Wells, Filled and Otherwise

Shauna posted recently about 'filling the well'. To be honest, it's a term I only started hearing a couple of years ago when I started spending time with writers.

The idea seems to be that creativity is a cool liquid, of which we drink deeply. Sometimes, a project can leave us feeling drained. Times like that, we need to stop drinking and let others' waters replenish our own.

At least, I think that's the idea. It's one of those things folks tend to talk about as though everyone else already knows. I've had to pick the metaphor up on the run.

I get the feeling writers expect to approach their new project with a well filled to the brim with sparkling ideas. With every day's work, the bucket has to dip just that little bit deeper. A few I know fear that one day they 'go to the well' and hear nothing but a dry thunk.

Me, I don't like this metaphor so much. It's so.....

passive.

If I have a well of ideas, its a bloody great artesian thing.

I'm a productive guy: I write a novel or two a year. Do maybe a dozen, two dozen paintings. Fill a couple of sketchbooks and occasionally bring a little extra spark to my gentle whoredom in the tattoo studio. I don't lower a bucket and hope to find something. For me, it's about not being knocked down by the spray.

So what do I do to stay creative?

1. Distrust Mood: I had the great good fortune to have the idea of a 'creative mood' drummed out of me early on. Stephen King puts it nicely in this article, where he suggests the muse is most likely to find you if you're already sitting there working.

2. Care for Your Tools: I keep my pencils sharp, my brushes soft, my pens inked, my typewriter oiled and my laptop clean. I also eat pretty well and stay in reasonable shape. I know painters who wouldn't dream of letting paint sludge dry on their brushes, but they do nothing to care for the hand and arm and brain doing the work.

3. Permission to Fail: By definition, every day cannot be our best. That's okay, no big deal. The more we practice our arts, the better we get. The better our 'average' becomes. I find it helpful to accept that today's work might suck, then get on with it.

4. Blood to Brain: Thinking burns glucose. It also requires oxygen, and the clearing of waste products. How does all that happen? Yup, blood flow.

When I feel blocked during a work session, I charge up the old heart. These days I have a heavy bag behind the house, and whaling on it feels great. Before the bag, I'd do pushups or situps. I'm often surprised at how a quick shock of activity like that will clear those blockages.

5. Sidestep: I like to jump around in different media. Even the ones I'm bad at. As long as it gives me a little bit of fun, what's the harm?

In fact, a sidestep was how I started writing in the first place. One of the reasons I started down this road was that I was doing an enormous amount of work-for-hire drawing comics. It was great fun, and I was forced to stretch my art in ways I never would have otherwise tried, but... I missed telling my own stories. Doing two comics at once was so time-consuming it was out of the question, so I sat down and wrote a novel. And another. And....

And lastly, COFFEE: I drink a lot of coffee. A lot.

Even when I'm going down a wrong turn, I get there quickly.

A Little on the Trashy Side

The Kentucky Headhunters once sang, "I like my women just a little on the trashy side."

While the Dynamo is a class act, my tastes in other stuff, well....

I grew up with sci fi, fantasy, noir detective yarns and comics. Space warps and talking swords, hard-boiled dicks who shot first and asked questions later and men in their underwear throwing cars at each other were my meat. Still are.

Except I had the blessing and the curse of a fairly posh education. I studied classics. I learned a hell of a lot about how to think well. But there was always a big disconnect between my professors and me.

I'd show them Jack Kirby's art. They'd see the Hulk trying to feed Galactus his teeth and miss a vibrant muscularity of line that goes right back to Michaelangelo.

I'd mention Raymond Chandler, and they'd miss the lean, stripped-down prose and an existential angst every bit as bleak as that of Hemingway or Fitzgerald, except that unlike those two, Chandler's fiction never quite gave up hope.

These days, heaps of literary writers work within the genres. It's the best of both worlds, and most everyone knows it. James Lee Burke, Thomas Harris, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, ah, the list goes on and on. And it's forced everyone to step up their game.

A writer who 30 years ago might have been content with lazy writing and a regular check now has to pay attention to language and character development and all that good stuff. And those ivory tower elitists have even started to (shudder) have plots.

These days it's okay to be a little on the trashy side. As long as it's 'quality trash'. And we're all the better for it.

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

73,000 words

Stephen King says building memorable and believable characters is nothing more or less than our own observation of human beings and our ability to tell the truth.

He also says, tell the truth and you won't be popular in polite society for long.

I remember being fourteen or fifteen years old. Being afraid all the time, and turning hard to hide that fear. Looking at the violence and addiction around me, the teenaged parents, the kids who came out of prison dead eyed and flat faced and the ones who never got more than a memorial page in the yearbook, I was scared.

I remember sitting with Interview With a Vampire and getting my first clear vision of a life beyond what I knew. The thought that I might one day sit at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny street in Paris was impossible, but too tantalizing to resist.

I got tastes of what I wanted, but I also plumbed a lot of my own personal darkness. One day, I finally did get free. My dreams came true because I paid what they cost.

When my work goes wrong, this is usually where it gets lost: it loses its honesty. It's tempting to write these sort of nifty-clean thrillers where you can imagine Roger Moore in the lead. Or genteel murder mysteries where old ladies have to figure out who killed the vicar. Hell, I love to read that stuff.

But that's not my voice. It's part of the human condition I can relate to vicariously, but not the part that I can speak from with any authority. I *can* be honest about fear, about predators and victims and souls in moral freefall, about violence, hope and love.

I once couch-surfed with a stripper/sometime hooker and her disgraced cop boyfriend/sometime pimp. I can be honest about the love and anger and sadness between them in a way that I can't about, say, a witty and debonair jewel thief, or a group of high school kids throwing a party with their parents out of town.

The Tiny Dynamo sometimes wishes I wrote Regency Romance. She's afraid to let her parents see my work. *My* parents never finished my first book. Ten pages, and they were out.

When the Dynamo read about the Christchurch I know, she was aghast. But she also admitted every word was true. So these last couple weeks, that's a lot of what I've been doing with this (almost finished) retrenchment.

Telling the truth.

28,000 words (very, very odd words.)

The big left turn is still waiting around a bend somewhere, but I've been doing the prep work for it. My villain's going through some changes, getting bad and worse.
Part of it was finding out that my initial setup was only possible in Auckland. Part of it was a growing sense that the bad guy I was sketching out belonged in a very different sort of thriller.

And part of it was a sense of connection between him and two other characters, connections that weren't possible as things stood.

Overall, I'm happy with the changes I'm seeing. My new villain's much more gritty and ferocious, and maybe slightly unhinged. Makes him fun to write, and it's been exciting waiting to see what he'll do next.

The last few days, I feel like I'm living Stephen King's archeological metaphor. That's the one where writing is like digging up odd-shaped bits and trying to figure out how they fit together. I feel as though in my initial enthusiasm, what I thought was a bit of arm bone or something actually belongs in the jaw. But then, if that's the case, I need more bits. And that means this thing I'm assembling must have really big teeth...

Or something like that.

Mostly I want to finish so I can see how the story turns out!

The occasional mental kick

status: 22,000

Over on his blog, Neil Gaiman's trying to play a wee practical joke on Penn & Teller fan, m'self.

I was going to write a little bit about 'quiet listening' as a part of the writing process. Then I realized Stephen King said it better here.

Yes, I'm finally getting comfortable with the link-thingy. First it was the Bronze Age, then everyone was going over to iron. Now I have to learn hyperlinks...

The book's trundling along. It's all about the subplots at the moment. I'm getting a clearer and clearer image of where the book ends up, so now the challenge is getting it where it's going. Mostly I listen. Sometimes I have to prod myself a bit.

Last night, I couldn't think of how the next scene would shape up. Mostly I'll go into a scene with a sense of the characters involved, the conflict/tension between them, or at least their different goals so I can found out how that shapes the conflict, but last night I just couldn't see it. I had an odd picture in my head and one sentence.

One mental kick in the ass later, I wrote that sentence. Then the next. And the one after that.

1200 words (I'm saving the extra 200 as a safety cushion in case I need it today) and four lean scenes later, I could have written heaps more. Stupid sleep...

Where Do Stories Come From, Grandpa

status: 18000 words (still on track)

In Lisey's Story, Stephen King talks about writing being like finding a piece of colored string on the ground and following it to see where it goes. I like all of his writing metaphors: an archeological dig, sitting in a basement with a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, trying to attract a shy smelly animal.

Today I thought I'd tlak about some of my colored strings, and where they seem to be leading me.

The first thread that set my gears turning was a tragedy. A seventeen year old juvenile delinquent was beaten to death when shackled to a max-security offender in the back of a van. The private security company (mall cops) who handle prison transport got the forms wrong.

The second was the New Year's crime spree of a mad dog killer. An ex-boxer turned convicted killer lifts weights in prison for twelve years and becomes really quite scary. No one thinks to ask why he hasn't been showing up to meet with his parole officer for weeks. When the cops finally do knock on his door, they find half an arsenal. A body count follows.

I didn't notice that I was paying more attention to those news items than others. Not until the first frayed ends of a scene started playing in my head and wouldn't quit. A man sat on a bench down in the courthouse basement, near the parking garage. It's lunchtime, and the alert, capable bailiffs have handed him over to a couple of lax, disinterested mall cops. The kid next to him keeps chattering away, nervous and annoying.

The man's eyes stay on the guards.

Of course, nothing stays the same. Tomorrow I'll post on how that soon-to-be-escaped felon is changing as I write.