Insights

Writing Rituals and Other Forms of Wizardry

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Writers have their rituals, don’t they? They have to have their cup of tea, or their blue Bic, or their yellow notepad, or their time of day, or they must be facing West.

I have fewer rituals than I once did. Now that I’m a parent, they’ve dwindled to simple ones like don’t-talk-to-me and can-we-not-scream-right-now. I also prefer to have a window or a big space in front of me (because I read something about it in a feng shui book once and it’s worked for me since).

I believe the writer’s rituals are important though, for two basic reasons.

First, we’re creating the circumstances for success by enforcing a kind of discipline, albeit one that is hiding behind superstition. Because ritual puts us into a routine, which in turn triggers our mind to say, “Okay, we’re in writer mode now, so the rest of you distracting thoughts clear out.” Like any habit, the more we do it, the better we get at it.

But second, this ritual is a kind of magic. Writing is an activity unlike virtually any other. To function in society, we have to wire our brains to speak to us in certain ways. There are certain logic connections we have to make, so that when we interact with others, everybody is on the same page. For example, if you tell me you’re ready to get out of here, I can infer you mean out of our immediate vicinity. I’m making a logical deduction based on context and past experience that you don’t mean the country or the planet. But, in writing, that kind of logic often hinders us whether we realize it or not. Our minds make enormous leaps between unlike objects to create things that are new and fresh and interesting. To harness that power we need a bit of magic. We need to believe in a little super power to craft strange new worlds. And if ritual can bring the lightning down, then by all means, wear the fuzzy Snoopy slippers that you keep tucked in a wooden box in the closet for just such an earth-rattling occasion.

When to Workshop Your Novel

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When your internal monologue stops talking, you may feel free to show your novel to a friend, or a fiction-writing group, or a workshop. But not before. That internal monologue is a sign that your subconscious is still working out the story. If you show someone else  your work-in-progress while your inner story machine is still cranking, you’re dooming your work. Because, as insightful and as clever as your friend may be, they cannot share your vision. It’s your vision — born of subconscious needs that you most likely don’t understand, or at the most have a small inkling of. That’s what makes it your story. And when your friend finds a problem, and she will, she’s going to help you solve it with her vision. And now you’re off on a tangent that you can never cleanse. Someone else’s vision has now wormed it’s way into your story. It’s tainted. Out of whack. Doomed.

Curse or blessing, my internal monologue never stops anymore. It always has more to say, more, more….

In the Beginning: Finding the Flow

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So, I’d been jotting down notes on the new steampunk novel for some time now: world notes, character notes, plot notes, etc. All in one long, jumbled document. The process was feeling rather grand. But there came a point when I begin to wonder among the growing complexities, how was this all fitting together? At this point, I had about 15,000 words, all notes, completely disorganized.

I decided that I needed a tangible way of dealing with organizing the mess. I remember reaching this point with the last novel. Then, I reacted by sticking post-it notes all over the closet door. This time though, I printed out all of my notes and cut them up, sorted them all out on the dining room table, adding notes as they occurred to me and taping the whole thing together in a long strip. It was something of a painstaking process, but gloriously rewarding. I’m starting to find that, when searching for the right story flow, there’s a lot to be said for a) working with your hands and b) working it out on a big surface (instead of that tiny computer screen we stare out for too many hours a day).

What I would like to have honestly is a wall-sized touch computer screen that I can grab little notes and slide them around, make connections, write new notes, etc. (Guess what, when I’m the next Kurt Vonnegut, that’s exactly what I’ll have.)

We Change and Change Again

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I’m reading through Robert McKee’s book on film writing, Story, which came recommended to me through a gaming podcast (that was discussing writing RPG modules of all things). I’m enjoying it so far, finding that most of it resonates with my own ideas of story, while also picking up some gems of insight.

McKee said something about the differences between the optimistic Hollywood approach to story versus the pessimistic European “art film” approach:

Americans are escapees from prisons of stagnant culture and rigid class who crave change. We change and change again, trying to find what, if anything, works. After weaving the trillion-dollar safety net of the Great Society, we’re now shredding it.

This statement seemed to mirror some of my own attitudes, particularly in my youth, when I was constantly challenging everything, often before I even really understood it. I would change a writing convention just because, at a subconscious level, I believed change was somehow in and of itself good. And honestly, although this may have been a personal rite of passage that I had to go through, I feel this wasted a lot of my time.

That’s not to say that I believe in adhering to traditional standards, because “they work damn’t!” It’s just to say, I wish I had understood some things about the way art works better with a thoughtful consistency and structure (whatever that arbitrary consistency is).

It’s not that change is bad. It can be wonderful. But it just seems like the wrong focus, that pulls energy away from where your artistic sweat and blood should be going. A good artist doesn’t lose sleep over whether his message is the arbiter of change. He worries about whether it’s the right message. Or least, an interesting one.

