Inside This Writer’s Mind

I often get asked what goes through my mind, as if being a writer puts me in a special category of thinking. Maybe, in a way it does, but I have the ordinary thoughts of grocery lists and cleaning schedules and dinner menus that everyone else thinks about. So what’s different? Is there really a difference to the way writer’s think? While I cannot pretend to know what other writer’s think, I can speak for myself and say, sure, why not? I do believe I think a bit differently, more creatively, if you will. That is not to say all people can’t or don’t, as I do believe anyone can think as a writer does, it just may come with a bit more effort.

I am not sure how to really describe what I see or how I think, except that I can see more than what a scene on a street can depict. For instance, take a young woman and a man sitting a few feet apart on a park bench. You may say, yes, that’s a coupl sitting on a park bench. But I say, no, it’s a woman sitting on a park bench feet away from the man she loves because she is struggling with how to tell him she is pregnant. The man is sitting there wondering why his girlfriend has become so distant lately and what did he do to make the situation come to fruition.
Take a woman hugging another woman who has just stepped off a plane. They embrace in a flood of tears, my mind sees a young woman meeting her birth mother after 25 years. I then go on to try to figure out how each must be feeling and the journey that led them here.

We often here there are three sides to every story, the truth, and the version of the two it involves. I believe there are many facets to a story. There is what we see, the truth, and then there is the way my mind perceives and interprets a scene. Maybe, the truth is too boring for my mind, but I find it utterly fascinating to let my mind wander off and come up with the scores of possibilities. It’s so much more exciting to come up with my own conclusions and it’s something, a gift that I can carry around with me and takes up little to no space in my bags.

Ok, so I have, in fact, one more quirk that may differentiate my thinking from others. I have not always felt comfortable speaking about this one as I feel that most people cannot relate and tend to see it as a reason to put people into padded cells, but I hear voices in my head.

The voices of all my characters that run around playing havoc with my sleep schedule and find new and creative ways to make their dramas very real to me. They talk to me, sometimes constantly as they plead with me to write their story or find them some very attractive sexy and brilliant love of their life. They argue and fight with me when I throw a monkey wrench into their plans just to see how they can and will handle it. My villains make me think that leading a life of crime is a natural and often fun thing to do and please, please won’t I just let them loose to commit all sorts of helter skelter (hari kari is what my mom would have said, however, I just found out I cannot use this…see below).

However, please do not think that because my characters speak to me they tell me everything. Often they don’t tell me a lot, like their name, or sex, or they leave out vital details that would have been good to know before I wrote fifteen chapters! It can be a definite love/hate relationship that is enough to drive the sanest person insane. But insane, I am not. I am just me, a writer, and this is just how my mind works. Some people are born to be great with numbers, and I applaud them, for I try to think about numbers infrequently. I really dislike math and I find it troubling and hard, but give me words….or give me death.

Ok, now I feel I must clarify an earlier statement on hari kari. I just asked a co-worker to spell it for me, and he said, the Japanese ritual suicide? So, I immediately rushed to Google and looked it up. Ouchy! I have been using the term horribly over the years. Helter skelter is much more fitting to what I am trying to convey. Blah…here I try to call myself a wordsmith…let me get back to my dictionary.

Procrastination Foe!

After a brilliant New Year’s day spent by playing World of Warcraft for 13 hours, cooking black eyed peas, and mulling over my thoughts, I thought it would be prudent to discuss my constant foe, Procrastination.

You could call him your personal demon, specifically designed to keep you from doing anything you should be doing! He’s great at giving you all the options that you want to do instead of sitting down and truly hunkering down and getting any, let’s say…writing done? I only have myself to blame I’m sure, but really I’d like to pass along some of that blame. Why should I shoulder it all?

It’s really not my fault they have designed a video game that is so enthralling and captivating that I want to sit all day and play. I don’t consider it wasting time, aren’t they supposed to build that eye-hand coordination? Besides who better than myself, or you, to play the game and pay a silent homage to the artists and creators who have not procrastinated and spent all that time producing such an intriguing world. Alas, as much as I love this game, it’s not my life and I do get tired of playing. On another positive for me…I spend quality time with my husband, so it’s not all bad. Laundry and dishes can wait, I think.

My other little personal procrastinator is reading. Don’t worry, none of them are books on writing. Just your usual run of the mill paranormal and genre romances with a little intrigue and mystery thrown in. I have a bad habit of buying and reading until done a good book. However, in my defense, I am supposed to read, read, and read books that are in the genre I am trying to be published in. So that can go both ways.

I do watch a lot of TV as well, although, in my defense, usually it’s ON and I am not engrossed, except for today when they had a load of back to back episodes of Iron Chef. I actually was engrossed, but I am human and do have flaws.

