Tag: writing process

The Lost Book Club: On Writing

I saved Stephen King’s On Writing, which was referenced in the Lost episode “Every Man for Himself” for the end of the season. When school gets out, I’ll start plugging away more seriously on my next novel, and I figured that perhaps King might offer some inspiration if not a swift kick in the proverbial pants.

King begins with a series of snapshots of his childhood and young adulthood leading up to the publication of Carrie. This is the memoir section of the book wherein King relates the tales of his wonder years interspersed with commentary about how these things led him to becoming the writer he became. From there, he shares advice and wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of writing. Some of it useful, some of it entertaining.

The most vivid portion is the end. This is the project he was working on when he was hit by a van while walking along a Maine highway back in 1999. He was very nearly killed and spent months in and out of surgery and in rehab learning to walk again. The end of the book, fittingly titled “On Living,” describes how getting back into writing helped him through that event. It’s powerfully written and terrifying in the way that reality often is.

On the whole, I can’t say I learned much that I didn’t know about the craft – that section of the book is thin and frequently not much more than an arrow pointing to Strunk & White – but what I got was a wide open sense of anything being possible. That kick in the pants to get me going this summer when I will have the time (starting next week) to finish the next book. Indeed, King himself describes the book as a permission slip:

…you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.

King’s unabashed belief in the literal magic of writing is a sentiment that I share, and probably the one thing, that more than anything else keeps me banging out these words despite the fact that so few wind up reading them. It is still worthwhile and as much my work as the things that pay the bills.

The optimism and inspiration are the best parts of On Writing.

This magic is also where On Writing connects to Lost when King explains what writng is.

Telepathy, of course.

He explains that the writer sends his thoughts out across time and space to readers scattered around the world and existing in different times. King points out that he is writing in 1999, but that the book won’t be released until 2000 so all readers are at least a few years down the timestream from him. Here king gets at the permanence of writing and suggests the great dialogs that have gone on in print for thousands of years much like (I think) Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose who described libararies as great silent conversations.

To illustrate his point, King sets up a little thought experiment and this is where King’s telepathic powers manifest themselves on Lost island:

Look, here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot stub which it is constantly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do.

He then argues that most readers of that paragraph will fixate on the ‘8’ on the rabbit’s back, and it’s this thought that creates the telepathy. It’s this image that the writer has projected into the reader’s mind. I agree; it’s what jumps out and creates the sense of mystery that will keep me wanting more. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the numbers, I want to know why it’s there.

I’m sure Sawyer did too.

In “Every Man for Himself” – an episode that also references Of Mice and Men (“Tell me about the rabbits, George”) much more explicitly than it does On Writing – Ben has Sawyer strapped to a table. He appears to have just come out of surgery. Ben shows him a rabbit in a cage and proceeds to give the cage the kind of shaking that kills babies. The rabbit dies. Ben tells Sawyer that the rabbit had a pacemaker just like the one he’s had implanted in Sawyer, which will explode if Sawyer’s heart rate goes too high as it might if he were to try to escape or sleep with Kate. It’s a clever scene, but what stands out is the blue ‘8’ stenciled on the rabbit’s back. Later, Ben tells Sawyer about the rabbits, or at least rabbit-8 when he confides that there were no pacemakers; instead, it was an elaborate con designed to break Sawyer’s will.

Referencing King’s thoughts about writing and telepathy appears at first to be a clever and subtle reminder of the apparent, though unexplained, role of telepathy on the show. More interesting, though, is the way it begins to lay the groundwork for seeing Lost as a show about time travel, which I think it is. I’m not sure we’ll see characters time traveling as in Back to the Future, but I think we will see (and have already seen) their consciences and thoughts projected through the timestream, which is really what King was talking about so I’m chalking On Writing up to being yet another literary hint about alternate or parallel or shifted timestreams on Lost.

There’s something else, too, aside from the fact that this bit of On Writing is another rabbitcentric literary reference joining Of Mice and Men, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Watership Down (all of which makes me wonder when Donnie Darko, a time travel film laden with rabbit symbolism will show up on Lost) and that’s The Stand.

I’ve never read The Stand, and it hasn’t shown up on Lost, but I do know that the show’s creators have said that it is an influence on the show. This is interesting because in On Writing, King devotes some time to describing the problems he had in completing that novel. He said there were too many characters, too many storylines. In the end the solution was to blow a bunch of them up.

Sound familiar? That would resolve many of the storylines and propel the other ones towards conclusion. As season 3 of Lost closes out in tonight’s “Through the Looking Glass” with the survivors hoarding dynamite and making plans to “blow the Others to hell,” I can’t but think that this sounds an awful lot like King’s recollection of how he moved The Stand to conclusion.

