Writing and the Writer

A friend of mine, Jai Clare , wrote about being a writer and whether one is still a writer when the creative juices are dry and one doesn’t feel “that pressing need.”

I’m not a disciplined person. If I didn’t enjoy writing, I wouldn’t do it – or at least I wouldn’t do it with any dedication, a couple hours a day.

I think there’s a writer’s personality type, which isn’t all that common. You tend to be an introvert who, paradoxically or not, likes people. Well, I like people anyhow. A writer can be more misanthropic than I am, but he has to at least be interested in people. On the other hand, you have to enjoy time on your own without people, and feel energized by it and not lonely.

You have to have some encouragement. I hear stories about writers who come out of families who didn’t read or who didn’t appreciate their talents, but at some point, someone had to say that something they wrote had merit. Rejection is part of the job, but you have to believe that what you’re doing is worthwhile to someone other than yourself, and have some basis for believing that.

The novel I’m working on now is technically my second. My first one I wrote in seventh grade. It was a murder mystery titled “A Little Madness In The Spring,” about competitive serial killers, father and son, killing off people at a college reunion in order of the squares on a Monopoly board. The detective was named Alabaster Cox.

Since then, I’ve been working as a writer and designer in the video game industry, and with my brother, I’ve written some screenplays which have been sold or optioned if not actually been made into movies or TV shows yet. Video games, TV, and film are obviously the most financially rewarding media, but there are certain stories which seem best suited to ink on paper. There is also a part of novel-writing which appeals to the autocrat in me. Obviously, when I finish my first draft, I’ll have friends and family read it and take their opinions into consideration, and down the line, there will be agents and editors, but ultimately I am the author. If it’s bad or good, it’s because of me, with no excuses, like a screenwriter might have when an actress butchers his lines, or a video game writer whose cutscenes get cut because the animators don’t have time on their schedule to do them. If it doesn’t sell well, of course, then I might have excuses. We’ll see.

I don’t expect to get rich writing novels, though that’s an agreeable possibility.

Right now, I’m 70,000 words into the first draft of my novel, and I’ve been told that it has to be 80,000 words for anyone to look at it … though there are obvious exception, like Nicholas Sparks’s “The Notebook,” which was 50,000 words. Still I have two and a half chapter to go, so I’m not concerned about length.

Insert obvious male joke here.