Notes from Maine - 2021/01/16

In Maine, we’re climbing out of the dark hole of winter and having a rainy, warm day. Warm for here, of course. It’s in the 40s F (5~10° C), and it’s not even going to freeze tonight. For January, this is balmy. Any other year, this storm might dump a foot or more of snow on us. I like the warm temps because it makes my outdoor chores more enjoyable, but it’s going to be sloppy and muddy tomorrow. 

Inside, I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve avoided in the past nine months. I’m still writing, but I haven’t been doing very much promotion or advertising. My last few book covers have been a little lackluster. I have creative energy for stories, but I refuse to use any of it for all the essential, non-writing tasks that I should be doing. 

Whatever. I’ll get to it later.

The book I’m working on right now is writing itself. On my best days, I’m merely typing the story that’s unfolding in my imagination. I don’t have to puzzle and fret over the next description or bit of dialog. The characters are moving around and waiting for me to document what they’re doing.

I don’t know if this correlates to the quality of the writing I’m producing. 

It’s easier. I’m not sure it’s better.

All writing is autobiographical, I’m sure. You take little bits of your interactions, people and personalities you know, and you fold them together. When I lean too heavily on imagination, or I rehash things I’ve seen in movies, it’s easy to come up with scenes that don’t ring true. I try not to do that. But, of course, there are significant limitations on what I’ve experienced. I don’t interact with murderers and monsters, so I have to make those up. I have to extend my real experiences and try to project them into that darkness. 

In the past couple of decades, I haven’t had significant dealings with anyone prone to irrational violence. When I try to write a character with no motive behind their explosions, I think I fall short. I have to try to understand how they got to their outburst. Life doesn’t always work like that though. There are irrational people. Maybe some are mentally ill. Maybe others have been conditioned to despise logic. I don’t know. Those are the characters I struggle with. In most of my stories, even the monsters have their own monstrous reasons for what they do.

The book I’m sending out today, Spores, has a very clear logic behind the chaos. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. Maybe you would disagree. Very early on, the characters take actions that don’t seem to make sense, but I put a lot of thought behind those actions and I tried to show why they did what they did. Later, some characters switch their stance, but I tried to show what triggered those switches. In a crisis, people sometimes flip positions and they’re not always aware of the exact reasons. I tired to track all that. 

Sometimes I think that my need to trace events back to their cause is a character flaw. It makes me ill-equipped to deal with some types of crises. I’m too worried about how we arrived in the turmoil to see it clearly. Perhaps I’ll get a better understanding of myself through writing about it. Perhaps not.