Preemptive Retaliation

When I work on stories, it’s mostly internal. I have an idea, or a spot of inspiration, or maybe I find something that I want to steal, and I just think about it. I come out with a basic premise, not really a plot, but a sequence that sums up a character or something. Sometimes I think of a scene, a whole scene, and I smile and leave it where it is. It just sits there and germinates. It waits patiently as I go about and do different things and if it’s lucky, if it’s very, very lucky, it grows. It grows larger, and more scenes adds onto it and join it, and soon it’s Something Bigger. Something Substantial. And then I sit down and write it.

I remember reading a story about Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he wrote A Hundred Years of Solitude. Apparently he had been thinking of the story for a while, pondering it both consciously and subconsciously, never writing anything down, never taking notes, until he was in the car with his family. He turned to his wife and told her it was time, that he had a story inside him, ready to come out, ready to be birthed. She turned around and he started writing it, from beginning to end. According to this legend, he wrote the book from beginning to end in its entirety, unedited from what we read today (except, maybe, in Spanish). Whether you believe it or not is up to you – I personally don’t – but I feel that my writing works in a similar way. Apart from the perfect-in-one sitting thing. My first drafts are slightly more flawed.

This is why I like NaNo so much. I look forward to it every year in a strange masochistic way. I have an idea that works its way round my head a million times, ready to pop out, and NaNo is the perfect time to spill it all out on paper. The pour my brain into the keyboard and let it all spread out in front of me. 

Admittedly, this is lazy. I can get away with writing without actually writing. I can say that I am working on something by watching films and playing videogames under the guise of research and absorbing other forms of entertainment. And yeah, that’s kind of true, but at the same time it’s a form of procrastination. 

So there has to be a time when the internal becomes external. You have to write this stuff down; put pen to paper or finger to key and start pouring out everything has built up. Now, that’s hard. But also fun. But it’s hard.