Get Lost Writing

Writing for me has always been an act of discovery. 

At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit. 

This tends to be the way I work.  I generate a lot of material early on.  A lot of varied beginnings.  I write quite a bit that eventually gets discarded, but some of it proves useful in the end.  A line of dialogue.  A setting.  A character.  An entire scene, as was the case yesterday.  A scene that I had been trying to fit like a puzzle piece into the wrong place for a very long time just fell right into where I see now it was always meant to - about 200 pages into this book.  So why does it feel right now as opposed to the seven or eight other times I thought it was finally working?  I can only say because I have the same sense now of understanding with the book that I had with The Book of Elizabeth; this is the way it's supposed to be.  This is the puzzle complete.

Some writers will argue this is why you should outline.  If you don't, you'll spend a lot of time wandering in the woods like me.  I can't say they don't have a point, but wandering in the woods is how you find things.  Get lost.  Literally.  Discoveries aren't made any other way.  You'll take the long way, and develop a lot of material you ultimately won't use.  But never throw anything away.  I don't.  There are snippets of this book five years old or more, from disparate sources; the same is true of Elizabeth, which features a paragraph originally written in college ten years ago.  Many of my short stories, particularly "News Right Fresh From Heaven," gestated in other forms for years before finally coming together into their final shape.  "News" actually began life as a different story entirely four years before it was published in Fantasy Magazine last year.

I'm kind of collector when it comes to writing, I guess.  I was going to say hoarder, but that's not true.  All my writing, all the paths that lead nowhere and fragments I hold on to, it all serves a purpose.  Eventually.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mirror, Mirror

Image
Recently I bought a copy of a pretty well reviewed and promoted speculative fiction novel.  About two chapters in, the main character looks in a mirror and describes themself.  I literally closed the book and stopped reading.  The novel had other issues, but this put me right out of the story.  This technique - being generous here - occurs a lot in first person narratives, about as often as a story beginning with the main character waking up from a dream.  The mirror device is best avoided, but not necessarily because it's so overused - it's best avoided because simply put, it's so easy.  A character, especially a protagonist, should never be described; they should be imagined.
Read more

Conversations With: Dr. Daniel Dahlquist

Here's what I hope is the start of a new weekly (or so) feature on the blog: a mini-interview with writers about the craft. My good friend and teacher Dr. Daniel Dahlquist inaugurates the series. Dr. Dahlquist is a wonderful poet; his poetry has appeared in respected literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Virginia Review, River Styx, Kentucky Poetry Review, and the Louisville Review. He graduated from the University of Iowa's storied Writer's Workshop and holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Southern Illinois University. His first book, SPEECH TO THE DEAD PEOPLE, was published in 1997 by Cedar Creek Press. You can read an excerpt from the book (and my favorite of his poems) here . Without further adieu: Q: What poets or other writers do you consider influences? A: The apocalyptic poets appealed to me when I was very young. I started writing poems at age sixteen, on my grandfather's 1928 L.C. Smith typewriter, largely to impress my English teacher.
Read more

My Advice For Writers

More and more I get asked for advice from aspiring writers. Mostly this is because I have a book, not because I really know anything. I'm not good at giving advice. Actually, I'm pretty good at it, just not very good at following it myself. So take all of this with a grain of salt. Actually, you should probably just click away to some other website right now. If you're still here, or have just reached the end of the internet, seriously: I've given a lot of thought to what I say to a serious writer who is asking me for serious perspective, and in so much as I can give it, I usually speak to these things: Find your faults . You have them. We all do. One thing my day job has taught me is to actively seek out process improvement. Usually we wait for problems to come to us - it's how we know they're problems - but most often in business, this can get you in trouble. The same applies to your art. It is a process; you should actively seek to impro
Read more