My Writing Process:

MY WRITING PROCESS - The World Blog Tour

First, I want to thank the amazing activist, writer, and teacher Diane Lefer  http://dianelefer.weebly.com/ for getting this thing going.  Yay! 

And thanks to my buddy, Natalia Sarkissian http://nataliasarkissian.com/, herself an amazing writer and photographer, for inviting me to become involved.  Write on!

What I've discovered through this short exercise is a better understanding of myself, my strengths as a writer, and my excuses for not working as hard as I can every day to better my craft.  It has been motivational, and for that I am grateful.

Please check out the two talented writers I am introducing at the end of this posting, and why not follow and support their blogs and their writing?

1)  What am I working on?

   I currently have two novels in progress.  One, tentatively titled Pontotoc is a coming-of-age novel about two Texas brothers, Rafe and Peep McLeod, who lose their parents in short order and head out seeking the tiny settlement of Pontotoc to locate an aunt and uncle.  Of course, in novels, those things rarely go according to plan, and the brothers end up lost, then on an ill-fated trail drive, and end up with young Tom O'Folliard involved in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory as two innocents running with Billy the Kid and his Regulators.  They make their way to El Paso after Pat Garrett kills the wrong Billy, and find work in the saloon of notorious Sheriff Dallas Stoudenmire, a former Ranger known for his hard drinking and rashness, which eventually gets him killed.  When sober, Stoudenmire is a good mentor and gets Rafe interested in the honor of Rangering. The boys move on to Austin and are befriended by Marshall Ben Thompson, the English gunman and his loco brother, Billy.  Because of Ben's penchant for violence, he and Rancher King Fisher are ambushed in a vendetta at the Vaudeville Theater in San Antonio.  Once again  the brothers push on for Pontotoc.  Their search for family and mentors has ended badly, but in the end, flawed role models are just as effective as good ones and the boys end up achieving their dream of becoming Texas Rangers.

  The second novel, untitled, flashes between 1843 and the present to the same location in Blanco County, Texas and then to several other locations across time and space as it follows Tim Reuland through his incarnations.  In the opening segment, Reuland is a straggler from a Texas Ranger company that rode down and massacred a small band of Comanche, having mistaken them for cattle thieves.   Reuland rapes the surviving woman, who then kills him -- and then continues to kill him in every lifetime up to his present one. 

   In this incarnation, the woman jerks a ladder from under Reuland while he is painting his ranch house, and the fall throws him into a closed brain injury coma.  The lights are on, but no one is home.  While his wife, Tina, enlists the best neurological doctors in the country, Tim floats between worlds where he and the Comanche woman, Rain Elk, finally come face-to-face to work out the issues that have bound and followed them through eternity.

2) How does my work differ from others of this genre?

   The first question would be in what genre am I working?  I would say it is literary historical fiction that I'm currently exploring. I am very cognizant that writers not only have to have to write beautifully, but they absolutely must tell a compelling story.  Story sustains the reader, whereas beauty and skill on the sentence level sustain the narrative. 

   I am a student of history and am most familiar with Texas as a setting, so I quite naturally combine the two in these novels.  I also have a penchant for magical realism, so non-ordinary occurrences sometimes happen as easily as breathing in my work.  This is obvious in the untitled work in progress as well as two finished narratives. I strive to make the boundaries between real and surreal disappear for the reader.  With that line blurred, stories become interesting.

   I've also been accused of having a certain level of violence in my works.  It works well for Cormac McCarthy, and as long as violence isn't gratuitous and is integral to the story, then I write it!  I do violence pretty well, which is obviously a necessity.  After all, the era I'm writing about was a violent time.

3)  Why do I write what I do?

   I write about things that interest me.  I've written about professional wrestlers, pimps and call girls, cowboys and Indians, and ghosts.  (Hmmm..I wonder what this says about me?) There's also a spiritual (not religious) undertone to most of my work, so I suppose I'm interested in what the hell is the purpose for our lives.  There has to be more to life than chance.  At least I think so.

   My characters get thrown into confusing, often magical situations that leave them straddling the threshold between life and the afterlife as they try to make sense of the beauty and awesomeness of this amazing and puzzling event.  I suppose that is the quest in my writing. 

4)  How does your writing process work?

   I'm going to fess up here and own up to the fact that my process this past year has been on par with retreating glaciers during the last ice age.  I blame that on several factors: 

  

   a) We became custodial grandparents of our infant grandson one year ago this month.  There are so many blessings that come with that opportunity, but keeping a schedule and getting enough sleep are not high on the list! 

   I've seen this with writer friends who have become new mothers, and now I  can identify.  Their blogs are all about the baby, motherhood, the challenges of trying to write with a baby, asking their readers "Am I talking about my child too much?", and writing mostly short-short posts fleshed out with a lot of photographs. 

