I have found new blood!
It’s amazing to me, sometimes at least – see, if I said it was amazing all the time it would be trite (or would it be tripe) but moments of realization are equally as powerful as moments of ennui are debilitating. As an example I’ll share a story comparing yesterday’s “writers mind” to the “writers mind” I am experiencing today.
I sat for a very long time yesterday (well it was long to me, longer than I think I have experienced this syndrome at least in my modern writing life -=twenty minutes=-) staring at my cursor that blinked on a blank WORD screen. Over the past six days the ideas of my novel have expanded into a much larger piece than I had been working with prior. I created a new outline and yesterday sat down to begin writing the first chapter.
In those moments I realized one of the truest moments of my entire writing experience; I realized that writing is hard. And I suddenly felt like I could not write. That I did not have it in me. That I do not have the gift of being able to create a story out of nothing; at least not a wry or a complex or a clever or an enchanting or even a desultory tale that would stir a reader to proceed past the first paragraph. This realization moved me to two afterthoughts, one that either I would take on the work of becoming a writer, that I would sit before the blinking cursor and sweat and squirm and in essence mimic what the sea of popular fictionalists do, ape and mutate the styles of other published fictionalists and then simply insert the apathetic, mundane tales of their mishaps in life.
Or that I could become a writer and learn to use words to translate what goes on in my mind into a form of engaging, yet Quixotic ramblings that might only lead deeper into a miasma that I myself may never escape. YES! That is what I want to do! I WANT to tell my story and I want to tell it my way! I want to talk my story to you the way that I talk when I think inside my brain. That means that I am not going to sit down and tell you a story in a completely linear fashion. I think that I may tell you three stories at one time, would that be ok? I want to tell the story that I want to write; the pure fiction; Intermingled with that I want to tell you about the facts of my life that inspire the fiction. Beyond that I need one more vent; I need to be able to talk about my writing process. I need to talk about what I am experiencing while I am writing this novel.
What does this mean? I need to start blogging again. In the 54 days since my last Bravejournal entry I have defended my decision to stop blogging in several different ways; the one I feel that is most legitimate is that I stopped blogging so that I could concentrate more fully on my fiction. And this is true. What has happened though is that my voice has gone still. And my writing has become sterile as a result. If I don’t write in this fashion by which I think I can’t do my best writing.
So if you received an invite to read this blog you are one of a very select group. This is to be a no holds barred blog. As you see, I have set it as a private blog; the general public cannot just stumble upon what I say here. This will give me freedom to talk as loudly as I need to about the distorted gunk that I scrape from the bottom of my souls carcass with little fear of being judged or tracked by the government . You few, I do care what you think of me but I am not afraid to say these things before you. If, one day, I just feel like saying K-C-U-F 100 times I will!
One thing I need to be careful of is putting too much time into the blog, time and energy that would steal away from me actually fictionalizing. I do want to start to read more too. I’ve got several authors open right now. Roald Dahl, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, and also several writers guides about novel writing.
Signing out,
Daryl
07.29.2005
4:56pm-pst
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