Anyway, during the last year or so I've been working to change my career. I love being involved with designing and writing software, but I really don't enjoy doing it for other people, and having to do so has slowly but surely strangled my love of all things softwarish. So I decided to pursue a dream I've always had: to be a novelist, writing things I'd enjoy reading as opposed to things that can be considered 'literary fiction'.
For most of my life I considered creative writing to be an innate skill: either you have it or you don't. This has recently changed. I realized (and then felt quite foolish for not realizing it right up front) that writing is a craft that must be improved through practice. It's like playing the guitar: all the best guitarists spend a large part of their time practicing their craft. I read somewhere that Eric Clapton spent 5+ years basically locked in his house playing this guitar from morning to night with the obvious breaks during the day.
I guess that I still believe that an active imagination is still something that you have or don't have. I've always had that in spades. Most of the times I really value it and love it, and sometimes it's gotten me in trouble. I can't think of how many times I got myself in trouble in school by daydreaming. One such event was when I was in middle school and evidently the teacher had changed subjects to discussing Haiku. After a short silence when the students were paying attention, I was off in some dream world rescuing the damsel in distress and in general making a nuisance of myself to eViL everywhere. Suddenly the teacher asked me to share my feelings on baseball. I guess that was the topic we were supposed to be writing a quick Haiku about. So being completely out of touch with what was going on, I nervously started expounding on why I liked baseball. The entire class laughed and I still carry emotional baggage from that moment where my imagination got me in trouble. Let it go, Jeremy, let it go!
But other than the imagination, the technical aspects of writing, including learning to allow characters to drive the action, the ability to create and maintain a solid plot, and being able to allow what a character says and does give insight into who they are rather than freak out on adjectives and TELL the reader those things. Those are just a few of the things that I focus on every time I write, and over time I've gotten better at those things. Where I had to put a lot of conscious thought into doing the right thing, it's become more second nature. As my craft improves I find myself becoming more prolific. I'm sure that means I'm turning out a lot of complete shit, but the sheer enjoyment I find myself taking in telling a story is one of the things that makes me the happiest in life (kids & wife being others).
It's funny how writing used to be hard work: I always thought of it as the painful process of producing something that people will want to read. A story they'll find engrossing. But now, while it's still hard work and must be committed to entirely, it's not painful at all. It's joyous.
Anyway, I'm sure most, if not all of you, are sitting there saying 'Duh, Jeremy.' And if so, that's fine--it's well deserved. But this realization has dramatically improvement my relationship with my writing. Don't get me wrong--it's still immature and often I miss what I'm aiming for, but I'm taking a lot more joy in it these days and the dream feels much more attainable as a result.
No comments:
Post a Comment