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.

Fantasy Names and Creations

I’ve noticed how frequently readers, and even other authors, will ask a writer of fantasy, "How do you come up with those names?" Umm…sometimes it’s a puzzle to the fantasy author too, how the perfect name just drifts to the front of your mind like the lettering inside a Magic Eight Ball. (Does anyone besides me remember those fascinating toys?) Of course, many authors of fantasy works are creating a story within the existing framework of familiar myths and legends, so names and places can easily be researched. Alternatively, you can look to Ancient languages such as Sanskrit depending on the type of culture or creature you are creating. You can find words in the old Celtic or Indo-European that read aloud as either melodious or forbidding;strong and forceful;or sweet and alluring. In my own story I was dealing with an alternate Earth, and a quasi-medieval setting. I chose to use a strong flavouring of the Celtic—blending both the familiar and the exotic. One of my characters is riding up a steep switchback trail, the Ttamarini warriors are in close pursuit below him. Ok. I need a fierce forest dwelling creature to appear and force him off-trail, and careening down a steep shale cliff. Fierce creature…hmm…something between a grizzly and wild boar…Ah-ha! “bristlefang!” “…the largest hump-backed bristlefang I’ve ever seen, loping along, hump swaying.” The villains of my piece, the Memteth, are humanoid, but descended from a reptilian race. The few words spoken in their language I simply made up, keeping them sibilant, however, as I imagine a speaking reptile might sound. Of course, you then have to keep a “dictionary” of the Memteth words. Sometimes I think how much more straightforward it must be to simply write in modern day setting, or at least, a well known historical one. But then, you wouldn’t have the freedom and fun of creating a world unique. Happy writing everyone.

What if you could meet Hemmingway?

What if there were a movie about a young writer who with the draft of his first novel in hand, went back in time to 1920’s Paris and had his manuscript reviewed by the likes of Ernest Hemmingway and Gertrude Stein…

I stumbled on a really enjoyable movie last night…scrolling through the “New Releases” on Shaw VOD I paused to read the synopsis for Midnight in Paris. Something about a family’s trip to Paris. Meh. More brash Americans, undoubtedly being offensive before redeeming themselves. Sigh. However, the cast looked good: Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody…and it had 3.5 stars. Ok.

Well, the synopsis didn’t do it justice. The “family” is an American businessman, his wife and their daughter and her fiancé. The fiancé, Gil Bender from Pasadena, played by Owen Wilson, is quickly enchanted by Paris (in more ways than one). While his fiancé and her mother are focused on expensive shopping excursions, Gil is browsing the antique and memorabilia shop across the street. He loves to imagine life in the 1920’s “Golden Age” of Paris, where great artists loved, argued, and sought inspiration in its streets, bars, and special ambiance. He could live here, he tells his fiancé, and write the novel he’s always wanted to. She believes Gil is succumbing to some kind of weak- minded escapism—and no way she would ever live anywhere but America.

On a late night walk alone, Gil gets lost and stops to rest on some steps by the river. As a bell tolls midnight, a 1920’s vintage limo drives up; stops, and the couple inside insist he join them. As they drive off, the elegantly dressed couple introduce themselves…Scott Fitzgerald and his Zelda. The party they arrive at is alive with Cole Porter music, women in flapper style evening dress. They bounce from there to a local bar, when Scott introduces Gil to the bar’s lone inhabitant, Ernest. Ernest Hemmingway. Gil tentatively, then excitedly begins to discuss his novel. “I won’t read it,” Hemmingway states, “if I don’t like it, I’ll tell you I hate it—If I like it, I’ll be jealous and tell you I hate it.” But he promises that if Gil brings it to him, he’ll take it to his friend Gertrude Stein for a review. “She reads my stuff,” he says.

Of course when Gil returns to his hotel, he has also returned to present day.

And so each night, he finds his way back to his new friends and the 1920’s. The story is peopled with interesting characters from our culture’s past: writers, artists and musicians.

The beauty of it is how Gil comes to realize that the people of every era believe that bygone times were the “Golden Age” and better than the present they live in; and we see Gil also come to appreciate, at last realizing, what life has to offer him in the here and now.

Writers, especially those in the early throes of the struggle will get a kick out of this movie. Two thumbs up ☺

When the Writer's Flood is at Trickle

Jean-Luc admonishes this doddling writer; arm uplifted, he commands, “Engage!”

“Aye, Captain,” I quaver, “but the dylithium crystals are gone, we canna reach warp speed.”

Do I only imagine that his expression deepens in solemnity; the finger points, “Make it so.”

What is a writer to do when one distracting event after another has taken her out of the required “mindset”? We don’t know what our character is going to say next, or where we want to set this scene?

Sometimes these things just flow… just keep typing (“Man the con!” Jean-Luc commands).

Aye, Captain, fingers moving, fingers moving…

Jean-Luc smiles, “I wish you clear horizons.” he murmurs.

Can Characters Plagerize??

Saturday was DVD night for us and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the movie

Thirteen Days

(Bruce Greenwood as President Kennedy), a docudrama of the Oct ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis. I was just a young Canadian kid when this event took place in history, with a clear memory however, of my school’s nuclear attack drills; the eerie wailing of the emergency sirens as teachers quickly marched us down to the furnace room, until the sirens wailed again, the “all clear”.I thought the movie did a good job of portraying just how much we owed John F Kennedy for his tough decisions, often contrary to the actions urged by his advisors. As the period of immediate crises ended, the President addressed these words to the American people:“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”I was so moved by these words (who was Kennedy’s speech writer??), that while Bill got the next movie loaded and ready to go, I looked up the speeches of President Kennedy and learned that this particular speech was delivered in Jun ’63.

Next movie was, Sum of All Fears a techno-thriller somewhat based on the Tom Clancy novel and starring Ben Affleck (as a young Jack Ryan). Hmmm…what was my surprise when at the conclusion of the movie (détente of what had been a modern-day escalating face-off between America and Russia) when the screenwriters chose to put these exact words from President Kennedy’s speech into the mouth of Russian President, Narmonov, as he and the American President address the public from the White House. So what were Sum of All Fears screenwriters’ thinking? As writers is it ok for us to take an excerpt from an historical document and credit its words to our characters? (I’m genuinely curious about this and hope an editor or other writer who has encountered this will advise/comment about it)On the other hand, I’m sure all American viewers would recognize these resonant words as JFK’s; so perhaps the screenwriters intended that President Narmonov use these words as a nod to a great American President—would a Russian President use any part of an American President’s speeches?

The Seed of a Story

Every writer will have their own story as to how their novel, or short story, evolved—what was the seed that started it all. 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 intriguing 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 a major character in my YA fantasy, Elanraigh (Eternal Press, Feb/12) And what about dreams; you wake and some image from your dream clings as ephemeral as a wisp of fog, and quickly, before it’s dispelled in the light of day, you write the words, or draw the item, saving the image for what it might creatively conjure on the page. Or you have a favourite period of history and want to explore some unusual character’s perception of those events. What if....