Write Like No One is Reading

I carry a notebook and pen everywhere I go, which is a habit I've had since childhood. It's often the case that a sentence or character will come to mind while I'm on the elliptical or doing squats at the gym. Snippets of people and places can be fleeting, so I take notes and put the sweaty pieces of paper in my exercise tights.

There are times at which the day flies by so quickly that it would be easy to say I had no time to write, but if I don't write, the day is lost -- ingesting information without a product seems like a waste. Pun intended.

I’ve studied writing in several colleges and really enjoyed the workshopping experience because the writing was private and critiquing was public.

In ‘group-write’ classes, writers would sneak glances at each other as they tried to decipher how each other’s process worked. I listened to the click of a keyboard, the scratch of pen on paper, loud nervous gum-chewing and I wondered how I had ended up in a room of competitive writers. It was a private act made public.

And as the sharing time came around, there were people who refused to read. After they listened to someone else and decided to allow self-centered insecurities to open up a sink hole in front of them, they leapt in. The sinkhole people interrupted the flow. Writing needs listeners and viewers to be fully realized. Looking at the audience’s faces, one can see where the beats are and should be and if the jokes and irony are landing.

Writers have to own their authority and embrace it. Readers won’t follow a writer whose authority is in question. But, in most cases, the authority thing is easy because we love the sound of our own voices, in our heads, and sometimes, out loud.

I love process, discussions of a character’s possible trajectory and analyzing data for the love of process. And my people are out there — overthinkers And overreachers...

Right now, I’m focused on writing scripts and studying in order to improve my talent in this area. For me, writing dialogue brings a character into being. In a script, unlike short story, you have the help of an actor to add necessary nuances, gravitas and special sauce to mere words. A script is the garden without the interesting weeds or background foliage.

The script is an underdressed story, so it’s a lot less work than short stories. Someone will disagree with the idea of writing scripts as being easier than writing fiction. But, that’s how playing with language works. What’s easy for one person is torture for another.

I'm considering the need for balance on a daily basis. Although I would love to read for 8 hours and write for 8 hours, I'm still on the road to that magical place: lying on a couch in my office as I wait for an idea -- that's the dream.

I slip out of this dream as bedtime nears and considers how writing happens - magically without constant scrutiny, learning to compartmentalize in order to write after you’ve suffered a loss or had someone scream at you for being selfish.