that, but it becomes harder to find if it goes silent for a long time.

Everything else is just scheduling and coordination: when you write, how long you write, where you write.  Those things all vary depending on everyone's lifestyle, so it doesn't behoove me, or them, to get into any of those details and start making recommendations as if suddenly someone out there is going to say, "Oh shit, so I need to write first thing in the morning!"

Don't get me wrong, I am reluctant to say that those habits are not important, because they are in a tangential fashion, but the most important thing is to commit to paper (or MS Word document, or Scrivener binder) those little hobgoblins of ideas that won't stop yammering at you.  They are the left-brain part of you trying to get out and expose their private parts to the world.  They are the part of you that makes you unique.  From those raw materials, you will hammer out your future novel, poem, short story, script, play, music video, etc.  Listening to and following an idea is the hardest element of writing to master, I think.  The words?  The words will come, subject then verb then direct object.  Don't stress out over style, it will come eventually.  Grammar is important, but only because bad grammar causes distraction, and you can't afford distraction when you are storytelling.

And one last thing: make sure you finish what you start.

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Well that was fun, it's only almost one o'clock in the morning in my neck of the woods.  Again, thanks to Susan Kicklighter for this great chance to stretch my writer's legs and chat with the denizens of the digitalsphere.