I love to put things off and I believe I tend to do my best work under pressure. Maybe that is why I succeeded in the NaNo WriMo this year. When it comes to a deadline, I will usually meet it after a lot of stress and a few tears, plenty of time in the video games or a book. Again, I think there is some perfect balance I haven’t found quote yet, but know that I am working on it. I did have time to put together a daily list of things I wanted to blog about! I only hope that my musings, rantings, and ravings can be of some use to even one of you.

So until next time….find your procrastination foe and sternly let him know he cannot dominate all of your time.

A Writer’s Organization

I attended a writer’s conference several years ago to meet and listen to one of my favorite authors. Not only did I meet and like her, but I met other published authors and those that are struggling to get published. We all hung out together over the course of four days. Lunches and dinners were filled with me sitting almost dumbstruck, or awestruck as they passed around tales of their writing experiences and hassles and tricks of the trade. All of a sudden they all get quiet and turn to me and ask how I organize myself before, during, and after my writing.

I was thrown off, to be honest, I had no clue there was a process of organization I needed. Then I began to freak out, what if I was missing a very key element? OK, apart from the fact that I never finish anything I start…..but we’ll get back to that. What if all I needed to become a successful author was a great organizational process? My process up until then had always been to sit down and pound out the story that was in my head and do a little research when the need arose.

The writer’s around the table began to tell me of their different methods and rituals and I was doing my best to memorize them all, because I had none and wanted to incorporate theirs. Writer A was definitely a type A, she mapped out everything, started off with an outline, made charts, graphs, the works, and then used a nifty little writing software. Writer B would brew a huge pot of coffee, buy special pens and write in notebooks, where she left the margins open for notes. Writer C did everything by his computer where he kept meticulous files of research. At this point in my life I was handwriting all my stories, so I felt a bit outdated.

I came home from the conference with a new resolve. I was going to get organized. I invested money in buying every book on writing known to man. To call me obsessed was an understatement. I read all the books, underlined passages, highlighted things for months, until a writer friend of mine asked when the last time I wrote anything was. I realized then that I was spending all my time reading about writing and not writing. So I felt like I was back at square one. I then emailed a writer from the conference about my dilemma. She told me that I had to find my own way and use what works for me to get my writing done. I didn’t need a fancy system. Just doing what I was doing was probably good enough.

My life is cluttered, but my writing life is all in my head. It’s all there for me to pluck out into my computer or onto the page and I don’t have to spend a ton of money on how to write books. I already know how to write, I just need to do it.

30 Day Blog Challenge

In the interest of keeping up with every other internet blogger fanatic, I have decided to issue myself the 30 day blog challenge. The goal is simple: to post a blog every day for a month. I figure this will benefit me in a number of ways being that I love to write and have decided for the new year that I will write at least 1500 words a day. What better way to knock off some of those words than to find things to blog about! I am told constantly that a writer needs to write everyday in order to keep the blocks away and when you think about it, it makes sense.

So I have outlined my next two weeks with a nice brainstorming session. I researched writing prompts and journaling exercises to better help me into my foray of blogging. I have an intense and grueling writing schedule tentatively mapped out and with a little help from my new Bubble planner, I will be able to keep myself on track.

While I don’t have any kids, just a husband who can be a big kid, I do have a real life and work to write around. But that’s the beauty of it all, being able to find a way to incorporate writing into my life. I’m not sure when I wanted to become a writer, maybe it was my intense love of books growing up, or perhaps it was truly the wild tales, or lies as my mother says, that I spun. My mother told me I should put my creative mind to a more productive use than lying to get myself out of trouble. Mind you, I couldn’t tell a small lie, they had to be grand whoppers filled with things so far from the truth that about half the time they were unbelievable. Now, as an adult I can look back and see how I began my journey into my writing career.

I belonged to a writer’s group for a long time and the group was amazed that I could be given a sentence and just run away with it creating a world filled with characters, action, drama, suspense, and of course good old fashioned romance. They would often tell me that it would take them weeks to construct what I had done in a matter of an hour or less. I didn’t really see anything special about that ability as it was always just there. I have theses stories, characters, plotlines just running amok in my head and with me at any given time.

I’m going to call myself creatively blessed and leave it at that, because to delve too deeply to find out the center may be more traumatic than I care to deal with.

So, you may ask, what exactly is my goal? Simply, to write, and become a famous author with books littering the best seller lists, of course. OK, realistically, I’d like to get something published. I’ve dabbled in poetry, but I know that’s not my particular talent. I’d much rather focus on people and the stories they need to tell and their interactions with each other.

OK, so my goal for this year is to rewrite and edit my novel I just finished in November as part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNo WriMo) and get it ready to be shipped off to a wonderful and talented agent and or publisher, who will then race to get my book read in one sitting and be knocking on my door the next day with a check.

While some of my blogs will keep you all updated on my progress, most will be about other things, including my struggles in life and in writing. So stay tuned, pull up a chair, a good book, and something nice to drink, and join me as I begin my journey into the next chapter of my life.