Writing

I have often been asked about my writing, considering that it so often differs from not only the way that I speak in person, but also from the written work of my peers.  The questions are varied, but tend to circle around a central theme of how I manage to sit down and write approximately four-hundred pages of a book.  For most people, this seems to be a nearly impossible feat, considering so many struggle to simply write a short blog numbering at three-hundred words.  There is no one thing that I do in order to write 2,800 words every day.  Rather, I simply settle myself into my favourite chair, with a steaming cup of coffee—or a cold beer—and simply let the words flow.  There is no secret to writing, the same way that there is no real secret to any form of art.  If you care about it, then it becomes the easiest thing in the world.

I suppose my most common answer to those who wish to know how to sit before the screen of a computer and tap away at a keyboard for hours on end, is to lightly plan what it is you want to write.  I have never been good with organization, and over the last year I cannot remember a third of the books that I planned out in detail greater than some of the written works that have been published recently.  Cities were brought to life with a humming downtown core, filled with merchants and vendors of various foods.  Stores lining the simple cobble-stone streets, windows of glass sparkling in the rays of golden sunlight that lit upon them.  However, not a one of those stories were even put to paper.  Perhaps, in my own way, I am simply saving them for a time when I feel that they will be fully evolved, but more likely I became bored of all the detail as it left nothing for my imagination to do.

When sitting down to write, to do anything, the imagination is an exceptionally vital part of the process, it powers so much of the world around us that to leave it with naught to do but slumber is to steal the very breath of life from our written works.  Rather than planning an upcoming blog post or written material in full, I encourage those who so often complain that writing is hard, to just relax and allow their imaginations to take control of their fingers.  Instead of writing about a simple city and how the voices of the thousands of citizens create an ungodly cacophony of noise, perhaps something beautiful will take place.

The sun rose over the silent, still sea, stretching forth fingers of red-gold light to shimmer across the blue surface of the water.  In the distance, the calling of birds could be heard faintly, and a breeze drifted gently over the sea, stirring forth small waves and wrapping about the woman like a lovers caress as she stood, with feet warmed by the sand, at the edge of the water.