The words buzz around in my head. I see an object, or I glimpse an expression on a face and I feel like I could base an entire novel on that very subject. The words – I can see them – twitching out from my fingertips on to the blank page. I imagine them there before I type them, and then my muscles obey, my digits stretching to reach this key, that letter. Suddenly, there they are. Right there before my eyes where I can read them. Do they make sense? Are they in the right order?
I inspect them. I skim them: sometimes I read them out loud. They are never good enough the first time around.
Inspiration is like having a balloon inside my head. It grows, it expands, until I can no longer contain it – until it either gets out or I go mad. And I do, sometimes. I’m sure my family knows when I get to the point where I MUST write. It’s almost like a disease, like an addiction. I suppose it is, in a way. I ignore my family, my housework, my social life suffers, I do nothing else in my leisure time. I haven’t watched TV in over a year.
And I can’t live without it.
I suppose, as with almost anything, if you do it enough and you’re lucky, you develop at least an aptitude for it. And if you’re really lucky, you find you have a talent for it. In the case of writing, if you have a vocabulary and an adequate imagination, all you need is a knowledge of grammar and you should be good to go. And yet, when I read those who are very talented – those who make it look easy – I realise I have a long road ahead of me still.
So, I write. The compulsion to put into writing the thoughts in my head is undeniable. As long as I have this driving will, this vast, open plain of ideas, and the means to make my hands work the magic that pulls rabbits out of hats in my noggin’, my addiction will be a part of me.
It all started with my romance writing course. The course was a requisite to acquiring the college certificate I’m after and I thought it would be fun to do anyway. Just to get a feel for the genre I went in search of novels to read that would cost me little or no money. Enter the freebies on my e-reader. Out of the ten or so I downloaded, two were well written – the rest, not so much. But I read them anyway. It was the general feeling I was going after, not the quality of writing.
At the same time I was finishing up the rough draft of my novel. That done, I started the editing process. In the meantime, the romance course finished and I went back to reading what I normally read. Well. I tell you.
After reading Stephen King (who, no matter whether you enjoy his stories or not, you must admit is a master of the craft of writing) I realised that my novel was right on par with the free romance crap I had been reading! Granted, I’m taking a grammar course now, so I’m finding mistakes I didn’t know were mistakes. But I still want to rewrite my entire manuscript.
I was amazed at how much influence what I read had on what I wrote. The time I spent describing things in minute detail instead of simply relating how my characters were reacting to things; the extra word count that came from blathering on about things that don’t matter is astounding.
I still have to cut down my word count by about 40,000 words in order for it to fit into even the most generous publisher’s limits, but I’m hoping with Stephen King’s influence I’ll be able to accomplish that. And from now on I must remember to keep away from authors I’m not interested in emulating whilst I write.
So I’m taking this grammar course. It’s necessary for the college certificate I’m aiming to get, in order to put something ‘professional’ on my resume, for me to take this course. I always thought my grammar was pretty good. Yes, I’ve learned a few things, such as the fact that if you’re quoting even the name of something at the end of a sentence, you should put the period inside the quotation marks. The same goes for a comma. That’s fine – I was bound to learn something new.
My problem is this: for my final assignment in this course, I have to write two grammatically correct paragraphs. No problem, right?
Wrong! In fact, SO wrong!
This course is making me question everything I learned in grade 7 English. Who knew there were eleven types of verbs? Now that I’m learning about all these different parts and tenses and exceptions and everything else on top, I’m almost afraid to speak, let alone write! And I have to construct something that’s going to be marked?
I wrote a flash fiction a little while ago called Puppet Master, and it got me to thinking about the characters I write. In a sense, I imagine them into being, but as they grow I can’t help but wonder if they were all my imagination. Perhaps they were always there, and I simply uncovered them.
When I ‘create’ a character, I take a single aspect of their personality. I then add a few details of their past, mix in a number of ‘what ifs’, and shove them into a cooker to see how they’ll handle it, suddenly I’m left with a complete person who evokes feelings of empathy, love, hatred, or what have you. The point is, they become real to me, and, I hope, my readers. After all, what we care about becomes real to us, does it not? Attachment to characters in a well written story can cause us to mourn when the story is over.
Going back to the Puppet Master story, I don’t feel that this is what I am. I may have the ultimate control over where my characters end up, but it is their own strengths and limitations which determines whether they will succeed or fail, live or die, as long as I remain true to them. Not to stay truthful when I write is, for me, a sin. That again is another argument in favour of the fact that they exist.
I have read many times about authors who feel that they are ‘God’ over their characters. Personally, if I felt that way I don’t think I’d be doing it right. My role is to simply make my characters known to as many people as I’m able. And if they came out of the oven delicious enough, people might even keep them alive through fan fiction. 😉
Well, I’m back from doing research for my novel in Kingston. I took this picture of the Inn I stayed in, at dusk, after I turned the lights on in the turret where my room was situated.
Turret
It was a long way up. 41 steps to be exact, not counting the stairs outside to get to the front door and the ladder to get to the top part of the turret.
Being someone who gets most of their inspiration from watching people and trying to imagine why they do the things they do (see photo), I’m finding it difficult to write anything new these days. What with summer vacation and the fact that I’m trying to save money for the trips I want to take, it’s hard to get out of the house, even for a little while. You might say, ‘Just take your kids out with you!’ but that doesn’t work when you’ve got an autistic teenager who’s bigger than you and has definite opinions on what he wants to do with his day, none of which involve leaving the house.
