On Writing~
I don’t know how it is for anyone else, and I don’t claim to know, either- but when I’m writing, I have to shut everything else off. strip away everything else, and roll up my sleeves. It’s almost a holy process, I think. When you watch the Televangelists on TV in the heights of their sermons and they jump and sweat and writhe and suffer it’s alot like how I feel. there’s this… I dunno, tremendous energy within me and if I don’t shut everything unnecessary off, I’ll never get anything done. I’ll stride around, punching my fist into my palm, hit walls, slap people, chainsmoke, drink, fuck, whatever, but I won’t channel that energy where it wants and needs to go- from my brain to my hands, from my hands to the paper.
My best writing comes at the exclusion of everything else. I ignore everything except the most basic processes. Drink. eat. smoke. shit. I shut off all the viewscreens, turn off all the sensors, hunker down, zone out, and work. I wrote maybe twenty pages of collateral information, had maybe eight windows open, plus three windows of Olf’s forum open because it had references. and I wrote about eighteen pages of story. I have a prologue and two chapters written already, and I’m planning Chapter three and four as we speak. I stayed up until 3am this morning, just writing.
Some of what I’m having to do is dulled because I have to write out for myself information that supplements Olf’s world- He’s a busy man, and he can’t be at my beck and call all the time, so I have to gather information on my own. It’s not even anything he’s written, it’s an amagalmation of what I want, corresponding with his world.
It’s like this: I know what I want to write. Olf’s world has some restrictions and limitations that make what I want to write a challenge. So i have to write things out that fall within his parameters. It’s like this: “I want this. It would behave like this in his world- okay, so let’s work it in.” It’s that side-work that I want to ignore, but important details like this cannot be overlooked.
But oh man. It feels so good to write like this.