How I Learned... #4: Why Do I Do It

Who Would Wish the Day of the Writer?

OR

In Which I Wonder Why the Hell I Do What I Do

Really, who would be a writer if they didn't absolutely have to be? It's an intensely isolating profession, both physically and mentally—one needs to have certain things in order to write, like quiet or an appropriate background noise, the proper tools (computer, typewriter, pen and paper, cuneiform tablets, papyrus, etc—each to his own), a window and a room of her own... But even more than that, mental privacy. Some slight, temporary freedom from personal attachments, bills, outside distractions... the freedom to think, and plot, and plan. Unfortunately, once I have that, I have to set to work immediately, before the ennui and the crippling loneliness kick in. The only way to beat the shadows back is to keep writing.

Finding that balance between real life and what's going on in my head is intensely difficult. Not in the schizophrenic, "I don't know what's real and what's not" sense, but in the immersive sense. You'll often hear authors talk about their characters telling them what to do, or that the story has taken control, stuff like that. It's not meant literally (at least not usually). It's simply that to tell a good story, with settings and characters that the reader will believe in, the writer has to believe in that world even more than the reader. Example: if you walk up to a painting and stare at it very closely, you'll find that to a painter, the human face is composed of various blobs of purple and green. But when you back up and look at the whole piece, what you see now are no longer the individual colors, but a single cohesive face.

I have a similar way of working. To tell a whole story, I have to look at each person and place in great detail. Before I can write about a small part of their lives or importance, I have to know everything. It's a labor-intensive, time-consuming process. But if my work is good, then this is the reason why. But again, it's an isolating way to work. I can spend so much time with the fictitious people that I instinctively know, in any given situation, how they will react, and then be caught completely off-guard when people in my day-to-day life don't react the way I expected them to. And then, sometimes, to be honestly shaken when someone in real life actually does act as I predicted, simply because I've spent so much time observing this person and unconsciously cataloging how they handle different situations and problems, how they walk, how they dress, their speech patterns.

As I said, it's hard to find a balance. And really, who would willingly chose to go through their life like this?

*snort* Oh, woe is me, the tortured artiste.

Also in connection with this, I am slowly coming to realize that being a writer ill-befits me for discussing books with people who are not writers. I'm developing a reputation for halting book discussions in their tracks because really, all I see anymore is the scaffolding. The colors, if you will. When I read a book, I acknowledge the story with about a quarter of my active brain; the rest is taken up with "Is this character consistent? Is this dialogue appropriate? Why did that MacGuffin just give birth to a herring? Why was the villain just bludgeoned to death with a deus ex machina? Is it a deus ex machina? I have to go back to page 32 to figure it out!"

And then I try to discuss this with people who've clearly not lost sleep over what happened on page 32 (and rightly so), and what they're mainly concerned with is the all-important question of "Was this a good book? And by whose definition?"

Meaning that I am obviously lost in a forest of trees, but I can see it, because there's a giant deus ex machina right in front of me, followed by a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias.