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.