Daniel’s Thoughts on Writing
I am too young to be giving out
writing advice, so I’ll just tell you a little bit about how I write in case
you’re a student writer who’s interested in writing.
I can’t write every day. I write a lot, but I don’t write fiction
every day. I write when I get the urge
to, and luckily I get the urge pretty often.
I find myself writing and reading the most when I have other things that
I should be doing. When I have a test
to study for, I write a short story.
And when I have a paper due, I read a book.
My writing is always crappy at
first. If I never revise it, it stays
crappy. But if I do revise it ten or
fifteen times, it usually gets pretty good--or at least good enough so I can
stand to read it.
For My Dog, The Meat Eater, I
planned more than I usually do.
However, I wasn’t really sure what I was planning for. I began writing two page exercises every day
in preparation for something that would be longer, better, different, and more
important than anything else I’d ever written.
I wrote stories about animals, stories told by animals, stories told
from the point of view of objects in the room, and other sorts of stories that
I felt were good practice for something.
After all this, I began to formulate
ideas for the main story. It would be
about a fictionalized version of the farm that I work at. I thought the old Puerto Rican man would make
an excellent subject for a story, so I began writing it. It was called Tommy Soda at
first. But as it developed, the story
became more about the younger boys who worked on the farm than the old Puerto
Rican man. The title changed to,
Bear In The Fields. This story
worked for a long time. I was happy
with it and happy working on it. But
then the ending came and I had nowhere to go.
So I left the story for a while.
It still filled my thoughts and I still made notes about it, but I
didn’t actively write for one or two hours a day as a I had in the
beginning.
After a while of letting the story
be, I read it again. This was the first
time I realized what the story was actually trying to be about. It was about the farm more so than the
characters. Once I realized this, the
book started to get good, and I started to realize what I had. I had a totally different story than
anything I’d ever read. It wasn’t about
characters and their daily lives, it was about the life of the farm
itself--secondarily it was about the people on the farm. I started writing for probably a total of
four or five hours a day. I was finally
writing with the knowledge that the book was about the grand cycles that we’re
all a part of, rather than the people, plants and animals that get swept up in
these processes. This type of book
immediately appealed to me as a biology major who loves thinking about living
things.
After months of this sort of work,
the book was done and I moved on to my goals of publication. The book almost wrote itself. Whole sections seemed to be written while I
was asleep and dreaming. My brain was
working at a different level than it ever has before or since the writing of
the book. It was a great feeling and
I’m sure it will happen again. I’ve
started working on my next lengthy piece of writing and already my brain has begun
whirring. But it’s not nearly at the
level it was during My Dog, The Meat Eater, and I’m not trying to rush
it.
As more and more time passes, the
book becomes more and more foreign to me.
At first, I had the whole thing memorized. But when I read it now, I can’t even remember writing some of the
sentences. I see things in it that I
don’t remember planning.
If you’re dying from advice from a
kid who was born in 1982, I’d have to say that you should take a break every
once in a while and let the writing show you what it’s trying to be about. Read what you’ve written and look for
meanings and trends that you never intended on putting there. Your brain is thinking about your writing on
a deeper level than you ever could. Let
it write for you, let it come up with your ideas. Your only job is to recognize what it’s trying to tell you and to
recognize when it comes up with something really wonderful. Not every idea that pops into your head from
somewhere unknown is worthwhile or applicable to the particular story you’re
working on.
Take my advice if you like it, or
just disregard it and go with what works for you. Trust yourself. All of
this advice is just what worked for me and I’m not sure if it’s universally
applicable.
Feel free to E-mail me and talk
about any of this. I also like reading
other people’s stuff and commenting on it if you feel like sending me some of
your writing.
<back>
Copyright © 2004
All rights reserved