A soul full of holes. . .

You don't know a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. That's the old saying and as far as I'm concerned one of the most profound inspirational quotes ever. Of course as a writer it means more to me than most other people. I spend a majority of my life in my own head, walking in other shoes, living other lives, imagining inspired worlds. But at the end of the day, I am not the warrior, or the poet; the lover, or the schemer, or even the mastermind. I can only ever be me.

There's another saying which is popular among writers, anyone who's taken a serious writing class will recognize it: Write what you know. And to me, that is one of the worst, most frustrating, embittering sayings ever. And unfortunately no less profound than the other.

They are both true, and in my opinion, set at juxtaposed positions. One of course urges the listener to explore or meditate. To empathize with those different from you by stepping outside yourself and imagine yourself under another person's stress. The other tells you to lean on your own experience, to write with confidence something that you're confidant about. Not to ponder, but to preach. To be the teacher of what you know, what you're good at.

I love the first for the same reason I dislike the second. Because my life is small.

That is not to say I dislike my life, but compared to all that my mind's eye is capable of, it falls short. I will never be the conquerer. I will never stand on the soil of another world. I will never fill my lungs with air that has never seen another human. What can my life compare with that? Until of course I remember that the ordinary makes the extraordinary possible.

I grasp for perspective because I can recognize that mine is so limited. We need both. A balance. That challenging of my own mind makes me a better person. I have faced hardship, but I have never known homelessness. I've lost family, though not tragically. My loss informs my compassion for other people. But because of that gap, I cannot help but struggle to understand. I'll never know the bite of bigotry or sexism, but my taste of ignorance has given me a hatred for it. I've never been betrayed by a friend, but seeing the wreckage afterwards of those who have, has cemented my commitment to be the best friend I can to those around me.

But how do I bridge the gap? Can I ever understand the difficulties that most minorities face daily? Life is inarticulable. A feature I'll probably write about later, but there is something too dissimilar in life, that there will always be a gap. I'll never stop trying to close it, but where do you draw the line? When do we give up trying to understand each other? As for me, it will be my dying breath.

Journal:
"There's us and there's them; there's the have's and the have not's. We're just fighting for a little closing of the gaps. Equal footing; that's it."
"But Joan, there are always going to be differences. Here, there, today, tomorrow and forever. Fighting isn't going to change the nature of the world. Its always been this way since the beginning of time!"
"But it doesn't have to be! Just because it hasn't, doesn't mean it won't. Ten thousand years it has been, and maybe another ten thousand years more, but maybe one day, ONE DAY, just maybe, people will learn to share freely, but only if we keep trying: Keep fighting! If we don't, you're right it will never happen. But as long as we keep trying, there's hope ONE day!"
"The nature of something MEANS it can't BE changed. People will always be like this. The difference is that you think a leopard can change its spots and I don't."
"No, the difference between us is that you can't imagine a world difference from this one. You can't imagine men and woman being equal or where race means nothing more than heritage, or where resources are given freely to anyone who is in need. You can't imagine a better world. Can't or won't."
"Oh, I can imagine it. But vision doesn't change natures."

Rocks fall, everyone dies...

 A lot of my stories spawned from a kind of wish fulfillment, in that I am usually lost in a daydream of some sort, imagining an adventure. And if my brain invents a scenario that really captures my imagination, I take it further and develop its own story.

Because of that, many of the stories that I imagine have plenty of action and fights in them. But when it comes to actually writing that scene, it usually presents a slue of its own problems; pacing, imagery, dynamic twists. They are all need complicated interpretation and explanation to tell you what you would normally just absorb in real life. When writing fight scenes there are much more considerations to control than one first thinks. No one ever just punches someone else in the face, even something so simple is intricately complex in a prosaic narrative.

For instance: If you were to watch two people just duke it out, you would need very little explained. There are so many minutia that the brain picks up and interprets without having to be told. The air between two people explains a context even if neither say anything. Were they two strangers? Friends having a tiff? One feeling betrayed and the other guilty? Both defensive. Are either martially trained? Are they fighting to blow off steam, hurt, or even kill each other? Everything is automatically noted by the audience. The reactions in the postures and body language would tell a whole story.

