Which Way to Go?

I have mentioned this before and thought I would give it another spin. (And no, this is not a Halloween-themed post) I have engaged a few up-and-coming writers about their next project, and they are not sure what to write. Upon diving deeper into their quandary, they are not sure if they want to write a life story - a non-fiction event - or an interesting story that would be based on their actual existence but more interesting, more exciting. This would seem to present a binary choice - truth or fiction - but actually suggests something which should move writers even more - what do they want to say?

The act of saying something in your story is simple if you want it to be, but it doesn't have to be. For example: I was in a bad car accident when I was 18. Now, if I want to tell people just what happened that night on Hamilton Road, then my task is fairly easy. I discuss the events, offer what I experienced, and how it concluded. It's clearly non-fiction, and tells everyone about that terrible experience. Now, that is writing (although it's more like reporting). Now here is where the road diverges.

In that example, such a story would say, "I was in a car accident when I was 18. Here is what happened." However, I happen to know there's a lot more to that moment than how a 1976 Pacer can end up on its roof along a country road. That story has more to say, if I let it. If what I want to say before I start writing is how I realized how freaking fragile life and the human body can be, well, I can tell the same story but make it more about feelings. Do I need to describe the spilled gasoline and coolant spilled across the street? It did happen, but it doesn't speak to what I really want to say. I can ignore that and talk about my own blood splashed about, the broken glass embedded in my skin, and the lingering shock of coming so close to being a roadside casualty. Still non-fiction, but exploring the emotions.

Now we bend into the fiction neighborhood. Let's pretend that what I want to say is the fear of walking through the night, injured, bleeding, and seeking refuge. Sure, I could stick with the car accident story and talk about walking to the nearest house not even a quarter-mile away. There's scary feelings with that...for the most part. But what if I fictionalize things a little, and that country road is longer and emptier than ever? What if my injuries are worse - a broken bone or two, an injury that won't stop bleeding? Now we really explore the fear of the moment, but at the expense of the facts. 

Now let's make the story suspenseful and put some skin in the game - like a passenger in the car too injured to move. The main character has to head out into the night, holding tight to their own injuries, desperately searching for help while not knowing if their passenger is alive or dead. We have diverged from the real story altogether, but we retain the elements that make it interesting. This becomes the story someone writes if they want to say something about being hurt, scared, and worried for someone else but pressing on in the face of adversity. And yes, it's total fiction, but the writer incorporates their experiences into the main character's feelings.

Now, this might seem like the point being made is that to make a story interesting, it has to be fictionalized. Here's the hook that ties all this together - any true-story can be made more interesting by incorporating all the feelings of what the author wants to say. Readers understand events, but connect with feelings, so by writing the story as it happened but focusing on the feelings, fears, and the nitty-gritty of the experience, true stories can still communicate what a writer wants to say. It's just a matter of knowing what you want to say and how you want to say it.           

When Did It All Begin?

Don't be alarmed - I'm not getting all philosophical. I was thinking the other day about my ongoing journey into writing and a thought bounced into my head: When did all of this start? When did I find myself drawn toward stories and storytelling, particularly of the kind we write about? It turns out, the answer to this is not as easy as one might think - at least as far as I am concerned. The more I got thinking about this, the more I realized it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to dive into. And yes, I felt I was up to the challenge.

Now, regular readers of this blog (or literally anyone who went back to read my first post, "Starting off as a writer,") know my foray into the actual art of writing started off as a severe liver infection that prompted me to start writing down all the stories bouncing around in my head. Simple, yes, but all the storytelling stuff and the writing stuff goes back well before that. I actually took a writing workshop course when I was fourteen as part of my high-school curriculum but it didn't go well, mostly because I was a very distracted fourteen and wasn't willing to dedicate the time and energy required for the study of writing. Furthermore, I definitely wasn't ready for the poetry part that would come the following semester - that would only come much later. This tells me that the interest was there even in my early teens, just not the focus.

Now, I did love to tell a good story back when I was six - at least according to my parents, who serve as biased source material. Apparently, someone asking me how my day was could trigger a long, winding yarn about everything that happened and drift into some things that clearly did not happen, but I was just loving the chance to be in that storytelling space. Looking back at some very early writing projects (like kindergarten), however, makes it readily apparent that I did not have the grammatical skills nor the patience to write all these wonderful tales down. After all, at that age I was still mastering things like not getting the letter 'e' backward and staying on the lines. Writing a sentence was challenging (and kind of boring considering how I preferred to just blurt things out), so the stories were there, just not the writing.

Why am I saying all this? I think it all gets down to the fact that we all have stories flowing through us, and for some of us, those stories are load-bearing entities holding us together. The writing of them, however, requires a few magical ingredients to get thrown into the pot before it all reaches critical mass and we begin our little journey. Now, these ingredients aren't going to mix themselves, and sometimes we have to add the last few touches to kick things off - inspiration, time, sentiment, something - because they need that little push.

