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Freeing The Pain 

/ PaigeRandall / 1 Comment

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With all of this thinking and all of this writing and all of this attempt at creation, a new section of my brain seems to have opened up. And that cleaving, that veritable exposing of my psyche, has hurt like a motherf**ker.

Years ago someone very close to me shared the following observation… you have three emotions, she said, happiness, anger and anger.  And that was working out just fine for me. Well little did I know that when I decided to climb into the fictional heads of my fictional characters, their fictional feelings would become very real to me.  Suddenly, sadness and loss, guilt and insecurity, vulnerability and indecision could only get to them through me. And that really really hurts (thank God for red wine). It is not unlike childbirth, but the outcome is very different. I felt a bit like Melisandre, without the fabulous red hair (G.O.T. reference, sorry), birthing, well, birthing something. In my writing workshop someone called it bleeding on the page.  That is exactly it.  And that bleeding is excruciatingly painful.

Fortunately my characters get laid a lot too, and so there is that.

 

The Movement of Inspiration

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It is everywhere or no where at all. Angel Oak, the tree above (behind my name) is outside of Charleston, SC. It is awe inspiring. The tiny snail over this post crawled his way onto my pages, inspiring as well. Music, for me, is the surest form of inspiration. In the early drafts of Circling, before giving a crap about precision or technique, just trying to “see it,” I listened to music a lot while I wrote. On headphones and LOUD (my audiologist friend is going to make a killing off me in a few years). A guitar riff can shift the action of a whole scene. One line of a song can alter a character’s entire motivation. Music is easy.

But inspiration comes from other, less expected, places. Driving down a city street, I saw a cable repair man standing in a hole gesturing with both hands facing down, pressing repeatedly, up and down, up and down, with fingers spread wide. I have no idea what he was doing, but it was a beautiful movement. It was ballet. It stuck with me and made me think about the challenge of transferring gestures and expressions to the page. That repair man gave my characters more movement. They tend to get a little static since they are busy having deep thoughts and making snappy retorts.

I tried to give that movement words all day. I still don’t have it, but trying is a good exercise.

Yeah I wrote that!

/ PaigeRandall / 12 Comments

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On February 7, 2014, I had coffee with a good friend.  We were in that part of the conversation where we offer each other a little self improvement ass kicking, as you can only do with really good girl friends.  “Will you write the fucking book already!” she said.  Ugh – for 25 years I have been talking about this book.  I don’t know what it is about or who the characters are or even what genre it is, but I know it must be written.  I guess she got tired of hearing me bitch about my busy schedule, work, family, blah blah blah.

That night I had dinner out, a little wine of course.  At 10:00 p.m., I powered up my tablet (note to self – never write on a tablet!) and sat down with a goal of writing a single sentence.  I felt like a pianist preparing to play Bach…. BUM, BUM, BUM, BUM. That probably isn’t coming across, but my Dad would have loved the metaphor.

I had no first words, no characters, no plot, no setting, no ideas, but I really wanted to prove something to my girlfriend!  And then it started coming  – beach houses, switched keys, and a super-hot man with a mild anxiety disorder.  At 2:00 a.m. I had 2,000 words and the pace wouldn’t slow. Thanks to a big snow, I kept that pace for six days. My car battery died. I forced a shower every other day. My calorie intake went from about 3,000 a day to 700. On the fourth day I had blood work because something certainly must have been wrong!

I. Could. Not. Stop. Writing.

I was hooked.