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How I Write
Apr. 17th, 2012 10:38 pmFor one of my classes, I'm reading a fun book entitled How I Write the Secret Lives of Authors. The books features small photographs of the working space of authors well known and otherwise and presents a nice little capsule summary of what the authors surroundings mean to them. This book reveals a bit about the create processes of these writers. I've come up with a sort of typology for these environmental/inspirational factors. There are four basic creative invocations that writers use: Talisman, Locus, Memory and Medicine. The talismans are small objects that serve to evoke certain moods or frames of mind. These objects are the spirit homes of the muses that supply writers with ideas. Other writers have an affinity for places or for a specific place. One writer has to write overlooking water, another find inspiration in a horse racing track. Many writers uses pictures to evoke the memory of a place where they felt at home to provide them with a secure base on which to build their imaginations. Then there's medicine. Writers use tea, yerba mate, booze or abundant supplies of hot water to medicate themselves into a creative state of mind.
I've been writing for decades, since middle school or thereabouts. I haven't had anything published yet. At least nothing fictional. I have small credit for a scientific paper in an obscure discipline; some of my words are even in that paper. This is what happens when a friend in another discipline wants you to build him Linux machine and says it'll only take a weekend. You wind up creating data archiving policies, rewriting math libraries and fine tuning imaging algorithims. I figure I did a hundred hours hard core coding for a case of beer and and an author credit. What the hey? It was fun. My last attempt at a first author paper was sacked by the French with their outrageous accents. Beyond that, I had a file of rejection letters for my attempts to publish fiction. Rejection letters are precious. They mean someone actually cared enough to dis your work and that implies they read it. The best rejection letters offer you ways to grow as a writer. Still, I continue to write. It's an odd compulsion.
I can write almost anywhere and I've churned out some good starts to things in hotel rooms in North American and Scotland. That said, I do my best work in my writing cave. In past years, that cave has been the smaller bedroom in one of several two bedroom flats my wife and I have rented. These days my cave is the converted breakfast nook of our single bedroom. Our dining room is our patio. I surround myself with talismans and charms. When I lived in the frozen lands of Flyover Country, I needed memories of home, the series of photos that reminded me I surfed once upon a time. Now that I surf again, those are unimportant. The collection of talismans changes over time. In days gone by, I had to have my Waite-Rider Tarot deck near me at all times. The deck is now so tattered that I don't dare shuffle it when I need to fidget with it. A few items in the collection remain constant. Somewhere near my desk, I have to hang my little rubber devil. He's the voice of all the things that I dare not say during that day. The devil tempts me to write. He is the contrary voice to the silence I must keep during the day to blend in with my academic world. Below him, I have to hang the busty Polynesian nutcracker. This is a long ago discarded tourist souvenir that my college roommate found for me at his local dump. It's a nutcracker made of tropical wood carved into the shape of buxom girl. It reminds me... Oh, hell, she reminds me that I like buxom girls. That's all. I generally do my best work when my books rest close at hand. Right now my books are mostly technical and academic. The truly inspiring books lay all the way across the living room. Every now and again, I have to walk over to that shelf and retrieve Thorton's Classical Dynamics. This books describes the mathematics of motion in the classical realm, uncomplicated by Quantum nonsense and Relativity hokum. Classical Dynamics orders my universe and lets me make predictions about where life and narrative will travel. If I'm lucky, my life remains subject to these laws. If I'm lucky, my narratives suffer from Quantum discontinuities and my settings expand to relativistic scales. Today, my life is a little different. My inspirations draw from Critical Theory, Statistics and Social Science research methods. Most of my writing lies in the imaginary, but quite non-fictional realm, of academic writing. Sometimes, it even rises to scientific.
I'm hoping to do a little fiction writing over the summer, but the warm months are getting full already. Once again, I'll be the Publication Manager(programmer actually) for the research institute I've worked at since 2004. I have to turn several vague notions into a research program. And, I absolutely, positively must surf. I keep wondering just why I'm trying for those three magic letters when I could be writing. Something about not starving, prestige and achieving goals. I think.
I've been writing for decades, since middle school or thereabouts. I haven't had anything published yet. At least nothing fictional. I have small credit for a scientific paper in an obscure discipline; some of my words are even in that paper. This is what happens when a friend in another discipline wants you to build him Linux machine and says it'll only take a weekend. You wind up creating data archiving policies, rewriting math libraries and fine tuning imaging algorithims. I figure I did a hundred hours hard core coding for a case of beer and and an author credit. What the hey? It was fun. My last attempt at a first author paper was sacked by the French with their outrageous accents. Beyond that, I had a file of rejection letters for my attempts to publish fiction. Rejection letters are precious. They mean someone actually cared enough to dis your work and that implies they read it. The best rejection letters offer you ways to grow as a writer. Still, I continue to write. It's an odd compulsion.
I can write almost anywhere and I've churned out some good starts to things in hotel rooms in North American and Scotland. That said, I do my best work in my writing cave. In past years, that cave has been the smaller bedroom in one of several two bedroom flats my wife and I have rented. These days my cave is the converted breakfast nook of our single bedroom. Our dining room is our patio. I surround myself with talismans and charms. When I lived in the frozen lands of Flyover Country, I needed memories of home, the series of photos that reminded me I surfed once upon a time. Now that I surf again, those are unimportant. The collection of talismans changes over time. In days gone by, I had to have my Waite-Rider Tarot deck near me at all times. The deck is now so tattered that I don't dare shuffle it when I need to fidget with it. A few items in the collection remain constant. Somewhere near my desk, I have to hang my little rubber devil. He's the voice of all the things that I dare not say during that day. The devil tempts me to write. He is the contrary voice to the silence I must keep during the day to blend in with my academic world. Below him, I have to hang the busty Polynesian nutcracker. This is a long ago discarded tourist souvenir that my college roommate found for me at his local dump. It's a nutcracker made of tropical wood carved into the shape of buxom girl. It reminds me... Oh, hell, she reminds me that I like buxom girls. That's all. I generally do my best work when my books rest close at hand. Right now my books are mostly technical and academic. The truly inspiring books lay all the way across the living room. Every now and again, I have to walk over to that shelf and retrieve Thorton's Classical Dynamics. This books describes the mathematics of motion in the classical realm, uncomplicated by Quantum nonsense and Relativity hokum. Classical Dynamics orders my universe and lets me make predictions about where life and narrative will travel. If I'm lucky, my life remains subject to these laws. If I'm lucky, my narratives suffer from Quantum discontinuities and my settings expand to relativistic scales. Today, my life is a little different. My inspirations draw from Critical Theory, Statistics and Social Science research methods. Most of my writing lies in the imaginary, but quite non-fictional realm, of academic writing. Sometimes, it even rises to scientific.
I'm hoping to do a little fiction writing over the summer, but the warm months are getting full already. Once again, I'll be the Publication Manager(programmer actually) for the research institute I've worked at since 2004. I have to turn several vague notions into a research program. And, I absolutely, positively must surf. I keep wondering just why I'm trying for those three magic letters when I could be writing. Something about not starving, prestige and achieving goals. I think.
