Bubbles and Brainstorming

I multi-task. Almost obsessively. I find it almost impossible to sit and do a single thing. I’m almost always multi-tasking while trying to write. However, I’ve discovered a few places where just thinking or brainstorming through a story or scene is better than actually trying to write. For example, it’s hard to follow a telephone conversation when I’m writing, red lights tend to turn green with people honking before I notice, I completely lose track of what’s going on in a meeting, and tonight I discovered that trying to write while taking a nice soothing bubble bath isn’t such a hot idea. After one paragraph, I managed to drop my notebook in the water. At least I didn’t lose more than a paragraph of new material. And the bath isn’t quite as relaxing as the advertisement for the bubble bath promised once you spend half the time spreading out notebook pages on the counter to dry.

But I’m not complaining. I’m feeling quite relaxed after this weekend regardless of the bubblebath fiasco. RW (my SO) returned from Germany. (Yay! Big smile!) For some reason, him just being here has a way of releasing me from my obsessive need to multi-task. That little squirrel on the wheel in my brain that’s constantly running crazy chasing down all the “to do’s” on my never-ending list every other normal day disappears when RW is here. Plus, RW’s “relaxing” beats the hell out of any bath, bubbles or not.

My love affair with spirals

Notebooks that is. Sorry, not a love scene from one of my books. Though I did write a lot of sex today. But that’s a rabbit trail off the main path of this blog. I thought about what I had written yesterday and realized I didn’t have it exactly right. I can jump into a story pretty much wherever my brain has worked through a scene, but not on the computer. For some reason, when I type, it’s got to be “in order”. In my mind, those words echo with pompous authority the way a large and ancient bell tolls the hour for beginning classes across the lawn of a strict, Ivy-league prep school where all the students are required to wear suit coats and of course the hallowed halls are empty because tardiness is not allowed.

Wow. I’m really wanting to dart down those darn rabbit trails.

Anyway, I can’t type out of order. Maybe because rough drafts for me, lists of ideas, random wanderings, all fit more naturally onto paper. Where if I scratch it out, I can come back to it and see it, gather up the direction of inspiration, the starts and stops and AH HA’s!! even weeks or years from the day of writing. Arrows and stars and brackets and doodles all meander easily across a piece of notebook paper for me. But on a keyboard with electronic letters and delete, save, print – it’s gone, done, finished – even with the multitude of fonts available – it’s just not the same.

It’s not MY writing. I can look at something I wrote weeks ago and tell by the slant and shape of the letters what kind of mood I was in. From the complexity and number of doodles just how long it took me to pull a thought from my head in a manner precise and narrow enough for words. And I like to see my work spread out. I do a lot of flipping back and forth, moving whole scenes, descriptions, conflicts, paragraphs, and descriptions around. When I try to do that on the computer, I get confused because I don’t have the visual clues that I do on my handwritten pages. There’s no blue star with a number one in the margin and a note to call mom before the NCAA championship game starts (because of course, she won’t answer when the game is actually being played.) No coffee spill on page 62 or half-written poem along the margin where the scene being played out sparked inspiration for several other stories.

The computer is wonderful. I absolutely would NOT want to live a life in today’s world without it. It makes so many things faster and easier. (And in my notebooks, let’s face it – as much as I love them, they DON’T automatically correct my spelling when I’m rushing and forget the “i before e except after c” rule among others.) But there’s something about seeing words formed by your own hand that just draws me, entrances me. Keeps me reaching for that notebook one more time. When I hit a writing block, 9 times out of 10, I’m sitting at the computer. And 9 times out of 10, all I have to do is shut it down, grab a spiral and a colored pen, take a deep breath and dive into that clear, inviting page that’s been waiting on me.