I suspect some storylines will end tonight and what remains will be the situation that propels Lost to its ultimate conclusion in 2010. Hell, I’m predicting mass doom.

Be sure to check out:

Pearls Before Swan for more thoughts about On Writing. (h/t as well since this is how I learned that rabbit-8 was referencing On Writing)
Mark at Scribes & Scoundrels also has a theory about the season finale: mass doom… or mass rescue?

Click here for my Lost Book Club index page.

Ahead of Where I Am

July 17, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

Sometimes – today for instance – I find myself writing a scene and it just isn’t coming together. It’s a key part of the story, but all I’m interested in is a scene that’s really coming together, but that won’t happen for another hundred pages or so.

I don’t like to claim writer’s block since that’s too easy an excuse to not write, but, man, I was so ahead of where I was and that killed the desire to work.

That’s when it’s a good idea to tackle those dirty dishes and that last load of laundry. It’s not really writing, but it’s not really not writing either. So, my heart is ahead of where I am in the latest novel, but when I got back to it I found the scene and left off at a place I’m excited to get back to.

Damn, this post is vague, but that’s what I did on this vague and fuzzy day.

Starting a New Novel

June 5, 2006 • James Brush • 1 Comment

Last week, I started on what will someday be my third novel. The second one, Try Everything in a Cartoon Romance, is pretty much done, but it’s time to begin a third one while I decide what to do with the second.

When I was in graduate school, I wrote a screenplay called Right of Way that I always intended to revisit and rewrite as a novel in order to explore the characters and issues more deeply than a screenplay allows. I’m using the old script as an outline while I get started on the story and reintroduce myself to the characters.

It starts in Austin in 1995. It’s about Larry and his younger brother, Chip, who has battled cancer on and off his whole life. After relapsing at age eighteen, Chip decides he’s not going to go back for treatment.

He runs away from his home in Houston and shows up at Larry’s doorstep in Austin wanting to “just try living for once.” He’s never really lived except in the books he read in the hospital and so with a head full of Kerouac, Thoreau, Hemingway and London, his own private wish-upon-a-star is to get to know his brother (who is ten years older and was all but forgotten by their parents who were perpetually focused on the sick kid) and travel to see the Grateful Dead, living the kind of adventure he’s read about in books.

Needless to say this is all quite a complication for his more strait-laced and settled older brother who wants to help Chip, but doesn’t know if helping him involves taking him on his grand adventure or getting him back to treatment.

That’s the story in broadest strokes. Even though I’ve already made major changes from the script I do have most of the story plotted out. I am, however, permitting myself to make as many changes as I want. Including the title, which for now is Short Time to Be Here, a modification of a line from the Grateful Dead’s “Box of Rain.”

I’m on page 15. It’s not really flowing yet. That comes later, when the characters truly start talking. The beginnings are always the hardest for me, but eventually the whole thing will come alive and then it just flows. I love when that happens.

“How Do You Make Up Your Stories?”

May 24, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

We have a guest speaker program at school, and last week I was asked to be the guest speaker and give a talk about writing.

I wasn’t sure what to talk about at first, but then I decided that I’d talk about the process of writing and publishing my book, which is what people always want to know about when they find out I’ve written a book (by the way – shameless self-promotion here – feel free to click over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase a copy). That led me to thinking about answering some of the questions that my students frequently ask about writing. Such things as: “Where do characters come from?” and “How do you make up your stories?”

I decided to talk mostly about making up stories and thought it would be useful (and hopefully entertaining) to read a short story I’d written and then use that as a frame of reference for discussing how a story develops.

The story I chose to read is called “Yawgoog.” I wrote it during the summer of 2000, and it was published in The Sound Of What?, a now vanished online literary journal/community. “Yawgoog” is about two boys who find a bunch of money out in the woods near a Boy Scout camp.

My short stories sometimes originate in real life, little moments that emerge from memory, scenes vividly recalled years later. I sometimes tell my students to try starting their stories with the everyday moments that they all know from firsthand experience and then build the story around those things. The story doesn’t have to be true; it just has to feel that way.

That’s how “Yawgoog” started. While watching an electrical strom come in one day a few summers back, I remembered another summer day, long ago, when I was in Boy Scouts. I was at summer camp, out on the pond in a canoe, or maybe a row boat, just drifting and fishing with a friend named John. An electrical storm suddenly appeared and we had to head in fast. We couldn’t make it to the docks so we put in at the nearest land, which was away from the camp and waited out the storm. It didn’t last long and when it moved out, we went back to the camp. End of story.

