About The Site

Man, when things happen they just happen.
I never force myself to sit down and write. I just nudge myself into it, much like exercise. As soon as you make a chore of it, it becomes dead to you. You cannot burn yourself out on it. The Kurgan might think it’s better to burn out than to fade away, but I disagree.

If I sit down now and write a sentence how different would that sentence be if I waited an hour, ate some peanut butter and then wrote the sentence. The syntax could be different, the subject/object relationship could change, the entire sentence could change. Using the Chaos Theory that Jeff Goldblum taught me, that means my entire story could be different stemming from just one sentence. A new idea can come to you, a new character, a new line of dialogue, a new story?

Do ideas live in our heads, hanging out and shooting some b-ball outside of the school, and then they just come out? And if you wait, they wait too? I don’t think so, I think ideas are fragmentary things, codes, that you might always have some pieces for, but only in that moment, at that place, will that idea come out in that form.

I say this because I am a large believer of Fate in my writing. When I write I have some idea of what I’m writing, but I am also letting the story live. Things come to me constantly, and I am always happy with the strange and random things that just surge forth on the ocean swell that is my, almost certainly, fucked up id and ego superbaby. I love the feeling of these things washing ashore, that’s part of the reason that I write in the first place, for that buzz. It can be just one line, a moment in a character’s back story, or any other sort of thing. I love being the architect who excavates what otherwise would have remained lost to civilisation. I love it!

So, when I write, I write. And sadly, when I don’t, I don’t. I cannot force it, no more than you can force your body to just lift a tonne with no training (or mutant powers). If it’s not coming I just go read a book, a comic, watch a dvd, make some food, go for a run. But I don’t sit at the screen and stress about it. That would be about as helpful as trying to create a new invention by going to the museum and figuring out what needs a clock attached to it. It doesn’t work for me.

In the last week I have written three issues of my mini series, Fate. It is only a four issue mini, and I already had the first issue written, so for those keeping score at home, I just finished my mini in one week. Granted I had spent a few weeks getting my notes down, and then getting them down again. But I just wrote three issues in a week, two of them over three days. I found that each day I sat down and was just ready to roll, which is always nice. As I wrote each day new things would come to me. New things that have changed the story slightly from what I had originally noted. I wonder, had I sat down at different times, before breakfast perhaps, would the story be all that different. I think it would be.

Had mum and dad waited a day, would I be someone else? You bet your ass I would, and wouldn’t that suck balls?

Posted on April 17th, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: Writing