Continuing The thought

As intimated previously, the first few weeks of writing were really hard. There were so many details that needed to be worked out. What did I need to learn about Jeff and Carl? What was it like in Seattle in the year 2025? What kind of first chapter should I write - solely an attention grabber, long on description, what?

There were many more questions, of course, but getting the important details straight from the start was number one. That meant gaining insight into what Seattle might well be like in 2025. That in turn would strongly influence Jeff and Carl's way of life and conclusions about life. I had lived in and around Seattle for over 20 years at that time and had watched it evolve over that period from a clean, bustling, true Emerald City into a wannabe San Francisco North where the pursuit of wealth and prestige were at the root of all activity. The old shack of a mobile home that I mentioned in an earlier post was located on Bainbridge Island west across Puget Sound from Seattle. The same evolutionary process took place there, except in spades.

Arriving on Bainbridge in 1974, by the time I left in 1996 the dreamy, quiet island of long-time residents of modest means and people in search of quietude had become a haven for people fleeing California, and others from Seattle itself now willing to put up with the 25 minute commute by ferry. The money came with them. By the time I left, multimillion dollar homes were being constructed in every ravine and on every available piece of property. Land values skyrocketed. Many residents of modest means and retired folks were forced out by high real estate taxes, bringing in more money. I had seen the entire process from beginning to near the end, and it was ugly. But there was more to it than that. I had also seen the island change as one, first of good income as a psychiatrist and then finally as a scraping along the bottom writer. The effect was profound and strongly affected my vision of Seattle in the year 2025.

Still, as I began to flesh out Seattle in that advanced year, my view also encompassed the same or similar processes in other large metropolitan areas. Certainly the changes noted were not unique to Seattle, it was just that I loved the Seattle that was lost. What resulted was a dark vision strongly influenced by the substance of evolutionary experience.

In order to avoid later confusion, I need to set out a writing time line here. I started writing in the spring of 1994, shortly after shutting down Home Baking Company. And although I mention the old mobile home, I actually started to write in a much nicer home I owned on the other side of the island. Some months later I lost that home and moved to the trailer. I was behind on taxes and trying to sell when someone got whiff of it and bought my home out from under me for the taxes. As you can imagine, that experience also influenced my view of Bainbridge and Seattle.

Looking back, I still feel the strong emotion of those times and understand more fully the reasons, good reasons, for leaving Bainbridge, Seattle, and planet Earth. So the move to the trailer was necessary, for that's where the real writing took place, but when I caught my final ferry off Bainbridge Island some months later on the way to Minnesota, I did shake the dust off my feet and departed with no regrets.

Life Verbatim - Chapter 3

Backing up a step for the moment, I've been reflecting on those first weeks after sitting down to write a book. Robert Heinlein said on a number of occasions that there was no other way for him to write than to march into his office, sit down facing a blank wall, and stay there for four hours. I recalled that and did likewise. I remember quite clearly how difficult it was - just sitting there trying to get something going. But what? What to write. It wasn't as if I had no idea where to start.

Some writers, regardless of the task, create an outline of greater or lesser complexity and follow it. I resisted that. It was too much like everything else I had been doing for the last 25 years. Too scheduled. Instead, finally, I settled on sketching out two characters and placed them at the University of Washington in the year 2025. Now, sitting restlessly at the keyboard, the question was: what's the story? In the process of answering that question I discovered the real work of writing. At that point it wasn't simply a matter of saying to heck with it and just barfing something onto the page. I knew that the opening scenes and first few chapters of the book would dictate plot elements I would have to live with for perhaps the entire novel. Certainly, plenty of examples came to mind where authors had to scramble around to make sense of the plot. It wasn't pretty and quite distracting.

I can't remember how many hours passed, how many sessions passed, before I was able to type the first sentence of the first paragraph of my first novel. That's the work of writing for me. It is, quite literally, painful. It hurt as I flogged my mind demanding that it come up with something. Anything that makes sense! And eventually it did. There it was. The first scene.

It's easier now, for I acknowledge the need for patience and understand more about the magic of creative writing. It is not the creature of conscious will, but the offspring of some land where the spirit of what I am and believe to be true resides. That spirit will not be dictated to but responds to patient expectation. In that sense, when fully involved in writing fiction one is also fully involved with that elusive inner being. It's no wonder, then, that it wasn't long into writing EXILE TO THE STARS before I departed Earth to roam Aketti.

Starting to Write - Part 2

It isn't that writing within quotations is that difficult. Complicated at times, yes, difficult, no. Like anything else, it's a matter of practice and sweat equity. As far as the mechanics go, I've found the Chicago Manual of Style to be an excellent source of information on just about any question having to do with punctuation. The challenge in writing dialog is making it come to life so that a conversation conveys the same impact as in the "real" world. The answer to this challenge is not found within quotation marks alone or even largely, but in the gestalt of writing. That is to say, the entire thought sequence or scene that the "speaking" part of the dialog is a part of.