So if you are feeling the urge to be a writer but there's something not quite there yet, start looking around for what inspired you in the past, for what moves you, for what gets you inspired, then ask yourself what's missing. Sometimes all it takes is just sitting down and typing, but other times it takes a larger step. And unless you are fortunate enough to get a severe liver infection, you will have to find that one yourself.    

The Tough Question

"So, how's your writing going?"

Every time I get asked that, I think, "Oh, kill me now." Not that I have a death wish, but open-ended questions like that hit me in two places at once. First and foremost, it reminds me that for the very moment I am being asked that question, I am not writing. I'm talking with people, at a party, or usually doing something social and the subject comes up. At that point, I've pretty much checkmated myself because I invite that very question to occur as a part of the ongoing small-talk - yet another reason I hate that question. However, I still feel this passive sense of guilt because I had a choice to either write or socialize, and I chose the latter. Now I would pay for it. However, that's not the worst part.

The real irksome part of getting hit with that question is it usually gets me to ask myself how my writing is going. I start a self-inventory process of the things I have written lately, anything I have running around my brain that I really want to write, what I am avoiding writing, and all these other writing questions. (Yes, I clearly overthink certain things.) But while I overthink everything, the question invariably comes up - how am I progressing as a writer? Am I progressing as a writer? What can I do to make more progress as a writer? (Wow, do I overthink things.)

The questions I end up asking myself may sound borne out of insecurity, but they do serve a purpose. Whenever we question ourselves as writers, the best thing to do is have a handy go-to move to put us back on track. One of my favorites is to look at old writing, just to see how far I actually have progressed. I can open up a ten-year-old document and do a quick word check on how many times I used, "that," "was," or "were," just to see where I wrote in a sloppy, passive manner. While I can't do that during whatever social event I attended that  led to getting asked that question, but it's still a good way to remedy doubts.

Of course, one of the sure-fire ways is always to just talk about the last thing you wrote, and let yourself get pulled back into your writing process. If your recent work was something as simple as a story of the last moments of a ham sandwich, remind yourself about whatever flared up in your mind and inspired you to write that story, to commit it to words instead of it just taking up a few neurons. Recreate whatever drove you to write, and express it in full. After all, you are a writer, so talk about writing.

However, the one thing that you should always keep in your back pocket is a little reminder. Even if you don't feel like much of a writer because you are going through writer's block, or caught in a plot contradiction, or getting those Act Two Blues, these are what writers go through. These happen, and will happen again as long as you continue to write. They are the unspoken moments writers go through, just like the war stories that never get told because they don't carry the drama of the exciting stories. So as long as you are writing, as long as you are living the life and working the processes you have developed and are developing, it's a pretty simple question to answer.

"It's going great, thank you."     

"When You Get Lost, You Learn"

The title of today's piece comes from an African proverb that basically says the same thing but with a few extra words. The reason I decided to lead with this is that for the past couple of weeks, I have been quite lost as a writer. It is difficult to explain, but my creative guide has been very much asleep, and I have been adrift in the sense that I haven't been able to find the route to creating anything. You know how I say it's important to have a bunch of routines to foster a creative environment? Well, those haven't been working. I have been very much in the midst of a strange land, and I didn't know the route to get me back to that place.

I have seen this with plenty of other writers, and indeed it is different than writer's block. When we are blocked, we know what we want to create but we can't grasp whatever it might take to get us from where we stand to where we want to be. This kind of lost feeling is like waking up and not having access to all those tools that allow us to create the bizarre monsters known as out writing. Nothing seems possible at that point, not as if we are back at square one, but as if we were in a maze where we no longer knew our objective. This can hit in the middle of writing an epic novel, or a poem, or anything really. But when we are stuck in this space, what do we do? How do we escape the maze when we don't even know how we got there?

This is where the proverb comes in. We learn the most when we are not surrounded by the familiar, by the known. When we are in unfamiliar territory, everything might be scary and different, but it is in fact, new. It can be taken as a terrifying situation, or it can be taken as a chance to discover a new world full of strange, fascinating things. Indeed, when we are lost, we are away from the familiar, but if we let it, that can be a liberating experience. Without presumptions and rules set for us to follow, we are free to do whatever we want. We can learn all about how this new world of the lost works, and see what it has to offer.

I read somewhere that one of the secrets to keeping an active mind was trying new things periodically, and doing this in many different ways. Break routines now and then, even if it's as simple as trying a new restaurant on occasion, taking a different route home once a month, seeing a movie that you would normally have no interest in. Do these things with no guarantee that they will be new and fascinating experiences - just accept that they will be different, and opportunities for fresh, new experiences. That's all they have to be, so try them out for size.

And when it comes to writing, I learned that once I got past the feeling that I was stuck in a new, weird, maze and changed that to the opportunity to explore an entirely new, different kind of world that happened to be maze-shaped, my writing issues crumbled. I adventured, I explored, and I didn't get lost because I didn't think I had to be anywhere but in that space in that moment. Once I appreciated that space, I started writing again. And I am glad to be back.