But for writers, we must assume the audience is blind, deaf, and sadly even dumb. Context, tone, atmosphere, speed, intensity, desperation. If a tooth is broken, you have to explain that. Does spattering visceral matter blind someone? If at the same time as the fight, a person across the room grabs their phone to call the police; you have to mention it somewhere.
It becomes a juggle to fit all of the pertinent details on the page without losing the tension or confusing the reader. And that's with all the stuff that you're intentionally putting in there. But there is always the need for situational cues and setting description. Minor events and chain-reactions often become lost in the tug-of-war in the struggle to follow a chronological step-by-step. Even the most talented writer can sometimes forget to mention the fight moving or scenery settling, like residence clearing the area or by-standers (the important ones anyways) reactions.
Unfortunately additional details clutter up the action. But all that information has to fit in somewhere. Do you stop the whole fight to explain the broader context? Do you make every odd sentence a violent one and every even one situational? Do the fighters halt their combat just so the audience can see what happened to the protagonist's date while they got into a brawl? Where does the line for detail verse drama go?
Sentence structure, and paragraph length are absolutely essential to pacing; which fight scenes live and die by. Someone like myself who strives to wholly immerse their audience in the urgency of the fight, stretch ourselves to examine every single word, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, to fit in those context clues. But that over-analysis often kills word-count momentum(that is to say total book completion); it's easy to lose the pace of an overall story-arch when we get caught in a fight scene.
In writing it's often necessary to budget: Words per sentence and sentences per paragraph, paragraphs per scene, et cetera. But for fight scenes, those budgets become stringently cheap. Mentioning the color of a shirt, or tears in cloth, or every bead of sweat becomes impossible. You begin having to cut details that seem indispensable. And it becomes tempting to sacrifice the tension in the fight to mention that the world goes on around them. Or even worse the temptation to pretend like the whole world stops while the fight goes on. Both of which are false. 

Fight scenes are similar to adrenaline highs. Sometimes they're necessary, but you get caught in the moment and lose your situational awareness. Then afterwards there's the disunion, the normal story pace feels slow in comparison. In this disjointing, transitions become invaluable for restoring the story's equilibrium. They have to pull the reader back to the story, and readjust the focus. But again, at cost of overall theme and character development. Unless of course the writer is very clever.
If he relies too much on a style focused on confrontation to pull the story along, he will give the reader a frenzied but empty feeling, which is off putting, because it often neglects story content. But on the other hand if you too few action sequences in an adventure story, the reader might feel cheated.

That may be why many modern writers stay away from action driven stories. Or why terrible books are so common. So next time you read a compelling story with an excellent fight scene; take a moment and appreciate how much effort and skill went into it.

Journal:

Adam walked down the dusky road, a small bag slung over his shoulder; necessities for living. He would not starve or freeze for a good long time. He walked at an easy pace, no where to be, no where to go; neither leaving or returning. He was dust, or wind. Driven by any force or will, because he had none. No purpose, no desire, and for the first time in his life he was absolutely free and in that moment he felt pure, uninhibited despair.

An empty mind and a full heart...

How many times have I sat down to write without a single thought of where to start? More times than I can count. But that's not saying a lot, I can't count very high. More times than most people could count, I wager. Yet time after time, day after day, chapter after chapter, I plod through, more instinct than intelligence. More grit than game. Its not an issue of skill, after all, what I lack in potential can't be taught, and what can be taught must be tempered with experience, so all I really can do is keep wading through the ocean of my imagination, paddling out pages as they come to me, and time will tell whether it is all been a waste or not.

That is not to say I start without a plan. I begin with inspiration. A song that resonates with adventure, a phrase that saddens me, a mysterious abandoned bit of rubbish my brain struggles to explain, or more often than not a dream like story which haunts me as I try to sleep. It begins days, weeks, sometimes months or years in the back of my brain, playing like some far-off song in the back of my mind, developing itself and molding itself to my psyche. Getting louder and louder until it cannot be ignored and I am force to summon it into physical world, beginning on the first page.

When I begin, there is a panic. My mind races to fill the void, and I am bombarded with the possibilities of a given story, threatened and enticed by the blank white of fresh paper. Characters and scenery dance around my head, all jostling to be first to the party. And suddenly the drought of words is drowned by the thoughts. 

Rarely is there any order to what my mind asserts first. No grand scheme, or powerful theme. Just a storm of color and emotion in raw form, desperate to be understood but too young to express themselves to me in an understandable way. They coo and cry and puke, pulling my hair and scratching my face while I guess at the best way to write them into the story. And often, I get it wrong. The characters I make don't fit best where I put them. Their personalities wouldn't do what I make them do, and I spend seven or eight rewrites trying to decipher an honest story, when I myself don't know what that looks like.

I write with my heart. Its about as stupid as it sounds, but that is the truth. It leads me down the wrong roads and costs me days of writing time. It would be easier and quicker to plan out a draft and character diagram every person, and map every decision, but whenever I do that I get the story wrong.

My dad is an engineer. He believes in diagraming, in formulas, in templates, and right answers. Every time he sees me he's got a new idea or a new strategy to make me the world's most famous writer. But what he fails to understand no matter how many times I try to explain it to him, is that people aren't machines. We don't act in predictable or simple ways. We are individual, flawed, illogical creatures, who say one thing and do another, believe things and condemn others for the same, and who don't understand the things they do themselves.

