Author: Douglas

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Timothy Truly Thought

Day 450

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Exactly 45% through 1000 days of daily writing. I’d be further if I’d written daily. I think I’d be done. Sigh.

I’m digging through my Evernote finds hoping to pull a charming maquette out of the bunch the way you flip a Beatles LP out of a stand of old records in a atticked box. I’m only finding the Bee Gees though. Maybe some days you just can’t have the Fab Four…

Timothy hunches in the auditorium chair appreciating the stark silhouette his shadow produces on the cement and the stackability of a row of cloned chairs: square chrome legs, orange cloth seats. He doesn’t know why the room is black. He doesn’t know why a single spot light beams into the crowd of chairs rather than the performance-free stage. He adjusts his shoulders to make the outline of his head on the floor distinct from the peaks of his jean jacket collar. Better.

Looking for an escape from the wedding party, he truly thought the door that swung open would lead to the outside and a polite secret smoke in the hotel ally. Instead he got this egotistically lit room. Of course he sat right down in the singular illuminated throne. But, as neatly as it served his mood initially, he still needed that smoke.

A pack of Marlboros appears out of habit. He packs it down and plucks out a lucky one before he realizes he’s decided to smoke in a building. Timothy casts back in the chair to prop it up on its two back legs so that he can fish his lighter out of his jeans.

Some more stuff happened but I ran out of time to write it today.

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Slowly Learning to Read

Day 449

I’ve been better able to notice the writing of others. This is an accomplishment for me others may find astounding for two reasons: it isn’t all that hard and I’ve had more than the regular share of literature training.

Let me scratch that second one off the list first with a the broad broom stroke of time. I could have had a minor in English lit if I’d only filled out the paperwork, but that reading was done in college nearly half my life ago. I forget things easily. Nor did those classes focus on the writing as a demonstration of how to become an author only how to critique what others had written.

Paying attention to the writing isn’t hard but it isn’t easy either. I don’t buy books so that I might learn to write better. I buy them so that I might spend time in a different world enjoying the imaginations of others. An author who makes the reading effortless lulls me into absorbing that experience rather than analysing it. (Maybe there is a simple lesson to learn right there.)

I recently completed a book that walked too close to the edge of bad. Usually keeping it’s balance fine, but sometimes wobbling on cliche and patterned dialog for noticable stretches. Given all the writing advice regarding eradicating cliche I was surprised this book made into publication. As for the dialog, the two male leads talked so much like women I thought the twist was going to be them turning out gay.

The very last bit of book I read—only the prologue from a book I’m re-reading—teaches me that if you have a plan for your story and goals for your characters you can get them to say and do things on target for that arc. That prologue is a throw-away bit of writing that does little more than fully introduce the world, establish back story for the birth of the main character we don’t see again until she graduates high school, and outline the rules of magic. Little more than that. Such understood direction derived from characters who know what they want gives heft to the reading in a way that just flouncing imagination cannot. Character sheets for writing always have a space to fill for goals or needs. I’ve never felt any way but hokey about these sections though I’ve felt the same way about the sections for eye color and weight. I think I can see now why I should stop feeeling that way.

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More Funner

Day 448

Early on, before I had trouble coming up with anything to write each morning, I wrote a few bits about pixies. The idea was to be that my children had been kidnapped. Taken to Faerie. And needed rescueing—or something.

That story never resolved enough for me to determine if the girls had been taken or run away or just plain lost. The possibility existed that I was kidnapped and they needed to save me. Or that may be confusion with another story I’ve had going stale in the intermitantly stocked pantry that is my brain.

Since the time I wrote that I’ve been invaded by rubberized plastic and DVD versions of nearly what I wanted to create at the time. These real invaders are quite a bit more Disney in both style and copyright than mine were to be. This pixie writing of mine came to mind because of last week’s plunking around with four women on a fantasy quest one frozen morning. The pixies would be more funner.

So many author’s have been motivated by telling stories to their children. I should tap into that motivation. Maybe instead of reading stories before bedtime I should be making them up and sharing them with my daughters.