If the goal is to replicate real life conversation in composition, then we must include other aspects of conversation to get the full effect. It is critical to include motion, gesture, expression and posture. I do not believe it is possible to have a real life conversation without these aspects of communication playing a major if not controlling role in conveying intent. And that means working outside quotation marks just as effectively as within. That's where the grace notes are, the warmth and color. For example, here's a short sequence from the first chapter of Exile to the Stars (HTML formatting restricts some styling):

Someone yanked a chair from his table and Jeff turned quickly to see who it was. The dils had not gone quietly into the night.
"Damn it, Carl, give me some warning! Where have you been?"
Blond hair fell over Carl's eyes when he sat down. He flicked it away with an impatient twitch of his head.
"Hell of a time getting here. Damn near civil war out there. Cops had two blocks sealed off just south of here. What you so uptight about?"
"Paddy told me Gado's scouting."
"It figures," Carl replied with a grimace. "Friday night and that bastard will wait until some poor slob is drunk on his ass trying to unwind." He glanced at the litter of broken glass. "Getting an early start, I see."

Now it must be noted that narrative plays a huge part in setting up dialog, and I haven't included narrative (as such) in the quote above. I hope to examine that aspect of writing in a later post. However, in only a few sentences one still gets a sense of Carl's personality from his body language. That's a strong element in the gestalt of writing. It isn't just dialog or narrative, but the whole milieu of writing that creates the image of life and reality, drawing the readier into the story and a different reality. Actually, writing in this manner becomes second nature once your characters take on life during those really tough first chapters devoted to getting the ball rolling. They do have personalities, and just like us tend to express themselves in familiar ways. As real personalities, how else could they express themselves? For instance:

"Tell you what, Jeff," Carl observed with a big grin, "I think Bugwit is going to have his hands full tonight. I mean, how is he going to impress everyone at the same time? This is going to be fun."
"For sure, and maybe this is the ngiht he'll shut up about that fellowship of his in Warsaw."
Carl halted abruptly and looked at Jeff with mock horror.
"Are you questioning his pilgrimage to the mecca? Tell me it isn't true! Why, everyone knows that makes him the resident sabrer expert."
"Well, it's a dirty job," Jeff said with an appreciative snicker. "I guess it does take a dickhead like Hathwaite to fill the slot."

It's impossible for Carl to be anything but what he is: irrepressible. Before signing off, let me emphasize that there are as many ways to express a thought or create a reality as there are authors. Some styles work, some don't. The above quotes are only brief snippets meant to illustrate a point.

Digression - starting to write

I think this is a good spot to step out of the main stream of thought for a moment and take a look at what it took for me to start writing. There may be some general lessons here, but that's for you to decide.

First of all, I had to STOP. That was the hardest part. Just stop. Stop the day-to-day anxiety-filled mad scramble to survive; to fight the world in order to survive. That took some doing, and it was only when desperation gave way to rejection, to a screw-the-world attitude, that I was finally able to find the peace of mind to sit down and contemplate the computer monitor. It was time to create, to actually do something positive. First problem. I mean, you have to have something to write about, don't you?

It may sound unnecessary to even mention, but you really must have something to write about. What I mean by that is something that fans the fire smoldering in your belly to full flame. Something that touches your heart and inspires your mind. Yes, there are many excellent professional writers in many fields who compose every day without that condition, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about top-notch fiction. For me, as I've commented on elsewhere in videos, it was the 25 years that had gone before; it was the utter, angry rejection of all the dishonest, malicious, cheating, penurious, treacherous, lying interactions of the prior 25 years. And for all of that time I knew in my heart it wasn't meant to be that way, but did not have what it took to stop fighting, or perhaps the maturity necessary to step aside and say bullshit to it all. That was and is my fire. That fire led me to Aketti and peoples I love. Now, how on earth do you put all of this into words?

The process of writing may seem simple, but believe me it is not. I am not even going to attempt to get around such a subject in one posting, but will likely nibble at the topic as we go along. Today, let's look at the first paragraph of a book (or paper, essay, etc.).

Okay, you have some idea of what you want to say. I'm not one for outlining, so I finally settled on building the story chapter by chapter around Jeff Friedrick and his best friend, Carl Jorgenson. I didn't want to know what was going to happen any farther ahead than that. Now, one could call Jeff and Carl characters in the story, but they're not - they're as real as I am. You see where I'm going with this? The fire in the belly? Really letting heart and mind become involved in what you have to say becomes reality. So, the fire is lighted and ideas are flooding out to fingers hovering over the keyboard. At this point I suddenly realized that I had no idea how to write dialog, or narrative for that matter.

