Why We Write

The other day, the devil came and whispered in my ear “anything you want, you can have. All I want is the usual.”

The usual? My soul? Okay, devil, take my soul – just gimme a few more of those juicy publishable things I call words.

And so the devil, satisfied with this renewed bargain, allowed me a few more minutes of computer time while I – ever so excited – spewed on about my life in general. I wrote about my parents and my girlfriend and myself. I chatted – to myself, because some things cannot be shared – about the state of my future and the decisions that await. I made everything seem so dark and hopeful and twisted because it felt so right, so justifiable, so true.

And then I come back to this essay. This is shot number three at “why we write,” my contribution to understanding the motivation of the working writer. And by working I don’t necessarily mean publishing – I mean a writer who is putting pen to paper regularly, dripping blood and sweat through the ends of fingertips worn raw with typing. That alone is the qualification for a working writer – the closer we come to this ideal, the more the words will match our lives, the less room there is for imagination and the more sway we give to truth.

As I write this, I feel like a fraud. I feel like a lamb with a shotgun about to hunt down his own cousin so Mary can have a little lamb with her sauerkraut. I’m not a writer by trade – I’m a struggling human being. Forget the artist part of starving – I’ve spent my entire life scrounging for money. So I tell myself the experiences will contribute to my art – does that make me a writer? If it means dropping engineering to study English? If I then enlist in the Army to get money for grad school?

Currently, I don’t have enough money to marry. Buying airline tickets to meet my girlfriend’s family isn’t in the budget. But writers aren’t collections of money – writers are people who put pen to paper. Writers are dedicated souls who search for the meaning in life and then – harder still – do their best to share what they’ve learned without spoken words, without hand gestures, without lights or camera or CGI or even a hint of sound.

Am I a writer? Some days I feel more like a sellout. I take the easy way out in the name of “literature.” When I could have toughed it out and demanded a desk job, I allowed an injury to get me out of the Army. When I could have taken on some debt for that fifth year to finish engineering, I decided to graduate and get out. I see people talking and I’m too afraid to meet them. I see politicians argue and I’m too quiet to show that I care. I’m not a writer because I love it – I’m a writer because there’s nothing else for me, there’s no other way to get my words out to be heard. I don’t talk loud enough. I’m a guy, a male American, and I’m too afraid of my own voice.

So here I am telling you, another writer, my friend the reader, what it takes to be a writer. If I charged you a dollar, it would be fraud. But since this is free, it’s ethos. It’s the mythology of writing. It’s my contribution to the lore of the professional wordsmith. And you read this because you want to know why you should keep writing, you want to know why we all keep writing.

I can tell you this – I began writing in the seventh grade. It was a journal we were assigned to keep, a page a week for an off-campus class I was lucky to take. I don’t know now how I managed to earn a slot in this class, or why anyone trusted a seventh-grader to ride the train half-way across Chicago once each week to take this class and miss half a day of school, but this class taught me to write. It taught me to put personal words on the page. The teachers taught me to staple the pages in half for the days when I didn’t want to share my words. Later, when I read about Arthur the King and Frodo the Hobbit, I thought I could write the same kinds of stories. I thought I’d be like other writers, taking my personal life and weaving it into the worlds of heroes and dragons. I didn’t know what I was doing – I was fourteen. I couldn’t tell the nominative from the jussive if you held a gun to my broadsword. But still, in the nighttime hours, when my parents went upstairs and there was no trusting a teenager to cross Chicago by himself to see friends, the pen was there. Without classroom assignments, there was no need to staple pages shut. The trick was saving these pages from the fate of spring cleaning, when every useless toy and outdated scrap of homework met the dumpster. They were my precious thoughts, those pages, my personal publication for the audience of one. And still I save these story notes and journal entries from back then. They sit in a box at the side of my desk, pages and pages of incoherent scrawl I’m afraid to read for fear of heartburn. I wrote that? Ick! Thank God I learned to write before our home had a computer – it’s harder to back-up loose leaf. And vomit goes better on paper than mousepad.

