I’m too analytical. And obsessive. I know this. Especially when things go wrong, I need to know WHY. I’ve even come to tell my students that why is my single favorite word. It’s like I’m three years old again. Why can’t I carry the cat around by his tail? Why can’t I play with the dead bird? Why does Daddy hide in the basement whenever Mommy crosses her eyes? It’s a powerful word, why, and I want my students to always ask it when they are writing. It is, I think, the single most important question a writer, any writer, can ask about their work.

Given my obsessive tendencies, however, it isn’t often that I stress out about the why behind a problem. It’s a puzzle that I enjoy trying to solve. Granted it tends to slow me down and throw me off schedule as I attempt to figure it out, but it is, after all, what it is. Recently, though, why gave me absolute fits with my writing.

When National Novel Writing Month ended last November, I knew I had a sprawling mess to try and fix. Hell, I knew it as I was writing it. I’m what some refer to as a “pantster” – as in I write by the seat of my pants. I’ll have a character or two, a line of dialogue, a scene, and a general idea of where I want to go. It usually means heavy, heavy rewrites, and normally if something starts to go off track, I’ll back up and try something new. But I couldn’t do that with NaNoWriMo because of the writing schedule I needed to keep, so I didn’t edit anything as I wrote it, even if I realized halfway through a scene that it would never work. I kept a notebook and jotted down page numbers and basic thoughts in it as I typed, or stuck quick revision ideas at the end of a scene or chapter. My plan was to let the manuscript sit for a few weeks while I finished up the semester and then get back to it over break. First I’d read through the whole thing, including all the notes, and then I’d use the notes I took to get me back into the story. It was a good plan, a solid plan.

But it didn’t work. I never even finished reading through the manuscript. The individual story lines were fine. They needed some work, certainly, but there wasn’t anything there to panic about. What got that inner why all fired up was the structure of the thing. Or, rather, the utter lack of structure. I couldn’t even see it. And in my frustration in trying to find the source of the problem, in trying to answer the why, something happened that has never happened before.

Everything shut down. I’d call it strange, but there were days that it was downright frightening. I started finding excuses not to write, knowing exactly that was what I was doing while I was doing it. I dove back into video games. I read even more than I usually do. I brought out and reread stories and screenplays and poems from ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. Material I only had hardcopy of I entered into the computer and saved in a folder titled “Beginnings.” I cleaned more than I cleaned in the previous twelve months. I cooked more than I cooked in the previous twelve months. I wrote less than I… well that doesn’t make much sense, but you know what I mean.

And it wasn’t just the novel I was avoiding. I tried playing around with these little things I call Snapshots, mainly, I think, because I was reading so much Lydia Davis back in January. I hoped they’d lead me to something more than just a quick vignette, but they never did. Nothing really held my interest. The only thing I was able to focus on, it seemed, was remaining utterly unfocused.

Six weeks of winter recess came and went, and not a single new page was written. Every night I’d go to bed cursing myself for not just buckling down and starting something new, anything new, and every morning I’d wake up and find new ways to avoid working on anything new. Worst of all, when my favorite word would start tingling in the back of my brain, I squashed it. I didn’t want to even think of the why that was behind my disinterest. And when school started back up at the end of January, it became even easier to avoid the writing.

But here I am, two months later, and slowly, ever so slowly the focus is coming back. I still haven’t let myself ask why, but I’m ok with that for now. Maybe my brain just needed to recharge. Maybe some of the ideas needed time to germinate a bit, and somehow, somewhere, I knew that without really knowing it. Either way, I don’t care anymore. It is what it is, it seems to be over, and it’s nice just to be writing again. I’m back to working on the novel, focusing on the structure first, working out mid-points and climaxes and the intersections of story lines. I’ve set aside my normal “pantster” ways and have become more of a plotter (and all my grad school professors cheer).

Eventually I’ll let myself ask why I’ve made this change to my writing style, but for now I’ll just go with it since it seems to be leading me in new directions. In the end, the only why I really care about is the one that revolves around my shutting down for almost four months. I didn’t like that feeling. Not. At. All.