The scene was vivid in my mind: two guys on a canoe outrunning a storm. Generally, when I think of scenes like this I write the scene as it appeared or felt at the time, but then I usually people them with invented characters. So I wrote the scene and got to know the characters in the canoe. The storm cames up, they paddle to shore and while waiting out the storm, one of them notices an old trash bag. I was as surprised as they were when a whole bunch of money fell out of that bag, but I ran with it, asking myself what these guys would do. That wondering about what they would do with it ultimately became the point of the story. Enjoy.

“Yawgoog”

The paddle cut easily through the water, and the canoe thrust forward a few feet, as silent as a shark. The sun was high, but the air already held the vague promise of coming fall. A gentle wind blew through the trees that surrounded the scout camp on the shore of the small pond. I set the paddle across the aluminum hull and stared out over the glassy surface of the water. Closer to the shore a small fleet of dinghies set sail as boys learned the art of running and tacking. Other than the sailboats, our canoe was the only other boat out. My friend Alexander, who was sitting in the front of the canoe, and I had lost interest in scouts years ago, but we went to camp and we fished and walked around the edges of the small pond while the younger and more eager boys attended to the business of earning merit badges.

Character and Plot

May 11, 2006 • James Brush • 2 Comments

As is wont to happen when I read the Gypsy Scholar blog, I find that thoughts become provoked and his post about plot and character (provoked for him by an entry on the interesting Contemporary Nomad blog) is one that provoked this response (though I hope my tone is not too provocative):

I find that when I write short stories (and screenplays) plot tends to come first and the characters serve it. With longer works, characters tend to come first and their personalities drive the plot because it’s the decisions the characters make that ultimately affect what happens to them and how the plot unfolds. For me, the plot changes from what I had intended originally more than the characters.

What you said about leaving out details in the interest of advancing story is very true and important, but the writer still knows those details and they inform the characters’ decisions and actions even if they are never explicitly revealed.

I agree with Jessica’s point about being drawn back by character. As an example, I’ll use To Kill a Mockingbird since it’s the last book I read. I keep turning the pages not because I want to know how the town deals with the trial but because I really like listening to Scout tell the story. I enjoy her voice and her sense of humor.

Perhaps this all sounds flaky as hell, but that’s how it works for me.

Now that school is winding down and summer, which is when I do most of my writing, is fast approaching, my thoughts turn to writing and I find that the character/plot issue is still on my mind.

For me and me alone, since writing is a very individual sport with as many methods as there are writers, character is where it starts and character is what provides the excitement and even the magic of the whole process. At the start of a piece, I usually don’t know the characters very well, but I tend to know them better than I know what will happen to them.

These imaginary people (I won’t call them friends) sort of develop, and I let them talk to one another and to me. We like to talk when we drive. These characters often have stories that are never revealed in the course of a piece of writing.

When I wrote A Place Without a Postcard, I wrote out 30 pages of Sergio (whose dog gives this blog its name) telling his story. I only meant to include a few lines, but I really got into this character’s story just flowing along. I had no idea how much there was to him when I first thought of him.

Once I know the characters I start to get a bead on what happens to them. That’s where the story develops and as the story comes together, I generally have no idea where (or even when) it’s going to end. Sometimes I know how I’d like it to go, but usually it ends up somewhere else.

Oftentimes I overwrite a character. My first drafts are substantially longer than than the final draft and those pages that are cut are often character bits: explorations, flashbacks, asides. All of these become parts of who those characters are and wind up informing their decisions, though they aren’t included in the final draft. Sometimes these deleted scenes, to use the language of DVDs, become separate stories.

Once a first draft is completed the plot may shift, and characters might change, but typically the plot changes more than the characters do. I do, however, frequently fire characters when I realize they are only there to advance the plot and whatever they were there to do suddenly seems uneccessary or can be accomplished more organically by another character.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps this stems from ways of viewing the world. Plot coming first feels to me like destiny. Character coming first feels like free will. I tend to lean towards free will and so the plot in any given piece of writing tends to spring more from the choices a character makes rather than what I need for him or her to do to get to the ending that I originally imagined.

That probably sounds a bit high-minded because in reality I don’t think about this at all when I’m actually writing. Besides the end result should be something in which character and plot and all the other elements that make up a whole and compelling tale flow seamlessly along leaving only chicken-and-the-egg musings such as this post.

Ultimately a writer has to be able to handle both. While in graduate school studying screenwriting, I learned about plot, because that seems to drive the writing process for scripts, but plot doesn’t get me writing. Characters do. Of course once I have a character that intrigues me, that character’s story will keep me going as I discover what exactly it is.

Finally, this brings to mind an analogy that one of my film professors used to use when encouraging students to learn both film and video (back when there was a difference): you’ve got to be able to play the piano with both hands. I think plot and character are like that. Every writer will start from a different place, but for the story to work for the reader, the two must be woven together, each supporting the other.