The (String) Art of Writing
By Cecilia Tan. Filed in Writers On Writing |Tags: melanie fletcher, writing life
by Melanie Fletcher
My sister gave me a rare and valued compliment the other day. She works with disabled children, and about six months ago she decided to write a book about her experiences. When I called her for our regular chat/rant/venting session, she said, “You know, you’ve been writing all these years, and I never really understood what you were doing until I started working on my book. Man, writing is hard.”
Truer words were never spoken.
There are many schools of thought about the craft of writing; you write because you love it, you write because you have to, you write so that you don’t have to strangle random assholes in your life. None of them, however, say that writing is easy. Don’t be fooled by the fact that writers are sitting down while they work; the body may be in an office chair, but the mind is wrestling with plot, prose, character and theme, not to mention the death of the midlist, an electricity bill that has DISCONNECTION NOTICE written on it in red, a spouse and/or children who are feeling neglected and want to know why Mom/Dad is wasting so much time on that stupid book, and the sneaking suspicion that all of your success to date has been a fluke and eventually someone is going to stand up, point an accusing finger at you and cry, “HACK!”
There’s a reason why writers drink, you know.
And yet we keep doing it — nailing our ass to the chair when the story just doesn’t want to come and sweating blood to get the words on the page anyway. Developing that thick skin that lets us shrug off Xeroxed rejection letters and comments such as, “Oh, you write SF/fantasy/horror/erotica/etc. — so you’re not a real writer, then.” Letting the housework slide and the spouse go to bed alone — again — because we need to get that last scene right, dammit. Hell, I just spent three days finishing a story that fought me every step of the way, when I could’ve been watching Project Runway or drinking mojitos at the Cheesecake Factory. Don’t talk to me about sacrifice.
So why do we do it? Are we masochists, craving another six of the best from a spring steel-armed headmaster? Cock-eyed optimists who have rose-tinted contacts permanently welded to our corneas? Or are we just completely and utterly deranged?
Maybe it’s a little of all three. We have these worlds in our heads, you see, and we want — no, need — to tell other people about them. If you tell people about these worlds one way, you get a close-fitted white canvas jacket and a lovely padded room with all the Thorazine you can eat. If you tell about these worlds another way, however, people will actually pay you for the privilege of hearing about them. Sometimes they pay quite well, as a poor single mother learned to her (and her banker’s) delight when she started writing stories about a boy who went to a school for wizards. I sometimes wish she would adopt me, but that’s another story.
And then there’s the pleasure, the bone-deep satisfaction, of creating something completely new out of the bits and pieces floating around in your head. I once described the act of writing as a piece of string art (and if you’re under the age of 40 and don’t remember string art, go ahead and Google it. When you stop laughing, come on back). You start off by fiddling around with the short gold-colored pins, trying to get them anchored securely in the black velvet-covered board in a predetermined outline. Then you wind the colored string around the pins in a specific pattern, making sure you keep the string nice and taut and all the pins upright. If you let the strings go slack, or the pins bend, or the damn things fall out entirely and get lost in the rug, you wind up with a tangled mess (and usually with a pin in the foot after you inadvertently step on the frigging thing. But I digress).
If you do it correctly, however, you have a lovely three-dimensional image of a sailboat that you can hang up in your rec room. Yes, I know that’s kind of a lame analogy, but it’s what writing feels like to me; and my God but it’s hella good when all the plot points wrap perfectly around securely anchored characters, and the setting is just right, and everything’s snug and tight and the whole thing just sings. I think my sister will eventually get to that point, after a certain number of messes. I still lose pins, myself, but I’m getting better with practice.
Speaking of which, I sold the story that was fighting me. Once I get paid, the mojitos are on me.
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Melanie Fletcher is an expatriate Chicagoan who currently lives in North Dallas. At night, she turns into SF Writer Girl, and has the SFWA membership card to prove it. Her fiction can be found in anthologies from Circlet Press, Yard Dog Press and DAW Books, as well as online zines such as Quantum Muse and Helix SF.