Snow, Almost

As I was sitting here, writing my post for today, I looked out the window and saw snow falling in gentle sheets.  I was going to say how there are few greater things in life, to me, than to be warm and writing while its snowing inside.  Then I looked outside again and it had stopped, cleared up, and is now completely sunny.  I expect, any second, to see budding flowers sprouting from the earth and robins dancing on the hood of my car.

That's New Mexico for you.  It'll be a blizzard in about an hour.  

Grisham

Somehow its possible, though I reserve judgement, to write during any sort of physical or mental difficulties.  There's the dim cloud of a headache drifting over my consciousness today and its threatening to bring the whole parade down.  How a person is supposed to ignore this fact and continue on with the process is a stunning feat to consider.  The act is beyond comprehension to me, mainly because I am in the throes of it.  Perhaps if I were beyond this, and into the next day when, I hope, all this nastiness as worn off, then I would see a little more clearly how it could be possible.

But then, what would be the point really?  I'd wouldn't have a headache anymore and I could write just as though it were any other day, mostly for the fact that it WOULD BE any other day.  But today, yeech.  I can feel the sick throbbing building up like a tantrums of some hideous beast in my skull.  There's filth in my brain, rubbing around in a disgusting friction.  That's a headache to me.  Its not even a migraine.  Imagine if it were.

Last night was an interesting revelation.  I watched the Charlie Rose Show as I occasionally do and on the screen was a friendly looking chap in a sharp tweed jacket (is there such a thing?) talking in the most casual of tones how wonderful his life was.  I'm always intrigued to hear how other people live, how they manage a day, how they relax, what they need to get through it.  He seemed like a genuinely happy, contented, well grounded, successful man and I wondered just who in the hell he was.  As it turned out, he was John Grisham.   Now, I will admit, I have always held some small air of contempt for the name.  Why, I can't say exactly.  I'm sure it stems from jealousy.  The man's written 21 novels, all of them wildly successful.  Not a single bomb amidst them even when he's ventured outside of his standard genre of the legal thriller. 

I have a hard time admitting it, but maybe I simply feel the same way about any popular novelist.  Not that I'm a literary snob, though my college years, looking back on them, did seem to cultivate in my mentality some kind of foolish sanctimony about the practice of writing.  Well, my introduction to John Grisham last night dispelled all of that in one single stroke.   And I'm grateful for it.  That man is just such a genuine person, I can't help but like him.  And more to the point, he and I have a lot in common.  Mainly that we are both supremely lazy and make no bones about it.

When asked by Charlie, how it is that he can manage to be consistently prolific, Grisham quipped that there's really nothing all that difficult about it.  He takes every precaution to prevent his writing from becoming work, which is only second nature when you regard work, as I do, as the Great Satan of our time.  He said he cranks out a book a year as a matter of practice and will never waiver form that schedule.  He holds fast to deadlines, which is what propelled him into the favor of publishers. But more importantly, he sticks to about a 5 to 7 page range per day.  Not a heavy work load, particularly when you're as practiced as he is.  He lives in Charlotte, Virginia, which I've visited in my distant past.  A reasonable place for a writer to live, I always thought, especially if you own a horse ranch, as Grisham does.  His wife is his primary editor and unlike many writers of his stature, he willfully submits his manuscripts to the harshest scrutiny of his editors, both professional and wedded.  "I make too many mistakes," he said.

Now that I've come around to liking the guy, I've begun to reconsider my stance on his writing style and his books in general.  I might just give them another try, particularly his new one, "The Appeal."  Its a fascinating concept that drives to the heart of one of our biggest problems in American today: the corruption of our judicial system by big business interests.  While I'm not typically into the legal thriller genre, I have grown more and more politically minded as I get older and the idea is becoming more attractive to me.  Its clear, too, that Grisham is doing precisely what I'd like to be doing: illuminating the problems of our day by entertaining the readers with them.

--Oh, and if you've been wondering what I've been doing in my absent time, see my other blog here on blogspot, via my profile.

Stuck? Draw a Map

No, I'm no star anise.  I've not shriveled up and died.  If its worth anything to you, I'm still here and I'm still trucking along.  The work continues.  The dude abides.

The swing of things have been so gloriously tuned, if you can believe it, that lately I haven't needed to warm up much.  There have been a few days, in fact, where I was able to just jump right in.  Other's I've needed only to lay down a few words, get a few blockades out of my head and proceed.  The warm up exercises from those days are hardly worth reading, much less posting.  

Today is a whole other story.

A lot of it depends on where in the story you end the previous day.  I assume that a lot of you writing types have by now figured out the secret but if you haven't, I'll be glad to share it with you.  Its not a big deal, really, just end the writing day at a point where you know what the next word, the next sentence, the next scene will be.  Don't write it.  Let it be and write it the next day.  If you know Baxter, the former world heavy-weight champion of chapter 2, now needs in Chapter 4 to confront his drug-addicted manager at the Piggly Wiggly, then end Chapter 3 on the way there. 

Not too tough.  Fairly obvious.

I failed to do that last night.  What?  Of course I have an outline!  No, you can't see it!  Get away from me you maniac!

I know where the next scene needs to go story-wise, I just don't know the setting, the ambiance, the exact logistics of how I'm going to get from the emotional start to the emotional end.  Its going to take some figuring.  A little elbow grease, if you will.  

I have a notepad in my desk, a small one, for just such moments of anxiety.  The idea, when you don't know how a scene should progress, is to take this notepad out and begin to draw a map.  Put the circumstances of the scene's beginning in the top corner and the end in the bottom corner.  The add events in small boxes as stepping stones along the way.  You can either add them to the top corner, reaching down, or to the bottom corner reaching up.  If you don't know whether one direction is better than the other, branch with both options and continue creating the map with multiple possible routes.  Add enough stepping stones, connected with a little line from one end to the other, and you'll find yourself with a clear path for the scene, and very often with a logical emotional arch.

Next time you're stuck, give it a shot.  Tell me how it went.