Write what you know. That's the first rule of writing.
Write every day, that's another rule. Write every day whether you want to or not, whether your muse comes down and hands you an idea that will get you every acclaim from the Man Booker Prize to Oprah's Book Club or whether your muse just comes down and hands you a big pile of reeking shit.
When you're writing, don't take the time to go back and edit it. Get the story down first, as fast as you can, like you're vomiting onto the paper, and then go back and see what's story and what's just puke.
He's heard all of these rules a hundred times, no, a hundred thousand, and yet he still can't write. It's not won't, he wants to write like the desert wants the rain, but he can't. Every time his fingers click down on the keys, they produce nothing more than uninteresting scenes with characters that he hates, or worse yet, feels nothing for. At one point he looks up to see what he has typed and sees the following sentence on screen:
Why the fuck can't I do this any more?
It is not a part of the narrative, it is not a witty piece of dialogue, it is not even a clunky piece of dialogue. It is just there in the middle of the screen, related to nothing. It does nothing to advance the plot, and yet, sadly, he thinks that it is the truest sentence he's written all day. Maybe the truest he's ever written.
He gets up, pacing the small confines of his apartment. Write what you know, that was his main problem. He's not a very interesting person, he'll be the first to admit it. He doesn't have an interesting job, he isn't going to school for anything interesting, he doesn't even have any interesting hobbies. As for reading, forget it. He never had time to read in the first place, and the most riveting fiction he's read lately is the turn-ons and turn-offs column for Miss December.
He doesn't even know any people who are interesting enough to swipe wholesale and transcribe onto a sheet of paper. He doesn't know anyone with any life threatening diseases or fascinating jobs or homicidal tendencies. Hell, he doesn't think he even knows anyone that's been robbed. All of his friends are drab, lifeless facsimiles of himself, people who were below the notice of most people, people who seemed doomed to lives in the service sector.
He doesn't have time to read, that's his main problem. He wonders where he got the idea that he would be able to write the Great American Novel when he doesn't even have time to read the back of cereal boxes anymore. Right now, even, while he stares at his computer screen, begging and pleading with his subconscious to burp up anything resembling a story, all he can hear from his brain is a mental litany of everything he's putting off to stare at this white screen. Even worse, it's not his own mental voice that he hears listing everything off. Instead, it is the whining, nasal voice of his bosses' secretary, and it is so clear that he can picture her, right down to her cat's eye glasses, attached to a chain that looked like it had once had a pen on the other end, and she is reading them in a bored voice.
Christ, even his subconscious was bored. He needs to go out and do something, do some research, live a little fer Chrissakes'. He stands up and walks over to the bookshelf, closing his eyes and running his fingers along the spines at random. He promises himself that whatever he pulls from the shelf, he'd go out today, right now, and research. No, not just research. Live, do, experience.
He runs his fingers along the spines for a few more minutes, trying to disorient himself, trying to forget that everything was in alphabetical order, that he had actually organized it by subject as well, and wondering what he would do if he pulled a biography off the shelf, wondering whether he would go out and impersonate that person, or whether he would simply try to live as they had. For a moment, he loses himself in the nearly inaudible piff-piff-piff his index finger makes as it jumps from spine to spine, from subject to subject.
After a moment, with a final piff, his finger stops, and he opens his eyes to see what the fates have decided.
He sees the title his finger has stopped on, and, smiling slightly, pulls the book down from the shelf and begins to peruse The Serial Killer's Encyclopedia.
1 comment:
I like this one a lot, I think you could expand it having him flip through at random to a specific killer or combining a few killers for him to experiment with. See how far this character would be willing to go.
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