Not Quite Making It

Recently much of my creative energies have been sucked up by a role-playing game I'm playing. My weekly group has begun The Dresden Files RPG and it's a lot of fun. I had planned to sit down this weekend and do some writing based on our adventures thus far, but I didn't quite make it.

I'm doing a lot of not quite making it lately, and I don't like it. I didn't quite make it Friday, when I missed posting an article in here. I had some paperwork to prepare for a meeting, and then I had to go to the meeting, you see, and by the time I got home it was time for lunch.

I do my best writing in the morning, I feel. It's the designated time for it in my schedule. Having a schedule is good. Having so strict a schedule that it doesn't occur to me to write at any other time of the day is less good. I've also fallen out of the habit of writing. Julia Cameron quite correctly points out, in a lecture I listened to, that when creatives are working - writing, painting, acting, whatever - they're in much better moods than when they're not. That day a couple of months ago when one of my characters seized me by my figurative lapels and stuck me in my chair and demanded to be written was wonderful. I felt great the rest of that day. I had written a lot of words and I felt accomplished. And I had a living, breathing character who, while rather bossy, was very real to me, and made the writing easy. Less like I was writing her than she was doing what she does and I just wrote down what I saw. My best writing is like that.

It occurs to me that I wrote that bossy character into a scene during the afternoon. But that morning I had sat down to write fiction on purpose, darn it, and it seemed to have primed the pump, so to speak. After lunch I sat down at the computer and wrote a few thousand words.

It comes back to discipline. If I want to write, I have to sit myself down and write. I'm not the greatest at that. And when the black dog comes around, it's even more difficult. But I pledge to try harder this week. We'll see what develops.

Who's In Charge Here? On Demanding Characters

On Thursday I had the awesome but very odd experience of being yanked to my writing place ... by one of my characters. I've been manipulated by characters before; I've long since learned that, in a similar way to the fact you can't steer a train, I can't force my characters to do something they don't want to do. This was a bit more than I'd bargained for.

The character in question is called Katherine. She's a red-headed Irish Australian living in America, and her son has been taken by the (very corrupt) government and has been held by INS for the past eighteen months. Her husband, normally a quiet sort who bows to her force of personality, has recently stepped up and broken their son out of custody. A peace-loving organisation is keeping the whole family in a safehouse in a nearby city, and the circumstance of living together under one roof again is putting a strain on everyone.

Katherine was painted in a poor light in a previous piece I did, and so when the Muse declared Writing Season open, she descended like a Valkyrie from, er, heaven, I suppose, and demanded to be written.

I sometimes get the sense when I write a character I'm intimately familiar with that I 'step into' them to experience their personas. In this case, I distinctly felt Katherine step into me as I sat at the desk. Very odd, yet very awesome.

So in addition to the thousand or so words I wrote in the morning, I also put down another three thousand or so in the afternoon. Yikes. I am writer, hear me ...er, write!