Still, the writing happened. Somewhere along the way I learned the feel and the sound of words written well. It may have been the long summer days stranded alone in the middle of Chicago – I had the choice of biking down to the end of the block and back or reading a book. Going around the block – and out of sight of the house – required special permission. My brother was autistic, my buddy from two-doors down grew up on Playboy in an attic that smelled of cat piss, and visiting my friends from school required a parent to drive. The books ate the time. I spent days on Treasure Island with the pirates. Black Beauty was a dear equine friend. King Arthur was more than my hero – he was my inspiration, my guide for how to live, how to act, how to be.

Still, I produced more tripe. Piles of tripe. Great bound piles of pages that weren’t fit for bathroom reading. Even in college, I did this. Somehow I found my way into creative writing workshops, and somehow the teachers liked me. I don’t think it was the work so much as it was the way I listened. When they said my stories needed conflict, I stared at them and waited for the punch-line. When I presented my eight-hundred-word masterpiece for Intro to Journalism, the professor cut four-hundred words and said the rest needed work. Again, I waited for the punch-line. I was barely twenty – I had no clue what I was doing.

Still, I wrote. I wrote because my girlfriend at the time wouldn’t have understood my leaving her the computer. I wrote because my parents couldn’t understand ne’er-do-well English majors. I wrote because I was too tired to study math or physics or any of those other subjects. I wrote because I wanted the bad guys to win. I wrote because I was only a phone call away from being the bad guy to someone, somewhere.

I’ve spent the past three weeks asking myself why we write. Twice I've tried writing the answer, but the words didn’t flow. They didn’t ring true. I was asking the wrong question. I wanted to explain why writers write – I should have been asking why I write. It’s pointless for me to fathom the depths of your soul – I might understand a bit, but I can’t explain why you should write. I have enough trouble understanding my own reasons. Especially this week, when I’ve written hardly a word aside from this essay. I tell myself I want to write fiction and that I want to publish novels, but then my own chapters make me nauseous. I get headaches and vision loss and a serious urge to “go outside” at the thought of editing my own work for mass consumption. And don’t get me started on the thoughts of finding an agent or, worse yet, publicity. It’s not my vibrant social life that fuels my writing – it’s the vibrant writing which fuels the little social life I have. Except with my girlfriend – she’s foreign, so her English isn’t the best. We hold entire conversations involving two syllables and a helping of curry-fried-shrimp. And where did I meet her? Online. Through e-mail. With the words we share beyond sound.

And so, when the devil returns again – when it’s morning, and the sun shines, and I’m late for work – I’ll look deep inside and ask what comes next. Is it the writing, this craft of my voice made audible through print? Or is it the daily struggle of getting out and saying hi and smiling back?

Ask yourself – before you forget – about why you write. Ask yourself the meaning of the words on the page.

I say this, now, because next semester I start a new phase in my writing. In the past, I’ve written in the dark, on hidden notebooks, majoring in the wrong subject, short on cash, in the middle of Afghanistan. But now, suddenly, I will be paid to write. A university has decided to trust this kid from Chicago. The professors see great promise in my work. They look forward to meeting me. They tell me that they are fascinated by my life experience. They believe I will be a fine addition to their MFA program.

So write. Write as much as you can. Write until it makes you sick. And then keep going. Learn from the authors you enjoy, learn from your mistakes, learn from everything you can. But remember where you came from. Fix your motivation in your mind – and in your writing – now. Because it does matter. Because it shapes who you are and what you write. Because the depths plumbed with words begin with the vast ocean we call life. And the minute you forget where you came from, you lose everything worth writing for.

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About Ryan Edel

First Law of Delete

A great point brought up in one of my classes was the question of where to go next with a story. In writing, this question plagues everyone. No story is ever so complete that it can't use work, not even the million-copy bestseller. Every word we write, there's the question of which words to place next, which direction to take.

For this class, and in all your writing, I encourage you to remember the First Law of Delete - anything written can be deleted. If you don't like it, you can get rid of it later. If it's awkward, ugly, smelly, disgusting, or simply too horrifically beautiful, the delete key's always ready, always hungry.

I say this because often, as writers, we get caught up trying to make a piece "perfect." This line of thought actually hurts the creative process, especially during the rough-draft - this is one of the main causes of writer's block. For the assignments, feel free to read the prompt and then start writing. Write for fifteen minutes. If the words feel wrong, keep writing. Keep pushing forward. Oftentimes, it takes a few minutes (or even a few hours) to get in the groove - all those words that sound wrong are simply stepping stones to the right path, the slow curve of the on-ramp before you merge with the interstate.

