Inspiration

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…the wait is simply too long.” ~Leonard S. Bernstein

I write in mountains. Don't you?

Inspiration is the great provider to us lowly writers. Prometheus, if you will. The problem is that inspiration is never a constant. While months and years may go in its passionate embrace, there will be those days–inevitable and infuriating–where inspiration withdraws into the shadows, to leave us cold and alone.

The question this leaves us to face is thus: do we press on without it, or wait for its return?

Some people wait. Personally, I’ve always found it silly. Growth happens regardless of whether or not you’re “in the zone,” and I daresay that if you find yourself, in that lonely forward push, stumbling through the writing, that as frustrating as it may be, it’s good for you. Failure reminds us we’re human. It also pushes us more forcefully toward self-improvement, in a way that success–or the appearance of success–never could.

Writing, as any skill, must be honed through constant practice. If we start taking large swathes of time off simply because we don’t “quite feel it,” we have the temptation to get lazy, and the writing itself could suffer. Do you want sloppy prose to be what you greet inspiration’s return with? Seems like a terrible welcome to me. Besides, there is the fact that inspiration could actually be summoned by your writing, rather than needing your writing to be summoned by inspiration. Immersing yourself in the world, in the characters, in the poem, what have you, could draw back inspiration as quickly as anything.

The other side of this, of course, is that if you don’t get a part just right, if you press through the numb of non-inspiration and end with a few thousand words that don’t quite capture the personality you know it needs, you’re not doing yourself justice. That is the beauty of writing: editing is a key part of the process. If you’re not going back and re-reading yourself anyway, you’re doing it wrong. When inspiration comes knocking again, return to any points you were concerned about, look over it with that newly stirred creative eye, and adjust accordingly. It’s not hard.

And don’t tell me “the moment is lost” if you must go back and do that. How many edits do you make at the end of a product your creative spirit told you was gold in the first place? Your editor?

Just write. Outline. Create something. Writing is not a one shot game. It’s many layers of writing and rewriting, editing and editing again. Breathe. Everything will be okay.

In Nature

“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” ~ Native American Proverb

Nothing clears the mind quite like a weekend in the mountains. A (surprisingly) stifling heater in the cabin didn’t hurt of course, but it just made the impact of walking out those doors and into the sunny, snow-struck earth all the more striking. Now it’s back to the real world. At least I face it refreshed.

The Divine Detail

Hello all – happy New Year and all that cheerful stuff. Hope the days ahead are bright, the weather snow free (unless that’s what you’re into), and your pen swift.

Here at the Waking Den, we like to kick weeks off with a few words for thought, and so this week, at the beginning of the new year, we’re following suit with a detail I find key, especially in fantasy works:

“Caress the detail, the divine detail.” ~Vladimir Nabokov

Detail. Now, I know this is one some folks will quirk an eyebrow at. Purveyors of the more Hemingway style of writing will tell you minimalism is key – too much detail washes out the story, drums it away from the personalities that make it. While I agree it can be a valid style in many situations, I would say for my own preferred style (fantasy, if you didn’t catch that), such is not the case.

Fantasy, after all, is largely about taking us away to new locations, new worlds, new realms of thought. What is society like? What is the land like? What are the people like? The magic, for Tolkien‘s sake? While it’s easy to overdo it, and overload readers with detail, the fact is we need description to aid that mighty “suspension of disbelief,” or to simply pain the picture of the world for us. It is divine in its way, for are we not crafting a whole new place to lodge our existence, however temporarily? There’s just so much to learn, so much to see…one should bare the soul of those places to our readers’ eyes, and let us drink it in.

This is not to say, give me 15 pages on that fellow’s eyeball over there. No, it takes creativity. A mix of subtlety and timing. There are places for longer descriptions, to be sure, but the more you can weave flawlessly into the moment, into the scene, into the action…the more you will captivate.

Holidays food for thought

Still surrounded by family here, so I’ll try and keep things brief this Monday, good people, and suffice to deliver to you the official New Years thought for all the writing types out there:

“You fail only if you stop writing.”
~Ray Bradbury

Never forget it.

Writing: For Self, not Sales

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
~Cyril Connolly

Writers, take those words to heart.

"Painting the Writing Master." Image care of Wikimedia Commons.

I know many of you come to the pen with big dreams—sometimes those big dreams include fat wallets, legions of fawning women (or sparkling vampires, as you will), and possibly an honorary lifetime supply of Captain Morgan’s finest. Well I’m probably not the first to tell you, but kiddies, one writer to another, let me just say, that’s not the way of the world—and if that is your sole interest in this art, I think you may wish to consider a new career path. Quickly.

While I’m not saying the former examples couldn’t happen (sans sparkling vampires, at least as far as I know. Call the cops if a pale lad covered in glitter shows up on your doorstep though—garlic optional), in the real world, it’s unlikely. In fact, these days, it’s a miracle for most writers to even make it into a steady career. I don’t say it to be harsh. It’s simple fact. Writing is a big dollar business for publishers—not for writers. Writers, more often than not, turn to their writing as a second job. Their passionate job. The work that gives their lives meaning.

But still, a second job.

