Writers tend to suffer from one of two problems:
1. Writer’s block, or lack of ideas and creative energy
2. Writer’s ‘flood’, for want of a better term; the surplus of ideas, making it difficult to focus your energy on one project
I have used various methods for blowing off and rerouting my surplus of ideas. The first and most common is to talk about them. This is the reverse of the tactic someone suffering from writer’s block would use. If I really need to finish something I will not discuss the project, but let it build up so I have to let it out at the keyboard.
Yesterday I was discussing a fictional protagonist with a friend at The Towson Diner when I said, as two elderly people began to seat themselves behind us, “He is committing war crimes and atrocities. He needs to die. I think I’ll kill him.”
Her eyes then got huge and bugged out at the ancient bone rack that was now hovering and glaring above me, propping himself up on the back of the booth with one arm and hefting his cane meaningfully in the other hand. He kept hovering and she began to have difficulty holding in her laughter. Eventually, when he sat after a minute or two, she began a silent uncontrollable giggle. With the ancient Hebrew prophet in the suit behind me—now immobilized on his ass and unable to rise for an hour or so—I asked her what was up and she mimed his glare and cane hefting. So I changed course.
Obviously the man behind me mistook my harsh judgment of my own fictional character for a judgment of his Terrorist-in-Chief for hiring video game geeks to use exploding model planes to blow up women and children in their beds. I personally have no problem with our Terrorist-in-Chief ordering the deaths of innocents. I mean what else do we expect a Terrorist-in-Chief to do? In any case, my verbal author’s vent had been shut down.
My other vents are as follows:
1. Reroute ideas into your existing major project, but not as expansions. Load these ideas and insights and cool characters into the existing structure to enrich it. Don’t let these characters change anything. Screw them! Let them stew. They are just like us, seeing the potential and living the reprehensible. Their frustrated presence will enrich your cast.
2. Write serials. My serial scheme on the site is my primary fiction vent. I use these more heavily when I am writing a nonfiction project, such as the self-help book I am ghostwriting for an employer. Wanting to maintain interest in the serials, I have settled on a scheme whereby I write them one bookmark at a time as opposed to one chapter at a time. I have learned that my limit for maintaining monthly serial installments per serial is seven, and that is a stretch. Ideally it is five, the number of sub-genres I write in.
3. With the exception of Out of Time and The Spiral Case, which are open-ended, my serials are novellas or short novels. My favorite length is the novelette. My first line of creative decompression is to do a bare outline: title; subtitle; bookmarks. I let that sit in my fiction file and try to never return, try to pretend it does not exist. If I cannot stay away I advance to vent 4 below.
4. This is the structured author’s notebook, with additional premise, notes, and perhaps some narrative fragments. I post that up on the site, fulfilling a part of the creative need, at least getting it out there. At this point I’m committed and will be writing it before long, probably over a single week while I work on other stuff, but sometimes, as with By This Axe! in a single psychotic sitting.
If you are a classic novelist this amounts to breaking composition rules and puts you in a box that you have to write out of, limiting your narrative flexibility. Since I am coming from a nonfiction writing background, and work from a strict character viewpoint framework, I actually thrive on writing within the box. This may be a step in the wrong direction for some writers. Burroughs would have sneered at me and L’Amour would have beaten my ass for suggesting it. If your art depends on deft handling of perspective shifts, and tweaking the beginning to fit the end, you cannot do this. With some of my major pieces I could not have risked putting the outline out there like this. Remember though, that the notebook outline is only a commitment to tell that story along a suggested trajectory. I’m certain, that the bookmarks for the three novelettes I am posting today will be altered by reduction or expansion.
Just this morning I looked at my fiction folder at the nine novelettes I have outlined there. Knowing that I will focus my fiction energy on a large novel as of January, I decided on committing to writing three of these before year’s end. I will be putting their notebooks up on the site later this morning. Once I get moving on that novel, my mid-sized novelette-length projects will consist of nonfiction works such as Lesser Angels of Our Nature and my upcoming The Most Evil Presidents.