Later, after the fifteen minutes (or twenty or thirty, if it's a good day), you can apply that First Law of Delete. And some days you will - there will be days when that whole fifteen minutes just doesn't work. But no worries. There will be other days when that awkward smelly no-good first paragraph becomes the keystone for a new plot you never saw coming. Embrace that plot. Enjoy it. And remember this irony: knowing you can delete everything helps you the stories you never forget.

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Fiction - The Unplanned Birth

In my workshop today, one of my writers touched on the fundamental difference between fiction and nonfiction. She said that she normally writes nonfiction, and that she’s accustomed to outlines and roadmaps for her writing. But she hasn’t liked the results of her planned fiction. She found that she likes the results of her freewriting, but that the process is scary – there is no planning, and editing is needed at the end. But still, the she likes the results.

Part of the reason freewriting inspires the creative process is that it forces the mind to write automatically. The result is that the words you produce are words you’re intimately familiar with. You begin writing about your life, about the things you’ve seen in life, even if the story is not a true story. And it works. It has the feel of truth, because in a deep way the words written on autopilot are truth – your truth. The life you’ve been living.

This is the funny thing about good fiction - it can't be planned. It's as random as our lives, as constant as the stars. Certain aspects of the human experience are accepted as absolute - the need for food, for example, or the strain and exhaustion that come with stress - but the events and decisions of an individual defy outlines. It's a strange phenomenon - generally, most writers avoid crossing back-and-forth between fiction and nonfiction. Before freewriting, I tried to control my writing. I wanted to “make” it good. I believed in working hard to produce the “perfect” story. But results of controlled fiction aren't good, let alone perfect. The characters are stale, the decisions pre-planned, the conflict watered down.

Fiction is not nonfiction. How do I know? Try writing nonfiction without an outline and good sources. That's just not a good idea, not for a longer work. The reader has to believe in the work, and for nonfiction that means believable, reputable facts. And these facts have to fit together tight as a jigsaw puzzle. To make the truth coherent, you have to sit down and plan it out, piece it together, see how every isolated piece matches with every other.

It's not that fiction's any different in that regard - the "facts" must still be "right," and they must certainly "fit together," but the source of these facts is a different place entirely. Some call it the heart, some say it’s the unconscious mind, others believe it's the soul. Tapping it, though, is hard. Allowing the disorder and the chaos of the inner mind to creep out onto the page is a process all by itself. And then telling your conscious mind – the part of your brain that stops you from giving embarrassing revelations at work – to step aside? For some, it’s inconceivable. I've met people who don't believe in freewriting and won't try it - they hold on to the control they have, choking their own creativity. It's not a pretty sight - flat characters, organized plots without purpose, antagonists who don't care about anything except owning the world.

When editors look for good fiction, they aren't looking for someone who can string words together in the "correct" way. They're looking for someone who can reveal a protagonist's inner hate, someone who can show the antagonist's hidden love, a writer who makes us appreciate life in new ways. As you push forward in your writing, make sure that you are learning to write from within rather than simply pen beautiful sentences. Don’t plan your novel to death – write it. Feel it. Express it. And then later, after the words are on the page, after you’ve bled your soul through the keyboard, go back and edit. Assert the control you didn’t need before. Make sure the grammar isn’t too ugly. But don’t do this until you’re done. Don’t edit until after the last line is written. If you’re tempted to edit early, tempted to “tweak” the story a little bit, just keep one thing in mind: you can always edit grammar. You can insert and delete characters and subplots in a finished story. You can even go through and emphasize a theme that didn’t get enough “air time” in the rough draft. But no matter how much you edit, you can’t revive a story without heart.

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Write Relevant Dialogue

Your story has just begun. The conflict is terrible, the plot superb, and the characters fascinating. It's time for the major scene, bringing together arch-nemesci in the same setting: the protagonist and antagonist. To pull off the ensuing confrontation, you'll need dialogue.

