[sudo-discuss] Writers inspiration - this year you write your novel by Walter Mosley

[Romy Ilano]

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http://www.npr.org/books/titles/138319963/this-year-you-write-your-novel#excerpt
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Excerpt: This Year You Write Your Novel
[image: This Year You Write Your
Novel]<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=138319963>



Chapter One*The General Disciplines That Every Writer Needs

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*writing every day*

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you
must do every day-every morning or every night, whatever time it is that
you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your
best work.

There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting
with your unconscious mind.

If you want to finish this novel of yours within a year, you have to get to
work! There's not a moment to lose. There's no time to wait for
inspiration. Getting your words down on the page takes time. How much? I
write three hours every morning. It's the first thing I do, Monday through
Sunday, fifty-two weeks a year. Some days I miss but rarely does this
happen more than once a month. Writing is a serious enterprise that takes a
certain amount of constancy and rigor.

But will and regularity are only the beginnings of the discipline and
rewards that daily writing will mean for you.

The most important thing I've found about writing is that it is primarily
an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is
larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods,
metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a
place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words.
Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted
journey through your protagonist's ragged heart. These moments are when you
have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal
that made you want to write to begin with.

The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not
even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting
there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring
you back into the dream of your story.

What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of
thought below your conscious mind-a place that you get closer to with each
foray into the words and worlds of your novel.

You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the
rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your
unconsciousness-moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places
your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within
your psyche. When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by
the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday.

If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will
drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you'll
have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only
you wrote every day.

Some days you will sit down and nothing will come-that's all right. Some
days you'll wish you had given yourself more time-that's okay too. You can
always pick up tomorrow where you left off today.

In order to be a writer, you have to set up a daily routine. Put aside an
amount of time (not less than an hour and a half) to sit with your computer
or notebook. I know that this is difficult. Some of you live in tight
spaces with loved ones. Some of you work so hard that you can't see
straight half the time. Some of you have little ones who might need your
attention at any time of the day or night.

I wish I had the answers to these problems. I don't. All I can tell you is
that if you want to finish your novel this year, you have to write each and
every day.

*learning how to write without restraint*

Self-restraint is what makes it possible for society to exist. We refrain,
most of the time, from expressing our rage and lust. Most of us do not
steal or murder or rape. Many words come into our minds that we never
utter-even when we're alone. We imagine terrible deeds but push them out of
our thoughts before they've had a chance to emerge fully.

Almost all adult human beings are emotionally restrained. Our closest
friends, our coworkers, and our families never know the brutal and deviant
urges and furies that reside in our breasts.

This restraint is a good thing. I know that my feelings are often quite
antisocial. Sometimes I just see someone walking down the street and the
devil in me wants to say things that would be awful to hear. No good would
come from my expressing these asocial instincts-at least not usually.

The writer, however, must loosen the bonds that have held her back all
these years. Sexual lust, hate for her own children, the desire to taste
the blood of her enemy-all these things and many more must, at times, crowd
the writer's mind.

Your protagonist, for instance, may at a certain moment despise his mother.
"She stinks of red wine and urine," he thinks. "And she looks like a
shriveled, pitted prune."

This is an unpleasant sentiment, to be sure. But does it bring your hero's
character into focus? This is the only question that's important. And
there's no getting around it. Your characters will have ugly sides to them;
they will be, at times, sexually deviant, bitter, racist, cruel.

"Sure," you say, "the antagonists, the bad guys in my book, will be like
that but not the heroes and heroines."

Not so.

The story you tell, the characters you present, will all have dark sides to
them. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over
the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you
would never express in your everyday life.

Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative
impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we
have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that
adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon. Many writers come to
the discipline after having read the old, and new, masters. They read
Dickens and Melville, Shakespeare and Homer. From these great books of
yore, they develop tics and reflexes that cause their words to become stiff
and unnatural.

Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to
past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being
created on this day.

You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and
content, of great books of the past. Your novel lies in your heart; it is a
book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a
contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you.

Don't get me wrong-you can read anything and learn from it. But your
learning will also come from modern songs, newscasts, magazine articles,
and conversations overheard on the street. A novel is a pedestrian work
about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints.

Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal
confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it. Many writers
use themselves, their families, and their friends as models for the
characters they portray. A young woman who has had a difficult time with
her mother may render a tale in which the mother seems overly harsh, maybe
even heartless. She (the writer) wades in, telling the story in all its
truth and ugliness, but then, feeling guilt, she backs away from it,
muddying the water. Maybe she stops writing for a while or changes her
subject.

Whatever it is she does, the novel suffers.

This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the
story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not
commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing
every day.

This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary.

To begin with, your mother is not reading what you have written. These
words are your private preserve until the day they're published.

Also you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on
its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the
characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from
the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some
time, gets upset with your words-so what? Live your life, sing your song.
Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

Don't let any feeling keep you from writing. Don't let the world slow you
down. Your story is the most important thing coming down the line this
year. It's your year-make the most of it.

*avoidance, false starts, and dead-end thinking*

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The
most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the
writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once
you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or
table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words.
Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally,
after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to
the story that must be told.

Straightforward procrastination is an author's worst enemy, but there are
others: the writer who suddenly has chores that have gone undone for months
but that now seem urgent; the diarist who develops a keen wish to write
about her experiences today instead of writing her book; the Good Samaritan
who realizes that there's a world out there that needs saving; the
jack-of-all-trades who, when he begins one project, imagines ten others
that are equally or even more important.

Forget all that. Don't write in the journal unless you're writing a chapter
of your book. Save the world at 8:30 instead of 7:00. Let the lawn get
shaggy and the paint peel from the walls.

For that time you have set aside to write your novel, don't do anything
else. Turn the ringer off on your phone. Don't answer the doorbell. Tell
your loved ones that you cannot be disturbed. And if they cannot bear to
live without you, go write in a coffee shop or library. Rent a room if you
have to-just make the time to write your book.

*a final note about process*

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have
to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow
yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like
highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are
creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there
will be a tale told.

*(Continues...)*




On Sun, May 12, 2013 at 3:12 PM, Romy Snowyla <romy at snowyla.com> wrote:

> Inspiration - donating this book this year you write your move, by Walter
> Mosley
>
> It's very good
>
> Most writers I met in Berlin said they were working on their book but few
> finished. Always delighted when I found out someone actually did get their
> book done
>
>
>
>
> Incidentally he is an African American mystery writer
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
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