“If I hit forty,” she said as she shoved the thimble across the board, “and I’m still single, and you’re still single, too, let’s get married.” She laughed after she said it. He laughed after she said it. And they promised to never forget.

And then she left town. And he left town. And other towns came and went, and other friends, and every now and then he tried to find her. He looked, and he wondered, as he looked, if she looked, too.

He’s over forty, now. And still single. And he knows that she’s over forty, but doesn’t know if she’s still single. Sometimes, in his tiny studio, he sits cross-legged on the bare floor, like they used to, playing Monopoly by himself. She goes first, and he moves her thimble to Oriental, and Baltic, and Reading Railroad. He buys her properties, builds her houses and hotels, and pays her two hundred dollars whenever she passes Go. And when it’s his turn, and his shoe lands on something she owns, he pays her with a smile.

She always wins.

As a Holy pally i [ALWAYS capitalize] just love stacking just SP and Crit. i [always capitalize] dont [missing apostrophe] stack much haste dont [missing apostrophe and comma (run-on sentence)] really need it.i dont [missing space; always capitalize!; missing apostrophe] even gem for it Or [missing punctuation or improper capitalization and run-on] mp5 unless its [its != it's; D- mistake!] for the socket bonus if it a [missing verb (really? seriously?)] socket bonus of SP or crit. Y i dont [Y is NOT a word! You know better!; capitalization; apostrophe] gem for Haste? i [ok, now you're doing it on purpose] sit at 14% haste i [press the extra key, dammit!] like it and in [2 independent clauses must be separated by a comma before the conjunction] my spec it give [improper verb form] me 15% more hast everytime i [spelling; every time = 2 words, i = laziness] judg b/c [spelling, informal or shorthand abbreviations should be avoided in final text] of jugements of the pure [spelling; proper nouns should be capitalized]. and y i dont [/facepalm] gem for mp5 is b/c [informal abbreviation] we have Divine Plnea [?] this it [missing verb again]. I [holy cow! You did it!] sit at 27k mana i [doh!] have 2801 SP and 27% crit my flask heals crit for 10 to 12k thats [apostrophe; run-on sentence] almost the as much a my [articles almost never proceed pronouns] holy light Holy like [interesting use of repetition and assonance... Oh, no, wait… that's one run-on sentence followed by a misspelling and another run-on sentence. Nevermind.] hits for13k [missing space] no crit and i [sigh] never run out for mana i [I've run out of things to say about this] dont [and this] need mp5 and y i  dont [please, I beg you, quit killing my language] gem for int like the other pallys are yea int give [improper verb form, but at least you remembered it.] you SP but [run-on sentence] you get more SP out of +23 sp the +20 int and [run-on] the only thing Int gives pallys is just SP and Crit. thats [capitalization; apostrophe] it it dont give [Oh. My. God.] you haste are [?] mp5  but i think its [capitalization; D- mistake] just better to just gem for SP and Crit not much int or hast or mp5 thats how i heal as a pally in pve i love it and it soo much fun most of the time i out heal ppl unless they are doing a lot of overhealing I dont just spem flash heal on the tank i really only heal if needed and when i ahve to bubble i put hand of sacrife on the tank i even do that in pvp for i dont get cc but that Diff. [Capitalization; spelling; repetition; spelling; punctuation; R.O.; capitalization; informal abbreviation;  R.O.; apostrophe; did you mean sperm?; punctuation; capitalization; punctuation; capitalization; R.O.; capitalization; spelling; punctuation; capitalization; capitalization; spelling; R.O.; capitalization; apostrophe; R.O.; capitalization] lol [huh?] But i [u suck (is that easier for you to understand?)] heal diff. then other eveyone Diff. [I don't even know what this means] so just do what you do and if it works dont change it btw i love healing thats all i love really in this game if there was not healing in this game i would not play anymore [R.O. and some other stuff] lol [I hope this stands for Learning Our Language.]
but thats how i heal i hope it helps  [Good thing you heal more effectively that you write, because I think my eyes are bleeding.]