Dialogue is nothing more than words. But many of the conventionals of traditional prose are waived or modified for dialogue. If you write a story using third-person point of view, for example, the words of your characters may provide an entirely different tone from the rest of the text. For example:

The town's cathedral was an imposing monument of God and tradition. The mayors from time-before-memory had each held their inaugurations on the cathedral steps, quietly dodging questions from outside reporters about the separation of church and state. Even Holly Muhammed, the first Muslim female mayor-elect in the state, had asked the deacon's blessing for her administration. The announcement of her upcoming inauguration was posted inside the cathedral's brand-new bulletin board - a gift from Mayor Muhammed's husband.

Patrick ran his fingers over the bulletin board's rough-hewn lumber. Then he yanked back his fingers in pain. "Dag-nabbit! Another splinter."

"Dad," Sharla asked, "you want me to get the tweezers?"

"Lay off, will ya?" Patrick shot back. "Can't you see a grown man dyin'?"

Sharla looked confused. Her gaze went from the embossed invitation to all local residents before returning to her father's face. "You don't look like you're dying," she said.

Patrick jabbed his thumb against the invitation. "You see that? Do you see that? We're all dying, girl, every last one of us."

Sharla shook her head. She wondered if Mayor Muhammed would follow tradition and invite the local quartet to play a bit of Brahms for the celebration. Every mayor did it - it was tradition.

The key to good dialogue is twofold: it must convey relevant information while sounding true to natural speech. Dialogue that lacks sufficient information sounds too wordy - if it doesn't sound true-to-life, it sounds forced, as if the writer had to make the characters share information. In the example above, the dialogue conveys information on multiple levels. We see that Patrick has misgivings about the new mayor even though he never mentions her directly. The tone of his dialogue is brusque, a strong contrast to the smooth, reflective tone of the narrative. Note also the use of physical gesture and expression to heighten the emotional impact of his words - he jabs the invitation to shift the reader's attention, and then speaks. In this way, the dialogue avoids unnecessary reference to the mayor - the kind of reference that a regular person speaking would never actually say.

Another key here is that each character has his or her own way of speaking. Sharla, the POV character in this dialogue, speaks little, and her words lack the heightened emotions of her father. Instead, her words have the more measured tone of the narrative because the narrative is from her own point of view. Yet does she talk about the traditions of the town with her father? Nope. There’d be no point. It’s clear her father would argue with her, and it’s clear that she’s not the confrontational type.

There are two key ways to improve your mastery of dialogue. The first is to listen to people talking. Seek out people who are different from yourself and listen to the words they say. If you find someone who talks with the same mannerisms you use yourself, you won’t learn as much – we hear the novelty of human speech best when the words are unfamiliar. For myself, I learned the most about dialogue after I finished college and joined the Army. In the army, soldiers don’t always use no proper English, and we can’t be wasting no time with words, we gotta be out the door and in formation at oh-four-thirty.

As you can see, dialogue like this has a rhythm of its own, a rhythm that you can pick up and incorporate in your own work only by hearing it and learning to feel the meaning deep down. But in addition, you must bear in mind the second rule of human dialogue – all words are spoken with a purpose. When a character in your story speaks, he or she should be saying words to achieve a goal – and the tone and diction must match this goal. A new baby is born – the proud aunt will announce the news at the top of her lungs in the hospital waiting room. Why does she do this? Because she’s excited, because she wants to world to know she’s an aunt, because this is the happiest day in her life so far. Will she calmly take the stage beside the artificial plants and explain the baby’s birth weight? Heck no. She’ll belt it out at the top of her lungs from inside her sister’s maternity room as the doctors shove her out the door, and then she’ll turn pink at the sight of all the onlookers turning to face her. Her voice will drop to a squeak. “Um…sorry?”

Keep these points in mind as you write, but don’t slow your writing to adjust until it’s time for editing. After you’ve completed your first draft, read your work aloud. In real life, dialogue is a tool of the ear. You will hear missteps in dialogue far better than you can read them, especially in your own work. Listen for how natural the words sound. Listen for whether the characters are speaking to convince other characters. Most importantly, decide if you believe in the words you hear, if they sound “right.” If they don’t, remember the true beauty of writing – you can edit the words until they do.