I suppose I could watch TV. *gasp* But whatever I see there has already been done, hasn’t it?
I should probably count my blessings. As long as I’m not finding inspiration to write something new it means I can work on editing my novel. The going is frustrating on that front as well. The re-write I’m currently working on (a section that I’m not pleased with) requires me to fully get into character. That’s difficult when you’ve either got someone looking over your shoulder asking, ‘What are you doing?’ or simply being interrupted every ten minutes.
Oh, shut up whining, Linda!
Needless to say I’m looking forward to my weekend trip next week. I plan to view the house in which I’m staying through the eyes of the girl my main character brings home with him. Her fascination will be my path to detail.
As for finding inspiration, who knows? On top of a fresh perspective on my major work, I may have time to find inspiration for a number of other things as well. I certainly won’t be sitting in my room the whole time I’m gone. Such freedom is a rarity for a single mom, especially during summer vacation.
With all this recent talk about doing research, I’ve decided to do some of my own. Actually, I decided a week ago, but I’m jumping on the bandwagon with those who have blogged about it.
Hochelaga Inn, Kingston Ontario
When I first decided to set my novel in Kingston, Ontario, I looked around the internet for historic houses there and found this one. As luck would have it, it’s a Bed and Breakfast. So next week, guess where I’m going to stay…? Yep, I’ll be right up in the tower room, which is complete with a ladder to the roof from the inside. I have described, using only my imagination, every nook and cranny of this glorious mansion. But now, I’ll be able to do so from the inside. 🙂
In the three days I’ll be spending there I plan also to both drive and walk around town, getting a real feel for the atmosphere. And who knows, maybe I’ll even meet my main character while I’m there. He’s sure to be in residence, after all. 😉
As a writer I need time to myself. I need the opportunity to be able to think and imagine without distraction. I have to say it’s even more difficult now that I’m working on the second draft of my novel; the writing, when I was fully into it, could sometimes be done even amidst the chaos that is my children.
Every other weekend, typically, I have this time alone when the children are with their father. What I think annoys me the most is that it takes me a day to simply wind down from the twelve previous days I’ve had to take care of them. They leave on Friday night, but it’s usually not until sometime late Saturday afternoon that I am in a state of mind where I can sit and concentrate.
So why am I not working on it now? I’m coming up to a major edit and this post has been bothering me, niggling in my brain to be written. This is me, getting it over and done with. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
I also wanted to say that, writing a novel makes me feel a bit like this guy:
The Eye, by David Altmejd
Disturbing, isn’t he? I found him at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal two weekends ago. The hands are my characters, wrapping themselves around my brain and wanting to get out; the hole is the feeling I have as I pour forth my entire being into my writing, onto the pages.
I hope my writing talent is worthy of such sentiment. If it is, I’m sure to be successful.
According to a blog post I read here at Brainsnorts the most important part about opening a novel is the first four sentences. So I decided to go to my bookshelf and pick up four novels at random and check it out, to see if there’s anything the first few sentences have in common in each book. These were my selections:
Standing Stones – The Best stories of John Metcalf
“Single Gents Only” (a short story)
After David had again wrested the heavy suitcase from his father’s obstinately polite grip and after he’d bought the ticket and assured his mother he wouldn’t lose it, the three of them stood in the echoing booking hall of the railway station. His mother was wearing a hat that looked like a pink felt Christmas pudding.
David knew that they appeared to others as obvious characters from a church-basement play. His father was trying to project affability or benevolence by moving his head in an almost imperceptible nodding motion while gazing with seeming approval at a Bovril advertisement.
This seems to me like a promising story. There is movement in it in the form of the fact that these people are going somewhere. The fact that the son takes the suitcase from his father tells me that he’s an adult. I want to know where they’re going. The description is good enough that I can imagine the scene easily.
The Marks of Cain by Tom Knox
Simon Quinn was listening to a young man describe how he’d sliced off his own thumb.
“And that,” said the man, “was the beginning of the end. I mean, cutting off your thumb, with a knife, that’s not nothing, is it? That’s serious shit. Cutting your own thumb off. Fucked my bowling.”
Okay, that was more than four sentences, but they were short ones. Shoot me. This opening is interesting. It doesn’t have much in the area of description, but how much description do we need? We can easily imagine the blood involved. Who is the man to Simon and why is he listening to such a horrific story? I want to know more.
It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance. Mrs. Baird’s was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper, gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs. Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and paper with which he always traveled.
I met Mrs. Baird in the front hall on my way out.
This opens very nicely indeed. The description is lush and from it we gather that Mrs. Baird is not going to be a central character, as we don’t get her first name from the narrator. Best of all, the very first sentence tells us that something mysterious will happen! Again, I want to read more!
I stare up through gaps in the sea-grass parasol at the bluest of skies, summer blue, Mediterranean blue, with a contented sigh. Christian is beside me, stretched out on a sun lounge. My husband – my hot, beautiful husband, shirtless and in cut-off jeans – is reading a book predicting the collapse of the Western banking system. By all accounts, it’s a page-turner.
Here we have two shades of blue and a good-looking man reading a boring book.
So. What do three of these openings have in common? Amazing descriptiveness, movement, action and/or gore and some element which makes us want to know more. What’s going to happen? Who are these people? Why are they; 1. in a train station; 2. cutting off their own thumbs; 3. staying in a place where someone is going to disappear?
And number 4? It tells us what not to do. By all accounts, it’s a page-turner. 😉
Thank you again to Brainsnorts for the idea for this post!
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