There are days as a writer when what you want more than anything is to write but you don’t have the words.
I have in my head a definite picture of my father: who he is. He is sitting on the porch, lawn chair like his throne, the dog stretched out beside him, patiently waiting for attention. He smokes a cigar in the warm afternoon while he reads some great tome of history or medicine or some other mental conundrum that is beyond me. Great words coming easily to him. He allows himself exactly one drink but he may have a second cigar if he is moved to do a project around the house. By the time I was born he was always head or chief of his department, no matter where that department was, so his pager sat by him, patient as the dog and a better warning of trouble as the dog only channeled my father’s displeasure of passers by.
I was born a pale copy of that. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. My dog is a tenth the size, a plum to his Beauregard, the dog he picked because it was the puppy that defended the runt of the litter from the others, though the runt, Bashful, my childhood dog, lived longest of all his siblings. I never knew as much and never dreamed I could. Even flailing my lines on stage I could only imitate the authority that he simply exhaled like smoke and the insistence that his children should know how to swear because the world should not surprise them. I was the clever child of a genius. My voice is his but I don’t have his words.
When I was a child I was the pale copy. But now I am a man and my father can’t read. His collection withered to favorite books he knew well enough to follow and then to favorite movies and now to whatever is on TV. He does not drink, rehab preserving my parent’s marriage to the bitter end. He sits inside, with the sun-shades drawn, where he cannot smoke. The new dog is smaller but close enough to the last one that he confuses the names and she is as loyal a channel of worry with two bum legs to his one. In my youth he would lecture. Last year it was, “whatever.” Yesterday it was an hour watching a movie we had all seen a dozen times and his only words were, “good to see you,” and “what’s wrong with the dog?”
My father’s words are gone. And they never came to me to take them up. Which means the only ones I have are, “I wish he had them back.”
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from “The Three Voices of Poetry” by T.S. Eliot (via tongueoftheworld) I would say that in some ways we writers are continuously writing love poetry, even those of us like myself that are not poets and certainly not love poets. We write out our love for our stories in the best words we can, for ourselves. If we’re lucky, then it is a gift of love for some special person. But the ultimate goal is to share that love, let it be overheard by an audience we’ve never imagined, who are looking for just the words we are trying to say because it’s their love too, even if they never knew it until it lay before them in black and white. |
| — | from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi (via tongueoftheworld) |
XD! So I was going through some old stuff today and I came across the rough draft of something I believe I intended to give as a birth present to my nephew, who, in 2003, my brother was threatening to name Darkon Zero because he wanted a “traditional” Jewish name XD! So for amusement, the only (Thank God) surviving draft of Good Night Empire:
Good Night, Empire, your curfew is here
So lock yourselves up with those you hold dear
Good Night, Patrollers, on your long lonely trot
With you on guard all the rebels will be caught
Good Night, Rebels, in cells deep and dank
You had ideas, what a pity they stank
Good Night, Wards of the state, know the Emperor loves you
And loves you much more than your dissident families used too
Good Night, Children, the future of our state
Tomorrow’s another day to make the empire great
Good Night, Citizens, with pride, say your pledge
Your neighbors are watching, so you better not hedge
Good Night, French Air Force, with your devious ways
We keep you around because blaming you pays
Good Night, Emperor, with your iron fist
If assassins should get you, know you’ll be missed
Good Night, Empire, with your totalitarian ways
Remember good nights make for double plus good days
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Write a short story, poem, or vignette with this line in it, either as is or as part of someone’s dialogue. Alternatively, suppose this is true for you. Supposing you bested Death, what road would you take? How do you imagine you might best Death? |
Writing is often discussed as two separate acts - though in practice they overlap, intermingle, and impersonate each other. They differ in emphasis, but are by no means merely sequential. If we do the well, both result in discovery. One is the act of exploration: some combination of premeditated searching and undisciplined, perhaps only partly conscious rambling. This includes scribbling notes, considering potential scenes, lines, or images, inventing characters, even writing drafts. History tells us that exploration is assertive action in the face of uncertain assumptions, often involving false starts, missteps, and surprises - all familiar parts of the writer’s work. If we persist, we discover our story (or poem, or novel) within the world of that story. The other act of writing we might call presentation. Applying knowledge, skill, and talent, we create a document meant to communicate with, and have an effect on, others. The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.
That is to say, at some point we turn from the role of Explorer to take on that of Guide.
| — | -Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer |
So I’d like to talk a moment about something I only see in books by men. Under the cut because I expect this could be triggering.
A first sentence to start a short story or vignette with.
One of my old favorite movies is Blazing Saddles. I hope you don’t mind me spoiling a 39 year old movie but one of the things I always got a kick out of was toward the end when the townsfolk of Rock Ridge know that Hedy Lamarr’s (It’s Hedley. Hedley!) evil gang is riding into town the next day to destroy it so the townsfolk and the railroad workers stay up all night to make a replica. And so we get a shot of the obviously fake Rock Ridge followed by a shot clearly made from where they’ve been shooting Rock Ridge the whole time to show that they’ve made a perfect replica. Of course the facade is probably where they’ve been shooting Rock Ridge all along too, it’s just that from inside the town it looks like a real town.
We as writers do the same thing. We put up facades and have them stand in for the real world but as long as we make the facades convincing, everyone assumes the environment that we don’t show. The insides of the other buildings. The rest of the town that should be found if you turn the corner on the end of the street. But this activity isn’t simply limited to the buildings and the towns. We do it for entire cultures, histories, worlds, technologies, you name it.
Since I put up one go to writing post because it had just been too long since I posted it, I figured I would put up what I still think is the best single article on creative writing for the same reason. I still believe that the process Holly Lisle describes is fairly close to what happens in your subconscious when ideas spontaneously occur. It’s a relatively short and extremely valuable read. It can be extrapolated to most writing activities.