Gotta get organized

I’m not a very organized person. I try, and “most” important things are under control. I don’t miss bill payments, I keep up with all the organizational needs of my work and my kids’ schedules and I remember most of my family’s birthdays – at least sometime during the correct month. (Numbers – in any form – dates, taxes, addresses, phone numbers, ages - just blur in my head. I write A LOT down. Finding where I wrote it….huh. That’s another trick.) But basically, life stays mostly in reach. Until recently. Lots to say on this, but today is about needing to get organized on one specific thing -  where the hell did I write that down at?

You see, I do quite a bit of writing in notebooks in “stolen” moments. Much of my writing time isn’t done in a peaceful, distractionless office (I’m not sure if I’ve even SEEN one of those) for hours at a time. I run around living life with these stories blaring away inside my head and as soon as I can, I let them bleed out into the closest spiral notebook laying around (of which there are more than a few spread throughout my home due to this exact thing). I’ll scribble paragraphs down and then take the notebook with me to pick up my daughter to finish a thought and it will get left in the car. I’ll jot down a conversation in another notebook and stuff it into my computer bag to finish noting down expressions and background during lunch. I’ll write down ideas about setting while fixing dinner and then toss the notebook onto a shelf when I need the counter space to mix up a sauce. Are you getting the picture? Eventually, I do get around to putting it into the computer at a later date (at which point I am extremely thankful for my English background which makes the grammar and mechanics of writing mostly a given rather than another hurdle to jump before sending it off to my editor).

But my problem is FINDING the right notebook when I’m ready for it. Today I searched for nearly an hour trying to find the scene I had written down when Connyn first shows his “non-jerk” side to his mate. I needed that scene to move on. My brain wouldn’t process through to the next section until it had reviewed what I had written before. Apparently I have an innate refusal to just “jump” into a story at any place in it and start writing. I finally did find the notebook. In the dining room on a shelf under a stack of my daughter’s latest assignments brought home from school, a pizza delivery flyer and Optimus Prime (one of my son’s Transformers). And judging from the splatters across the bottom corner, I had been working on this while fixing last week’s lasangna.

There’s got to be a better way.

Genie and a polar bear

Just a quick note on inspiration. I think for writers it comes from just about everywhere. I don’t need much personally for my brain to take off on a tangent for a story. It’s actually harder for me to stay focused on one single story at a time to see it through ASAP because there are always a solid dozen or more constantly going through my head. And any little thing might set another story off.

For instance, just this morning I was driving to work, scanning radio stations when I heard these lyrics from a Christina Aguilera song:

I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Gotta rub me the right way, honey
I’m a genie in a bottle, baby
Come, come, come and let me out

And bam! Another story was kick-started through my imagination. I just saw it. It joined the one from yesterday morning that got started from a dream I had about being chased by a huge polar bear through a Louisiana swamp over rickety old catwalks until I came to a dead end at a trailer where I burst into it and scared a woman speechless who was rocking her baby to sleep. Seeing her there surprised me and I stopped just long enough for the polar bear to catch me and he batted at me because he’d been wanting to play. Here I’d been running for my life and so frightened in my dream and he’d just wanted to play. Sheesh. Even in my dream, I was rolling my eyes.

Sometimes, I wish I had a little less inspiration.   …I know – be careful what you wish for…

Method or just madness?

There’s a great discussion going on over at Romancing the Blog about symbolism and it got me thinking about why I write. To entertain? To get across a message? To get my name out there and become rich and famous?  – ok, be right back, LMAO at that last one… (whew!) Ok, where was I? Oh yes, why do I write.

Good question and one which honestly, I haven’t given a lot of thought to. I just simply do. Always have. It’s a part of me. Could I live without it? Absolutely. Would I be living my life fully without writing. Absolutely not. If I go for too long without writing something, I start to itch inside. A restlessness under my skin. A mental caging that’s only set free on paper.

