Wordsmithies

I used to write with music playing in the background. The lyric of a song could set me off writing an entire story about some sentiment in the song. For example, the line ‘Rael, imperial aerosol kid’ from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway inspired a boxful of notebooks crammed with ideas and eventually a novel of 130,000 words. The songwriter, Sting, goes the other way, where he reads a book and writes a song that boils down the essence of a book.

Artists feed off each other for ideas, for different ways of expressing emotions. Poets have to find powerful words and line them up one at a time to create something marvelous in a minuscule space. Novelists need to be equally careful with their words, but they have the luxury of being able to circle around the main point, drawing the reader into the intended mood by stealth.

We write to tell stories, but we also write to use words, to watch them slowly move across the page, savoring certain phrases for their rhythm and beauty. That’s why it is so hard to edit things out, even when we know it will improve the pacing of the overall work. There is a temptation to say ‘to heck with the story, I’ll just write,’ but sharing our words and our stories is our ultimate goal, so we must sometimes defer to our audience and hit delete when we’d rather not.

All art and craft is an exercise in precision and precision seems a cold process. Perhaps it is cold in a good way, though. How else do we get a shiver from having found the exact way to describe something?

Amy

Writing in the Wrong Direction

I have been doing a great deal of writing the past two weeks, but I feel like the more I write, the farther afield I go. I've become too comfortable with the characters and instead of their actions moving them forward with determination, they now stroll leisurely through a pastoral world. Every new scene I write seems to pull them farther away from the super-highway of inevitablity that I thought I had paved. How does a writer keep up the pressure on the cast of characters to keep them moving along at a decent clip? Do we just get tired of the struggle of writing so many conflict/resolution scenes that at some point we feel obligated to let our characters take a vacation?

Amy

Meaning to Post

Scenes swirl through my head like fireflies on a midsummer evening. I keep seeing Giles throw down the eight-year-old Sebastian into the muck of a stall, but it happens too soon, even though it comes at the right time to solve a different plot dilemma.

Writing scenes out of sequence poses many problems in a book with several strong characters whose actions yield consequences years later. It’s like writing a symphony backwards. I’m worried that my characters will get out of hand, just like they did in my first novel. Already, Turner is doing things he wasn’t meant to do, but now that he’s done them I envision dark possibilities for him later on. I wish I could write faster.

Amy

Forgotten?

None of us has posted since Feb. 21 when Victoria let Aggie pummel her daughter. We are all . . . not posting. We must be writing, just not posting. And me, I am sick of writing. Instead, I'm assembling materials to make an art book, a collage, I just want to work with color and wavy lines. I dug in my wardrobe tonight and pulled out fabric I bought a few years ago. Sumptuous satins in delicious colors. Jewel colors that will drape. I need to feed my eyes.

But I will also write. short stuff and free associations. In fact, I am journaling daily. It is necessary.
REva