Going to stop here for the time or this post is really going to get out of hand. I'll continue this thread in the next post before wandering back to the main stream again.

Life Verbatim - Chapter 2

After scratching out an existence and fighting to survive for thirteen years, it was no easy matter giving up. Leaving psychiatry and medicine had been more than difficult, but being forced to shut down Home Baking Company was several notches above that on the destructive scale. Gradually, after closing the doors, all worldly possessions disappeared one by one, lost to an inevitable financial process that finally took my home as well. The only place available that I could afford was a very old mobile home, and that's where I moved what remained of my past life.

That mobile home must have been 50 years old. Musty with mold, bedrooms slanted and the size of a closet, the old shack was infested with mice. It was springtime, and I used to wake up early in the morning to the sound of rodents fighting in the bathroom. Still, that old mobile had a wonderful double-wide living room with a decrepit wood-burning stove that made up for a lot. Setting up the 386 computer in one of the closet bedrooms, wondering how I would survive month to month (still with one kid at home), I sat down to see what would come of it. And that's how it all started, fourteen years ago at the age of 55.

The place was quiet, my son was in school, and the world gradually faded away over a several month period as my ability to write dialog and narrative improved to the point that emotions, ideas, and life as I had experienced it could be freely expressed through the keyboard. During that period, I'm not sure when exactly, I left a world that was not mine and discovered one that was.

New Video

Here's that link to the YouTube video mentioned in the post below. It's also posted in the panel on the left. Back soon.

Life Verbatim - The Beginning

Welcome to Life Verbatim: Expressing thoughts in writing about life as I have experienced it, and what I have come to understand about the nature of writing itself. I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed at the moment, considering the nature and breadth of the task, so what I intend to do is start with some background information about who I am, where I have been, and what I have written. We'll see where it goes from there.

Before I really get into this, I'm going to link to my website, Ardent Publishing, so you can look it over for yourself. In the near future I will be adding a second link to a companion video on YouTube. They will both be permanently listed in the sidebar as well.

There was a time in my undergraduate life when I dreamed about writing as a way of life. That was a time and place, however, when college was a place you attended to learn a profession, and it was quite common to graduate in four years with the tools to do so. Writing for a living was no more than a pipe dream, and like a puff of smoke that dream was swallowed up by the drive to "succeed". And so I did, quotation marks included.

In order to make it through medical school I signed up for the Navy Senior Medical Student Program and upon graduation headed for Long Island and a Navy internship. This was during the height of the Vietnam War. The St. Albans Naval Hospital (now closed) was an evacuation destination for wounded soldiers. In spite of knowing one never volunteers for anything in the military, I agreed to serve on the dirty wound ward for one rotation and will never forget that experience. Nor will I ever regret it. There I experienced, for the first time, truly, Life and Death Verbatim. True honor and quiet courage of a remarkable nature among those young men so torn apart and some, dying. I learned something about writing there.

Considering that experience, it would seem natural to avoid volunteering again. Still, the Submarine Service seemed so interesting... Going regular Navy I was soon attending Submarine Medical School in New London, CT, and six months later was assigned to the USS John Marshal, SSBN 611. Assigned as medical officer to the Gold Crew (two crews to each submarine so it could operate year around), I was approached by my opposite number on the Blue Crew who wanted to swap places. I didn't know the guy very well, or know that he was a smooth-talking slime ball, and decided to accomodate him. Turns out he had checked out the CO's and discovered the Blue Crew captain was a total jerk. Two years and two patrols later I emerged from active submarine service shaken to the core from a survival experience with a CO who was determined to destroy every officer he could not convert to his world view. Considering the power of Naval Captains, he destroyed more than a few. I learned a lot about writing there.

Fed up with military life, I resigned my commission and decided to have a go at practicing psychiatry in civilian life. Folloing residency training I practiced that art of artificial worlds created with words, worlds created with smoke and mirrors (more about that later), for about nine years before leaving psychiatry and medicine. I never looked back. To say that I learned many things about writing during this period would certainly be true, but I also learned things about what it means to be human that go so deep that they are still emerging many years later.

Truly at loose ends, and true to form, I decided to pursue learning a trade and set about teaching myself how to bake bread. That was a REAL transition, and, looking back, still has me shaking my head. Still, founding a wholesale bread company, I worked my butt off to build up a company that eventually served three counties. Thirteen years later, utterly exhausted physically, and psycholigically on my last legs, it became clear that my only option was to shut it down and walk away. And so I did. Without doubt I learned just an awful lot about writing during those thirteen years of incredible physical labor as I fought a rear-guard action that could end in only one way.

Shutting the company down and walking away with nothing to show for those thirteen years except an old 386 IBM computer and financial ruin, I decided, finally, that enough was enough.

Good place to stop for now. Be back shortly.

DBM