That I am that kind of person, and that is the kind of book I'm trying to write. Not a right book, or a good book, or even a popular book, but a person book. A story with its own life, for better or worse, that is truthful and authentic without being right or perfect. I write from the heart because I believe people can feel when something authentic the same why people understand when a musical note is on key or not.

Maybe one day I'll learn how to write with my heart and my head. But since I can only write with one right now, I'm going to write the most emotionally authentic story I can.

Journal:

Social upheaval is the result of two things: The failure of a past generation to foster their own legacy. And the failure of the next generation to accept the condition of the world they were born into.

Re: I am a write . . .

Wow, can I just say: Wow. I am sorry. That first post, so many years ago, was awful. I'm pretty sure I was on a sugar high when I wrote it. Honestly, that whole year is a little foggy. But still there is no proper apology for a post written that badly.
Which brings me to another point: I apologize in advance, because I am horrible in that regard. Grammar rules and spelling have never been my forte. I struggle with it daily, and there will undoubtably be future slip ups. And for that I give you my humblest and most heartfelt condolences to all the writing enthusiasts and proud grammar-nazis' out there. I will try to take measures to ensure something like that doesn't happen again.

That said, let me restate what I think past me was trying to say:

I am a writer. A flawed one, which is painfully evident. But if you haven't met me: I am awesome. Take the word of the people who do, I get told it almost daily. I am not usually the smartest person in a crowded room, but I do occasionally have moments under the sun. I've been known to be profound and insightful, even inspirational occasionally. But that is not my natural state. On average I'm just the class clown. A goof. I don't know what it was that inspired me to become a writer, or what compels me to write year after year despite not being great at it, but I've gotten quite good for someone of my caliber. Because of that, I often surprise myself. Scenes I've created will suddenly click, character's I've molded will suddenly pop, and worlds I've inspired will suddenly turn on me and refuse I exist. Just kidding. Just a bit of an atheist joke.
But really, when I'm writing, usually the longer I spend working on a particular idea, the more forced it feels. While on other other hand, characters will sometimes spring from my stories wholly unplanned and steal the show. Characters with intriguing motivations, deep emotions and convicting plots. And somehow I will end having learned from my characters. Which is awesome, after all isn't that why I write? Isn't that why all people crave a good story? We ache for meaning from the depths of our soul, but as a writer, sometimes I get fixed on the idea that I'm the one molding. And I wake up and find a story which I wrote which fundamentally challenges me and my preconceptions. Funny that.
I mean, all characters have to be inherently flawed. It is necessary to move the plot forward. The character drives for meaning or resolution while struggling with his own weakness. And that story compels us because we too struggle like that. A compelling character reflects the reader. Even if its the villain, maybe even especially if its the villain. Art reflects life. As it should. And vice versa, because stories tell us how to live, and why. It helps us make sense of our confused own psyche. But often times I forget, its as much a therapy for me as it is a pulpit. I don't mean to say that I write so that I can preach, although that is in a way true. I try to write what I've found is true. About life, and relationships, and about the self. And I never claim to have all the answers, but it is these moments which remind me, the answers are rarely as difficult as I think they are. I find truth in front of when I write because often times, I ignore it because its hard or too close to see.
THAT - is what I think I meant for this blog when I started it. To help myself see and record the simple truths, those small often neglected nuggets, so I can't keep ignoring them forever. And if a few people enjoy reading the idiotic hijinks along the way, all the better.

Journal:
A timid heart is a prison in itself. While A man in chains may find ways to push the limits of his boundaries and free his soul, a free man may be more bound by the confinement of his own fear than any chain. 

Ant hills and all that . . .

