Alan Edwards's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

The impetus that finally pushed me to write a novel consisted of a combination of two things. The first was the incredibly vivid Zombie Dreams I’ve had over the years. These dreams are full Technicolor and Stereoscope dreams, with jump cuts and multiple camera angles, where I might be a spectator, actor, or disembodied witness, but always vaguely aware that I’m watching a dream and ready to fill my role as either zombie killer or victim or hard-running candyass. I love these dreams, and have never thought it right to call them nightmares – I may get creeped out, but I don’t necessarily want to wake up from them.

The Zombie Dreams laid the foundation. The second push came from a daydream I had, where my friends and family were villagers in a medieval town that was overrun by zombies and eaten in a very gory and glorious fashion.

I’m a swell friend, eh?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could actually see it all playing out in my head, as if I’d seen it as a movie years before and remembered most of the details. When one of the daydreams seemed to include a beginning – one of these friends playing a role as an innocent village girl, naive and friendly, greeting a Stranger to her town with just-picked early spring flowers – I knew I was going to write it. I was going to kill off my friends and family.

I mean, I’m an awesome friend.

So I got started. At first I thought I’d make all of the characters friends and family, throwing in some in-jokes, especially since I never expected anyone but friends or family to actually buy the damn thing. Since many of my friends are actors or roleplayers or just plain odd, it was easy to picture them playing the roles I gave them, and having their images as visual aids made it easier to conjure just the right sketch to give them each a distinctive look. As I went, though, a funny thing began to happen.

They weren’t my friends anymore.

I mean, the faces were, but the characters weren’t. It became as if I really were directing the movie of my book, casting certain people in roles that I knew they could play since I’d seen them perform similar roles over the years. The characters themselves became their own thing, with their own motivations and desires and foibles that went further and further from the person they looked like in reality. They became Mine.

Looking at it now, there are definitely people who are easily pointed out by Those In The Know that can say, “This character is Joe, this character is Beth”, because of real-life name similarities and physical descriptions and some exaggerated real-life characteristics. I recognize that, and I mean it as an homage in the most sincere way – these people have moved me to an extent that I wanted to immortalize part of them the best I could with what little talent I have. I’ve killed many of them along the way, but it was never done maliciously, I swear.

The rest, though – they might “look” like friends, but they aren’t them. Not anymore. The problem lies in situations where one “known” character, say Joe, has a son in the book and a real-life son. The assumption is made that the sons are automatically the same person and inspiration. That isn’t the case all the time – in fact, it only happened twice out of a lot of characters – but the perception is occasionally there.

The most important part during the editing process became making sure these characters, all of them, could stand on their own, without real-life knowledge of who they may have been based on. Without doing that, then no-one would truly want to read the story if they weren’t already an existing friend. It would be like sitting at a table with strangers who all knew each other in college and converse in a language you know but can’t understand and connect to, leaving you there to nod and smile while feeling like the dumbest person alive. As an aside, I hate going to weddings alone.

I believe I succeeded, according to the people who have read it and don’t know my friends. I know others do this as well: a friend of mine (and traditional publishing success story) kills off another friend of ours in every novel he writes. Tolkien based Treebeard off of his friend C.S. Lewis (who apparently loved saying Ho, hmm, come now), and I imagine a lot of the most memorable characters in fiction began their lives as someone’s mailman or cousin or best friend. For me, being able to really capture a scene requires me to actually see it inside my head, with colors and textures and scents, and having a model that I can picture readily makes it that much simpler.

Plus, when one of my friends annoy me, I can have their heads gnawed off. I’m a special friend.

I go through crippling periods of self-doubt when it comes to my writing. Luckily, at the moment, I am not in one of those trenches of despair where every word I type including “Sincerely, Aravan” looks ungainly and wrong. Bad word choice. Probably spelled wrong even though there isn’t another way to spell it. Tone is flat, metaphors lame, characters boring, setting insipid, point pointless, and everything I’ve ever written should probably just be gathered and burned so I can crawl into the supply closet of some abandoned factory somewhere and never have to reveal my stupid face to the world.

Other days, I feel even worse.

