What I'm about to tell you via this blog post is going to give you a terrible, awful, accurate description of myself:
Someone found my flashdrive! Poor thing. I would have posted a picture of it, looking all dilapidated and sorry for itself, but I can't seem to remember where I set the thing down...
Carley.
Yes, I know.
You lost your flashdrive.
Yes, I know.
And then you found it again.
Well, technically-
And then you lost it again.
Yes, I KNOW! But novel-wise, that's okay, because I've reached the point I was at in my novel, prior to losing all information. And I had to sit on that writing for a long time, hemming and hawing and mulling it over in the back of my mind because whenever I tried to write something, it sounded dry and happy.
Dry and happy aren't always terrible qualities to have in a book. Where would Lemony Snicket be without the combination of dry and happy, after all. But there come times in my writing journey where whatever I'm writing is coming out of my fingertips and onto a screen, but those words just aren't mine. Too dry. Too happy.
It's hard to make a reader care on demand. Can you force someone to care about whatever it is you are writing?
Definitely not.
I'd say definitely probably, depending on how much experience you've had, and how many writing tricks you've hidden up your sleeve. You can't make someone care about the characters in a historic novel concerning the invention of the cotton loom (don't know where that one came from), by regurgitating a Wikipedia page or two, and whipping out some researched baby names that were used in 1803 (John or George or some other rock-band names from the 1970s). You have to put YOU into the story. If you care, that's the element that reaches out past the ink and paper, grabbing a reader by the heart. That's what makes a good book or a great book. That's why anyone can write a good book and a bad book in the same week. Care. About. What. You. Do.
We readers can smell you pretending to care about what you write. It smells boring.
I'm not a perfect writer. The fact that I might even consider myself to be an ESTEEMED AND GREATLY ADMIRED WRITER OF PREFECT WIT AND PROSE is an idea worthy of a laughing track. With a smattering of ironic applause. And a sardonic "Encore!"
There are a few things I know, however. For instance, experience. Reading books equals the making of a writer. I figured this out a long time ago, before I really knew what was happening. Here's an entry from a certain March seventh from the past:
"Finished The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle. At some parts, they were almost too overwhelming. I didn't cry, though." [blogger note: I had great pride in not-crying for a long
time, a pride that would come to an inevitable fall] "I lay awake in the dark afterwards-staring at the stars," [glow-in-the-dark-stars on the ceiling] "and wondering-do I really have to return to the real world tomorrow? And then I thought-perhaps I won't!
But I did. And here I am."
See that? That was me learning what books can DO to a person, mind, body and soul. Excellent lesson.
The next lesson, according to this journal, is that magic doesn't just come into a pen with time. There are a few places where I write that I am, "patiently as possible, waiting for the magical feeling to return to my pen." Which never ended up working.
Here, I tried to inaugurate some good writing with an incantation, doubtlessly inspired by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Jeanne Birdsall:
"Come forth, oh faeries of wisdom-shower me with your light. Send forth a wind full of patient understanding-send me urging and persistence!"
Every writer's private prayer. What I didn't know at the time, however, was that it wasn't the spell chanted that made my writing magic return, it was the journaling itself.
Lesson two learned: keep a good, private journal. Good for unintentional ideas and writer's block.
Not so private now, is it?
Well, I don't share every-thing, Johnny. It would take years to come before I learned what Louis L'Amour put so well: Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on."
That and synaptic pruning. Painful, sometimes, but helpful.
What are you blabbering?!
I'm blabbering about edited, silly.
More pages of the diaries past, darling readers. Until then.
Be well.
(and be certain to go to the rabbit's special page, where you can meet the newest member of the family!)
"Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you—unless, of course, you fail the test?" -2nd Corinthians 13:5
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