At the moment, due to where life is for me right now, most of the time I live with this feeling as a dull ache – like the kind of headache that isn’t incapacitating, just there. Because presently, I can’t get enough aspirin (i.e. time) in the chunks I need it to completely satisfy and salve this ache. The last time I felt a full relief was after three solid days of hiding and writing – taking only small breaks for sleeping and eating. Any working full-time (not writing) single moms of small children out there I’m sure can tell you that those kinds of “chunk times” are few, few, few and far between.

And no matter what anyone says, writing takes a hell of a lot of time. Time, time, time. Time to think. Time to dream. Time to organize. Time to sort. Time to dig. Time to let the characters wander around my brain so I can get to know them, understand them, hear what they have to say. Time to sit in front of a computer and figure out how to get the story in my head into coherent sentences so a reader NOT inside my head can “get it”. Time to take a four-dimensional Picasso “looking” story of emotion, motivation, passion, belief, impulse and impetus and mold it into finite words without losing the heart and soul of the story that keeps me awake when I’m too tired to stand and my eyes are burning from staring at a screen. And this is before a single word is typed. Then there’s the cutting, expanding, condensing, time-line checking, word over-use catching, character verifying, sequence inspection, plot tightening – god! It goes on forever! Yet it drives me. Sometimes not what I want to do. But always a need inside to do.

And I wonder, why couldn’t I “itch” to sing? Then I could just pop over to an American Idol audition, win the competition and be happy.

My first child…ummm…story :)

The other day I came across the initial draft of my first full-length romance story. One of those proud, sentimental moments not unlike looking at old pictures of my children when they were babies. And then I opened it and started reading.

 

I suppose for a first story, it’s not really that bad. The plot is decent, there’s some very good place descriptions and the hero is a hunk. Yum. There’s a kidnapping, a chase across Ireland, a very scary and manipulative villain, a knife-wielding heroine…and did I mention the hero? A sexy, blue-eyed, black-haired oooohhh yes please(!!) man.

 

Who doesn’t show up until chapter four.

 

Uhhh…yeah. Now we know why that book isn’t published. Apparently, the hero needs to show up a little sooner. Did I mention that it was a romance? Well, supposed to be a romance. Hard to get the whole romance thing started when the hero and heroine don’t know each other are alive for four whole freakin’ chapters. Sparks of some sort need to be singing through the pages a heck of a lot sooner than that. I flipped through the rest of the manuscript and wondered, WHAT was I thinking?? And then I looked at the other manuscripts on my shelf that have been published in the last couple of years and I know what I was thinking: I want to write a story.

 

But thank goodness that several years later, I not only still want to write a story, I can write a better story. J

Don’t forget the…what??

Whenever my writing needs music references, I go running for help. I love to listen to music, but titles, singers, bands, heck- sometimes entire genres, movements and eras elude me. It’s as if the section of my brain meant to store that information has been closed for renovations since, well…since permanently. Music information is water through a sieve for me. It just doesn’t stick.

My boyfriend is himself a walking trivia machine when it comes to music, movies, or TV. Good news is, whenever I have a question or need a suggestion, I have a virtually unlimited resource. And, best of all, he loves me, so when he’s not laughing at me, he does his best to help me figure out the reference I’m looking for. Why does he laugh you might ask?

Me: Hey, what’s that song, that old song about a hippie?

Him: A hippie?

Me.: Not a hippie. Older. It’s a slow song. A rock song.

Him: An old, slow rock song about a hippie? (Look on his face says: what the hell?)

Me: Yes. Sort of. That’s the wrong word.

Him: Do you know who sang this old, slow rock song that’s not about a hippie?

Me: AC/DC. I think.

Him: Uh huh. (Look on his face says: you really don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, do you?)

Me: Oh wait. A Bohemian something.

Him: (Look on his face says: you’ve just desecrated a sacred shrine and you don’t even realize it) Bohemian Rhapsody. By Queen.

So see? Sad, isn’t it? He may tease, but he has his reasons. Plus, he is very patient and he always helps me find my song. Though don’t expect to see me on “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” any time soon. I’m as good with those as I am with these pesky titles…