“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”
-Carl Sagan
01.
TIGHTROPE TIPTOE
Leap from the pages of last night’s splintered fairytale
and pick up today’s clock shards,
stomped to pieces by the troll of your fears;
you’re hangover still—drunk by a bucketful of wishes
and a fistful of lofty ideals
but you tread on the borderline of dreamscapes anyway
and attempt to hold the pain in its place, to stay,
like a coffee stain that won’t go away.
The highwire act of your life is up;
love polygons bounced as you toe across
the nylon string, one that is as fragile as your optimism.
The circus lights blink at you
like mechanical stars, and their brightness seem to mock
the gaping hellhole in your heart.
Flashes of images when you fell:
you hugging a pillow that is not him,
the nighttime silence lulling you to slumber,
and dollops of sunshine trickling down the side of a teacup
from yesterday’s breakfast.
You fell hard,
but it didn’t hurt.
I talk about the things people have always talked about in stories: pain, hate, truth, courage, destiny, friendship, responsibility, growing old, growing up, falling in love, all of these things. What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads. I try to go into those places in me that contain the cauldrous. I want to dip up the fire, and I want to put it on paper. The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.
“
| — | Harlan Ellison |
My attitude on writing has always been threefold. Any fictional work you read should be able to take you away from reality one paragraph at a time. You should be able to have an emotional response to the story or characters completely regardless of whether you have known that feeling before or not. And, it should be good for you. If that’s by teaching you something, making you think, or just taking you away from other situations in life that trouble you.
The first two items I can strive for, the third is primarily up to you, the reader. But what they can do is let you be another person, a character, as you hear their thoughts and say their words. They can make you laugh, tug your heart, and give you a little vacation.
“
| — | Isis CW (my favorite Gundam Wing fanfic writer) |
On Writing Your Characters
Remember that you’re the God of your world when you’re writing a story. That’s why when you’re writing your characters, you should be creating real people, not just cardboard cutouts to stand in an imagined world. The characters should not merely be tools that will push the plot forward, or one-dimensional caricatures to serve as avatars for your idiosyncrasies. Make them live. Make them breathe.
You must know each character inside out. You should see him naked—literally and metaphorically. Undress him. Learn all the facts about him, from his real full name to the last toy he ever had as a kid. Know all his blemishes and flaws, his most embarrassing memories, his worst fears. Discover his dreams and aspirations, his regrets and frustrations; find out what makes him flinch and what makes him smile despite himself. Feel him under your hands, run your fingers over his scars and wounds, those little histories scribbled on his skin. Learn what his weaknesses are. Prod the skeletons he’s keeping in the built-in closet of his personality. And in the end…give him the respect he deserves.
You ripped his clothes—for your own benefit—and you respect him? Yes. It may seem so technical when you do it with the eyes of a scientist studying a specimen, but it’s much better when you do it with sincere feelings. You must learn to “love” the character. You see his imperfections and accept them as a unique part of his personality. Perhaps it’s parental love (characters are your children!), or “friendly” love (characters are your friends!). What’s important here is that you view the character as someone close to you, and it shouldn’t matter if he’s a good guy or a bad guy.
Keep in mind that, like real human beings, they’re akin to icebergs too. What’s on the surface is just 10% of the whole thing. Keep the water level up, and let your readers find the 90% all by themselves. The legwork should be theirs, but all their efforts would be dependent on your writing. Let your character’s speeches, thought processes, and actions unfold more about himself. And slowly, as the story charges on, let your readers undress your character, too. :)
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
“
| — | William Blake |
Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
“
| — | Henry Green |
Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
The candy wrapper I picked up that afternoon was a mosaic of shoeprints. It made me wonder about the lives of people who stepped on it—they’re all going different paths, they have different destinations, and they wove different plans in their heads about their hundred-hundred tomorrows. At some point in their journey, their souls converge or slide upon each other without knowing it. This wrapper is a witness. If our souls ever bump into each other, will we be aware of it? Will you let the chance pass? Will another wrapper be recording our asymptotic history in its thin surface?
“
| — | “Prints” at my OneWord account. |
Beware of the metaphor. It is the spirit of good prose. It gives the reader a picture, a glimpse of what the subject really looks like to the writer. But it is dangerous, can easily get tangled and insistent, and more so when it almost works: don’t have a violent explosion pave the way for a new growth.
“
| — | Sheridan Baker |
