Writing stuff...

Imagine for a moment that you are Superman. It can be any version of Superman - except the one played by Dean Cain in "Lois and Clark". That, of course, goes without saying.
Now imagine that you're sitting down to eat a delightful dinner that took you all day to cook - obviously, you didn't use your heat vision to whip it up in an instant, you wanted to cook it like a normal guy. You've prepared it, served it and are now getting ready to eat it.
But you take one bite and you start choking. Somehow, there is kryptonite in the dinner. You don't know how it got there, but you've eaten it and swallowed it and now you're falling off your chair...

Writing feels like that sometimes. Here I am with this new story, that has existed in my head in one form or another for many, many years, that I've spent more or less the last three months developing in anticipation of actually writing, but now that I've spent the last two weeks actually trying to write it, what happens? The only thing that comes out is listless, uninspired rubbish. No tension, no flow, no nothing, really. I can blame a lot of it on my job, which has somewhat retrained my brain, and dulled the inspirational fire I had as a young man, but in truth... The kryptonite is me. My too-harsh deadlines, and the ease with which I'll say, "I'll leave it for 20 minutes, see if my head de-clogs."
I know everything that's meant to happen - have planned it in minute detail - but it's just not coming out. Every single paragraph - dull as they are right now - feels like a mountain climb. The krytonite is lodged deep in my chest and I'm falling off my yellow-WWF style steel chair...

That is, until this morning.

Having tried no less than SEVEN different scenes to serve as a prologue, none of which grabbed the attention, or set up any intrigue, I finally broke down and damn near cried at 5:56 am, wondering what happened to my drive. Worse, what happened to my talent? Working Partners could NOT have dulled it all. Whatever happened to the dementedly driven 19 year old wannabe writer, who didn't know the first thing about writing, but did it anyway - and somehow always did it more right than wrong? Where did he go?
Where did the arrogant creative writing university student go? The one who learned the first things about writing, adhered to the rules he liked, broke the ones he didn't, and STILL end up writing more good stuff than bad?
Where did the mad-at-the-world 21 year old newly-employed editor go? The one who couldn't get a handle on editorial process, but could still blow people away with the first two lines of a writing sample?
In short, whatever happened to Jimmy Noble?
This morning, James stepped back and got mentally ready for his job as an editor, while Jimmy took his rightful place in front of the PC. And, at last, a breakthrough was had...

For I sat down and tried to think of what I used to do, when I didn't know a thing about writing. Maybe if I broke one of the rules I now implicitly obey, I might start a fire in my mind.
Why was there no tension in this book? Well, for starters, I set up an impenetrable fantasy world, that we will only come to know through the eyes of a sceptical human character who is introduced to it. The juxtaposition of real world action and mysterious fantasy world action is currently perplexing and not in a good way. And the real world is chock full of so much misery that I KNEW no one would want to keep reading. I knew that the whole time I was writing it, but half a decade at WPL has left me unable to immediately fix it, and too stubborn to go right back to the drawing board. I mean, I put together an exhaustive synopsis, so I have to be on the right track, right?
WRONG!
At the back of my mind, a tiny voice said, "You DO know how to fix this... You DO..."
And I DID… But I would have to do something that I had not done in a book for YEARS… I would have to input an extended flashback… -gasp-



When I first decided to try writing, the two writers I modelled myself on – that is, the two who got me excited about the process of storytelling – were Stephen King and Quentin Tarantino. The latter I admired for his early brazen flouting of the linear film narrative structure – it was through QT that I learned how an author could manipulate an audience or reader’s viewing of the material by moving around through the timeline of the piece. Tension would be wrought from a reader knowing more than the characters did; Intrigue would be built up from characters acting on knowledge that readers did not have.

Likewise, Stephen King thought nothing of jumping back and forward in time, the dual narrative of “IT” for example, being a wonderful showcase for how a non-linear book can be riveting and full of mystery and wonder. In other cases, books like “The Dark Tower” use flashbacks to broaden the world of the stories, give characters depth. To do this, you have to have a good story and good characters, first and foremost – but you also have to trust your abilities. I have the first part – but I don’t have the second anymore, and I need to retrieve that if I’m ever going to have a future as a writer.

So now, I begin with what was originally going to be Chapter 7 – the first of the early chapters that I was really looking forward to writing. In a linear format, it was going to be a tense scene – because the reader didn’t have all the information. So I thought, “OK – this is the best scene in the first ten chapters, it’s going to be where people commit to the book, the story, the protagonist’s journey. Why not just start with it? Modify the beginning so that it can be the start of the book, let it play as before – both reader and character are totally bewildered by the end of it. Then begin the book proper, going back THREE DAYS before that happened, and letting the INTRIGUE slowly build as to what happened there. This will involve tightening and streamlining the first six chapters, but what I should find is that the intrigue will add flavour to these scenes and go some way to improving them anyway…”

So there’s been a breakthrough. Now I just have to write it. I’m almost looking forward to it. I’m REALLY looking forward to the Xmas break, where I get to play-act at being a full-time writer for NEARLY TWO WEEKS. But I must say, even though I haven’t done something NEW with the structure, it just feels so damn good to be doing something that’s not the ‘way’ to do it… Intellectually and artistically, I grew up on non-linear narratives, across different mediums – they were my inspiration.

I forgot that working where I work.

I won’t ever forget it again.