writer

Delicious Duplicity

/ PaigeRandall / Leave a comment

 

coaster2

I lead two lives.  I am Batman. Okay that is a stretch.  I am probably closer to Jeckyll and Hyde.  Reliable professional by day.  Passionate, writer of love by night.

By day, I sit up straight at my desk, say the word fuck under my breath only in a hushed whisper, and can always be counted on to meet the tightest deadline. I say please and thank you and neaten items on my desk, more than a little compulsively. I prefer my stapler parallel to my tape dispenser, at a slight angle to the tissue box, which is parallel to my in-box and so on.  I keep cough drops and mint gum and fruit flavored antacids in my desk to share with anyone in need. My beverage rests on a hand made coaster to prevent condensation damage to the surface of my desk.

But by night… well that is a different matter entirely and I’m not sharing.

Yesterday, while I was sitting in Starbucks revising the latest draft of Circling, an old acquaintance came over to say hello with his children. My how you girls have grown I said with a smile, sliding my hand to protect the scene I was editing from young eyes. If he knew my hand rested on a steamy oral interlude, he would have had a good laugh.

I’m not ready to share yet though. I’m enjoying the duplicity too much.

 

Freeing The Pain 

/ PaigeRandall / 1 Comment

robins

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

/ PaigeRandall / Leave a comment

unnamed

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.