Isn't it funny how sometimes the things we struggle with for days, usually turns out to have a ridiculously simple answer. Like coming to a river and getting all flustered because you can't decide whether you should build a raft or a bridge. Then someone points out it's only knee deep. The whole time you were just too afraid to get wet to even look at how deep the water was. You could have waded across in the first minute, but the answer was too simple for you to see.
That's pretty much how my life is characterized. Like all the time.
I take small problems and I blow them out of proportion. I have to write a new scene, so I do all this research, make three drafts, and stay up all night pounding out a rough idea, while making maps, cultural cues and even inventing a few words for my fake language when I could have blown through the scene and been half-way through the next chapter if I had actually sat down and WROTE.
I spend a saddening amount of time richening the world with details that will probably never make it into the final product, polishing characters that will probably be cut, and setting up complex rabbit trails designed to excite and confuse the reader only to later decide, "that's not the direction I want to go."
Case in point; last year for NaNoWriMo, as always, I set aside North of the Sword (the tentative name of my main project), to explore other other projects that I've been intrigued by. I spent 15 of the 30 days, pounding away at a furious +2k words a day only in the end to realize every single word was worthless because none of it matched to the story I was trying to tell. (long story short, I was continuing from a previous year's NaNo project, and the tone/setting/characters/pacing were all inharmoniously different.) I spent dozens of hours planning schemes for my characters; plotting and executing twists and double-crosses because I wanted to try for an espionage genre mash-up; which didn't mesh at all with the adventure/western feel I had in the first half of the story I was continuing from. I scrapped the project (side-lined, not deleted), and quit NaNo early, but it took me a few weeks to recover from the resulting depression. And yes, my failures in writing can lead to some very real emotional kickback. It's the price for vesting myself in an artistically driven project.
But the whole dilemma happened because I tried to make the new half something that it wasn't, I was too focused on experimenting with aspects of the story instead of doing the simple (right) thing and just continuing the story. I tried to be a multi-genre genius, and ended up wasting a whole month of prime writing momentum and popping a painful bubble of pride. In short: I am my own worst enemy. And I don't see myself wising up any time soon. Sorry.

Journal expert:
Courage is not a mountain. It is not a lion or a storm. There is no courage in victory or ambition. Courage is not a shout; it is a whisper. So faint it may be drowned out by the splash of a single raindrop.

Waiting for a clear sky. . .

Writing is hard. Like really hard. For me at least. Writing a story from beginning to end, containing the proper balance of characters, development, tension and resolution; it takes a grandios vision. You must know what you want, and plot each point along the way with an iron dedication. If your attention or conviction wavers, if you lose the thought, if you change your mind, you wake to find yourself in strange waters, without compass or current or provisions. Its terrifying.

More times than I can count, I have grasped themes of powerful worth. Moments that people could frame their lives around. The ideas which I write for with the potential to inspire and transform lives. But when it comes time for execution, I get lost in the waves, I loose my heading, or a storm steals me from my route.

For four years I have worked on a single book. Over that time it has transformed from that etherial inkling I began with, to a solid work of art which everyday I try to wrap my head around. But it had grown so much now, that I cannot get my mind around my own work. My book, in a very real way has out grown me. I find myself struggling to keep up, fighting to in a real sense, to become worthy of my own art. It is frustrating, and inspiring.

When I look inside of myself I see the potential to be a great writer. Not in a prideful way. But there are clear days, when I read something I've written and it's good. Really good. Those are the moments which keep me going.

But those days are few. They are vastly outmeasured by the clouded days, the foggy days, the days I couldn't see my own hand in front of my face. I hammer through, knowing what part of the story I've generally have to finish pace wise, but unable to see whether what I'm writing is good or crap. But I struggle through knowing the horizon is somewhere, knowing I'll meet landfall or I'll crash into the shoals; either way then I'll be done.

But for now, its foggy sailing from here on. 

Journal excerpt:

People tend to hold on to the things they consider precious; rightly so. The world is often characterized by lose and destruction so it truly follows that anything we consider important we would shelter from destruction.

But with the desire to protect also comes the danger to hold too tightly to that thing. It is like holding onto an egg. Grip it too tightly to yourself and you could crush it yourself; destroying the very thing you tried to protect. Thus there must be a balance to the things we protect, diligence and vigilance with gentleness and objectivity.   

Paying in pennies. . .

So its been years since I posted any form of blog (or even tried). Call it lack of persistence, call it a lack of edifying things to say. I bet no ever thought I'd run out of things to say. But since I'm trying to take this whole writing thing "seriously" I figured I have to take another crack at it. So here we go.

Since often I begin these posts without knowing where I'm going, I decided every time I need a post and lack content I'll post something from one of my journals. There's plenty there after all even if most of it isn't cohesive. My 'first' post is a prime example:

In all of creation, what two forms were made for each other.

To the sower and my soul, to these I dedicated thee. My words and my wisdom.

To my source, that of my wisdom and my gifts, my words, my world. May I never forget that which I pay most dearly to learn or that which I have already paid.

To my soul, that inspiration may one day reach your ears and to the day I shoulder all your cares.

And to tomorrow which holds such promise of life. Pride with such sorant words be left in the past fulfilled with glory and terry no more in the shadow of despair. 

I would have 'joiced at the use of my energy in a more noble and worthy vessel by the knower plans all in perfect time, so may my pen exchange blessing in the name of the Father, the Son and thy Spirit.

Amen.

A poem I wrote, some five or six years ago. I have never been much of a poet as is directly obvious and I barely remember what I was writing about, but there it is, for your viewing pleasure (as much as to help me get into the habit of posting). To anyone offended at the poor quality of it: You and me both. But this is it in its original form because it wouldn't be right any other way.