Unity!

Congratulations D.C. and M.C. (nee M.L.)!

Back to the regular stuff next week.

I'm Done

Endings are hard. They seem easy when you crap out ten pages about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, moreso when Professor Historicalbore wanted twenty. So, you keep adding here and there, paragraph on similarities between Roman conflicts and East/West rap conflicts, paragraphs on what it means to you to be Roman, whatever. In the mix, you forget about the conclusion, or even worse, you add pages to the conclusory statement, and just struggle forward, belaboring the same concepts and ideas you just talked about last paragraph, which summarized the same concepts and ideas you discussed over eighteen pages, which in turn plagiarized different sources in the name of research. And this was a structured work.

Endings scare me. I’ve always thought of stories as long snippets from a larger context, and not the Twilight Zone episode when the child zapped his town into Limbo. You should know something about what you’ve written, beyond the boundaries delineated by your paper/computer. Think of sculptors carving out hair on statues that stand flush against a wall. Who would see the hair? They do. You’ve got to anchor your story to something, though it float freely upon the sea of ideas when someone else reads it. Then, you have to cut it out of your larger latticework, set it free to work on its own. Your ending is like saying goodbye to your baby, but it also gives your work independence, self-sufficiency. Its hard to say goodbye, but you eventually have to.

(I wanted to work in an umbilical cord metaphor here, so I googled “umbilical cord clip.” I clicked on the first link, which dealt with reworking baby dolls to appear newborn. I screamed.)

At what point should you, do you end a story? There are so many ideas to transcribe, and you’ve invested so much time, and now you want to get out? Somedays, I want to live with my little bastards. Disconnect from the real world, plug into the fake, walk among my creations. Somewhat related, climax and anti-climax. Once you achieve the high point, you should end soon, unless you want people bored for two hundred more pages. How can you ramp down everything within a short amount of text?

Sometimes, the problem might be that you don’t know where you’re going. Nothing wrong with that. It might have started with an image, maybe a cat falling from a building, not landing on its back. Then, you see in your mind a brick tied to its back, and a child laughing from the fourteenth floor. Then, the brick isn’t just a brick, but a PDA, and the owner is looking for it. Then the garbageman enters, and after a few days of research, takes the cracked device to his poor but talented hacker friend, and you rush off from there. How did you get to that from a cat falling? Who knows.

One way to end, just go home. Finish where you began. Show how your protagonists react to changes in the beginning, or how they’ve changed, and those reactions to the beginning. You might try ending everything on mundane notes, showing that there’s nothing particularly special in each ending. Give the action, and move on. You might try constant cliffhangers, keep the audience engrossed, waiting to see what will happen next, and see what happens if you end on the biggest cliffhanger of them all. (and drive them nuts). Start with the ending and work backwards, like mystery writers, so that you can leave all the clues and there are fewer untouched plot threads. Sometimes, you just have to put the pen down, say, that’s it, deadlines are tomorrow, I can’t do anymore, it ends here. Just like college papers.

Damnable resolution, damnable human desire for resolution. I say we need more beginnings. From now on, instead of wrapping up stories, just use them as opportunities for new beginnings, plain and simple. Nothing will ever end, everything continues forever. Let us all defy the natural order of things.

Speak Up

What do I sound like? I don’t remember. Probably a lot worse than I sound when I talk in the shower. In the shower, when I’m talking to myself, I sound confident, self-assured, a bit insufferable in an acceptable way, only because I’m so good. I’ve just recorded myself reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and damned if I don’t have a childish/child-like timbre to my voice. Damn.

How many of us truly know our own voice? When I was still one of The Chosen, they threw the cliché at me a lot. “Find your voice.” Thanks, that’s real helpful. They never really followed it up with anything, just “Find your voice.” Not only did we get sent off into the literary desert to find our voice, we had to determine what the hell a voice was. I love direction, especially when it’s all cardinal directions at the same time.

I liked to think that voice meant style. Find your writing style, the little hooks and tricks that bookmark your writing as exclusively your own. In effect, this meant you had to develop your own serial number, so if someone stole your work, you could readily identify your own writing with a simple comparison to past work. Finding your voice meant getting insurance against plagiarists. Problem is, the best insurance against plagiarists is crappy writing. You don’t copy off the D students, unless you were the F student.