   I recently read that the average American now has an attention span of 8 seconds.  Yup.  Sounds about right to me.  Everything I've been writing for the past year has been micro-fiction.  I think it has to do with attention span and the relegation of craft time to the hours when I don't think straight anymore.  Novels have definitely gone begging.  I have two in progress that are feeling like red-headed stepchildren right now.  I do like micro fiction.  I also write poetry as a warm up for fiction.  It makes me economical with word choice and rhythm.

   b) A rebounding economy.  I'm in the design and construction business (www.CasaDesignCo(dot)com) and these days I am being pulled in 16 1/2 different directions.  It's called making a living.  Tom Clancy, Elmore Leonard, and many of you have probably figured out how to keep all the balls in the air, but this year it has eluded me.  I need someone expecting my manuscripts.  My life is built around deadlines and deliverables.  Without deadlines there are no deliverables.

   So why have I not pushed forward as well as I would have liked?  Paying clients get the best hours.  Family gets second tier time (don't act so damn holier than thou, Oh my readers), and the things I like to do but that don't pay at the moment -- writing, going to the gym to workout, sex -- compete for what's left.  Oh, and sleep.  Yeah.  What's that?

   I could blame being stuck on the structure of the novels in progress, especially the untitled one, and that's the truth.  But I also know that if I would put my ass in the chair and work on my process every day, the structure would work itself out.  I've done it before.  Novels take on a certain synergy when given the chance to blossom.

   Which brings me around to general sloth and laziness.  I find myself wanting to qualify the bluntness of that statement, but there's really nothing to say to soften truth.  For such a hard worker and self-starter on so many fronts, it would appear I have taken a three martini lunch this year and forgotten I have to go back to the writing "office" if I want to get anything of value accomplished. 

   When I think about process, I dream of getting up at five a.m., doing a little yoga and meditation, then retreating to my office to write until 11 a.m. every day.  The trick would be to not let people see the self-imposed solitude and to let them simply wonder how the hell you are managing to crank out a novel a year.  And still have time for golf. 

   Remember, I said I dream of that.  The reality is that I end up taking off my analytical work hat and slipping into a coffee shop to don my writer's suit.  The one with a cape and the big W on the front.  Then if I can magically shift thought processes, I can eke out maybe two hours at best before the other commitments find me.  Heaven help me if I check my email, which will derail everything.  So I don't.  Nevertheless, it can still take thirty minutes to decompress enough to get started.  Let's just say I am overly concerned about time because there just isn't enough of it.  Todd Rundgren sang, "I don't want to work, I just want to bang on the drum all day."  I just want to bang on the keyboard and create.

   I generally begin by editing my last writing session and usually puts me into the moment where I previously left off, and catches me up to this session's starting point.  They say you shouldn't edit while you write and I try to adhere to that in order to get words on the page.  I'm a good editor so I know I'll catch up to that part later.

   My strength is probably voice.  That's a good strength to have.

   My weakness is probably the structure, the architecture so to speak, of the novel.  I employ a lot of what would be called magical realism, possibly because it allows me to create happenings and novel events that don't always have to be "logical."  I'm tired of logic.  Real life strives to be logical.  We all get enough of that.  I want a novel to lift me out of logic.  Some might say I am just being lazy and don't want to work out the details. Some could be right.

  So there you have it, folks.  The bare facts as I see them on March 10, 2014.  The Blog Tour is a good exercise not only to introduce myself to you, but to also examine the holes in my own writing process.  The main thing is to create space and time to let the process work, because when I do, it always comes through and in the process takes me for a wild and very interesting ride.  That is when writing becomes truly magical -- when I sit back and wonder what my characters will create next. 

Thanks for reading!

Let me introduce some other writers to you, who will be posting for the Tour on March 17th.  Please check them out and follow their work:

Zack Kopp is a freelance writer, musician and tour guide currently living in Denver. This blog is the latest part of his ongoing effort to market himself as a writer of multiple aptitudes, featuring, as it does, various sorts of citizen journalism, intelligent fiction, and something Kopp calls "metamorphic prose." The blog, updated as frequently as possible, is also a way to market Kopp's published works and act as a nerve center for his online presence. http://rentparty.blogspot.com/

Jennifer (Jaijot Kaur) Eldridge Benjamin finds herself at a crossroads, it seems almost daily. She is currently a student of Chinese Medicine, a long time yoga practitioner, yoga teacher, yoga teacher trainer, mother and wife. Jennifer's family and studies inform her every breath. When not filling the roles listed previously she finds deep satisfaction from digging in the earth. She expresses her creativity, vulnerability and sheer joy for life through writing.

The blog "New Rules for the Good Girl", which can be found at www.jaijotkaur.com, started as an experiment to keep in touch with friends while walking the Camino de Santiago across the North of Spain. Since the walk she has been working on a novel which is based on her adventure, as well as the journeys of three other fascinating women with moving, transformative and entertaining stories to tell. Jennifer shares her writing with the hope that those who read it will see that it is possible to be brave enough to go after their dreams (even when they seem impossible), find their truths (especially if they are hard) and be strong enough to live them (no matter the perceived consequences.) Her vision is that we can touch those deeply held spaces, be present for the learning that resides within them, and heal, all the while laughing at the mystery, magic and comedy of this play we call life.

 

Bert Jansch - January Man