This article is part of the FICTION 101 workshop sponsored by 1-2-Writing. Information regarding this free workshop and other courses may be viewed at http://www.12writingworkshopsonline.com/.

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About Ryan Edel

Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character

I remember setting as the bread and butter of my days in Reading class. Setting was the most wonderful (and most analyzed) part of every fiction story we read. Were there trees? What did they look like? How do they make you feel?

As you move up in the writing world, so to speak, setting begins to take a back seat in writing classes. Not that good setting is easy to write, but it becomes neglected as a tool. Setting is usually the one part of any story that is most easily grasped and understood. If you read a book that has too much setting, you still know exactly what's going on in the story - you can see everything. If there isn't enough setting, then you don't see and understand the imagined world. Oh well. It wasn't a very interesting story to begin with.

So we have a dichotomy with the teaching of how to write setting. One the one hand, it's taught early because it is so "simple" to understand. As a child, I couldn't have told you the first thing about character development, but I could read a story and describe the setting. On the other hand, setting is somewhat ignored later because a story can survive without it. In my experience, workshop stories often have problems with the setting (most of my own stories have setting issues, as well), but readers don't give much feedback on how to fix those problems. Larger issues take precedence. Is the main character fully realized? Do we see the conflict in light of the protagonist's inner development? "Oh, by the way, I wasn't clear on where this story was taking place - was it in the hospital room? Okay, if you can just fix that for next time." Sometimes we hear "you know, the description of the flowers in the vase on the bedside table was a little too much exposition." Okay, too much setting, so what? Don't you want to know where the story takes place?

Fortunately, we have a yardstick to judge whether you have "too little" or "too much" or "just enough" setting. In any work of fiction, setting must contribute to the story. It can set the tone, it can establish the character's mood, it can be a part of the action, and sometimes it acts almost as a character itself. The task of the writer is to identify the role played by the setting and to ensure that the setting fulfills that role without going overboard. The best way to understand this is through example.

Tone and mood are relatively straightforward. Let's say you have a detective novel - a young girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Is the kidnapper a terrible villain? Are the parents worried? Is there a strong possibility that the girl is already dead? You can hint at all these things through your choice of setting:

The parents, they lived up on a mansion at the edge of the bay. I drove up in the rain. All I could see through the storm was the road - the sky and water to my right merged into a wall of black, and the mountain on the left looked like it might fall in any time. Lightning flashed - suddenly I saw the house, white like a corpse in the rain. The back end was a box floating in space over the bay. I figured it was only a matter of time before the whole place slipped away into the ocean.

Dark and brooding, with rain for tears - it's blunt, and such a setting builds the expectation that something terrible has happened or will soon happen. But you can go for a more subtle effect. Say the kidnapping happens in a small town - you may want to give the impression of innocence lost:

One by one, the clowns gave out balloons - long puppets twisted into lions and parrots and puppy dogs. The cotton candy vendor smiled and pointed over to her treats - clouds of syrup sweet pink and blue and yellow waited. A hand-lettered sign with a smiley face advertised "Hot Dogs, Too!" I looked away. In the corner of her stall was the garbage stuffed to overflowing. A pile of cigarette butts had been left on the counter by the ketchup. Obviously, no one had told these people the news.

What do cigarettes have to do with kidnapping? Nothing. But through the eyes of the protagonist, they take on a new meaning. Just as people always remember the clouds at funerals and the sun at weddings, your protagonist will see the world through the lens of mood. Beware of clumsy techniques in writing - it's rarely good to simply tell the reader exactly what the protagonist feels. "I was frustrated because the girl had disappeared, and it was my watch" abuses the reader's intellect. Instead, by focusing on setting, your narrative accomplishes two tasks as once. In the example above, it's clear how the protagonist feels - the readers don't yet know that the girl is gone, but they don't need to. By withholding this information and establishing a dark tone to "the news," you build immediate suspense. As you continue to answer questions and build more suspense, you will gain the trust and more importantly the interest of your readers. If you tell your readers everything right away, then there's nothing left for them to read.

