Writing as Magic

So last week I talked about writing as exercise i.e. takes effort but done regularly reaps rewards. But exercise has a certain mechanical, mathematical even, rule to it – if I do an hour’s worth of exercise I will burn a certain amount of calories. I can do it grudgingly. I can be in a bad mood. I can be unmotivated and only just manage it, or I can skip along happily. Doesn’t matter, do the work and the calories burn and a certain amount of progress has been made toward the goal.

Writing isn’t like that.

Not quite anyhow. Because it’s creative the goal is to produce something worthwhile. Perhaps not straight away and we can be patient about the level of quality but not all writing is equal. I can spend an hour writing and produce nothing but pages of ‘ideas’ and ‘brainstorming’ that aren’t anything that can be shared or published. Or I can spend the same hour writing a story that someone might read and enjoy.

But it’s not guaranteed. This is the scary part. Working hard or consistently isn’t enough.

However I kinda sorta don’t worry about that. My attitude and experience is that creativity will flow. When or how inspiration will strike I don’t know. But it does so more if I’m actually writing and it can only be turned into something shareable if I am actually writing. And an idea in my head is wonderful but it’s only something I actually write and finish and can share that really counts.

So you sort of have to have faith in the magic of it. You sit down. You’re tired, uninspired, in a bad mood and feeling lacking in any talent or confidence. Any you start to write. Anything. Ideas. Thoughts about themes, characters, words, phrases, scenes, visual ideas, snippets of dialogue. For me it’s most often writing about writing and then asking myself questions – how does this work? where does he come from? how does she feel?

And I write for my allotted time and maybe, probably for the first few sessions, I have nothing. But eventually, if I keep at it, the magic happens, the spark comes from where-ever it comes from and ideas start to flow. Better than that I actually start to like what I’m writing.

But it’s not guaranteed. I have no idea how it really works just that I do certain things and then it happens. A few days later, particularly if I haven’t written in between times or am working on a new project, I may be back to feeling like I have nothing. So I start over with my brainstorming and journaling and just typing whatever comes into my head. And hope/believe/pray that it happens again.

Repeat the ritual, keep the faith, wait for the fire to fall.

Reliable but unpredictable – magic.

Writing Done this Week

Well I was back at work this week and predictably that has meant I haven’t written as often or as much. I’ve only written on three of the last seven days. Each time though I wrote for 30mins and overall I wrote about 1565 words. Most of that was in the form of ideas though i.e. the kind of rambling I described above.

I did write the first draft of an idea for the TWI Monday flash, but the deadline was Friday 9pm and since I didn’t write at all that day I missed it. I may come back to the idea but it was very slight and to be honest it’s not one of my favourites.

I wrote some thoughts on how to do a sequel/re-write of a story I wrote a few years ago. M. told me it was her favourite of mine and that I should write something similar. I’m not sure how so I wrote about that (see above re: questions)

This evening I wrote mostly brainstorming ideas for Web Writer’s September challenge – which is to write a 3,500 word story called “Hunting Season”. Actually a lot of my thoughts were about combining it with “airship” and another idea I’ve had called “the purpose of flight” – these may still be three stories but may take place in the same world.

Writing as Exercise

I’m doing this because I have started writing again. And I’ve started writing again on the basis that writing is like exercise. In that:

it’s hard to face doing when you haven’t done it for a while

it’s always a little hard to get going but enjoyable when you do

still it’s always going to be easier not to bother

but you do it because you want the long term results

doing it regularly, possibly every day, is a good idea

doing it every day makes it easier to get started

doing it every day makes it more effective

progress is gradual but real

Current Projects

Here’s a list of things I’ve been working on. I’m not going to give too much details here and may even resort to code names rather than titles (I’m a bit weird about talking about stuff that’s still in the early stages) and it’s not my intention to discuss specifics or give excerpts or anything like that. I mostly want to track progress.

TWI Monday Flash – The Write Idea is a writing forum I’m part of and they run a weekly flash fiction competition (250 words). I wrote a piece called “Looking for the Other Aardvark” about Noah. The prompt (that I used) was “it’s going to rain”. I got a couple of votes. There were I think 6 entries overall and the winner scored 4.

Web Writers August Challenge – This is an email list I’m part of. Yesterday I wrote a ~650word story on a theme of a change of attitude/latitude. Today I re-wrote it and it came to 999words. I was quite happy with the results even though I got latitude and longitude the wrong way round. D’oh!

The Young Poisoners Club – this is a story I submitted to an online competition I was part of in 2008. It’s the only one of several such competitions where I’ve completed each round. Anyway, when I started about a week and a half ago thinking about writing again at first I had no inspiration. So I looked at re-writing something and this was it. Sent it to Web Writers and got some nice feedback but realised I’d done little more than tweak it when it needs some structural changes. I may look at making it a play.

The Magic Witch – oh now this is a semi-mythical piece of work. I started it in 2003 and have gone back to it a couple of times but never managed to finish it. It’s a children’s story. In its current form it has, or had until a few days ago, a beginning, an ending and a part in the middle with the words “MISSING MIDSECTION” in bold. I’ve now written some notes sketching out the missing midsection. All I have to do now is write it.

Radio play – I’ve had this idea that I’d like to write a radio play. Aside from possibly converting YPC above I scribbled down an idea called “airship“. No more than notes on an idea for a sort of theme and a character.

World/Feeling – this is super-vague. If I had to describe my own work then I’d say that most of my stories are cute ideas or twist-in-the-tail stories. What I’d like to be able to do is create a sense of a world, a character or just a tone. Like I said, vague.

Well that was quite a lot. Mind you that’s almost two weeks’ worth and I’ve been on holiday. Back to work tomorrow but I do intend to still write every day.

[1]I know, I know. I’m going to do a catch-up, possibly tomorrow.