Additional comments: *name redacted*, your content is solid, but you are still struggling with the basics. Run-on sentences and capitalization remain your biggest stumbling blocks, but you’re getting there. Keep practicing, and one of these days it will all fall into place. Overall, a nice improvement!

I’ve created a new category of post, Snapshots, for some of my creative writing. In a nutshell, these are the very beginnings of ideas. Most will be in their earliest of stages, before much polishing or editing has been done to them.

That’s how almost all of my writing starts… a single scene, a title, sometimes a line or two of dialogue. I flesh out these moments, these snapshots, until I get to a place where I don’t know what else to write. And that’s when I start thinking of the story behind the moment, that’s when I start asking questions. How did I get there? What happens next? What does this mean? What is that watermelon doing there (for you Buckaroo fans, I’ll tell you later)?

Most of the posts will be less than 1000 words (for a frame of reference, this one is ~200 words) and likely closer to 500 words. Some will be completely fictional. Some will be non-fiction. Others will have a few elements of non-fiction buried in fiction. None, however will be “finished” or “complete.” Some, like the first entry, “Culture Clash” will even be nearly incomprehensible. They are just the starting points for something else.

I have been using computers since somewhere around 1980 when my Dad brought home a Franklin Ace 1000. Since then, I have switched from Apple to typewriter to ATT back to Apple and finally to PC where I have been for the last 10 years or so.

The problem is, with all that switching, I have, literally, piles of hardcopy in boxes and files and envelopes and binders and anything else I could stuff full of old poems, screenplays, and shorts. Usually, I have about 3 or 4 WIP’s (Works in Progress) at any one time, most at different states of completion, and in between drafts I switch from one to another. One of the things I started doing this summer was limiting myself to 3 original pieces and entering 1 old piece into the computer so I can get it properly archived.

Currently, I am inputting an old screenplay I wrote while I was living out in LA doing the starving actor/writer thing. Beyond the quality of the writing or the story, I am slowly becoming fascinated with how I structured the screenplay, and some of the technique (or lack thereof!) I used… gads… 10 or 11 years ago. One thing in particular I have noted is character names. Just reading the names could tell you who I thought of.

There was Debbie, with whom I was secretly in love, and our friends Kelly and Paul. And Lydia, a friend from college who I missed terribly, along with Chris, Kim and Tom, also friends from college. Reading their names brings back a lot of really good memories of people I thought I would never, ever lose touch with. Of the entire group, only Tom and I remain in contact. Kim, Kelly and Paul have gone on to successful acting careers. Chris moved to Europe and the last I heard he was in Prague. Lydia is probably in New York City. Debbie may have ended up there as well, but last I heard she was heading to Massachusetts.

Why bring this up here? It’s an interesting analysis of more than just fading friendships, I think, and I don’t recall making conscious, specific choices to model their characters after them. Actually, in most cases, the only resemblance is the name itself. But these people were, are, important to me, and their inclusion in the screenplay made it, at the time, a much more personal endeavor for me, just like reading it has become much more personal that it would have otherwise been.

There is more than technique, and form, and grammar to writing. An author needs a personal investment in the story being told. Back then, I personalized the screenplay by using the names of my friends. Were I to re-write it today, many names would change as my vision of them just doesn’t fit the character they represent. That said, the personal relationship with that character is already forged, initially helped along by linking it directly to someone I knew. If I don’t feel that investment, that link with and between the characters, then it is difficult to motivate myself to finish a story. Conversely, a story that has begun to stagnate (or that is being resurrected after a long hiatus) can often be changed quite drastically just by changing a character name.

So if your find yourself stuck, change a name, even if only temporarily. That serial killer got you down with his brooding psychosis? What’s he like as a Billy Joe? Or a Herman? Or even a Dirk? Play with it a little. Perhaps you’ll discover an interesting new personality quirk that really fits him, especially if you keep the quirk and revert to the old name.

Names are your friend.

Oh, speaking of friends… If you happen to think you may be the Lydia, Debbie, Paul, Kim, Kelly or Chris that I mentioned (last names omitted on purpose so the chances are admittedly slim), feel free to drop me line via email or in the comments. It’s been fun thinking about you guys the last couple days and it makes me sad that we all lost touch.