On Writing

Today I'll write on a subject that hits as close to home as almost any I can think of. Today I'll talk about writing. I do this often and at length (as I'm sure my readers can tell from my previous posts) and I love to do it, but my true love is the writing of books. It is also a great many other things to me. It is a constant disapointment when the books I try to write turn out to be, in my opinion, very bad. It is a constant itch at the back of my brain where idea after idea shows itself and then retreats back into the depths of the grey mass never to surface again. It is a vision of a career, a lifestyle, that I've never been able to let go of since it occurred to me that not only could I love to read books, but maybe I could write them too. Maybe I could. So far I have not. I have boxes full of rough drafts, ideas, partial manuscripts, and sketches that started off the way I wanted them to and then, inevitable, took on a life of their own and either wandered off staring at shiny things like a lost little puppy or took a nose dive off a cliff like lemmings following all the others. None of them are dead, but most of them are bruised and broken. The one thing that gives me hope that the dream is alive is the writings of successful authors, on writing, that talk of their own struggles to create something new, valid, and worth reading.
One of the main things that they all seem to agree on is that almost none of them ever made it before watching so many of their projects fail that they were on the verge of giving up. Like all artists, for writing is definately an art, they were their own worst critics. They threw manuscripts away, burned them, abandoned them, and sometimes gave up for months or years at a time. But they always came back to it. In the act of writing there is a love-hate relationship that cannot be denied or ignored. The desire to do it comes from a love of the written word, the desire to create something new, something great, and ultimately something that will last. In the process of all of this the writer tends to be dissappointed in his work and in his ability to do anything the way he intended. The constant failure pushes every writer away but it also always brings them back. Always.
So I keep trying. I write things down every day and add them to the box of errant ideas and then start writing more. I start up a blog because it's easier, more forgiving, and for some reason I can write here without hating what I write. Writing a few paragraphs that other people are willing to read is much easier than writing a whole book that someone will be willing to read. The truth is that writing is what I intend to do. It's what I've always intended to do since I realized that it was a possibility. It is a release for me in ways that nothing else ever has been. So, to use a quote from an excellent movie, I keep beating my skull against my desk until something useful comes out. Sometimes something does.
The thing about the box of the bruised and broken is that sometimes they heal themselves. After an undeterminable amount of time goes by they can be pulled out and reshaped into something that works. You can see where the wounds were, you can still see the scars, but often their all the better for them. The truth is that no one likes perfection. No one believes perfection. Even if they did, perfection is not interesting. It is the flaws, the inconcistencies, and the differences between us that make others interesting to hear or read about. This holds true for fictional people too. Perfection may be pretty, but it's boring. We like the characters with the scars and wounds. We like the people that try and fail. We like the bad guys and the good guys not because they're perfect, but because they never are. The bad guys do good things and the good guys do bad things. They're conflicted, confused, and usually only the way they are by chance. Knowing all this, however, does not make them easier to write.
Writing a fictional person is a lot like trying to change a real person. Ultimately what you're writing is some part of youself so that character will do things you don't want them to, things you don't like, or completely the oposite of what you want them to. You'll tell them to do something and they'll smile at you very politely and say "no." Just that. No reasons, no explanations, just "no." So you put them in their box for awhile to give you both time to think about the situation and then when you pull them back out you're both a little bit more willing to compromise. This may sound crazy, and maybe it is a little bit. I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a writer that struck me as normal. The act of creating fictional people and places is essentially the act of dividing up your brain and providing each of those characters a place to live and think. You have to know what they think, how they feel, how they'll respond to different stimuli, and why they're different from each other. They have to be different from each other, as anyone who's ever read a bad book will know.
So this is why I write. I think it is why I always will. The truth is no matter how many times I try to give it up, I always come back to it. Sometimes I find myself doing it without realizing it. It's just a part of who I am. So for all those people who read this (thank you very much, by the way) the books will come someday. Maybe they won't. Who knows. The point is that the effort to create them will always be there. Or it will be here. I don't know where there is yet. I'm looking for it though. I'll let you know if I find it. I hear it's a cool place.