Naturally, once you've got your readers hooked in the opening lines, you need to keep their attention. Setting alone cannot do that (unless of course you're writing a pure landscape...though painters normally have better luck with that than writers). Reader interest requires action, and setting is crucial for establishing the context of events. In speculative fiction genres, setting is often half the story - what would the science fiction masterpiece be without starships and plasma cannons? How can one read a fantasy tale without magic? Some authors confuse the need for setting with an excuse for exposition. When you need setting to establish your story, incorporate it with action:

Deidre climbed faster. The ladder's narrow rungs pinched her skin and bruised her shins. She could hear them below - their voices echoed up the narrow shaft. They couldn't have been closer than twenty feet - they sounded practically on top of her. She pulled herself up too fast, and the spin of the ship knocked her into the wall. Dazed, she kept up her climb.

Compare that to the following exposition:

The decks of the ship were linked by a ladder shaft. The ladder had metal rungs, and the shaft's interior carried echoes across decks. Coriolis forces from the ship's spin prevented objects from falling in a straight down the shaft.

Both examples provide the same setting details, but the first offers excitement and danger while the second provides a description without reference. Why should the reader care that the shaft carries an echo? If the reader has no reason to care about a detail, that detail will be forgotten, even if that detail holds critical importance later (and you don't want your reader leafing back to figure out "what the heck?" after getting to the exciting part).

There is, of course, a drawback to incorporating all setting into action - a good action scene is often too quick to adequately explain the setting. Readers may become confused by the spin of the ship knocking Deidre into the wall, and breaking out of the narrative to explain Coriolis forces interrupts the action. You can use judicious exposition establish the setting you need for upcoming action scenes. Build the tone and mood of the story tone to make details memorable:

Deidre avoided the long shafts between decks. The cramped metal walls and the narrow ladder left her claustrophobic. The echoes of voices from the other decks made her imagine ghosts inhabiting the ship. Most of all, though, she didn't like the Coriolis forces, as the engineer called them. She understood how the spinning ship provided a sense of gravity, but she didn't understand why nothing could fall in a straight line. She had tried it with a quarter, dropping it down the center of the longest shaft. The quarter's ricochets off the walls had nauseated her with a sickening ping!

Finally, we come to perhaps the most complex use of setting - establishing a world or a place with the force of character. You can cheat with personification, but most readers distrust stories told with "the glowering eyes of the thunderclouds" and "the chatter of the power lines as they exchanged the gossip of electrons." When setting takes on the element of character, if must fill the duties of a character from the background - it must drive plot, is must react to events in the story, and it should give opinion of its own. And it must accomplish these tasks without a body or dialogue. To pull off this feat, you must successfully provide your setting with a believable voice of its own. The key is in the interaction between your characters and their surroundings - the reactions of the characters become the window for viewing setting's character traits:

Turtle stared up at the clouds gathering overhead. He pointed
the end of his walking stick at a funnel cloud beginning to come
down.

"You've angered the sky," he said.

John rolled his eyes. "What, you think global warming will go away all on its
own? We expected the mirror to leave a storm front."

Turtle lowered his stick, leaned his weight upon it. Through the ground, he
could feel the vibrations ofdistant lightening. It struck the Earth
harder, now, than before. Like a freight train, the sound of it
carried through rock and soil. It was only a matter of time before
this new lightening found a city for its hunger.

"Look at the bright side," John said. "All this lightning's a great source of
renewable energy."

Here, the raging storms are a reaction to something the characters have done, and we can see that John's last line ensures an ongoing conflict. Can the sky really be angry? No, of course not. But for the story, Turtle will perceive it as angry, and Turtle's reaction to this setting establishes both his and the storm's attitude.

Ultimately, mastery of setting in your writing will come down to obeying the one rule: everything in your writing must work in terms of the story. Too much setting will drown a story in detail just as easily as an undeveloped sense of place will leave the reader thirsting for context. Use the examples here as a guide, but push forward in your own direction. If you fear that you are writing too much setting, keep going - you can always edit later, and sometimes it is harder to write in new setting than it is to pare down the words already on the page. Conversely, if you fear that you are not writing enough, keep going in the direction you are on. In the first draft, you are looking for the core of your story, the essence, and sometimes an aspect like setting gets left for later as you sketch out your plot and characters. Whatever it is you are writing, write it - that alone is the only sure way to success.