Writing is not about money. It’s not even about fame. Writing, in its purest form, is art—no different from the portraits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the sculptures of the Frederick Meijer Gardens, and so on. It is art with a pen, rather than the hammer or the brush. While these things can produce the other two, they should be undertaken for a love of the craft, and the howling of the soul.

Yes, howl. Like a werewolf. If writing doesn’t stir the primal in you, if it doesn’t roar through you with all the power of a freight train, if the thought of never writing again—regardless of whether anyone ever would or could lay eyes upon it—doesn’t crunch your soul into a knot, than perhaps you should re-evaluate what you are doing.

Why do you write?

Do you write for your family? What about fame? The almighty dollar? Or do you write because the sun rises in the morning, sets in the evening, and leaves starlight to bathe the night in silver?

It is that intrinsic to my own nature—and to my sanity. What does writing mean to you?

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Characters set the Prose

“The character on the page determines the prose—its music, its rhythms, the range and limit of its vocabulary—yet, at the outset at least, I determine the character. It usually happens that the fictitious character, once released, acquires a life and will of his or her own, so the prose, too, acquires its own inexplicable fluidity. This is one of the reasons I write: to ‘hear’ a voice not quite my own, yet summoned forth by way of my own.”

Author Joyce Carol Oates, image care of Wikimedia Commons.

~Joyce Carol Oates

Have truer words been spoken? Characters guide the writing. We build them. We give them life. Yet once upon the page, the character moves to a tune its own. We let the characters guide our hands, more often than not – and while we may put them in situations that cause them stress, worry, even pride…their personalities decide how those very situations will play out.

Tones should appropriately shift, person to person. Hopes. Fears. Vocabulary. One soul is not the same as another, and neither will each behave the same as the other.

Take your time. Breathe. Become your character. How would they react? How do they think? Many people do it in the act of reading, picturing themselves escaping into another soul’s life. Well, writers, close your eyes and be able to do the same with your own creations. Don’t speak with your voice, your authority, for each – think how they would act.

The writer may be the creator, but the character is the forward momentum of any world, both for the readers and the writer himself. It is why outlines are only good to a point. We may have our “goals,” but our own characters may surprise us in the routes they take.

“People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed—they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also.”
~Lois Duncan

A Pinch of Character, a Pound of Plot

“Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.”
~Anne Lamott

“I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots–things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story–readers see an “unknotting” of sorts. Not what they expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable emotional experiences.”
~Terry Mc Millan

Mile Markers on the Writing Trail

In one week, a work I have put the last two years of my life into will finally be out of my hands. No more editing. No more non-writing details to fret over. No more questioning–well, alright, I’m almost certainly still going to be questioning myself. Too engrained in my nature. Even so, the whole affair’s a bit surreal, when I stop to think on it. One week until countless hours of body, mind, and soul are bound between two covers and slapped together for any eye to see–online, in print, close to home, or nations away. The mind whirls. Drifts.

What do I do, the mind asks. What do I do now?

Marketing demands a certain level of attention, to be sure, but it’s not the same. The writer swoons. Twitches. A moment of panic blossoms. Then comes the simple answer: I keep writing.

Next week will mark a culmination of one stage of my life – a part I dare dub the beginning.

Not the beginning of writing, certainly. Not the beginning of living – I’ve plenty of mountains out here that would attest I’ve been at that one for a goodly while. The soul of the individual remains as is. What this marks is completion. The end of the beginning, in proving the ability to commit. It’s an important stage for any writer, for it is the conquering of one’s fears, one’s uncertainties – but also the conquering of good facets of life as well: of hopes, of dreams. It is making writing not just a part of one’s spirit, but of one’s life.

“Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don’t talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.”
~E. L. Konigsburg

Yet in spite of this culmination, one must always be wary of contentment. Something like this is not an end. Writing is…well, as E. L. Doctorow once said:

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
~E. L. Doctorow

And yes, I found two different people whose names begin with the same initials for today’s quotes. Want to fight about it? No? Good. Because that would have been silly.

But the point is this: publishing is an accomplishment. It is a moment in time a writer can sit back and smile at themselves (in spite of all the chaos of promotion and the like). Yet it is merely a step. For a writer, writing will always beckon. You never finish. You merely stop long enough to admire the scenery, and dive back in…

A Writer; A Soldier

The writer is not merely a creator. He must also be a soldier. A warrior. He must be able to withstand the world’s blows and keep on hammering through with that spark of creativity. Writers will bleed. They will know pain along their path. But they must have the strength to push forward, to drive themselves over bursts of disappointment and trenches of rejection to plant their flag in the fertile fields beyond.

Endurance is as great a friend as any other. And hopefully this week’s quotes will help drive that point home…

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.  Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” 
~Jacob A. Riis

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it.  The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”
~Earl Nightingale

Doctor’s Order: A Little Self-Respect

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, image care of Wikimedia Commmons

Though imagination and creativity form the bread and butter of the writer’s world, there is no greater shield at their disposal than self-respect. If you write, you will be met with criticisms, with ridicule, with doubt. The writer needs to be able to stand against them, to take their words in stride yet have the power and the faith in themselves that they might continue on…

“Self-respect cannot be hunted.  It cannot be purchased.  It is never for sale.  It cannot be fabricated out of public relations.  It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it.” 
~Whitney Griswold

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” 
~Cyril Connolly

“He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.” 
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow