“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

In the early 1980’s when I was in fourth or fifth grade the teacher showed a film titled, Legend of the Boy & the Eagle (Disney, 1967)*. It’s the story of a young Hopi boy who’s banished from his village and befriends an eagle that teaches him how to hunt. One day he returns to his village but is rejected and mocked by other boys who tie eagle’s feathers to his arms. The Hopi boy flees to a high cliff. When he jumps, he changes into a golden eagle and flies away. It’s a beautiful story and one that has stuck with me all my life. I remember rooting for him in the movie. I dreamt about that film for years. When I was a child, my big take away was that a boy could transform himself into something else and rise above the world he knew.

Some days writing is like setting out with a wide smile on a world of adventure. Other days it’s like getting in a boxing ring with one arm and facing a guy twice my size. All I can do is hope for the best.

What am I going to write? Why am I going to write? Am I going to tap the keys for another fantasy, poetry, or story about a lost childhood? What difference will it make with all that is going on in our world today? What am I going to say that will matter against all the wars and divisions among us? How can I have an effect on the political, racial, or ideological walls that separate people? They say love is the universal language, well so is hate. There’s a lot of both in the world, and each one tugs at the ears of writers to listen. How does my voice find its way in the world?

Being a writer is like being a cartographer for the human soul and mind. Whether we write fantasy, romance, horror, or non-fiction, we are all marking the way to some collective truth for others to find.

Sometimes I think of all those writers who came before. For them it seems, in any period, the world was as it is today: full of doubt, full of confusion and war, but also full of grace and insurmountable love. What would they write about today? My guess is that it would be not that different from what they wrote before. Writing is the constant sharpening of the mind and the self against the dulling forces of time.

I am just a grain of sand on the vast shore of humankind and I know it. All writers are. Despite the futility, the writer, that grain of sand, stands up and tells a story. He or she knows that everyone else has his and her own story to tell. Yet they tell it anyway, knowing all the while that deep down that maybe no one will listen. It might be that only a few will even hear it. Maybe they will love it or they might hate the story, but all the writer knows, and what is important, is that there’s story to be told. It has to come out.

According to data reported in 2017, 7.53 billion people currently live on earth. That means that there are (more or less) seven and a half billion minds out there thinking thoughts, making observations and dreaming when they go to sleep. For any zombies reading this, that’s a lot of brains. For the sake of the metaphor in the above paragraph, it’s also a lot of grains.

There are more people alive today than ever before. Isn’t this how it has always been? The world is full of people, and the number is always more than it’s ever been before. There are always people making war, making love and writers around to document it all and everything in between. There are good writers, and bad ones and some who never get read. What happens to the written word once it’s been read? Does it dissipate like a trail of smoke or does it plant itself like a seed somewhere in the garden of the reader’s mind?  

All these people and all the various cultures have points of view and traditions that differ from one another, but there are two things that ring true no matter where you go; love and hate. We see this in the headlines every day. People doing great things for others out of love, and people doing terrible things to others out of hate.

Where is the love in your story? If you’re writing, it’s in the words. It’s in every easy flowing paragraph or thought and in all the mind-crushingly painful lines that you labor to get down.

As I’ve said before, I believe you write what story sits down with you to write. I believe in this wholeheartedly. However, that does not change the fact that I sometimes question the stories that sit down with me.

“Really?” I say to the pregnant woman in a suit of armor who wants me to write about her again. “The world has gone crazy. You want me to write about you?”

“I’m a pregnant woman in a suit of armor,” she says coolly. “What else are you going to do with me?”

Sigh. “Point taken.”

So, I write fantasy, and generally whatever else comes to mind. What else is there to do? I just have to keep going, keep tapping away at the keys because that’s what I love. Even when it’s hard to get out of bed to write or to work or to do anything, and regardless of whether or not my work is rejected or rejoiced–I have to keep going. This is no different from any other writer who ever kept trying.

It’s love that makes me write. Love of words, love of stories, and humanity itself (and probably a love of my own voice too). Sometimes love inspires me to write about certain things or certain people. Even when I write something full of anger or sadness love is at the source of it. Love may very well be what makes this blue marble spin on the black tile of space.

Or maybe writing is just a way of showing love for oneself. It’s not the kind of love that comes with putting oneself above others, but loving something forgotten, or rather someone. Maybe I write for the little boy I once was, that kid buried under so many layers and years of self-doubt and loathing. In some deep cave, I found him hiding in his mother’s closet, afraid of the basement and giants. With a pen, I can give the boy something to hold onto and crawl out of the dark. With writing, he can become an eagle and fly above his fears.

*If you want to see the video, click on this link to see the ending of the film, Legend of the Boy and the Eagle (Disney, 1967)

When you write about a place you give it life. Perhaps the best way to ground a story is to focus on where it takes place. Steinbeck spent pages describing the California countryside in The Grapes of Wrath, Neil Gaiman sets the story of The Graveyard Book in (you guessed it) a graveyard. I can think of no better example where the setting of a story becomes a character. The setting in that book is alive despite itself. It offers beauty and dread and in this writer’s humble opinion, the story would be lost without it. One could spend days discussing the various uses of setting in literature regardless of genre.

I have always felt that the surroundings the characters of a book find themselves in are tantamount to adding another character to the scene. In Carolyn Forche’s prose poem, The Colonel, the setting stands out as a stark reminder of the situation in which the speaker in the poem finds herself. Stucco walls with broken bottles embedded in them to “scoop the kneecaps” of would be intruders, and the razor wire on the walls, all serve to provide the reader with the sense that the speaker is in a dangerous place. But it’s more than that, it’s as if the dictator’s compound itself looms as a shadowy henchman over the speaker. It makes the implied threat to her real at all times.  

Wherever we go, if we take a look around and notice the uniqueness of our surroundings we might see that even the buildings or mountains or trees appear to have their own sense of personality. I live in Tempe, Arizona. On McDowell and Priest Roads there is a park known as Papago Park. Red Rock Mountains rise from the park at the peak of the hill crested by McDowell to overlook Phoenix. Aside from the amazing sunsets, if you look from the western side of the mountains you can see a face in the rock. It looks like it could be the face of a gorilla or maybe Jabba the Hut melting. I’ve never been able to drive by without noticing it.

What does the use of setting say about the following short pieces based in downtown Phoenix? 

Barrett drives home from the mental health clinic through the familiar streets of Phoenix. The clinic sits behind a dusty, barren lot surrounded by a chain-link fence between railroad tracks and an old factory. Shanty huts made of anything scrounged from dumpsters are stuffed into underpasses like broken childhood dreams. A woman walks down the dimly lit sidewalk as the sun closes its eyes to the world. She stops at a motel with more boards in the windows than glass, wearing a gray gown fit to her form. Down the side, from armpit to ankle, her dress is cut like a knight’s tabard. It gives a side view of the woman’s naked body underneath. Seeing her reminds Barrett of another woman who used to go to his clinic.

The first time he met Grace, Barrett and her case manager conducted a home visit. Grace was a woman in her thirties with a face of sixty. The smell of cigarettes leaned on the nostrils when she opened the door. A cockroach sat in the open on a wall. Grace reported that she took her medications, for the most part. She was wearing a gray dress with a hole cut in the crotch, where the mid-morning light died in her pubic hair. Inside the apartment, a thin mattress sagged on the floor under a weight Barrett could not imagine. There was one chair but no table for the social security checks that paid for the apartment.

“Have you been saved?” Grace asked Barrett.

Surprised, he answered, “I’m not religious, Ma’am.”

She smiled and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

The examples above, I believe, show the use of setting as a means to express a sense of loneliness or hopelessness in someone’s situation. The trappings of poverty or wealth can convey so much about a person in a story. Who they are or what they do can sometimes be decided by their surroundings.   

Below is a different example.

Barrett locked up the clinic for the night and parked his car a few blocks from work. It was Friday, the end to a long and trying week. He was ready for a beer he was ready for twelve. He walked by the old psychiatric center where he used to take people when they were psychotic or suicidal. It had been closed for years and now had a fence around it promising a smart new restaurant or nightclub. The area around it had been gentrified. Where before Barrett would have seen a dive bar, a drive-thru liquor store and a strip club he now saw a coffee house and a trendy spot where people could drink craft beer and play shuffleboard. Downtown was confusing now, there were tall buildings where before was only sky. Smiling women walked together down sidewalks dotted with lamps. The night was young and full of fun. The light of possibility and youth danced on their cheeks.

The setting above shows something quite different from the two before it. Ironically, all these are composites of real parts of Phoenix that are all only a few blocks apart.

Setting is important, and something that I try to give due respect to, though I have been guilty of overwriting it. The characters should still be the focus in the story. I say that for myself as well as anyone who might benefit from it. Too much exposition and not enough character development can stifle a story. As writers, we all have to find our own balance.

Have you ever walked downtown at night and really noticed the various buildings? High rises and squat, rectangular shops are like people in a crowd. How do they fit in a scene? Maybe they are innocent bystanders to the characters in a story. Or maybe they are witnesses who stay silent at the scene of some tragedy. They stand around, apart from one another, nobody speaks–they just stand there knowing. Buildings in cities do not look each other in the eyes. When something happens, they just stand there. Silence is their dialogue, perhaps saying, “This is how it is. This is how it has always been.”

I love writing dialogue. It is where the people in a story really come to life. I mentioned in my last blog, “The Journey,” how writing dialogue and action can ultimately change the course of a scene, a chapter or even the whole story.

How many times have you had a conversation with someone that was so deep it stays with you long after? Even if the conversation was short, I remember instances when I met someone and what we talked about, the gist of it has never left me. Though we may not remember all the words, they create a form that remains in time where that conversation took place. The words then are like a ghost that lingers where a moment was shared with another human being.

We’ve all had trivial or even seemingly meaningless conversations throughout our lives. The “How are yous?” and the “Good mornings,” and all the little bits of dialogue with strangers, or people we see every day. These moments of shared words have meaning too. These tidbits of conversation are like the spaces of blank page between scenes. Everyday words with others give us the space for the important, soul moving talks to grow. We need it all to complete the stories we live, and the ones we write.  

What an incredible creature the tongue is. It tastes our food, keeps our lips from being dry, it can signify disapproval with a simple protrusion from its little cave. It can be used for pleasure when invited to play with another person to whom we are attracted. Mainly though, we use it to fit sounds around our thoughts and push them out of our mouths to be understood, feared, adored or obeyed. It’s like having a miniature god to control, one who obeys our commands only some of the time. Without it we would have no spoken word, but with it, the ability to say anything. Words are used to create, convey, or destroy. It’s how we use them that matters. Where would humanity be now if we’d never developed the ability to use these sounds that that somehow make sense? What would the world be without them?

I’ve heard it said that you need other people in order to be human. I think that might be true. Talking can reveal a new sense of being. Words spoken aloud when alone are like puffs of smoke. They may linger for a while, they might even be good to hear for ourselves, but they dissipate quickly without others to hear them. Words spoken aloud with another person are like tiny strings that tie us to one another, even if they are meant to drive us apart. Words matter and they have form.

When you’re writing, how many times have you had two characters speak in a scene when one of them says something you didn’t expect? Aren’t we as the authors supposed to have total command of the words our characters speak? I think yes and no. there is something to be said for just letting the conversation play out. I like to put two characters in a scene and let them go. Much of what I write in such moments is ultimately cut, but in my opinion, it’s the best way to get the most authentic conversation out of the people.

We create our characters from some primordial pool of our imagination. On paper, we set them upright, and give them a face, and a name, and motives by using little black letters set in a row. Yet, I believe that aside from the actions they take, it is in the moments when we let them talk that we learn the most about them.  

Conversation between two or more people is a living thing. Sometimes when I write dialogue I just play it out, I try to go where the characters’ conversation goes and they reveal themselves even more. I have had moments of dialogue reshape entire chapters. It can be illuminating and frustrating, just like talking to a person. Dialogue is alive. It becomes its own character, and that character has a place in the story. 

“A story should entertain the writer too.” – Stephen King

I am only talking about my process here. Maybe something will be amusing or helpful to another writer, if so, I will feel fulfilled, and if not, I thank you for reading.

To my good friends I am not known for my spontaneity. The phrase, “a man of routine,” has been uttered about me a time or two. I like to cook a giant crock-pot full of food so that I don’t have to wonder what I will eat for lunch during the week when I’m at work. Sometimes I do cook the same thing several times before changing it up, but that’s only because I love my own cooking. I generally get up at the same time every day, around 5:30am, I eat the same breakfast, and I drink the same coffee.

It’s not that I’m opposed to change, but the goal for me is productivity. Time is valuable, and I try to use it to the best of my ability and write as much as I can before I have to leave for work. I eat the same thing because it takes no deciding, and that leaves me more time to devote my thinking to whatever it is I’m working on at the time. Writing is an adventure. It’s like going on safari in my mind. Having certain mundane things taken care of is like packing enough water and a first aid kit when you go on a hike. I like to have all the nuts & bolts taken care of so I can enjoy the journey, after all, safety first!

The Stephen King quote above puts into words something I have always felt. It is so important to be surprised, moved, saddened or even elated when you write. I have felt them all as sit at my computer and tip-tap out the fate of people only I know. That happens because when I write, I think of it as an experience the characters and I are having together. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I am literally unaware of what’s going to happen to the people in my stories, but there have been many times over the course of my novel, Mother Made of Iron where I was legitimately surprised.

When I write I try to maintain a level of curiosity and wonder. I do plan certain things, but I would not call myself a planner when I write. Nor could I ever get away with saying that for anything else in my life. I don’t know where things are going to go all the time. I may have a general idea and a structure of sorts but it often works out differently than originally planned. This may explain why it took ten years and two attempts to get the book right.

(I did mention this is not meant to be advice right?)

Music for me can be a great medium for spontaneity. I will often listen to music when I write, as I am sure others do. No words, just music, words get in the way. Typically, I listen to soundtracks of movies or whatever music I come upon that moves me to write. I once wrote eighty-seven pages from listening to the 55-second intro to Metallica’s, Unforgiven 3. It’s a haunting piano piece that I challenge anyone not to be inspired by.

I love how dynamic writing can be. Whether you stare at a sunset, a mountain, or the face of a beautiful woman, words come marching in. I never know what is going to happen when I sit down to write. Sometimes I have an idea, I know where I want to go but not how I’ll get there. The map is never finished until it’s finished. The journey is the joy.

When I was writing my novel, I had watched the movie, Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson. The music in that movie is amazing. I found clips of it on YouTube and listened to one particular clip, “Melting Into Matter,” by Eric Serra, which is all of 3:31 seconds and wrote an entire chapter of my book listening to it again and again. It was so moving, and the imagery that came to me when I listened to this beautiful piece of music added a kind of beauty to the character’s story line. I get this from music all the time.

Certain types of music belong to specific characters I have found. The music I previously mentioned was for only one person in my novel, “Faunie.” She was originally meant to be only a minor person in the story. What she became, and what she is still becoming grew beyond my imagination.

Through the combination of dialogue, action and a healthy dose of music Faunie turned into one of the most significant characters I’ve ever written. When I started writing out her scenes, I had no idea what would happen, but she has since become so real I miss not writing her right now. She owns a special place in my heart, this girl with a black wing mark on her arm. I hope to introduce her to people one day.

“A writer is working when looking out the window.” – Unknown

What is wrong with taking time away from writing? Nothing, it is not a bad thing. It can even be, at times, necessary. You can’t do one thing too much without reaching a point of exhaustion. I write every day, generally speaking, but there are times when that’s just not possible. Life has to be lived. We have to work, we have to relate to others, take care of those who are important to us in whatever ways we do. Mothers have to be mothers, fathers have to be fathers, and friends have to be friends.

Time away from writing is not the same as not writing however. Each and every single one of life’s experiences and moments we live, whether they are shared with others or by ourselves are subject to later material. Our minds are like refineries taking in our senses and memories and turning them into potential fuel for stories. The refinery never shuts down, never stops.  

I once got into oil painting, deeply into oil painting. I mean that both literally and financially, (it’s not cheap to paint with oil). I got so into it that I didn’t write for probably a year. I had no idea what I was doing, had never taken a class save for the typical art classes you take in high school. I enjoyed it, like writing it got intense–I would sometimes spend up to eight hours painting and could get so lost in it that I wouldn’t eat until I felt I was going to pass out (something I had only ever done with writing).

Being creative feeds me. I eat at work almost non-stop. I might as well have a feedbag strapped around my neck so I can graze endlessly throughout the day. On average, I have three meals at work from 8 to 5 and snack on whatever I can find. When I am at home, writing, I hardly stop at all to eat. As I typed that last sentence, it is 9:32 pm and I’ve eaten twice since I got up at 5:00am.

I am no visual artist, but I had fun doing it while I did. I think in some way it made me a better writer. Exercising my creativity with different skills only makes it stronger. When I first started painting, I did so out of grief. I was going through the breakup of my life at the time and after spending years of writing, I felt that words would not do the trick. I picked up a brush and filled my small apartment then with drawings, easels and canvases and the ubiquitous smell of oil paint and turpentine based cleaner. I took a few classes at my local park recreation center and learned a few things. One day in 2008, I just stopped and put down the brush to sit at the keyboard again. I haven’t painted since.

I still dabble in drawing sometimes, but the painting days are over, at least for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t long after I’d stopped trying to channel my inner Van Gogh that I came upon my idea for my fantasy novel. Once that hit, I was in full-blown creative mode for ten years straight, writing like a man possessed, because I was. Taking a break from writing may or may not work for other writers. Only the writer can determine that for her or himself.

We don’t know what will happen in life, so there is always a risk, but in my case at least, I feel it was necessary. Taking a step back is scary though, I must admit. However, I had exhausted myself and I needed to refuel in a way that fed me differently. The creative side of my soul is a ravenous creature. It stopped eating for a while there, and had I not fed it with visual art it might have gone mad and eaten me alive. If I don’t put words down, or if I am unable to get the time to write for more than a day or so an irritable restlessness boils up inside.

Like some kind of fiend, I have to sate it or it will consume me. Writing a line here or a paragraph there whenever I can keeps me sane.

One of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me was a Moleskine notebook. I have carried one around with me ever since. It fits in my back pocket and has saved me from forgetting an idea so many times I could not begin to count them. So often, it has helped me, in many ways. Before I start a new Moleskine, I “bless” it with a number of quotes from other authors on the topic of writing itself. The current one I carry around starts with the quote below, which I believe says everything I’ve said in this blog, only she says it better.  

            “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” –Virginia Woolf

“The only kind of writing, is rewriting.” – Ernest Hemingway

Revisions. The quote above says it all. The beauty of revision is it is exactly that, a re-vision, looking at something again with new eyes. How comforting is it to know that you can redo something as many times as you need? If only we could do the same in life. Personally, I’ve never written anything just right in the first go.

When I first started writing my fantasy novel I belted out over a thousand pages, it was over 200,000 words, and none of it is in my completed work. I had to take another look at it, a hard look. The story wasn’t alive. It had no breath. I’d been typing away and throwing ideas down without giving my characters life. It was devastating to have done so much work and have to leave it behind. The real story wasn’t with the character I wanted it to be with, it was with his mother.

Three years later and I have a completed novel. When I made the decision to focus the story on my previous character’s mother and her story, the world opened up to me. It was amazing. Since finishing it, I have been on the query path, still on it. This is not yet a success story in the traditional sense. I am not an award-winning novelist. I don’t have my own Master’s Class on YouTube. I’m just a guy who wrote his book twice over ten grueling years. I regret nothing.  

I feel fortunate to have taken that honest look at what I was doing, at what I was missing in the story’s original form. Now I have my main character, Izra Moonborn, and though the first book is done, she still occupies my time as no other woman ever has. Since finishing, Mother Made of Iron, I have written a novelette, a sort of origin story for Izra titled, The Wandering Oak. It is out on submission now with a contest and my fingers are perpetually crossed. If I had never taken the honest accounting of where I was in my storytelling, I don’t know where I would be right now. It’s hard admitting you have to rethink things you were previously so sure of. You really have to love a story, love the characters in it to put yourself through that.

Izra’s story was originally a short scene in my first conception of her character, no more than a few pages. Then she went from being in a scene to being in several, then it was a prologue and that prologue turned into a 600-page novel, and one for which I am proud.

There is another side to revision though, and it sneaks up on you sometimes. I have revised stories so much that I rewrote the story right out of them. A balance has to be struck. This is why I think it’s good to have a workshop to go to, or at the very least, another writer friend who understands what you are trying to accomplish and how difficult it can be. Other writers and time away are great for the work. Having spent a few months away from my book after I finished writing it gave me the opportunity to see it with some fresh eyes. There were moments when I found myself saying, “Wow, I wrote that?” It’s nice to find a line or two where I was pleasantly surprised. Then of course, there were the other times when I said, “Wow. I wrote that?” (DELETE)

Second, third or fourth drafts, I think we all go through them to some degree. Time away gives us a chance to see the good and find the bad. Both will be there. Stephen King says in his book, On Writing, that the second draft is where you take out, “all the things that are not the story.”  

In the end, all writing is world building, and all writing is word building. All of us who write are really just kids on a beach trying to make books out of sand. Use the words, build the world, and when you’re done building it, fill it with living things.