Category: Writing Thinkery

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We are often told as writers to write what we know. That’s all well and good but what if you don’t know much? What if you haven’t experienced much?  If your life isn’t as exciting or dramatic as you would like your stories to be? Are you doomed? I don’t think so.

The thing is, you have had experiences. An astronomical amount of experiences throughout your life. There have been millions of smells, tastes, sounds, and sensations. All of which made their own little imprint in your mind. You’ve seen and done so many things that if you stick just a fraction of those miniscule details together, you can create quite the mighty tale. The key lies in the math. The addition and subtraction of these tiny bits of experience equal the whole of a unique event. We as writers recognize this when writing any fleshed-out scene. These small details flesh out our real lives in the same way.

This theory is something that I’ve been kicking around for a few years now and has stemmed from my travels since moving to Europe. It’s probably not a new line of thinking but it’s not something I have researched either. I’d done some traveling in the past but living abroad and having so many travel opportunities at my finger tips, opportunities to see famous, extravagant places, has helped me realize that different locations on the map are far more similar than one might think. I’m forever grateful for the travel I’ve done, and while it has helped my writing, it isn’t a necessity. Very few of the small details that surround me as I travel are different than those back home.

A cold rain in New York and a cold rain in Amsterdam feel the same. The smell of loam and pine will greet your nose in an Austrian forest just as it would on a trail in the Rockies. The sound of a waterfall in Croatia is the sound of a waterfall in Hawaii. This of course is comparing like for like, glamorous for glamorous, which is not entirely what I’m talking about. I’m talking about using small ordinary details to build epic scenes no matter where the detail was experienced.

I recently had the chance to travel to Venice, Italy for Carnevale. The trip had been planned for almost a year and we decided to go for the gusto. Here’s a picture of us in full costume.

(c) Martin Kamin, professional photographer, http://fotograf-praha.kamin.cz
(c) Martin Kamin, professional photographer, http://fotograf-praha.kamin.cz

This was a massive, life-altering trip. Strolling through the gilded, elaborate enclosure of Saint Mark’s Square, dressed as some pagan god and being swarmed by photographers was, on the surface, utterly foreign. It seemed that way to me at first. I had never in my life been in a situation like that, or rather, that specific situation. As I thought about what was actually happening, as I narrowed my focus, I realized that the foreign feeling wasn’t in the details but in how they came together. Ordinary pieces came together to build a something remarkable. (more…)

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Okay, so, you started writing a novel. Maybe it’s your first, maybe not. Either way, at some point a mind nugget erupted deep in your psyche, giving you visions. Scenes from an epic story burst forth in Technicolor. Scenes that you, you personally, must write.

You put pen to paper or more likely, fingers to keys and pound out line after line with enthusiasm and gusto. The story rolls out in front of you like a winding mountain road bathed in the golden light of a spring evening. As the words flow you begin to analyze what you’ve created. Self critique is natural and inevitable. You critique both what you’ve already written and what’s to come. Though you still have much to write, the end is in sight and you want to make sure that it is indeed where you want to go.

There, in the distance, past towering sequoia and a carpet of lush sword fern, you spy your vision of the end. The grand conclusion to your magnum opus. You squint to see what your vision holds. Originally, you envisioned a moss-covered, flat rock overlooking a vast canyon with cascading waterfalls and a river that glistens like sapphires. That’s the ending your story deserves. That’s the ending you desire.

Instead, the golden light illuminates the winding road as it dead ends into the cul-de-sac of an RV park.  Wait, what? This isn’t right. It can’t be right. Is your story doomed?

Maybe. Before the horror begins to set in, the first thing, I think, is to talk to somebody you trust and get their honest opinion. Let their fresh eyes and mind assess your ending. We as writers often struggle to be objective about our own ideas. Sometimes that disappointing vision at the end of the road is just a mirage. Our satisfying ending still awaits. Our minds may just be playing tricks on us. If so, we must forge ahead to where the promised land awaits.

Or, maybe our confidant will confirm that our story really does end in that RV park and that if we don’t alter course, our story will end with canned chili and the din of ten inch tv screens tuned into game shows. If this is the case, it’s time to pull into a gas station or motel and work out a brand new route. That route may come quickly or need a lot of planning but there is always better route.

Our story map holds many roads that we can travel.   We just need to be sure that our original road is indeed wrong before we make a change. It would be a shame to let a trick of the eye ruin a beautiful trip.

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Forgive me writers for I have sinned.

I, after a lot of soul-searching, decided to shelve a work in progress, at least for the time being.

One of the most common rules in the deep and muddy mire that is writing advice is to finish what you start. While I am on board with this statement in theory, I’ve found myself unable, or more accurately, unwilling to follow it.

I was 40,000+ words into a novel that I’m very proud of. The concepts, characters and world I’ve built mean a lot to me. Within what I had written, I felt I had developed something that has to potential to be great. The problem was that I’d spent way too long trying to write the story in a way that lives up to what I know it could be. The foundation was solid and the tangled web of intrigue was well tangled but every time I tried to untangle those knots, my own reactions to those resolutions were lackluster. What would my readers think if I couldn’t even wow myself?

My motivation to write fell to near nothing. To top it all off, I had another story idea that kept begging to be written like a little annoying brain baby fussing for attention. The story planning  for this brain baby was such that I could start at any time but I was holding off until I finished my struggling novel. I was supposed to finish what I started. It’s the writer’s way.

Yet, another golden rule of writing is that you have to write… and I wasn’t.  I couldn’t motivate myself to lay down line after line of bullshit when I knew I would have to scrape it all back off when I finally found inspiration. I was frozen.

“Finish what thou start-eth”  was blocking “writer, thou shalt write” and I was left with a decision. Stick with the current project and continue to break both rules or sacrifice one to save the other. I chose sacrifice.

Here’s hoping it was the right decision. It feels right…so far.