Posts Tagged ‘writing’
I keep noodling on the idea of how you earn — not build, necessarily, but earn — your audience as a creative type. I’m not sure I have all (or any of) the answers, but here’s a good shot at it. Note that this list isn’t meant to be a bunch of checkboxes — you don’t need to do all of these (or even any of them, beyond the first). It’s just meant to offer thoughts and options.
My mother’s father was a coal miner. (Died of black lung.) My father’s father was a farmer. Sun up to sun down. My father worked 4AM to 4PM in a chemical-rich pigment factory. My mother cleaned houses. Day in, day out, back-breaking work. I am a writer. I sit in a fairly comfy office chair [...]
The article, by Damien Walter, asserts that (from the article’s title): “Fandom matters: writers must respect their followers or pay with their careers.” It’s for many authors a rough and troubling assertion — in it is the suggestion that the book (or movie or comic or whatever) is not enough (and, taken to an illogical degree, may not even matter).
Shit, long before you start banging out an outline or a treatment, long before you start barfing up ink on the page or the screen, you sit and… let the story tumble around your head. Characters. Plot. Odd ideas that don’t fit together (yet). Metaphors that live in the space between sizzling spark plug synapses. The storyteller’s internal psychic life is the life is a little kid, right?
A good story traps us in the moment and compels us by its incompleteness. The equation then becomes X + 5 = 9, and we are driven to solve for X. It is the X that haunts us. It is the emptiness of that variable we hope to fill. Like with the Matrix, we are driven by the question.
