True Confessions # 2

I'm an adult-onset atheist.

I was an easy sell for the warm and fuzzy parts of religion. But not for nothing am I a lawyer. I can recognize a losing argument.

Religion endures. Not for much longer, perhaps, but its had an awfully good run. Sure, lots of the Bible now sounds bizarre. Like offering your daughter to satisfy the sexual appetites of house guests or the death penalty for wearing mixed fibres. Or human sacrifice. The Bible's world was different from ours.

How different? Well, 100 years ago we seriously debated whether women should vote. 250 years ago, slavery made a lot of sense to a lot of people. 2000 years ago, 1000 was M.

Now, imagine the world was 1000s of years ago. The earth is flat, and almost everything in it is a mystery. You likely believe in lots of Gods, on the QT, even if you're Jewish. Your tribe is your universe.

That's the world of the Bible. A world I love.

Not for the mind-numbing genealogies. Not for the obsessive-compulsive brutality of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, or for the psychedelic sadism of Revelations.

I love the stories. Jealous Cain. Joseph, weeping on his reunion with the long lost brothers who almost killed him. Esther's courage. Jacob's love for Rachel, burning bright for all those years that he tended her father's sheep. The good Samaritan.

Thousands of years ago, without pens, pencils, books, or paper, people recorded these stories. They're still compelling.

That's more than miraculous enough for me. If I have faith in anything, I have faith in stories.

Where does it happen for you?

Ideas have been hurling themselves at me for a long time.

Sometimes they slip by before I can write them down. Sometimes they stay with me stubbornly over months or even years, until I yield to their demands to let me out of your head and onto a page, goddammit!

I don't pursue them. Not usually. Every once in a while I have to: for assignments, or because I'm expected to make some original remarks, or something like that. I find inspiration doesn't take well to being chased down and trussed up. The results of this process are rarely appetizing.

This morning, an idea came to me as I was lying in bed, with an hour or so left to go before the alarm would sound. I've now lost that idea, which is annoying, but its also quite aside from the point I'm about to make.

It also struck me - and I managed to remember this part - that most ideas come to me in the wee hours, while I wait for the alarm.

Why? Its warm and secure, perhaps. Most of the year, where I live, its also pitch black. I won't be interrupted. I'm relaxed. I'm still wrapped in the texture of dreams.

I'm also just a little bit bored. Ideas abhor a vacuum.

In about 40 years of thinking about stories, I never appreciated the importance of being in my bed, 6 am.

Where and when do your ideas get delivered?

How much do you value your Unwritten pages?

I see you there, in the thin winter dawn, on your way to work. I see you on your way home too, in the frigid twilight of another forgettable day. I see the dream glowing warmly inside you. That dream is as familiar to me as my porch light.

A dream is a song your heart sings, right? Its what Martin Luther King had. You gotta have one. Otherwise, how ya gonna make a dream come true?

I want you to extinguish your dream.

As long as that dream is your identity, you'll never risk it. Your unwritten pages will be worth more than your written ones. I can't give you a new identity; you'll have to find something else to burn inside you, to fuel you through life's slow and mushy sections.

If you actually put pen to paper, perhaps you will become famous. But the odds are against it. That's what makes artists courageous. They exchange their fantasies of what might be in order to create what is.

That's also why humility is part of creating just about anything. I know there are plenty of artists who seem stuffed with their own cultural importance. To toss your own work into the unending river of human creativity, and hope that it will surface, even if only briefly - that takes guts. And maybe some bravado, too.

It takes an even deeper fortitude to know that what is so very dear to you may end up not even being the froth on a wave.

Trade the theoretical perfection of your undone work for the truth of what you can complete.

If a little puffery helps you out with that, you're forgiven.

As long as you actually write.

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #3

Hand-writing

Personally, I find handwriting to be quite magical.

Typing makes editing easy. Most of us are good at editing. Way better than we are at writing. So we favour the strong editing muscle, making it stronger, and neglect the writing muscle, making it weaker still.

Handwriting helps level the playing field. It makes editing a bit harder. Messier. Which encourages you to keep writing, which is what you really need to do.

Its easier to type a lie than it is to write it. No really, I mean that. Just like its easier to tell a lie dressed in a suit and positioned behind a desk than it is to do so in your favorite jeans while walking the dog in the park on Sunday morning. True things, the things you really want to write, are more likely to flow from your pen than a keyboard.

Writing, for many of us, is just plain old scary. This not just because of all those would-be editors out there (although they're also part of the problem). Its because we're all scared of going deep inside and coming up with nothing.

I handwrote the first 20,000 words or so of my longest novel. This also means its the only one of my three novels that had a true "first draft," because the manuscript had to be transcribed, a job which was surprisingly worthwhile.

I think its no accident that this is also the novel on which I've made the most progress. If you're not a pen addict already, why not try this for the early stages of your next idea? Could it hurt?

Added bonus: its fun to sit among the netbooks in Starbucks, and be the only one with a notebook - a real one, I mean. Deliciously Luddite. And you never have to worry about the batteries running out.

