Storytellersunplugged

By Jeff Mariotte

You don’t have to have read many of my posts here at Storytellers Unplugged to know that I don’t believe writers should wait around for inspiration to strike. Regular keyboard time, daily if possible, exercises the writing muscles, and employing those muscles, through hard work, replaces inspiration. The daily “inspirations”—how should the plot proceed from this point? What will the characters say to each other? What am I really writing about?—reveal themselves through this effort.

I practice what I preach. My daily work schedule finds me at the keyboard from about 8:00-5:00, unless something (usually ranch chores) interferes. There’s always something to be written, even when, as right now, I don’t have any immediate novel deadlines looming. I’m committed to a short story, an original graphic novel, a long-deadline tie-in novel (the rarest kind), and I have a couple of original novel proposals in the works.

But that phrase at the top of the page, “Time to Write,” has a different meaning, and it’s more akin to inspiration than I usually accept. Anyone who’s written fiction knows that sitting down at the keyboard and typing is only part of the process. Before you get to that (even if you’re writing other things more or less simultaneously), you churn the story over and over in your head. You see scenes play out like movies in your brain. You hear snatches of dialogue, visualize the characters, learn about their lives. You feel the theme of the work, the deeper meaning, reach out toward you with tendrils of mist that dissipate when you grasp at them.

At some point—at least for me—all these images and smells and sounds coalesce into words, and it doesn’t matter if it isn’t working hours, or if I’ve been at the keyboard all day and want nothing less than to be away from it for a few hours, those words want to come out.

That’s when I know it’s time to begin a book…when I know that the time spent thinking about it in the car or the shower or the back pasture is paying off, and the thing is ready for me to be writing it instead of just dwelling on it.

After a couple of weeks working on an outline, that happened for me on Friday night, around 7:00. I was reading upstairs, and the words flowed into my brain, blocking out the ones on the page, and forced me down to the computer. When I’m really going on a project, I sometimes have to leave the computer on all night because I never know when I’ll be drawn to it, if only to delete a phrase and insert a better one, to add a few words, or to write an entire page or two. I’ve learned that it’s better to give in to these impulses than to try to remember the phrasing that inserted itself into my head the next morning. If it stinks, it can always be changed or erased, but if it slips away before it’s written down, it might not return.

Here’s what I wrote Friday night, edited a little on Saturday. It may or may not end up in the final book—if I even sell the book and write it. But it wanted to come out, and that means I’m ready to begin the process.

The alarm gave off a faint, high-pitched beeping noise, spaced a second or two apart, like something you might hear in a hospital. It was accompanied by a blinking red light, its flashes in counterpoint to the beeps. I had been dreaming of the war—Chancellorsville, to be precise, smoke and flames obliterating the sky and the woods and the enemy except for the dull crack of their rifles and ours and the whining of minie balls bursting through the haze and the wretched screams of those who got hit—and although the digital clock blazed 1:32, for a few moments I didn’t know what year it was, or even what decade. Oscar Peterson played softly in the background, his fingers racing across the keyboard like he had six hands, which could have put it anywhere in the 1950s or early 60s. But the tune came from my TV—I slept with classic jazz on, mature music, music that speaks to adults even if they’ve died and come back and then done it again—and satellite radio on television is a modern invention. Twenty-first century, then. That narrowed it down.

Sometimes giving into this process, this compulsion to put something down, tells me things I didn’t know about the book I was about to write. When I wrote Missing White Girl (on sale now, but look for it under the name Jeffrey J. Mariotte), this first page became the first chapter.

The back of a van or truck, she guesses, but hard, anyway, and ridged. She rolls on the turns, slams into solid steel when the vehicle brakes suddenly. A hump that keeps ramming into her spine might be a wheel well. Head pounding, blindfolded. Duct tape holds an awful rag stuffed in her mouth and straps down her hair, bites her flesh.
No idea how long she’s been riding, or who took her.
Or why.
No idea….

Most of the rest of the book is in past tense, not present. Only the scenes about Lulu Lavender (who has been abducted, but who is not the missing white girl of the title [either of them, in fact]) are in the present tense, which serves, I hope, to heighten the tension and terror of her situation.

That was not a conscious decision, though—it came in one of those early bursts of write-this-down-now that I couldn’t ignore. Then I had to look at it later and make the decision whether or not to keep that tense and tone in the book. If it works, it’s because I was ready to write it.

Speaking of being ready to write, and of being overcommitted, this will be my final post on Storytellers Unplugged. I’ve enjoyed my time here—I’ve been part of it from the beginning—and appreciate the sense of community we’ve developed here. But my own blog has suffered (some might say benefited) from my lack of time to devote to everything I need to do, and I have to cut back in some areas. Anyway, it’s good to give new voices room to sound off, too, and I’m as anxious as anyone to find out who’ll be taking the 21st of the month in my stead.

If you’re interested in continuing to see what I’m up to and joining in conversation about my life and work, drop on by Dispatches From the Flying M. I hope to see you there, and I’ll certainly still be around here, as a reader if not an essayist. Thanks for your attention and participation here.

Jeff