Why We Write

This says it all…

A Little Freaked Out

Obviously by now everyone’s heard about the mass murder shootings at Fort Hood.

Like everyone else I watched the news in rapt attention.

Listening to news radio during  my morning commute they made following distinctions about the event:

1. The shootings were done by a single gunman
2. It appears that Major Hasan snapped
3. He used semi-auto pistols
4. He performed the shootings in a calm, controlled manner
5. He was stopped by a civilian police officer who shot him
6. Hasan killed 13 people: 12 Soldiers and 1 civilian (rumored o be a cop)

When I heard this, I got a little freaked out.

Why?

I started writing my NaNoWriMo novel this past Sunday, just like must people who are participating. The very first scene I wrote this past Sunday was eerily frikkin similar to current events.

1. It involved a lone gunman
2. He was a combat veteran who snapped
3. He used a semi-automatic pistol
4. He went around in a calm, controlled manner shooting people
5. He was stopped by being shot by the police
6. He killed 13 people: 12 civilians and 1 cop

It was these coincidences that freaked me out. Here I wrote this scene on Sunday only for a real-life major event with glaring similarities to occur four days later on Thursday.

The most significant difference between my story and the real one is that the shooter in my story died after being shot by the cops.

 

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Off to A Decent Start

I wrote 2,221 words of story today. Not bad.

I had set the goal of getting in 5,000 but it was so nice out after yesterday’s deep gloom that I just had to get out of the house for a while and enjoy the day.

Robert Frost Revelations

Taking a break from writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I visited my friend Rick Holmes, our town historian. As always we had a terrific conversation. When they open the authentic Irish Pub across the street from the museum in the old fire station, we’ll be having our talks over a pint of Guinness.

I bought his latest book about Derry, and as he signed it he told me the next book he’s going to write is about Robert Frost during his years in Derry from 1900 – 1910.

He related an awesome story, told by Frost’s own daughter, about one of Mr. Frost’s most famous poems Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.

It was actually inspired by an event in Derry, but the poem itself was not published for another 20 years. Rick told me the meaning behind what inspired the poem and exactly where Frost was and what he was doing at that time.

I know exactly where that spot is and have been there dozens of times. From now, on whenever I visit that spot, I will look upon it very differently forever more.

Rick also said he has a photograph of Frost from these years that has never been published. I can hardly wait the 2-3 years before this book finally sees publication.

Now I know what I know about this poem, it has a whole new and deeper meaning to me than it had before:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Setting the Tone

In preparation for the start of NaNoWriMo, I have listening to the audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, to set the tone of my own story.

I listen to it while I commute to and from work. The first couple of days of listening to the story were rainy, cold and gloomy – just like in the story. Lemme tell ya, that really sets a tone in itself. It’s also not a great mindset to take to work in the morning, but a large cup of coffee usually helps with that.

This is one of the most emotionally heavy stories I’ve come across. The story gives you such a sense of hopelessness. You think, “What’s the use? What is the purpose?”

Stephen King’s The Stand is a unicorn and rainbow filled fairy tale of joy and happiness in comparison.

Of course The Road won a Pulitzer and another literary award. The literary community just loves stories about the hopelessness of life.

After I finish this – I was thinking of renting the movie Ironweed (another Pulitzer winner) to watch on a rainy afternoon. Then I think I’ll jump out of a basement window…

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Worse Than Writer’s Block

As stated in the last post, I participated in the Gotham Writer’s Fiction Workshop. It was a good course and there was a good group of people with which to interact.

I was really into it and enjoying myself. I stretched my writing muscle quite a bit and got a lot of great feedback. Of the critiques, they were very constructive and in a positive tone – a style which I appreciated and reciprocated.

Somewhere around Week 8 of the 10 Week course, I suddenly lost all interest. Not just in the class, but with fiction writing altogether. I had no idea why, but I completely and utterly lost all passion for writing stories.

I was still writing plenty of non-fiction blog articles, but there was no passion for the writing of fiction at all. It left a culpable hole, no a void where my love of writing stories once resided.

I have had plenty of periods in the past where I did not want to write creatively for a while, but I always knew that when I stepped away from it for a while that urge would awaken and I’d be back at it. This time was different – the urge was gone. It had left me or died. I had never felt this way before.
 
I was shocked by this development of going from always having an interest in writing from the time I was 8, to not wanting to have anything to do with it at all. Even worse, I was beginning to accept it and be okay with it. It got to the point where I was going to donate my extensive books on writing to our library.  

I have no idea why it happened, but now that I no longer had that passion for writing a part of me felt dead inside. The thing is I didn’t want to lose it and wanted to understand what went wrong.

For weeks I could not brink myself to even look at a writing magazine, book or blog – let alone open one up and read it. I still read some fiction, but mostly non-fiction.

 

I recently remembered that back in 2000, I read Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I remember thinking while reading that book, ‘Man, I didn’t know you were allowed to write like this’. It was brilliant.

I went to the library and checked it out to see if I could remember why I felt that way about it. I still think it’s a great piece of writing, but there wasn’t that “Aha!” moment I had hoped for.

