stories are the bones of everything
This guy. Augusten Burroughs. I haven’t read his novels yet, but based on the advice given in this short video, I’m going to.
Update: March 24, 2017 – [easyazon_link identifier=”B008O9BKGC” locale=”US” nw=”y” tag=”penfist-20″]Running with Scissors[/easyazon_link] is a crazy book.
Stop believing in it. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist.
If you sit down and stare at a blank canvas, something will happen. If that thing isn’t writing, it is because you are either (in order of likelihood):
I will address these conditions in reverse order and share the solution to each of them.
Impaired
If you suffer from cognitive impairment, seek medical advice. This takes precedence over “writer’s block” under any circumstances. Once your team of medical professionals deals with the impairment, sit back down and move on to:
Unmotivated
If you find yourself unmotivated, write down the three things you are most passionate about in this world. If you aren’t writing about one of them, start. If you write those three things down and don’t have a single idea of what you should be writing about, you aren’t living in the same world all the rest of us inhabit. Go back to step one. Otherwise consider that you are simply:
Scared
If can’t write because you are scared, hello. I’ve been you. Exchange the word can’t for the word won’t. Examine what you are afraid of and tell it to fuck off. Please feel free to replace the invective with something that appeals to you. But realize you’re wasting time. Meanwhile, telling whatever you’re scared of to go blow is the only way to move past the word can’t and realize fear of failure isn’t an excuse. True passion always trumps fear. Cowards are what they are because of choices they have made.
Writer’s block is an excuse to fail. If you heart beats for the stories you to tell, stare at the canvas until your hands start moving and your brain starts pouring words. If it doesn’t happen, you’re not a storyteller.
I wrote this to myself, but I hope it helps you, unknown reader who wants to be reborn a writer.
The human brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t really hold on to the past very well. I speak for myself of course. Every brain is different. Some people, I’m told, have photo recall. They see remember everything exactly as it happened.
I know a girl who forgets some things almost immediately. Other things, her brain clamps down on and holds close with the teeth of a vicious attack dog. Her brain does one thing with the past and mine does another. We’re different that way. Someone else I used to know turned everything into a life or death emergency. Yet another person who passed through my life insisted on revisiting every recent event in the hopes that all concerned would agree with her version of how things went. She had a compulsive need that way.
My brain turns memories into stories. Softens the edges. Creates heroes and villains. Adds richness and descriptive details. Changes the timeline for dramatic effect. Sometimes I think that makes me a liar, and sometimes I think it makes me a good storyteller. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
I have to deal with the way my brain holds on to the past and processes it. Acknowledging my own tendency to distort the past and turn it into an entertaining story is important.
I can process a trauma by making my own role something I can live with. But that might not be what actually happened in the moments. In the story I might be brave. In real life I probably wasn’t. My hands were shaking. My teeth were chattering. I was behind a wall when the bullets started flying. Not running towards them.
There are 1,000 ways to get through events that should have or could have killed you or left you mentally broken. My way of coping is to make the thing into a story. But I mix up the pieces and parts of everything after a while. The faces get stuck on other bodies. The weather is more menacing and alive. Timelines get stretched and compressed. Antiheroes are born out of the shells of boring people.
In my stories, the omniscient narrator is me without the omniscience. How it happened and how it happened in my head are often two different things. Especially after years pass before I write the story. Often times I change details or major plot twists intentionally. I’m a fiction writer after all. Most of my stories start out that way intentionally. In my stories the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred. It happens to you too. Trust me.
It was like this doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as what actually happened. My brain tricks me. Chances are yours does the same thing. Memory is all we have sometimes to chart the course guiding us into the future.
Remember that. Looking back through the distorted lens of your own filters can be inspiring but it can also be deceiving. Stories are an important part of being human. Be open to the way others see things too. Hear their stories and pick the pieces that fit into your own.
No guide for life is the complete truth because every single one of them has been produced and filtered through human brains. In a world filled with a hundred million stories, pick and choose the ones you believe in carefully.
Make your own stories. Write them down before too much time passes. Pick out the truths that resonate with you and live your own fantasies. Memory is what you make of it.
When you write, people like to give you free advice based on their own ideas about what it means to be a writer. I appreciate all of the advice. I’m not going to follow most of it. One of the pieces of advice I have spent time thinking about is that I choose different pen names for different genres. The idea being that if you like my BDSM erotica you might not like my self-help books. Or if you like my fantasy you might not like my horror. I hope you like all my offerings. If you don’t however, that’s OK too. Your choice. My name is Penfist. Call me Pen. I’m going to write whatever I want. That’s why I chose to do this.
I am a writer because I need to tell stories. The stories that I want to tell. You can float me an idea and it might grab me by the teeth and pull me into itself. That’s a wonderfully terrifying experience when it happens. I encourage you to engage with me that way. Send me an epiphany so large I have to write an entire novel or tome about that idea. In the meantime, understand that one person has many facets. You do. I do. We all do. I’m trying to simplify my life be exploring them all. I can’t do that as effectively if I have to wear masks. Commercial success will happen if the work I produce resonates. Entertains. Pulls you in.
I write self-help, erotica, horror, contemporary fantasy, post-apocalyptic stories and whatever else I decide contains a story that needs to be told. That’s going to make some people dismiss me as “that guy who does whatever he wants.” I’m totally comfortable with that. I want to attract people with malleable minds not brittle ones. The point of writing this out and putting it into the world is that I hope you’ll choose the same path. Be true to your own muse. Create art. Own the results. Learn from the feedback. Keep creating. It’s your story and the characters in it belong to you. Surround yourself with others who believe in that and you’ll explode with endless inspiration. Both given and received. That’s what I believe. It’s why I won’t create a bunch of different writing personas. I want to focus on being that guy who writes whatever he wants. I’m being true to myself and I think you should consider living that way too.
Now go buy a book so I can pay the web hosting fees this month.