WIP Wednesday: The Answer is Not to Ask.
“Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.”
-Stephen King. On Writing
And I agree with the clever Mr. King for the most part. There is this ‘thing’-this X factor to our writing. It gets into us-springs from somewhere undefined and flows from our head and chest, the last stop being our quickly typing or writing hands. But I disagree that we or at least I don’t understand what that harbinger of good and bad writing is.
The religious say it’s God’s hand that sits on ours while we create. I don’t know, but I’m not going to go there today. And I know it’s not Muse or at least the way I see Muse. Muse is what sparks our imaginations attention. It’s the fertilizer on our ideas-the planter of them really. Muse and what we collect in the name of Muse is what feeds our works. Muse inspires.
I believe that ‘thing’ in us that is conductive to good writing, or if left out-bad writing, is our ability to not over think our writing, but feel it. Feel the place our muse took us. Feel our characters. Feel open to whatever it is that does come into us and flows out of us while we write.
And I have come to understand that we are not to understand everything about the creative process. It would be like finding out all of the Magician’s tricks before the start of a show or the understanding that rainbows are just a meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. Bummer, huh?
Knowing why or how a story becomes more than a bunch of chapters and a character becomes a breathing entity to us and our readers, would be like getting “42” as the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” (Hitchhiker’s anyone?). Because knowing ‘why’ can, and often does, take away the magic.
It’s our ability to ‘feel’ the unexplained-the magic, that makes us creative beings. It’s how much we are willing to allow ourselves to let go and let that 'thing' into our hearts and heads, that will determine if we are to sink, swim or flounder.
Boy, I hope this makes some sort of sense when I come back to it later... Just have a lot in my head today. But I did remember cookies-Dutch Coco, so take one on the way out.
And ‘NO’ I didn’t spike them...
-Stephen King. On Writing
And I agree with the clever Mr. King for the most part. There is this ‘thing’-this X factor to our writing. It gets into us-springs from somewhere undefined and flows from our head and chest, the last stop being our quickly typing or writing hands. But I disagree that we or at least I don’t understand what that harbinger of good and bad writing is.
The religious say it’s God’s hand that sits on ours while we create. I don’t know, but I’m not going to go there today. And I know it’s not Muse or at least the way I see Muse. Muse is what sparks our imaginations attention. It’s the fertilizer on our ideas-the planter of them really. Muse and what we collect in the name of Muse is what feeds our works. Muse inspires.
I believe that ‘thing’ in us that is conductive to good writing, or if left out-bad writing, is our ability to not over think our writing, but feel it. Feel the place our muse took us. Feel our characters. Feel open to whatever it is that does come into us and flows out of us while we write.
And I have come to understand that we are not to understand everything about the creative process. It would be like finding out all of the Magician’s tricks before the start of a show or the understanding that rainbows are just a meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. Bummer, huh?
Knowing why or how a story becomes more than a bunch of chapters and a character becomes a breathing entity to us and our readers, would be like getting “42” as the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” (Hitchhiker’s anyone?). Because knowing ‘why’ can, and often does, take away the magic.
It’s our ability to ‘feel’ the unexplained-the magic, that makes us creative beings. It’s how much we are willing to allow ourselves to let go and let that 'thing' into our hearts and heads, that will determine if we are to sink, swim or flounder.
Boy, I hope this makes some sort of sense when I come back to it later... Just have a lot in my head today. But I did remember cookies-Dutch Coco, so take one on the way out.
And ‘NO’ I didn’t spike them...