creativity

November 23, 2012

You Can Think About Writing – Too Much

I do a lot of planning for every novel. I have the whole thing roughly laid out before I start writing and I decide what I want to accomplish each day before I begin. And yet, I never sit down to think about my writing. All my best ideas come when I am brushing my teeth or weeding the garden. Then, when I do sit down to write, the unplanned, unanticipated bits are so often the best products of any writing session. Furthermore, if I need to solve a particular writing problem, I can’t sit down and stare at the screen or the page.  I have to take a hike instead, or do some housework, or go to sleep.

All of which makes me conclude that my un-, sub-, and super-*conscious brain is a better writer than my conscious one. And I speculate that all the planning and the structure are craft equivalents of brushing my teeth: they give my conscious brain something to do while the rest of my brain gets the real job done.

*Damn, now where did I get that phrasing from? “Un-, sub-, and supernatural forces” I think that is how the original went … something by Stoppard, I believe… Rosencrantz?

November 21, 2012

My Unrequited Career as a Musician

I have had so many jobs, and quite a few careers. Writing is my calling, so that has persisted through change after change of day job. But if I could have just one job – and if I got my choice – I would be a musician. I guess I would need to be a musician who writes songs, as I’ll always need to write.  Yes, that’s a plan I could live with.

The only problem with my being a musician is that I’m no good at it. No talent. No vision. Incredibly average voice. Skill that rarely breaks past the rudimentary barrier. My best hope of being a musician was back in the early days of punk,when desire trumped ability. I don’t know why I wasn’t in a band back then, say a goof of a band like Heather once had in my novel Scar Jewelry. I suppose I lacked the right kind of cojones.

All four of my novels (three completed, one in progress) have musicians in them and two of them have music as a focus. I only just noticed this as a pattern. Sometimes the author is the last to know.

November 14, 2012

Plot: My Gratitude at Being Surprised

When it comes to a plot, like anybody I want a story that hangs together — and for me it is so satisfying to get to the end of the book and find that all of the subplots were intrinsic and pivotal to the main plotline.  However, when it comes to a plot, what I most cherish is surprise. This is a consequence of my many years working as a motion picture story analyst. At the rate of 5 novels or 10 screenplays per week, I read and critiqued materials submitted to movie studios. After several years of this, you’ve seen it all, plot-wise. That was a long time ago, but unfortunately I still anticipate most plot twists. Sometimes I like an otherwise mediocre movie just because it has some story element that I didn’t see coming. I am less charitable with mediocre novels; I suppose that is because my emotional investment in a novel can be so much greater.

One of the (many) things that hooked me on the Potter books was how many surprises J.K. Rowling conjured. I think I was in book 5 before I anticipated a single surprise. Ahhhhhhh.

November 11, 2012

What I Want in a Character

Sometimes I read non-fiction but it never grabs me. It’s novels that grab and shake and catapult and expand me. I read novels to get immersed in the lives of people I can care about. I don’t have to like them. I hope they will be complicated, not trivial or easy to understand; nothing better than a character who baffles me – so long as I perceive that the author isn’t B.S.ing me, that the mysteries and the discrepancies are resolvable, and that once I spend more time with the character, I will start to understand.

Authors don’t fully understand the characters they “create”, even when they think they do.  There’s a part of me that has the chutzpah to think that I design my characters. There’s another, dazzled part of me that senses them flying in through a door I’ve managed to open, just a crack.

The best characters are like great song lyrics. A few twists of phrase and they change me, profoundly and forever.

November 10, 2012

Melodious Peach

Some of the most creative writing I’ve encountered appears in the names of paint colors. There is no Light Gray. Instead there is Pompeii Ruins or Evaporated.

Dark Red? Don’t be pedestrian. Instead expect Romantic Attachment or Can Can. Madder of Fact Red. Go a bit lighter and you come to River Rouge.

I might have called these Gray Blue:  Babbling Creek or Wind Blown or the (brilliant!)  Atmospheric Pressure.

I’ve got rooms done in Melodious Peach. Turns out that is recommended for pairing with Treaded Grapes or Composed Bloom.

What color would you expect Earthly Pleasure to be? How about Philosophically Speaking?

Paint color names can be evocative, stimulatiing, witty, sly. Perhaps their only limitation is that they stick to the light side of the emotional palette. I guess that makes sense. Hard to imagine someone wanting a room painted in Spiteful Orange or Narcissist’s Pearl.