If you’re a writer, or have ever written, or ever plan on writing so much as an email in the future, then I hope you go through this feeling of utter self-loathing several times in your life. Why? Because I am a small bitter person who takes some measure of meager self-satisfaction from the joint suffering of others and will take whatever mean-spirited path I need to in order to make myself feel better. But also because I think it makes you a better writer in the long run.
Somewhere in the world, there is a writer who feels a sense of calm satisfaction with every word she types. She has no doubt that everything she writes is exactly correct, the choices she makes with the language are flawless, and that the world at large could not possibly help itself but to admire her utter brilliance. If such a person exists in the world, my guess is that it’s probably Harlan Ellison. (Long Parenthetical Aside: I like Ellison’s stories. Not love, but like them well enough. Unfortunately, I read the Foreword from one of his short story collections recently, and came away with the impression that here is a man who thinks his shit not only doesn’t stink, but also feeds hungry children in Haiti, postulated string theory, and is currently ranked third worldwide in single’s tennis. I get confidence, I can handle a little bit of arrogance truly earned, but the level of hubris that oozed its way off the page made me want to shower with a cheese grater.) Anyway, if that person really exists, I hate her. Hate isn’t even the right word. Loathe comes close. I need a word that means “the feeling caused by the sight of someone who you’d give nearly anything in the world to see hoisted on a gigantic platform for the entire universe to witness getting humiliated in such a fashion that even single-celled creatures view them with derision.” You probably do too, if you’ve ever struggled to come up with just the right salutation for an email to your company’s CEO, or tried desperately to describe the scene in your head but suddenly discover that there aren’t any words in any of the 3 languages you know to explain that particular manner of foot-positioning.

But it’s OK, because Ellison, errr that person, will never do the one thing that you do every time you type a word: Improve.

That’s right, those stupid plunges into frantic self-hatred are good for you. It means you don’t feel perfect. It means you aren’t convinced that you have no room to possibly get one iota better. It means you can still learn, and without that you’re just stagnant and predictable and doomed to exist in the same rut you’ve made for yourself. It’s a horrible tragic painful learning experience, like every other terrible gut-wrenching agonizing episode you’ll ever go through in your life.

I hate those times when I’m mired in self-doubt, when I don’t even want to look at the title of my horrendous mutant creation of a Word Doc. I become morose in all phases of my life. I stop blogging, I withdraw from my friends, I struggle to write the simplest emails. It honestly and truly sucks. But it also gives me a perspective I generally don’t carry. It exposes me to feelings that, although uncomfortable, will make me a better writer if I can tap into the memory of them when I want to describe something tragic. At some point, the feeling will pass, and I will own it and make it mine and hug it and pet it and call it George. I’ll use it at some point in my writing to describe how that person feels when they hit rock-bottom inside their own heads, the place they have the farthest to fall.

Or at least I hope so, because if I don’t get anything out of it then I totally want to be Harlan Ellison.

But I never will be, and I have to come to grips with those times when I hit my own mental Skid Row. Usually during the throes of self-flagellation I just stop writing, take a mental break for a while. Then, when I think I’m ready, I’ll take a story I’ve written that I normally like or a section of my book that I haven’t read for a while and read it again. My eye is super-critical, it’s true, but those times when I read something I’ve written and it can still make me smile a bit, or there is a turn of phrase I don’t have any conscious memory of writing but enjoy immensely, I can begin to feel a sense that I’m not the world’s worst writer after all, that I have a perspective worth sharing, that my ability to translate thoughts into words is at least somewhat operational. And that’s good enough.

And if that doesn’t work? I have a secret weapon. I generally don’t give advice, but here I will: get one too. It’s amazingly helpful. On a shelf at home I have access to what I consider the most god-awful pile of dreck that was ever written. It’s published by an actual publishing house, one of the places that rejected me. It’s awful. So every now and again I take it down and read some it, and I feel a little better. My novel may be a festering pile of shit, but it can only be the second-worst novel ever written. I take comfort in that. Because I am small and bitter and mean. So find that book or poem or play or whatever, that someone actually published, and think to yourself, I might suck, but this crap got published. Mine deserves to be too. And keep writing and learning and improving. That’s important too.