We were writers, damnit. No, excuse me, authors. We were authors. Writing is too commonplace. Anyone can write, but how many people auth? Not too damn many. I always forget that there’s something mystical about writing, something the ordinary person can’t comprehend, much less embrace. So, maybe there’s something more to voice than just mere style. Perhaps some unique quality all my own that cannot be discovered until I stop looking for it. If that’s right, then when I stop looking for it, then I’ll find my voice. For the first time.

Then, you have to take into account the vocal component. Your physical voice and literary voice are so intertwined, like the snakes on the caduceus, to develop one and let the other rot is like raising up one child by having it stand on the back of the other. Some people believe your writing should be of roughly the same quality as your normal speaking voice. Hence, the key to finding my voice is elocution lessons, and never to use slang ever again, unless it fits the story, which it might not. Unless it does.

There’s a possibility that voice doesn’t exist, and they’re justifiying our education through a snipe hunt. Maybe what no one has realized is that we all write the same, and the only difference is word choice, word order, punctuation, organization, etc.

So, we don’t know what voice is, but we don’t need to in order to find it. Just start writing, and keep writing. Write until you want to throw up on the page. Write until it your words are just vomit on the page. Keep going. You’re bound to get better. Voices may not be as unique as fingerprints, but they’re probably all special. Just keep writing, and learn from the process. Even if you’re just writing a bus schedule, or a business letter, keep on plugging away.

As I sit here trying to conclude this, I remember just how hard conclusions are. This leads me to the topic of the next entry.

A Boy and His Blog

Why “blog?” Why not “webl?” Because Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down (commence dodging to-mah-toes).

Why am I blogging? I am a functional mute (sometimes, I wish I were a literal mute, but that’s for another day). Sometimes, I need to say something, and am unable to speak the words which would express the ideas. As a result, I retreat to my notebook, shredded and compressed from the finest rain forests, and frolic amongst its leaves. Maybe that effort isn’t enough. This third novel attempt is brimming over, boiling with ideas I’ve been having for the better part of two years. How many people to date have read it? One. The net effect is the same. My words fall upon eyes glazed over, having read the words several times over already. I know what I’ve said, sometimes even before its been written.

Are my ideas so important they should be recorded in a semi-tangible state? Probably not, but that’s the miracle of the internet. It makes valuable information accessible by the masses, and devalues widespread information. Instant Publishing. Countless voices are given a digital soapbox in the digital ether. There’s a satisfying mystery surrounding the possibility the world at large might hear you. However, there’s also a strong responsibility inherent in making your thoughts available to others. It forms a pseudo teacher-student relationship with the reader, and the teacher must assume a teacher’s responsibility. While I dare not delineate firm the limits of those duties, allow me to propose enlightenment and encouragement as the two most important, at least for me.

Given that plenty of everything/nothing blogs concern themselves with everything and nothing (can that subsequently be considered concern if we treat them so lightly?), by this point, we’ve exceeded the original scope of this Hello World. Certainly, if anyone were to start a blog to enlighten and encourage, the politically-slanted blogs would be the ones, doing their damnedest to help the world see their political views are correct. I can assure you up front this will not be a political blog, for I don’t know jack about politics. To be fair, I don’t know any Jacks.

What I do pretend to begin to claim a partial proficiency in is the writing process, and even then, I’m a gardener with rusty shears, trying to prune through the briars and thatches of my own writing, hopefully producing some sort of literary topiary, pleasing to the common reader as well as the aesthete (How’s that for attempting to convince you I’m competent AND modest?).

How do I intend to enlighten you? Many of you have never attempted to write a novel, but I would hope all of you have desired something so deeply it makes you suffer. Love hurts, and the writing process hurts. Somewhere in the intersection of the two, I stand sweating blood. I’m going to make an attempt to record my insights into the “writing process.” If nothing else, it will show you a new form of suffering.

How do I intend to encourage you? Simple. I am no longer as good a writer as once I was. Oh, I may be proficient in legal writing. Introduction, roadmap, topics one, two, three, summation. I can follow the forms like a martial artist performing a kata from rote muscle memory. But the creative spark has fizzled like a candle in a vacuum. I’ve allowed my skills to lay fallow in the field for far too long, and now I reap naught but withered sprouts and too short stories. However, the field still bore crops, no matter how tiny and insignificant. As I travel along the path, attempt to rediscover my “voice,” hopefully you’ll be encouraged to also write something.

Good ship blog, with this bottle of Thunderbird wine, I christen thee Writ. Come on, would you waste expensive champagne on a ship’s hull? Ok, would you waste it on a blog?