Prologue
Don’t wait for the muse; shackle her.
Too often would-be writers are filled with images of sitting under trees, with quill in trembling hand, waiting for the muse to descend and fill them with inspiration. Fast forward five years. Now you have a homeless man who smells of Mad Dog and piss shoving newspaper into his coat, quill lost somewhere under the cardboard box. You do not want to be that guy.
On the other hand, there are those who think that writing is nothing more than a few formulas, a way to arrange plot structure. Some of these people even try to employ computer programs in order to arrange plot elements, as though they were building a shed. The trouble here is that most sheds look pretty much alike and no one really pays much attention to them, other than as a convenient place to store a grass trimmer.
Then on the other hand–for I am a three-handed writer–there are those snobby people in MFA programs that disdain the use of plot or any other traditional storytelling methods, who wish to create “stories” in which nothing happens, where there is no real conflict, and which inevitably end in a depressing whimper. These same types often have very good craftsmanship on the sentence-by-sentence level, but produce works that are pure drudgery to read. And no one does read them, except other people in MFA programs.
So, there are many extremes, fallacies and dead-end roads when it comes to writing, and I hope to avoid them in my own writing. Calliope was a muse of writing, but you cannot wait for her to come to you. You have to put her on a schedule and make her work. Real writing is 10% inspiration and 90% technique. Good writing is neither hack work nor pretentious drivel.
I adhere to very traditional ideas concerning writing. My textbook begins with Aristotle, moves through Shakespeare up to solid modern writers like Chuck Palahniuk. The first lesson a writer would do well to learn is that both Homer and Shakespeare were popular writers–and this is exactly what they tried to be. All great literature from the past was generally popular in its own time.
I make no claims of mastery here; I am merely a student on the path, one who hopes to learn the craft through discipline and effort. In this blog I hope to share some of my insights, but also my difficulties. It is a blog about process. This is going to be a semi-biographical blog, a blog about learning techniques, about listening to what good writers have to say, about seeing what good writers of the past did. I hope that you will join me in this endeavor and offer your own insights as well.
I realize that it will take some time before I have a decent readership here, but I would like to start things properly. I hope for this to be an interactive blog, with lively discussion in the comments sections. To help promote such, I will ask a simple question at the end of each entry.
