The hardest part is to start. It’s always to start. It’s not the plotting, the characterizations, the creation of a place for them to stay – these things tend to begin to coalesce if given time, the atoms of each being tugged into a cohesive orbit by the gravity of the others. But nothing is quite as important as that first word, that first sentence, sparking off galaxies. And damnit if it isn’t the hardest one to write. Every single time.
I have to be careful here. I don’t want to rehash old territory. Walk through lands I’ve seen before and contradict myself with present thoughts. Thoughts are tricky things, looping around through temporality, tangential tracers that seek to distract, and are usually too fast to hold on to for long.
I do want to talk about the things that trouble me though. So I’m going to talk about my process, where it tends to find the atoms, what it does to tease them into molecules, into tracers, evolve them into something eukaryotic, something macro, capable of breathing on land, or in water, somewhere besides the vacuum of the space in my head.
Music is the most important part of my process. Thematically, I guess you would say. I can’t write without it. It immediately inspires mood, triggering flares in the brain like filaments in a lightbulb. You’ve got to find a way to say what you want to say. That was Oasis I think. This path, today, is apparently Oasis I think. They turned on the light.
One of the comments on my most recent workshop was regarding the musical references. Are the songs that are mentioned important, was the question. Not really. Unless they work well with some particular turn of phrase, segue or just some general comment or thought process of one of those darlings pinwheeling in my head. They (the songs, not the darlings) work more as internal metaphors for me specifically, mile markers for conjuring mood, usually in the characters themselves. The ones that are explicitly referenced are very rarely that important. Maybe they should largely be removed. Probably. I’ll play with that.
But there are plenty of unheard songs that lilt and pitch through everything I write, little lyricisms twisted into moods that try beneath the surface to replicate an internal rhythm that I’m feeling when I’m writing. Sometimes, I’ll put a song on repeat. Listen to it forty times or four hours, whichever comes first. Sometimes I just let the radio play, pick a genre, or even not, and watch as oases dry up, or the mud underneath gives way, falls through, plunging to deeper waters, to drown slowly into the essence of something new entirely. Sometimes, the songs never make it into the stories’ internal structures. Sometimes they twist away. More often than not actually. When it works, they stick around, momentary notes belying the complex structures concealed behind something else entirely.
I’m very much an officianado of the idea of life as a series of incidents, flashes of consciousness, moving quickly from one to the next. Internal temporal rhythm seeks to connect those moments, and largely fails. Threads of time get crossed, bunched up, knotted. Was that last week or Tuesday? Did we date before she had that dog? I can’t believe I took that picture ten years ago! That sort of thing. When we dream of memories, when we remember dreams, we don’t see a cohesive narrative, we see snapshots that encapsulate, that symbolize deeper structures that span out across the blazing synapses. We pick at them and push them down avenues. But they’re still just snapshots. Worlds conjured for one singular moment.
Who knows. Maybe that’s just me.
There are other things that trouble me about my writing. Voice is the big one. Next week, I think I’ll write a bit about that, and about imitation. This is a concept Gardner discusses all too briefly for a book for beginning writers, but I appreciate the deference he gives it all the same. It’s a very important concept. Imitation pushed me through my Thompson and Chandler phases, Lovecraft and Wallace. Covered my consciousness in little bits and pieces of each. They’re all still under there somewhere, playing their own notes. But I’ll write about that later. Or maybe I already wrote about it.