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About Ryan Edel

Elin O'Hara Slavick on Creativity

Today, National Public Radio's "The State of Things" featured photographer and activist Elin O'Hara Slavick. This was my first introduction to the artist, but her commentary provides very revealing insight regarding the creative process. One of her comments that sticks with me is the sentiment that if you look too hard for your memories, you won't find them. You have to rely on the memories that come to the surface, even if they're inaccurate or twisted by time.

During this interview, Professor Slavick also discusses her role in attempting to foster more peaceful - and productive - reactions to September 11th and the roles of social and financial concerns in the making of art. I highly recommend this program as a look at the artistic process. Although Slavick herself focuses on photography and social activism, many parallels can be drawn with writing.

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Writing through Distraction

Freewriting's open, free-form structure is great for the office, the beach, the classroom - anywhere you go that allows only snatches of time to write your story. Since the free-write is usually not intended as a marketable story, you don't have to worry about typos or smudges or whether you can concentrate enough to make the story "good." But it still takes concentration to write, especially to "get in the groove" and write fast.

This is where your real-world setting can pose some problems. Sometimes, the air conditioner is just too loud. At the beach, you just can't take the glare of the sun in your eyes. And then, of course, there's the chatter from two cubicles down - it's nearly impossible to tune-out a conversation in-progress. For human curiosity, people talking provides too much interest. It's worse even than CNN. When you want to be writing, your mind locks-in full attention on people you don't know and don't care about simply because they're producing words.

But don't worry. You can free-write through such distractions. The key, first of all, is to relax. Writing may feel important at times, but it's rarely important enough to stress over (essays, term papers, and grad school applications excepted, of course...). It's a constant struggle for me, but I've found that placing too much importance on the words themselves hurts the work itself. When I feel pressured to perform, I begin writing words because they sound right, not because they are. Distraction then pushes me over the edge. Perfection in writing is an impossible goal - thinking about it while the AC churns is a headache waiting to happen.

The next trick - and this works really well for freewriting - is to write the distraction into your manuscript. Write about the air conditioner's grim rattle or that too-hot sun - you'll think about it less once you've written around it. I used to think this was a funny idea because I've always been good at tuning things out. My younger brother is autistic, so I grew up learning to read and study while he gave my parents and babysitters hell the next room over. But I can't tune out everything, and I can't control when and where distractions arise. One night, after a very stressful week, I set all my hopes on an hour of writing at Barnes and Noble. That was to be my "unwind time" when I could catch up with the story I hadn't worked on all week. But then there was a very large, very loud man having a one-way conversation with his wife and the entire rest of the bookstore coffee shop. I couldn't ignore him, and I already had a headache from the rest of my week - so I wrote him into a free-write. It wasn't a flattering portrayal, but the writing went on. Strangely, as I wrote more about him, I stopped hearing him talk. It was as if the mind processed his existence and then moved on to other concerns - namely writing.

But then there's the big question: what do you do when you can't write a word? When staring at the page makes you sick? When the AC and the sun and those yapping coworkers simply will not go away? Or, worse, what about when there's no physical distraction? When you're busy worrying about your taxes and your health insurance and the upcoming visit with your mother-in-law? How do you tune out your own mind?

Sometimes you don't. Instead you start writing a journal entry. You call up a friend and gripe. Or you break out the old 1040 and start filling in rows of numbers for the IRS. At some point, you have to resolve the personal distractions in your own life to allow your mind to focus on creative pursuits.

Sometimes, though, even that isn't enough. It's worse, of course, when you're working under a deadline, when you know that you have, say, one week to finish a story for a class. The days get whittled away as you sit at the keyboard contemplating the blank screen, your blank life, the blank career prospects for creative writing. You contemplate ugly notions involving your computer and the window.

That's the time to go outside. Call up some friends and hit the volleyball court. Catch a movie. Stroll on over to the local pub and start talking with random people about random things (if the people are no longer so random, then you know you're a regular). The key is to get out and live a bit. Let the brain rest. Let the ideas simmer without too much thought. Later, when you get back to your page, you'll find that the story is still in there, still ready to come out. It just flows a little better when you're relaxed. And, of course, a beer or two never hurt - never enough that I remember, of course.

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