Update from the Writing Factory

You may have noticed I missed two posts recently (or maybe you didn’t), but the writing factory is still open. I chose to forgo my last two posts because I’ve been working on a story for my other blog, Saturday Night Pulps, which has run into a longer project.

                This happens sometimes. You start writing, grabbing ideas from the ether, not sure where it is going, and bam, your short story turns into a novella, or novel, or an epic ten book fantasy.

                It’s one of the things I love about writing. Sometimes, no matter how well you plan or outline, if you do plan or outline your stories, the characters take you by the arm and lead you down some ally way you weren’t expecting to go down.

                I don’t usually plan or outline my stories. I start with one sentence, or idea, or a vague notion of a character I want to write about. But this new story I started did start with an outline. I thought it would make it a tighter story to fit within the framework of my SNP blog. Well, I was wrong.  The characters took me by the ear this time, and said, “Uh-uh, Donny boy. This story is bigger than you thought.”

                When a story does that, you have to go with it. To deny it, would be to deny the very fabric of what makes a writer write. It makes all those other stories I’ve started, just to toss them out because they weren’t going anywhere, worth it. When inspiration strikes, you strike back, because you never know when she’s coming, or if she’ll ever return.  It’s a fear I think all writers have.  To one day wake up with the stories gone. The ideas and characters you dream up vanished back into the regions from which they came.

                You also never know what the story could have been if you don’t see it through.  Even if it’s garbage thrown into the recycle bin, it’s all going somewhere. Tools you can pull out when you need them.

                I have this one character I created when I was a kid and was first seduced by the goddess creativity.  He was a cowboy and a lot of him was taken from other cowboys I had seen in the movies or read about it books. But he was my cowboy. I created him, and I wrote about his adventures.  This cowboy might never see the light of day. His adventures might always be for me and my own enjoyment. But the tools and experience I picked up writing about him will always be useful to me and will always show up in the stories I do share.

                So, off I go, to whip the workers in the writing factory into shape to meet an all to quickly approaching deadline. Maybe I’ll give them a bonus if they can fit this weekly blog into their schedule as well. Or, maybe not. A writer’s life is supposed to be torture, after all. Can’t let them get to comfortable.

Jeeves keeps the monkeys in line

Lost in Notebooks (I think I took a wrong turn in Albuquerqe)

My article is late because I’ve been working.  I start lots of stories that I never finish, and sometimes they aren’t worth finishing, or I just get stuck, or I lose my motivation.  So, this week I sat down to finish a couple of them.

                These are long stories.  Stories I envision will turn into short novels.  But it took some work just to get them going again.  Both are buried in notebooks.  And not just one notebook, but spread out amongst many, and so to transcribe them on my computer, I had to go through just about every notebook I have, just to find excerpts.  Slowly, like a puzzle, I piece these excerpts together and follow them like a treasure map to rediscover the characters and plots I had stored away until they were almost forgotten.  One of them goes back two years. The other only a year. And now, I’m dusting them off, gently, like an archeologist digging up bones and trying to figure out what goes where.

                It’s hard work.  I see the words fresh.  Like someone else wrote them.  In one of them, I see a style I was going for, and maybe I don’t like that style anymore, or it doesn’t suit the story, or maybe it does, and I’m just not the same writer I was when I began the story.  But I recognize it, and the character still wants me to tell his story.  He’s there, in the work, telling me, “You must finish this.  You can’t leave me here with no conclusion. You took my arm and left me alone.  Finish me!”

                It’s hard because I know once I get the notebooks transcribed, I have to finish the story.  Not only that, but I’ll have to revise the story.  It’s a daunting prospect, like any expedition, and it leaves me a little nervous. I have to put aside other works. Short stories and revisions I’ve been working on.  I have to pick what I think is more important or advantageous.  I have to be selective, because it’s not easy.  It’s not. 

                But it is fun. It is rewarding.

                I watched a Ken Burns doc about the first guy to drive a car across the United States.  This was in the early 1900’s.  There were no highways and the roads were unfit for automobiles.  It took him 60 days and thousands of dollars in 1910 money.  He did because a man bet him $50 he couldn’t.  So, he climbed in the car, with little preparation, and hit the road to prove to himself he could do it.  And he did.  He won the bet.  But he never bothered to collect his winnings.

                Take what you can from that analogy.  I think it says something about the human spirit.  If you want something bad enough, you’ll do it.  Not because of some bet, or someone else’s expectations, but because there’s something inside of you, that makes you go on.  Even when there are no mechanics, no roads, and no highways.  You’ll get to the end, and you’ll say, “I did it.”

Bud - the first dog to wag his tongue out the window on a road trip