Stuff, with a Things Chaser
I dragged my heels on the walk up to the office this morning. The sun is actually out a little bit today, and it is Not Raining, so time outdoors during daylight hours seems especially precious. I paused to take a few pictures on the walk in as an excuse for the dawdling. It's always good to have a camera in my pocket that way.
I was running late anyway because I stopped in to pick up breakfast at the Our Lady of the Egregious Apostrophe (Specialty's Bakery) that's conveniently situated on my walk between the train and the bus, and while I was waiting for my breakfast sandwich (somehow "no cracked pepper, no garlic butter," turned into "All the Cracked Pepper! All the Garlic Butter!" somewhere between the register and the kitchen) I got sucked into making notes on a writing project, and completely lost track of time or, you know, external reality. I have Fiction Brain again!
I have been reading Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, on the recommendation of the fabulous mcjulie, and it is resonating for me like howdy. I mean, I hoped it would offer a viable method for writing faster, and I'm pretty sure it delivers on that -- I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but it makes sense and seems promising -- but what I didn't expect was that in suggesting strategies for preparing to write, or ways to get unstuck when you hit a roadblock, the book would also rocket me fully back into my fiction writing head.
There's a place where your stories start talking to you, and you make brilliant discoveries about them and their characters and their world, and all of a sudden you're in playland, and the whole business of making things up is fun and exciting and something you voraciously want to do more of, and still more. For a moment, like Theodore in Her, you can believe you're the best writer in the world. Somehow Aaron's book took me right back there. Which, even if I got nothing else out of the book (though I did), would easily be worth ten times the ridiculously tiny price I paid for it. If you write, you should buy it is what I'm saying here. Because the book gave me a ticket back to playland. As Aaron says, if writing is painful, you're doing it wrong. Writing should be fun. Whee, I'm having fun!
Also, if you like Sinus Friction Si Fri Science Fiction movies, I also heartily recommend Her, which is probably the sweetest, gentlest, most human, loveliest, and yet most melancholy AI story in the history of the planet. Joaquin Phoenix's performance is unutterably amazing. I particularly love the tension between characters who are so emotionally generous and genuinely kind and the howling loneliness and isolation that permeates every life we see for most of the film. It is totally believable that falling in love with a person who has no physical presence, but is nonetheless present, companionable, funny and vulnerable, would be the most obvious and easy thing in the world. In a way -- no accident I think, given what Theodore's job is -- it's very much an epistolary romance. If Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning had had the internet, they might have fallen in love like this.