The Writer's Toybox

Writing, especially fiction writing, is a fairly aberrant pastime, and most writers need a coping mechanism to deal with the unnatural levels of solitude and introspection that decent writing often requires. In short, they need something to get themselves out of their own heads for a little while.

Every writer has a different way of doing this. The really legendary ones seem to turn to drinking, to drugging, or to chasing down a mid-life crisis in the guise of a string of women half their age. Me, I'm not the stuff of legend- I like to play with toys.

Previously, I've mentioned my, uh, son's (yes, that's it) Planet of the Apes Kubricks and the Monkey King Playmobils that I've customized. Believe me, I could go on and on about cool toys I have in the house, cool toys I've had, or cool toys I want (I'm on toy probation, in general. One in, one out is the house rule) but this isn't a toy blog, it's a writing blog, and in that vein, I won't mention my wonderful double barrel soft dart shotgun (oops). Instead, I present for your enjoyment, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone (I've been reading Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and it's given me Moorcock on the brain. Heh.) It's a Playmobil custom, done after Brom's well known painting:



The best part is that my son can play with it, though I've decided not to teach him the part about black swords and their soul-stealing properties. Maybe when he's four.

Habits

I write nearly every day. Sometimes I write for fifteen minutes, sometimes for an hour. Sometimes it's just on this blog. But it's important to do it, because writing is a habit that must be cultivated like any other habit. The great thing about this particular vice is that instead of smoker's lung or a bad liver, you end up with a body of work that you can be proud of, perhaps even a legacy, if you're that ambitious.

Well, if anything's gonna break it . . .

This post falls squarely under "write it down before you forget it". My son and I met my wife (and his mother) for lunch yesterday, and as a surprise she brought along a tiny meteorite her boss had generously loaned to her for me to see. Cool. Yet another thing I've always wanted to hold in my hands. So we're sitting in the taqueria, and I'm holding this neat little hunk of space iron, and I drop it onto the concrete floor. "Ah crap!" I say, and I think to myself I hope I didn't break it. Yes, I actually thought to myself I hope I didn't break this little melted hunk of iron that has been hurtling through deep space before punching through our burning atmosphere and plummeting tens of thousands of feet to collide with the Earth. Yep.

Storytelling

There's a certain obvious freedom that comes with having a very small audience. Since I can never be sure that I'm writing for anyone but me, most of the time I simply write for me. I get a vision in my head, a line of dialogue, the workings of a theme, and I try to manifest it. It's something I enjoy, writing, something I find sacred in a strange irreverent way, and while I take my work seriously, I find it hard to think of myself (or most other writers for that matter) in a serious light. It's really a foolish bit of business, stringing words together into a sentence, sentences into paragraphs, hoping someone will read them. It can also be a pain in the ass, and I wonder if anyone would do it at all if the need to tell stories wasn't such a deep-seated human compulsion. I need to tell stories, and the stories in my head apparently need to get out. It seems like this should be categorized as a mental illness, but I've heard they actually give awards for it.

Taking it where I can get it

When my son was born, close to 2 1/2 years ago, I was a little over three quarters finished writing my first novel. Thank God for that, because if the entire endeavor had been like that last quarter I would probably be working on it even now.

It's true that most babies sleep a lot in the first months after birth, but they don't do it all at once, and if you don't sleep when they do at least some of the time then you are screwed. Add in a full time job and the minimal amount of hours needed to keep the house from turning into a roach infested superfund site and, well, if you're a writer then you're screwed. Sacrifices must be made, and for me it was sleep. I did a lot of writing during naptime, with my son asleep in my lap, and a lot of writing and revising in the car while he slept in his seat in the back. Thankfully, he was born in winter, so this could be done at a park with the windows rolled down (it is the desert, remember). It was an arduous process, but I stuck it out, and like any habit worth having that perseverance has stuck with me.

Still, that was two years ago, and I can forgive you for wondering what relevance this little anecdote has to my writing life in the present. Well, let me tell you, it doesn't get easier as children propel themselves like lemmings headfirst toward their first years of school. They sleep less, and if anything they demand more attention. Also, forget about Quiet and Solitude, they left for the childless neighbor's house. So what to do? Right now I'm writing this in a notebook (a real notebook, pen and paper) in my car while my son is asleep in his seat in the back. Correction: was asleep. Sigh.

Write What You Know = Basically, Nothing

How about writing what you don't know? That opens up the whole world to your fiction. Do a little research. Use your imagination. Learn something. Maybe even make a fool of yourself. God forbid you should make a fool of yourself, huh? Just remember: The Muse will forgive factual error, but She will never, ever, forgive creative bankruptcy.

Even a Swine Deserves a Small Pearl

When I was younger, and in the bad habit of not finishing things, I used to worry that I'd run out of ideas. Now that I'm older I realize that what I'm going to run out of is time. It's a less terrifying but ultimately more depressing conclusion. But I have come neither to bury Caesar nor to praise him. I'm here, quite simply, to crow.

As a writer, I have certain personal ambitions. They're pretty modest, but they're the goals that keep me engaged, day in and day out, in a lonely calling that pays me in a sputtering stream of delayed gratification. Some I've achieved, which is truly a pleasure indescribable, but like I said, they're personal, and not likely to be of interest to anyone but me. Still, it's not really fair to bring a subject up and then say "Well, I can't really talk about it," so I'll tell you of one as yet unfulfilled ambition, the very one that's pertinent to this post.

If you didn't already know it, you will now be made aware that I am a history buff, and that ancient Rome is one of my obsessions (Medieval Europe, Feudal Japan, and lately, Elizabethan England, are the others) and for a long time I have wanted to write a novel set in the Empire during the second century. I'll get to it, given enough time, but there are several projects ahead of it, and one thing I've learned over the years is that I can only do one project at a time. The rest, no matter how compelling, simply have to get in line. Otherwise I end up with a bunch of half-realized, unfinished fragments. In other words, crap.

Nevertheless, just because an idea is in the back of the line, it doesn't mean it's been abandoned. I'm constantly on the lookout for relevant research material, which I store like a squirrel and often (gasp!) read for pleasure.

So. . .

The other day I'm in a certain bookstore and I find these fabulous books on Rome that are very inexpensive. Now forgive my saying so but books on Rome are a dime a dozen, I mean, the place is older than Jesus himself, so a lot has been written about it, but what really made these books special were the illustrations, full color recreations of Roman military life. It only took a cursory glance and those babies were mine, bought and paid for.

Well, I get these very inexpensive and beautiful books on the Roman army home and in my spare time I start to read through them. It seems they focus on the Dacian wars in the time of Trajan. Wow, that's the period I was planning on writing about in my novel. Cool. I read a little more and I realize that the title of these books are not simply The Legionary and The Cavalryman, but Tiberius Claudius Maximus The Legionary and Tiberius Claudius Maximus The Cavalryman. Dear reader, you will be forgiven for not knowing this, and I myself had forgotten it, but Tiberius Claudius Maximus was the cavalry officer who hunted down and captured the Dacian king, Decebalus, at the end of the war. He's no one, really, but his name is written in one of my notebooks as an important secondary character in my evolving narrative. Unwittingly, I had stumbled on a two part biography of an obscure Roman, who up to that point was nothing more than a name to me. My friends, I live for little moments like that. Oink, oink.