Last week I had a package delivered. Rather unsurprisingly this happened while I was at work. And while my housemates were at work. So what was the poor beleaguered delivery man to do but slip a little card through the door telling me that we’d need to pick it up from the depot. Naturally, there were complications. The main complication being that the depot in question was six and a bit miles away in the industrialised wastelands that surround the city where I live like they do so many others. What ensued was a frantic search to find a way to get there within five days before they invoked “return to sender”. To make matters worse this was all occurring across the four-day Easter mega-weekend, scratching two possible days I could collect it. What with the depot being closed and its occupants rather inconsiderately taking the day off. Most people might have been content to wait, but not I. I wanted that package. I wanted that package bad.
Tag Archives: Writing
The Source
Ideas, when you get right down to it, are bastards. Without them any artistic venture simply cannot get off the ground. Without an idea what do you write about? What do you paint? Not only do you have to start somewhere, but you’ve also got to actually go somewhere. Without an idea you’ll just end up sitting at your desk twiddling your thumbs and resisting the urge to trawl the sordid nether regions of the internet. But as I said ideas are bastards; they are things of whimsy and caprice. They’re not something that can just be summoned or called upon at a moments notice. Ideas aren’t something you can simply manufacture, trying to is equivalent to a blacksmith trying to hammer a sword out of the wind. A good proper idea is a rare gem, something forged in the bowels of the earth of countless millennia, something which you’ll have to shift a metric fuck-ton of shit just to get to.
Getting in the mood
Over the years there’s something I’ve noticed about writing. It might not be true for everyone else but it certainly is for me. I find writing requires a certain mindset, a certain state of being. You really do need to be in the mood. But the mood for writing is something intangible and fleeting. It can be upon you in an instant like a summer storm. In that time a deluge of ideas will fall upon you. Inspiration will flash like lightning across your brain. You’ll feel as if there is no single being or obstacle in the entirety of creation that can stop you from writing the greatest work of fiction that man will ever read. You’ll dash upstairs to the computer or lunge wildly to the biro by the fridge, snatching up the envelope that the water bill came in. You’ll ready yourself to slash that pen across the page like a sword across the heavens. You’ll touch it to the paper and then…nothing. It’ll be gone. Just like the storm it will have passed, there wont be a cloud in the sky and the only reason you’ll even believe the storm happened will be the lingering wetness of your clothes. There’ll be little traces of the ideas you had, the ghosts of genius rapidly fading second by second. You’ll but down the pen and it’ll all seem futile and pointless. The mood’s gone. No writing for you. Not today. No matter how hard you try you can’t conjure the mood, just like you can’t conjure a storm. Unless you’re a wizard, but if you’re a wizard you’ve probably got better things to do than write fiction. Like fighting dragons or battling that warlock in the next valley who borrowed your spell-book and never gave it back; bastard.
Cometh the hour
Well Monday did not in fact see the release of SFFS’s Zine. It did not arrive on the shores of the internet until Wednesday. I felt slighted. I felt betrayed, stabbed in the back. Left behind to suffer at the hands of a monstrous horde. My rage was incandescent. And then I was given a biscuit for my efforts and the anger melted away on a breeze of chocolate and baked dough. That and I realised that being twos days late wasn’t all that bad and I was evidently over reacting. Sometimes the industrious little gnome in my head likes to throw on a pair of tights and a ruff; turn the drama all the way up eleven, start yelling “verily” and “forsooth” and act the ever loving shit out of a situation. His elocution could do with some work though.
Anyway, I advise you to hunt out this Zine about Mr Callis and his shenanigans. It’s also worth having a read of my friend Sam’s story called “Jeremy”. The last line is quite the stroke of genius. Or at the very least bad punning.
Now I’ll leave you with a link and bid you good night. For as much as one might want to wish otherwise, the dread Minecraft is no substitute for food and sleep.
Unhappy the land that needs heroes
Tomorrow should see the release of the latest issue of SFFS’s termly e-zine. It’s called the Zine. It should also contain the third instalment of “The Trails and Adventures of Mister Callis”. For the uninitiated, which I suspect will be more or less everyone, they’re a series of short stories cornering the eponymous Mr Callis. I’ve always been a big fan of fantasy literature, the epic tales of high adventure from the likes of Eddings and more recently the dark and seedy world’s of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch. I’ve always wanted to write a fantasy story but my previous attempts have been somewhat lacklustre, dry and a bit boring to write. The difference with this is that writing about Callis is fun, it’s exciting and I continually want to do more. This does however concern me greatly. Not for the reason that I’m writing a lot for fun, that’s great. But because of specifically who and what Callis is.
The voices inside my head
Occasionally I try to write things. Most of the time I don’t have much success in making a great deal of headway with these sorts of projects. There’s usually a brief flurry of activity as my keyboard takes a massive pounding. Before I know it I’ve got a couple of thousand words sitting in front of me. Then the bright supernova of verbiage winks out. Then there’s nothing for months, sometimes years. It’s always a cumulation of factors that seem to get in the way. I’ve got to go out. I’ve got to do something else first. I can’t be bothered. I’m ill. My computer’s covered in bees. The list is endless. Then there’s the old chestnut writer’s block. Most of the time it feels quite a bit bigger than just a block, it tends to feel more like a mountain. A mountain that is continually falling on my head over and over. I tend to find I get distracted easily as well. I just start making some headway with one idea and then another pops into my head that DEMANDS immediate work on it. Then the whole cycle starts over again.
Out there in the arid badlands of the internet there’s a motley assortment of websites and/or blogs offering tips on how to overcome these bugbears. Some of them are helpful, other just utterly shatter everything you held to be true and make you want to weep in the corner while eating all the pages out of your notebook. But all of this rambling is largely peripheral to the point I’m slowly meandering my way towards. I find that a good, solid point needs to be approached with a running start and a fuck-ton of inertia, just in case it tries to fight back. I call this the super tanker approach. Once you’ve got yourself going you’re not going to stop even if you realise later on that you probably should. On one of my many journeys across the internet badlands I found one of the aforementioned sites. One of the things they recommended was giving your writing “a voice”. For one reason or another they thought it was a splendid idea to create a little compartmentalised identity in your head which did all the writing, not you. I suspect they meant just giving it a funny accent or a couple of textual idiosyncrasies. I think I went too far.
Now I’ve got a tiny little gnome living in my head. He’s called Hieronymous P. Taber and he pumps steaming, hot gouts of “what the fuck” through my fingers. He dodders around the musty cave of my skull in a little flat cap and pale blue dungarees. His beard’s shot with that sort of iron grey hair which suggests he’s probably getting on a bit but isn’t yet past his best. The pumping’s all done by a big set of bellows that are all covered in soot and grease and no matter how hard Hieronymous tries it gets everywhere. He even carries a little tartan hanky to wipe it off his hands and face. He drinks tea out of a jam-jar and smokes dog-eared cigarettes rolled in greaseproof paper.
And that I think adequately demonstrates that I tend to over think things and how easily I get distracted.
Mind you, Philip K. Dick used to claim his writing was the result of a big pink idea laser that god shone into his brain. On second thoughts, I don’t think that helps my case.
The Rogue Verbumancer 