Writer on Fire

Sometimes when writing a particular scene I've had the experience that all of a sudden the words poured out of me, a psychic might say something like “you’re channeling a guide/mentor, or the Akashic Records”. Or, perhaps I could best describe it as a deeply meditative state, where everything your mind’s eye sees is brilliantly vivid and real. After this storm of writing passes, you lapse back, exhilarated and amazed, and realize that what you’ve written is some of your best yet.

It’s something of a “mountain top” experience, though. Not something you can deliberately coax it into being.  You may attempt to seduce it, but it comes only when it wills.  I was curious whether other writers shared this phenomenon; so I posed this question to other writers in the blogasphere:

...If this is something you've experienced, please tell me about it; was it after hours of plodding work, or did it happen as soon as you set fingers to keyboard. What was your frame of mind? Did something put you in that frame of mind, i.e.: were you listening to music? Reading some other writer’s work and suddenly…”

The answers flew in, and yes whether in a meditative state such as I’ve experienced, or from the sub-conscious world of dreams, writers agree that from there, they’ve draw their best inspirations. Here’s some samplings of the responses I’ve had:

 “I’ve experienced the same feeling of writing as if someone is moving my fingers...

 “My characters come to life in my dreams. Sometimes I wake up pretty tired but I get some of my best scenes that way. It’s almost like they are writing the story and I just type it.”

This aspect of our characters taking the bit between their teeth and running with it seems to be a common thread in many responses.

 “…sometimes when I’m writing, my character will reveal something about him/herself that I didn’t know.”

Or how about this comment, “My characters won’t leave me alone—and usually at two o’clock in the morning! I can’t shut them up until I write them.”

“…an out of body experience. I’m the vessel, for whatever is being said. It’s the best high out there.”

Perhaps as a reader of books you have read some in which you’ve become totally immersed in the novel’s world in all its detail: you taste the food, smell the air and live in the skin of the characters—you are moved by their grief, shaken by their terrors, and can shed tears of joy for their happiness. When the book closes, you know that your life has been enriched. That book was written by a writer on fire

  

The Influence of Setting

In 1995 I read an intriguing article in the Vancouver Sun, titled “Lumber firm wails the blues over “singing forest”. Apparently a local tree planter had a spiritual experience in a forest near Tenise Creek; she says, “something akin to the voice of angels rose from the landscape.” I tucked the thought provoking article away and some years later, was sorting through my tattered old file full of various newspaper and magazine articles, the “Story Ideas File”, and read the “singing forest” article again. I began to type and wrote, ““The Elanraigh forest quivered with deep unease. Forest-mind sifted the westerly wind and breathed its warning.” And so a sentient forest came to be both a major character and the setting for my YA fantasy, Elanraigh: The Vow.

Besides, forests are something I’m familiar with, having always lived near forests and ocean—so the additional advantage for this story setting is that it’s a world I know. One less bit of research homework J as my chosen time period is an alternate-earth, medieval society; there was enough research to do there.

Also, the environment of rainforest and stormy coast, both beautiful and ever changing suited the storyline and complimented a story of a girl’s coming of age and blossoming into power.

Just as an aside, in another scene of the book, my protagonist and her party have an encounter and battle to the death with a party of Memteth raiders. The setting for this scene is “Shawl Bay.” In my mind’s eye while writing, I envisioned MacKenzie Beach, known well to me, as it’s located just outside Tofino on Vancouver Island. Ironically enough, it is this same beach that is used as “La Push” in the Twilight movies.

Think how settings affect us in such post-apocalyptic films as the Book of Eli or The Road. We are immersed in dust and despair in the sepia-toned colors of the wasteland, only to brighten in color when Eli and Solara reach Sanctuary and the Curator.

The depression-era circus in Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is a wonderful background for her characters’ stories. Just as the glitz and trappings of the big tent’s show disguises the gritty poverty of the circus roustabouts; so do the various costumed performers have their secrets and scars.

A movie like Under the Tuscan Sun is redolent of savory foods, wine and sun-drenched landscapes…a perfect setting for a hurt and lonely woman to heal and learn to open herself to life once again.

The ambience of a book determines much of its mood; setting is a tool the writer can use to evoke emotional response in the reader.