Photo Talk About Writer's Block

Paul Butzi, one of a growing number of truly thoughtful photographers whose blogs I read routinely, has a post called 'Quantity is Quality' (you'll need to do a find for that heading). In it, he describes setting a goal for himself--early this year--of producing a mounted print a week.

While he hasn't quite lived up to the notion, he has produced much more than he did last year, and he has found, in the process, that more work (more consistent output) means better work. This idea touches very closely on the theme of the post I wrote earlier about writer's block. I mentioned there that forcing myself to produce, insisting that I put words, no matter how incompetent, to paper, made me a better writer. Not only did the word count improve, but the quality improved as well.

It was striking to see the theme repeated by a respect-worthy artist in an entirely different field.

Character is King -- And What That Means

More and more, as I read other writers--some published, some aspiring to be--and as I get more serious about my own writing, I come to realize that the activity in a story, the wars, car chases, fatal diseases and heroic last minute big-game victories, no matter how well presented, caries very little weight.

What matters is not what happens to a character. What matters is how that character responds to what happens to him.

I find, as I do my own writing, that I care most for the scenes that happen in the gaps, the scenes that allow a person to absorb and, with time for reflection, respond to the goings-on. At a certain point, the action stuff becomes almost a necessary evil, the noisy filler keeping readers listening until we reach the heart of a story.

It's a counterintuitive notion, really, that a character's somber reflections, a character's quiet redirection after explossive action in her life, is what matters. But when you really think about it, and you realize that you've seen every possible turn of physical events available to man--seen each of them done poorly and spectacularly--the only meaningful thing left to explore is how the character on stage right now will respond. It's the only real mystery, and the only rooting interest left to us.

More From My MotoFlex

Rolling down Imperial Highway--or somewhere thereabouts.
Not a single big-nasty-red-head in sight.

Cell Phone Sunset

My cell phone, a beat-up 2-year old motorola, occasionally makes for interesting impressionistic photos.

A Dopey Poem On Language Usage

I wrote this years ago and submitted it as filler to Writer's Digest. They rejected it with a form letter saying they had enough such material to last until the year 3021. For some reason, the poem has stuck in my head.

She said she'd been walking on egg-shells

I asked her, So why do you care?
If it's shells underfoot
Then the damage is done

And you needn't walk carefully there.

The point being, of course, that the phrase is--and sensibly so--walking on eggs.

For God's Sake, Don't Say 'Hello'

Written dialog is special, meaning it's absolutely nothing like the blathering we usually do day-to-day as human beings. For every thousand sentences you utter in life, perhaps one could earn itself a place in your novel.

Your co-workers and I expect you to say Hello and Goodbye during the course of a business day, but they beg you--and I beg you--not to bore us with that crap in your novel, or short story, or poem.

Why?

Simple. Fiction is conflict. Fiction is drama. Fiction is not workaday chatter.

A Tree Being Ignored

Just yards away from this spot, a class of perhaps twenty people assembled in their room to learn photography. Not one of them stopped to look at, never mind photograph, this great view.

Ty's Dream Girl (The Middle)

Ty faced the now-empty beach with a blinking incomprehension. It wasn’t possible for Kit to have walked--or even run--down to the water in the time he’d been submerged. And even if it were possible, where was the chaise?

Despite the impossibility of it, the evidence--a long slash-mark in the sand--pointed waterward.

Feeling stupid even before he began to move, Ty took a deep breath and dived under. Eyes open and alert, he took several slow underwater strokes toward shore.

Directly ahead, in the knee-deep shallows, he thought he could make out a cloud of dirt, the aftermath of some soon-to-be-forgotten disturbance. But when the impression failed to prove itself, he eased himself back to the surface.

Without really knowing what he was looking for, he turned around in the water, glancing off in all directions for some sign of help. The only visible activity was the sailboat he’d seen earlier, unreachable in the distance.

Some part of him--the hopeful, mystic part--felt that if he just stayed there, dog-paddling long enough, Kit would reappear, that she would come walking out of somewhere, and that her reappearance would make sense of her disappearance.

In a strange bargain with himself and with this girl he’d never even officially met, he decided to give her a count of 100 before taking any other action. But almost as soon as he began to count, the dog-paddling grew hard. An act that had been easy and natural just moments before grew labored now that it was being measured.

Despite the struggle, when he broke 50 his counting slowed in an unconscious effort to give Kit more time. But even then, the numbers seemed to come too fast.

He had just settled on an even slower count when something underwater grazed his leg. A whispered number “73” died on his lips and he instinctively jerked away from the touch, tucking his legs up toward him. Squinting down into the water, he waited for the next contact, sure that he would scream when it came.

Nothing happened for what seemed an eternity. He had just decided to swim for his own beach when, just a yard away, something floated almost imperceptibly to the surface. At first, the brown strands rolling gently in the water confused him. But almost immediately his brain made the connection; he was staring at a tiny island of dislocated human hair, floating long and brown there on the surface.

Ty's Dream Girl (The Beginning)

Twelve-year-old Ty Austin lay face-down on the dock, head resting on an inflatable life ring, a barely perceptible breeze rolling over him from the north.

For the last half hour, he’d watched a sailboat--the only movement in sight--gliding down the opposite shore.

But now, he grew aware of a new movement. On the beach at the next door cottages, the new girl--he’d heard her mom call her Kit--pulled up a folding lounge chair and lay out in her bikini. Ty watched her with his one open eye, hoping that she wouldn’t sense his attention.

She was thin and pale, and the vision of her first stepping out on the beach a few days before had echoed in Ty’s head ever since.

Now that he was aware of her presence, he quickly grew self-conscious, feeling, without really knowing it, that he had to prove himself worthy of existing in the same space as Kit.

With a move he hoped looked smooth and nonchalant, he stood and stretched, stealing a glance at the girl. For a moment, she appeared unaware of him. He tried to will her to look his way, tried, through some undiscovered telepathy, to convince her he was worth noticing. He had nearly given up when she did, finally, turn toward him. With a nervous flourish, he executed a jackknife dive off the end of the dock.

His heart raced as he pulled hard under water, driving himself to the bottom before pushing off with his feet. He felt at once proud and stupid. Would Kit be impressed? Or would she think him a showy fool?

When he broke the surface again, he sucked a deep breath and wiped the water from his eyes. Dog-paddling now, he turned slowly around to spy her beach. For a moment, he was disoriented, facing an empty stretch of sand. He looked left and right to orient himself, but it only took one steady glance--noting the stand of three birch and the granite outcropping--to realize that he was, in fact, facing the right beach.

A nervous confusion blossomed in him. He took several tentative strokes toward shore to get a better view before an odd pattern resolved itself in the sand. In an instant, confusion turned to realization. The jagged lines from mid-beach down to the water were a signature, the final words of a lounge chair being dragged to nowhere.

A short story coming next

The next three posts are the components of a short-story written in three installments for a friend's writing newsletter.

The Peaceful Time

Just back from vacation in New Hampshire (the first in a long, long time).

I'm reading Elizabeth George's Write Away--my second attempt--and enjoying it more this time around. It's much more detailed (at the nuts-and-bolts level) than Stephen King's On Writing.

I'll have more to say when I've actually finished it.