Bleeding For Your Craft

It was Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith who said of writing "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." I thought the quote was charming, maybe slightly credible, when I first heard it. In reality, it is profoundly true. 

When I first began this journey, I tried to remain inside myself. I was extremely selective about the people I informed about what I was doing. I didn't want people to know because I didn't want people to want to read what I was writing. Basically, I didn't want them in my head. 

When you are writing a character-driven novel you need your characters to be real. And if your characters are going to be real, a lot of soul searching is inevitable. You have to step into your situations to try to learn what your new friends will say, how they will feel, how they react. Sometimes it comes naturally, like remembering what it was like to hold your child for the first time. But other times--well, other times require you to reach deep into yourself and pull out emotions and memories that you may have long since buried. Emotions and memories that cause pain once you rip them out.

Is it worth it, this cutting into yourself and opening old wounds? If I can take a slice of myself and effectively use it to breathe life into another being, then the answer is undeniably yes. And if that being is able to bring some sort of escape, enlightenment, or encouragement to someone else, I can even let people inside my head for a few hundred pages. After all, as E.L. Doctorow said, "writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Following the Advice of Others

I have read through the first 80 pages of my rough draft so far, and I'm glad that I am not doing the rewrite yet. Yes, I've made a few minor changes here and there, but those were just because I didn't want to miss them the next time through. Whoever all of these established novelists are before me, they really know what they are talking about!

By reading through the first part of my novel again, I have discovered how my early characters are so vastly different from the characters they turned out to be. Much of the early dialog does not quite fit the personality of my characters, and so a lot of tweaking will have to made to it when I do start my rewrite. By not starting my rewrite yet, I have time to sit back and come up with dialog that my characters actually would have with each other. I know my characters so much better now than I did when I first started this journey with them. It would not be fair for me to not represent them properly.

I also made a huge, story-changing decision last night. When I started writing, the story in my head was about three friends, with one being the central character, and the other two being major supporters. As the story came together on paper, more was revealed about my major supporters than I even knew existed. Last night I realized that I have enough backstory to bring out the struggles of the supporting characters more and give them more of the limelight. And since I envision at least one, maybe two following books on these characters, that will give me more to play with in the subsequent novel/s.

So, here's to all of the published writers who are willing to share what they have learned with the world on their blogs. I am very thankful for all of the tips I have learned from them. I hope that as I refine my own way of writing I don't forget to also share what I'm learning along the way.