“Hey — I was wondering if you could give me a hand…wait, are you okay? What’s wrong?”
A wipe of the eyes, and an excuse: “It’s nothing, just some allergies…what do you need?”
There’s a reason why I train the staff and regulars at the brewery to leave me alone when I write. I get very into what I’m writing at the moment; if I don’t care about the characters, and about the death scene I’m writing, why the hell would any reader?
This is part of the deal, for me, as a writer. I’ve described before how my ideas are the ghosts that float around the back of my mind…and about how Connor & Oz were those ghosts who just wouldn’t shut the fuck up, who wouldn’t leave me alone and let me get on with other shit. No, they demanded to be written…and they became, over the course of all the effort and thought and emotion I’ve put into them, real.
Do your characters talk to you?
Is there any question more awkward to answer to non-writers? Because…well…of course they do, of course my characters talk to me.
If they didn’t talk to me, they couldn’t tell their own story. If they didn’t talk to me, they couldn’t force me to change my plots and plans and ideas to suit themselves. If they didn’t talk to me, they couldn’t, in the end, be real.
But it does make things awkward as hell when you write in a public setting. Especially when you’re killing one of those characters off…
I have become, it must be said, incredibly scattered today.
One (death) scene written…not really planned, nor really tied into the other stuff (because it’s the end of Flicker, and has nothing really to do with Silence), but written nonetheless. A second scene half-finished, before the emotion and the words ran out…
Hey, let’s try something different! I know — blog posts!
Two blog posts — yep, TWO — half-finished, as well. After the intensity of the first scene, it’s just hard to truly follow through and finish…well, anything.
This is why I usually try to have a plan for what I’m going to write in a given session. This is why I (usually) don’t just “wing it”.
On the other hand…I made myself cry. And, yes, as much as all the rest: this is why I write.
Finding My Way Out 