One of the many cool side effects of coming into contact with a whole slew of authors, indie and otherwise, is being able to hear about the writing process from other perspectives. It’s fascinating (to me) to hear about how people go through the creative process and what they do to keep on track and plot and plan and gather information and organize themselves and all the work that goes into the long painful birthing process. I’ve read about the outlines people put together. I’ve seen in-depth analysis (with pictures!) about the creation of character cards that detail each person’s description, personality, traits, and their connection to the other major and minor figures in the novel all charted on a huge whiteboard. Notebooks, scribblings, collages, all part of an organized approach to writing a novel.

I see this stuff, and all I can think of is: Holy shit, I am the least organized writer of all time.
I’ve written one novel and am about 70k words into its sequel. So in roughly 150,000 words I have created the following extensive archives of notes to help me along (CAUTION: SPOILERS!): One (1) yellow half-sheet that has a few names and cunningly drawn arrows.

That’s it. It’s the “outline” of the last three chapters of Storm (the sequel). I did have another 3 sticky notes of jottings from Curse which are now gone, and were mostly illegible and made no sense when I did have them. That is the sum total of my prep-work for writing. I’ve always been this way, from birth as far as I can tell. Every paper I turned in for school was the first draft, written the night before, from grade school to college. I’d lose points for not turning in outlines and whatever, but I didn’t care. I had one paper in me, and that’s what my teachers got. A unique academic snowflake.

I am sure there are a lot of people who don’t come close to the level of organization I talked about at first, but I have never seen anyone do as little organizational work as I have. My guess is they are out there, but get too intimidated by the sheer load of stuff other people do to ever mention it publicly.

So how do I write?

I do my writing in the shower. Also, in the car on my way to and from work. Sometimes when it’s morning and I’m slowly chewing my cereal looking vaguely more alive than the zombies I write about. Anytime I’m staring off into space not doing anything, or when I’m reading something only to realize I’ve been reading the same three paragraphs over and over again without acknowledging a single word, I’m probably writing.

The way I do it is I picture the scene I want to describe, or a scene I want to get to, or the penultimate scene, or whatever my brain happens to want to work at. I see the characters, their clothing, their mannerisms. When I want this character to say this line, I watch him saying it to figure out how he’d fold his arms or roll his eyes or whatever. I watch my book as a movie first, then I describe as best I can what I saw. It can be frustrating sometimes when I discover that I don’t have the words to convey the scene like I see it, and that can bog me down. Other times, I’ve daydreamed a scene, the couldn’t remember exactly what happened or why, and to me that’s a sign that the scene didn’t resonate enough with me. I know that there are Pantsters (writing by the seat of, in other words), but I don’t know of anyone that takes it to that level. The only reason why I “outlined” the last three chapters were to make sure I hit all the points I wanted to. There are probably 20 scenes that will be in it that I didn’t write down, the bridge scenes and color and whatnot. They’ll just happen. For the rest, I can jot “zombie stuff” on the top flap of a Fruit Loops box and I know what I mean without ever saving the box for reference.

I envy the Plotters. I can’t imagine having all that shit at my fingertips. I just don’t think I’d ever be able to do anything with it. I’d have it all, neatly there, and then write a completely different book anyway. More likely, though, I’d get halfway through plotting and outlining, then say Fuck it, I’m gonna watch this Mythbusters rerun instead. The mechanical tedium would murder me. I want the good stuff, the writing itself, the unfolding of story, the development of the characters as they come and introduce themselves fully to me and say Howdy. I don’t necessarily know who they are until I write them.

Perfect example: I had a bunch of scenes in mind when I wrote Curse, the Have to Happens to move the plot along. One character was going to do something that was necessary (from a plot perspective) to spread the zombie plague further and faster than it might have otherwise. I knew what he was going to do and how he would do it. When I got to that point, something funny happened.

He wouldn’t do it.

I realized that character couldn’t do it. There’s just no way he would have. Not like he was a great guy about to do something out of character, but the way things developed around him, he grew as a person until I couldn’t make it happen. The scene ended up happening, but for entirely different reasons that made for a much better story. I think, anyway. I know it worked 1,000 times better for me, anyway.

So for all you Plotters, hats off. I couldn’t do what you do. And for other Pantsters like me, you aren’t alone. Sometimes the only way something can get written is to sit down and write the goddamn thing, because in the end, you still have to do that anyway.