It’s been a week since I wrote my last word.
I don’t mean on my blog, I mean my writing. I mean that world that I get to go to when I let myself go there. There were reasons I stopped writing for a week; I had work I needed to focus on…but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s been a week since I wrote my last word. It makes me remember how dangerous it is to stop working, how slippery that slope is back down to the bottom of the mountain. Well, I’m not fucking doing that shit again, guys…I write about this tonight because I can’t stop, and I won’t stop. I’m marking the time tonight and taking note of how long it’s been and I’m promising myself and I’m promising you guys that it ends tomorrow. I don’t *how* I’m going to fucking do that, but it’s going to happen.
This detour DID work. I DID get the other work done that I needed to, the work that is paying my bills. So, I do have that, and I am very, very satisfied in that regard. The ability to put my mind to a goal and to (almost…close enough) reach that goal through sitting the fuck down and focusing is not something I take for granted. That’s something I’ve written a lot about on this blog – that ability to self-discipline (in the verb sense of “discipline”) is a skill that requires practice and persistence. The same goes for writing.
I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing right now, and I *of course* feel like I’m a fucking dunce for not having read it when I was a teenager dreaming of being a novelist. It was simply that I didn’t realize that Stephen King and I travelled in the same circles. He was a horror writer. I liked space stories. What did we have in common? So much, teenage Ira…so much. He’s a guy you fucking listen to because he’s DONE it. All of it. Stephen King might die knowing there were hundreds of stories that he never wrote, but the rest of us in the world will know the real truth: Stephen King wrote every word he was ever meant to write and told every story that his mortal body had in it because he never fucking stopped. May we all die with the world knowing the same about us.
I don’t know why I killed Stephen King right there. Perhaps it’s appropriate given the imagination he dwells within…but I will say that my own mortality is definitely something lurking behind every post like this I write and all the anxieties I have whenever I feel my creative work slipping away from me. I can’t let that happen. And I won’t. I know that now. Knowing a thing and still being afraid isn’t a contradiction or a fallacy.
Reading his book is teaching me so much. I can already feel it changing me…how he talks about how we should write clearly what we mean and not try to convolute or hide it. Really what he’s talking about is precision and clarity. That’s why people hide behind convoluted words – that’s why *I* hide behind convoluted words – because I haven’t found clarity, I don’t know what I’m saying…yet. And King talks about that, too…it takes time and work to find clarity, and once you have clarity you can have precision. He doesn’t use those words, but those are words I’m using.
He also talked to me last night about theme, and how important it is to know why you are telling a story. MOST of the best stories have something to say, something that the author is trying to say about life, death, and/or everything in between. And I was reading it last night and I was saying “Yes. YES! This is YES!” The “why” of my stories is so, so important to me. I didn’t know that until I wrote my first draft of my novel, but I know it now: I can’t fully SEE a story until I know the “why.”
So far the “why” has been something with which I have a strong emotion attached – the death of my brother, for example. Or how just because your family looks different than someone else’s doesn’t mean that it’s not a family. I know that a story is worth actually sitting down and spending two freaking years squeezing it out of my stupid brain when there’s something at the center of it that makes me almost cry every time I think about it, like I am right now.
King also says that story must come first, before theme, which I also almost whooped in glee to read…because that’s always what comes first for me too. In a flash, usually, attached with some sort of strong FEELING that I’m not sure what it means yet, but that I know runs deep…it’s usually a situation, a conversation, a line of dialogue, an image…for every one of my story ideas, I can pinpoint for you what the first seed was. Then it explodes from there into a (usually) archetypal story…which I then try to fiddle with into something new, and then the characters come…and just like King’s they’re flat and functional at first. It’s only when I start writing that I start to find them…and that makes fucking sense, right? I mean, you only get to really know someone when you spend time with them, right? And I don’t mean that in some sort of poetic or imaginary sense. I mean, yes, they ARE figments of my imagination, but they are in every other sense real people who do things I don’t expect and who come to life the more time I spend with them.
Anyway…that’s another big paragraph, as the Ho would point out 😛 King would also tell me to shorten my fucking paragraphs. So, we’ll stop for now and just say that I’m really glad I’m reading Stephen King. I respect the word of those who are do-ers. I respect the word of those who have actually done the things I want to do, and am doing right now. There’s a reason why I haven’t written posts on this blog about “writing tips”…because I’m not qualified yet, guys. YET.
Just keep writing.
That would be the name of my how-to book, and it quite possibly would consist of just those three words. They’re the most important.
Just Keep Writing.
Tonight’s artwork is unattributed.