How to Anger English Teachers: Step 1

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What is it with this maxim in creative writing to only use the word “said” for describing the action of dialogue? I hear this time and time again, and I’m just not buying it. Are words like” shouted” and “whispered” so distracting? But I wouldn’t stop there. I enjoy creative options like “spat” and” sobbed,” as well. The argument, I guess, is that readers are so easily distracted by interesting language that the moment they read that someone “chided” another, they’re immediately disconnected from the story. Really? Doesn’t descriptive language help to connect us more to a scene? Sure, you can go overboard with descriptive language and overwhelm the reader, but that’s really not what we’re talking about here. It’s a single verb. I feel like this is a case of either a) the ol’ bandwagon, or b) underestimating readers.

Caveat: I was an English teacher briefly and may well be one in the future.

The Long Rewrite

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Now that the first draft is complete, it’s time to go back through and do all sorts of rewriting and editing. I have a decent list of story subjects to be added and enhanced, characters to be deepened, technology to be researched. I am far from through.

I’ll give you an example. One of my rewrite items is to enhance a particular characteristic of one of my characters – essentially to make him a little less likable, a little more odious, if you will. Well, this particular character is a major one, and so it has taken quite a while to go through and ferret out these opportunities. After spending several hours, I’m still not complete with this one task. It’s enough to make the whole rewriting process a little overwhelming.

And as I continue to read outside of my novel, I continue to get inspiration from other areas, and think of still more items to add to the rewrite list. I’ve always said that art is about layers, and now I’m applying it on a broad scale.

Sure the whole book right now seems at the end of a far tunnel. But I’m still having a thrill creating it.

Pace Setting for Writers

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As I come up on 250 pages in my novel, I’ve been pondering the importance of pace in writing. The closer to the end of the narrative I come, the more anxious I become, and I sometimes fear that I write too quickly. I used to not dwell on this. You write at the speed you write, right?

Years of practice have shown me this isn’t so. I’ve learned that slowing myself down a little can help the quality of the work. Slow enough that I consider how the language is fitting together. Word choices, symbolism, character motivations, all of these background components get a little more screen time in my writing brain. It’s important to not go so slow that you lose your emotional momentum. That is probably more disastrous than the alternative. But pulling back a little, I’ve learned, makes everything shine a little more.

Writing as Ritual

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I think there’s a little mysticism in every good writing process. The little tics and superstitions that we pursue that help us enter that proper state for ultimate wordsmithing. The act of creative writing involves a bit of tearing into our subconscious, and it’s very unlike mentally painless processes like changing a tire. We’re are taking advantage of our fragile psyche, and so we need to get comfortable first.

Here are  a few of my rituals:

  • Location: A public venue, like a coffee shop, with a busy, but relatively quiet clientele works best.
  • A beverage: Lately this has been a red bush tea.
  • The right spot at the right angle. This is probably some mental residue from having read one of Carlos Castenada books and his discussion around places of power. See, I told you: Mysticism.
  • A review of what’s been done before, usually to include the last paragraph or so of prose and my notes on plot and character.

Many years ago, I was compelled to write everything longhand and then transcribe back to the PC. Obviously, this is terribly inefficient, and through pure consideration for the time I have on earth, I trained myself out of this. Although, I must say, I still compose most poetry by pen first.

The Timelessness of Wells?

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Last night, I started reading The Time Machine, published first in 1895, and was struck with H.G. Wells’ audacious choice to forgo proper names, referring to his characters as “the Time Traveller,” “the Psychologist,” “the Editor,” and so on. With difficulty, I tried imagining picking up a modern novel that made choices like that. There may be many who feel the choice an archaic one, removing too much of the necessary personality and detail from the story’s characters, turning them into nothing more than stereotypes. A fair argument. But I find it a bit exciting. Perhaps, it’s because it makes the story feel more like a fairy tale filled with impossible things.

Torturing Characters

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I listened to a podcast today in which someone quoted an interview with Jim Butcher, writer for the Dresden Files. Jim basically said that he loves to torture his protagonist, presumably to heighten the comedy and drama of the show. And I realized that I don’t go far enough with my characters in that way. I treat them too nicely. Perhaps, in a sense, I’m too “nice” of a person to write dramatic fiction. I hope not, because I sure love doing it.

So from this realization, I have formed my next step. I’m going to do some brainstorming around my main characters on how to “turn up the psychological heat” for each of them. I may end up throwing all these ideas out, but I want to see what happens if I can make things a lot worse for each of them. I just hope I’m not too squeamish. I want to get my hands a little dirty here. I’ll let you know how it goes.

After all, words are messy.