Mary’s Comments (group member since Oct 26, 2015)

Mary’s comments from the Conversation: Why Do We Write and Read? group.

They say you are what you do, Jeanette. Keep doing it and you'll become it. Then you won't be able to stop. I swear.

Thank you for all that, Jeannette. It was moving and even inspirational. I hope you continue to write, with or without the rush. For us. The readers.

Yes, yes, Anne. And one shouldn't torture oneself w the why.

Thanks for getting it, Sharman, and distilling it so sublimely.

Content is king. I get that, Peter. So do more readers than you know. . .

Without ego, we'd be what? All id and superego? Oy! The horror, the horror!

Your welcome, Allen. You've spurred interesting reflections for me, too.

I like your process, Allen. To the one true sentence bit, I'd add one true image. That's how it goes from me. If I get that image, whether it comes in the beginning of a story or whether I envision it as the end, then I can build a whole world around it.

As far as the challenge of telling a captivating story goes, I usually imagine I'm telling it to myself. I'm a hard audience. If I entertain or inform or move me, I've got a good chance of doing so for strangers. Also, that intimacy with my own vision creates an authenticity I'd have trouble finding elsewhere.

Oh, Peter, you are so kind! But I wasn't speaking of my own writing in that case. I don't let that sentence rest til I can hear the music.

But this brings up something else. How important the ear is when writing. If the voice sounds wrong, I always advise, then it IS wrong. Go back in the piece to where the voice sounded "right". Then start again.

The point is, it's not necessary to figure out why the voice went wrong. Don't waste time trying to determine the why. Just ditch it and start over.

I swear. It's all in the ear.

Ah! I didn't mention why I read! Two reasons: to learn as in learn something about my craft from an accomplished practitioner or to learn something that will inform my work in progress, research, if you will.

I rarely read purely for pleasure anymore. Perhaps because I've become too analytical about what I'm reading. It's a loss. Every once in a while I come across a text that enchants, that I can lose myself in. But less and less often.

I regret that.

And here I am, the killjoy.

I don't know when it was that writing became for me nothing like a metaphysical or spiritual or even consciously self-expressive activity. I suffered more than three decades of rejection before enjoying a measure of success. (It was not deserved. Out of seven
rejected novels, only one was really bad. The rest were pretty good!) Somewhere along the way, writing became an occupation I neither reveled in nor approached mystically. Too much rejection will do that. Writing was simply what I did, what I could not help doing. A compulsion, if you will. Often as much curse as blessing.

As Peter says, the pleasure is in the work. For me, that's simply because our minds need something to do. They wither without work. But is writing any different from many kinds of work? You get up in the morning, you do it, applying your best energies, and hope for the best. You change direction, consider market, reject market when you have to, embrace it whenever you can. All forms of work require a degree of creativity when done well.

I've never felt a character possess me, or step away from me, or motivate itself, although my mind sometimes surprises me with a direction I hadn't consciously anticipated. I've never understood when authors speak of characters who take over their work. That pose resembles schizophrenia to me.

Of all the arts, writing for me is most like music. When I am intensely focused on my words, it's their rhythm that most enthralls me, I think. I'm told by a friend/reader who is a professional musician that my prose has a distinct cadence, something involving triads. I haven't a clue what that means to my process, but ever since he said it, I try to chop up my internal series of threes, just to be ornery, I guess.

So, perhaps being self contradictory here, I believe there is an unconscious element in writing, unconscious in the Jungian sense. It may be neurotic, I don't know, but it's part of the pleasure and part of the compulsion both. Regardless, it's the conscious shaping of that element that makes the work sing. Otherwise, it's cacophony. It's vital that the creator never to lose control of the work, or the sound is like an orchestra playing on its own without a conductor. Banal, unshaped, unruly, dull.

I don't think about why I write anymore. Or even how. I just try to do it. So I may read all this later and decide I'm stuffed full of shite. But I thought I'd offer it anyway.