Writers Blog

This is the blog for Saturday – April 30 that is. Only two weeks late.

Before I left for Ireland, I had no problem with daily blogging. I had a list of topics next to my computer. I just crossed them off one at a time. But while we were visiting family I was off my routine. I don’t own a laptop and the ones in my daughter’s house all have foreign keyboards.

Oh, you’re thinking, kanji or Chinese with all those pictograms. No. The family recently moved to Ireland from Germany. In Germany, Z is more popular than Y, so they’ve traded places in the lineup. QWERTZ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Plus, there’s a U with an umlaut someplace. The British keyboard isn’t quite the same either. I don’t touch type anyway, but I’m pretty quick at hunt-and-peck. Having to think about a different keyboard throws my rhythm off.

Actually, that’s just an excuse. After I got home, I set to work chopping logs to burn in my woodstove next winter, and blogging was the last thing on my mind. Okay, even that’s just an excuse.

I was procrastinating. I hadn’t written up a new list of topics and I was afraid to sit down to write with nothing to say. That is one of my terrors that keeps me awake at night.

When I’m writing a novel, I mull over the topic for a few months, then sit down to write. I can usually churn out five to ten pages a day. If I’m working steadily, I can complete a three hundred page draft in about two months. After that, I let it age for a few months while I forget what I’ve written, then look at it again, hopefully with a fresh eye. The whole process takes six months to a year.

The hardest part is getting started. Once I start typing, the story flows out of my head pretty much in final form. I’ve gone back to change something a year after I’ve written it, only to discover that the change is the same thing I wrote in the first place.

I know this isn’t the case with everyone. Writer’s block is famously portrayed by an author staring at a blank page. Everything after “Chapter 1” is a mystery.

My friend Ann Rant has several hundred pages of manuscript she’s been laboring over for years. She has a clear idea of where the story is going: the beginning, middle and end of the plot, but as she writes, she keeps tacking new material onto the beginning, like she’s writing the story backwards.

Ann is a beautiful writer with superb command of language, vivid characters, a solid plot and a dramatic writing style. What she lacks is the confidence in her story. She can’t look objectively at what she’s written and say, “Yes, that’s what I needed to say.” She’s forever mired in “but…”

I have seen the work of other writers, many of them in print as bestsellers, who clearly don’t realize how bad their writing is. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe if you’re writing thrillers, the clichés, heavy-handed foreshadowing, botched details and impossible plot twists are okay. They are, after all, selling well and I am not.

H. L. Menken said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Okay, but I’m not really aiming for people whose lips still move while they read. I try to use puns, literary constructs and imagery. I expect my readers to remember things I wrote in previous chapters. I try to show them emotions without spelling out what I expect them to see.

The point is, writer’s block is not a problem if you’re content to fill the page by blathering on, restating a phrase five ways in the same sentence. It’s a lot harder to be succinct, to be vivid without repeating yourself, to expect something from your readers.

If you have any.

In the end, the important thing is to write. If you’re not satisfied with your work, you can always go back and fix it. Nothing could be easier with a word processor.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have some catching up to do. I’m more than three weeks behind in my daily blog.