Altered states

I'll be travelling for work next week. The day time will be taken up with law stuff, and some of the evening, too. But there will be a few hours, above and beyond that. Wee hours, perhaps.

Hours that are just for me.

No dishes, no kids, no last call to make, no pile of recycling I really should take out. Just a hotel room and the minimal temptations of cable.

So its back to Untold Stories, the novel I hoped I'd finish by Christmas. The one that's long enough (70,000 + words) to be a novel already. Except I'm not done with it.

I love this story. One character is an art historian. In my publication fantasies, the book is loaded with beautiful, glossy pictures, the same ones which fill her mind.

Here's my problem. I've been away from this thing for about 2 and a half months now, between pagan Saturnalia, finishing the play, raising two kids and earning an income. So I need to re-immerse and reacquaint. To reread.

But when I re-read, I edit. Editing is so very seductive. And its way less scary (and less work) than actually writing new material.

So, I think what I'll do is put a deadline on the re-reading process. First night away only. Might even force myself to skim in some areas. If I could come back with two new chapters, even rough ones, I'd be delirious. I need to write a dinner party stand-off and some connective tissue wherein two characters cement their relationship into a (holding) pattern.

I can do this.

Wish me luck.

Back on the Wagon

I'd like to pretend that you noticed that I've been away for the last week. Actually, I do pretend that: in my mind I have a whole cast of readers. They all comment, too. I'm even getting to know some of them.

There's Jim, who'se tall and skinny and writes science fiction. His comments can be snarky, but never, ever when my own post sounds depressed or disheartened. Reading between the lines, his day job must be a menial bore.

There's Eloise, a know it all teen. She's already written 3 adult novels; two have been published. They didn't do well. She shows up here to lord it over the rest of us and forget that she's washed up at 19. We all scavenge her posts for scraps of info about the real literary world.

There's Heather, a housewife in Miami. And Peach, who's teaching on a native reserve. And Edgar, a highly erudite 70 something who I really worry about, because he has Parkinson's and talks alot about death.

sigh.

Anyway, I fell off the blog wagon last week. Big time. Work, volunteer commitments, my yellow lab's operation, kids, house, etc. etc.

Oh, and I finished the play I've worked on for the last six months. Finished. A delicious word.

Don't feel too slighted - I also had tickets to two plays I didn't get to see.

While having a full life means you can't write as much as you'd like, it does give you a great guilt shield at times like this.

And as of today, the wagon's got my weight to carry again. Four pounds less of that, btw. Another thing that kept me busy.

True Confessions #1

Before we go much further, I need to tell you about the romances.

Of course, I read other books. Lots of them. Very high-brow stuff, too, for the most part. You know - Shakespeare, Shelley, Virginia Woolf. And Genest, Rilke and Tolstoy. All that.

I got hooked on pink crack as a teen. Do you remember Barbara Cartland? She was a popular icon at one point: an octogenarian in rose silks, trailed by swaths of pekingese. Even I cringed at the gilt candelabra and pseudo-Versailles back drops.

But the books! 140-160 pages, paragraphs of no more than five lines and dialogue which, way before texting, often ended in "...". Schmaltzy beyond belief. Never more licentious than a kiss. I started when I was 14, gradually expanding my tastes to novels by other romanticists.

Over the following dozen years, I read over a thousand of them.

Yep, you read that right. Over. One. Thousand. I'll help you with the math. That's about 90/year. One or two a week. Except that doesn't reflect the reality of periodic 3 book a day benders.

I eschewed the bodice rippers, and had no time for Harlequin. For a long time, I told myself this meant I hadn't quite sunk to the bottom.

While I wrote a thesis on romances, I make no pretence that the authors I read were more than competent (one exception - see below). Collectively, however, the books formed a literary river into which I am now glad that I was baptised.

It was all there. The importance of setting. The right balance of dialogue and narration. The impossibility of ever being completely original. The tension between voice and genre.

And I loved them.

The exception, by the way, is Georgette Heyer. A genius. Why not overcome your own prejudices, read her and find out why?

100% Unguaranteed Anti-Block #2

Cheat on the one you love

You have this great idea right? So good that the awesomeness of it quietly blows your mind when you're riding the bus home. So good that you're afraid to tell anyone about it. So good that it will change the history of the written word, and make critics bow down in awe.

So good that your fingers cramp with fear as you sit down to your key board. Assuming you even manage to get that far.

If this sounds familiar, it may be that you aren't ready for your great idea. Yet. Just because you're in love with the prettiest girl at the high school dance doesn't mean that the time is right to sweep her onto the floor.

Try practicing your moves first. With a partner who's less intimidating.

There are lots of things you can write besides novels. Like letters to the Editor. Facebook posts. The Parent/teacher report.

No, I am not joking. You're a writer. Get out there and write. Hone your craft in a less pressured atmosphere. Take it seriously, or it won't count. Enroll in a course in some other kind of writing. Become a contributor to your community newspaper. Do something -anything - other people will read.

I learned a lot about writing from drafting legal submissions. Go figure.

Come home to your love when you've acquired enough polish to woo her properly. Trust me on this one. It'll go a lot more smoothly.