As October rolled around, it dawned on me that the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November was fast approaching. I felt melancholy that I was not going to be a part of NaNoWriMo. I always had fun with it. It would have been my 9^th year.

I perused the NaNoWriMo forums as I always had, and decided to post in the NaNoWriMo Ate My Soul forum. I posted my woes and bid farewell to NaNoWriMo and left it at that.

Over a week later, this Monday, something prompted me to go back to the forums and see if anybody left any remarks about my situation. I was surprised to see 17 responses. As I read each one there was good advice, encouragement and support. I took each piece of advice and response to heart and before I knew it ideas were beginning to flow.

One great idea came to me fully formed. I would fictionalize an event I experienced during a paranormal investigation I went on. It has haunted my thoughts ever since.

The passion for writing fiction isn’t as intense as it once was, but the interest is there. It’s like resurrecting a clinically dead person with a defibrillator – shocking them back to life. The pulse is weak but it’s there.

I have my story idea, I know what I want to do with it and the current working title is The Death Walker

Getting Serious…

I once read an essay written by Randy Ingermanson, a sci-fi and Christian novelist, where he talked about how he got started as a writer while working as a physicist. He said that once he decided to get seriousabout his writing, he invested in books, classes and conferences to learn the craft.

That has always stuck with me.

I’m getting serious about my writing.

I joined the Gotham Writer’s Workshops out of NYC.

I’m taking a 10-week online course in Fiction Writing. Recently, I was toying with the idea of taking a screenwriting class with GWW, but after some soul searching, I knew I had to go with my gut and take the fiction class.

Knowing I wanted to get some formal instruction, I researched dozens and dozens of online writing courses over a 2-month period. All roads kept leading back to Gotham. It is by far the most respected and highly regarded school of its kind. So I signed up this week.

I hope it lives up to its reputation. I’m willing to do the work.

The class sizes are a maximum of 18 participants, so it allows for more personal access to the instructor and better interaction between participants in the class.

Our class has 16 participants – fifteen of which are from the various parts of the U.S. and one from Grand Fond, in the Guadeloupe archipelago of the French Caribbean.

The first request was to submit a bio about ourselves. Several people have bio’s and experiences that seem to be on the same page as myself.

My submission was as follows:

_________________________________________________________

Okay, I’ll try to be brief here…

My wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary a month ago. We have three children, the youngest of which is 16 and he just received his driver’s license this week. Ugh. Our oldest daughter is going into her junior year in college and is working toward a career as an English teacher. Our middle child, another daughter, will be a senior in high school this year and wants to go to college for fashion design. In addition, we also have a herd of eight cats with varying personalities (man, I wish I had a dog).

I was born in New York. When I was 10, we moved to England for a short bit and then we were off to a small town in Germany for a couple of years, where I lived the life of Tom Sawyer. It was the best two years of my childhood. We moved back to Long Island, New York where I completed public school, dropped out of college, traveled, had a few crappy jobs then landed a position as a street messenger in Manhattan’s financial district and worked my way up to a spot in IT. I took a job transfer to Massachusetts, but decided we’d like to live in and commute from New Hampshire.

I earned a late-bloomer B.S. degree in Finance and now work as a financial analyst for the human resources division of a major private financial institution. I really like what I do.

In person I’m an introvert by nature, but find I am able to express myself much better on the written page. I’m a big guy and have been told often that because of my size and the way I hold myself, I look “scary’ or “intimidating”, but I don’t mean to be. People have also said my facial expression makes me look as though I’m “mean” or “pissed-off” all of the time, but really…I’m not. It must be a holdover from the tough times I had growing up in New York. I guess it’s true when they say, “You can take the man out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the man”.

As much as I enjoy my job, I have had a passion for reading and writing stories since I was very young. I am mildly dyslexic so I read slowly, but I read a lot. My core genre interests are in horror and action/adventure, but I read widely outside of those realms. Out of a long list of authors I like to read, some of my all-time favorites are: Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Koontz, Bill Bryson, Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard and Scott Sigler.

I have a bad habit of beginning stories but not finishing them. I have file folders filled with story ideas and unfinished stories. In the fall of 2001, I joined NaNoWriMo.org. My story writing progressed, but I didn’t complete a full novel until 2004. Most of the novels I wrote suck…badly, but I’ve been improving every year. The side benefit to NaNoWriMo is that it helped improve my writing enough to where I had the courage to query and write freelance articles for some motorcycle/chopper magazines (another interest of mine).

I infrequently maintain a couple of public writer-centric blogs: WritersReport2.0 (for 2 years) and 1667 Words-a-Day (for 6 years), as well as a private blog. Most of my current writing has involved essays and commentary, but I’m also working on some short stories.

In my free-time I participate in paranormal investigations using a pragmatic science-based approach. This avocation provides plenty of interesting experiences to draw from for the type of stories I like to write.

What I’m hoping to get out of this GWW class is to learn the craft of writing fiction – the right way – and to get the needed critical instruction and feedback to take me to the next level.

Sorry…I lied about being brief.

_________________________________________________________

I am really looking forward to this class.

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