As those who’ve read my various books will have noticed, each is a totally separate animal from the other. I’d hate to be a writer who churned out more or less the same kind of work over and over. That road would lead to tedium. To me, writing is like eying a big lump of stone, armed with a hammer and chisel. I get tapping and cutting, and while doing this, I contemplate what shape the beast is within the stone that I want to see emerge. I have no idea what it will be while I’m working on it – but I know that eventually something strange and interesting will be revealed in all its glory (hopefully).
I’ve noticed there are motifs in my work. The Moon seems to feature, night skies, stars. Characters pause to inhale and notice their surroundings. Tunnels also occasionally feature – why? No idea. I do know its not to ‘fill space’ with redundancies.
Speaking of which, I was reading an extract from someone’s work on the the ‘Meet the Author’ forum on Amazon, and was amazed with how much ‘time’ was taken up in describing a character running, falling, catching themselves, biting their lip in anguish, then rising and running some more. I think its a fair call to say that the writer in question wasn’t trying for a Proust-like effect. The narrative, what little there was, had disappeared behind a shoddy flurry of description. The writer was asking for comments, and I thought about dissecting the extract and showing them why it didn’t work, but then thought better of it. Life is too short, I’m no teacher, and I get no thrills at seeing substandard work, or for that matter, pointing it out. Others might differ. I’m too selfish and very self-absorbed in getting my own prose as tight as possible.
Its all quite contradictory. I regard blogging as little more than scribbling on a wall in a cyber-back alley somewhere. My prose, my ‘real’ work is not represented by anything I write here. I spend little thought crafting these sentences. I’m well aware that many see blogging as a great PR exercise for their work. I’m less convinced of this. Besides, given how I create my work, I’m the last person who should be trying to sell it under the guise of a regular blog. My blog will reveal that I’m more concerned with the state of my orgasm than I am with the so-called democratic process underway in the political sphere. My work, my ‘actual’ writing, on the other hand, takes itself deadly seriously.
But ‘me’ – the ‘me’ that is simply having a smoke and a break from the formal writing and scribbling these words here for a purpose I have yet to properly determine, comes from a much more lighthearted place. I work with hindsight. I create stuff – and then make up great intellectual justifications about what I’m doing and why I do it. In essence, I lie, almost all the time when discussing my work. Its nothing I can help. I can point to words like ‘intuitive’ to try convey the truth of my process – but then the Prankster in me goes ‘why on earth would anyone be bothering to read my meanderings on a blog?’ I’ve written some fairly good books. Those are what count, not this nonsense.
Perhaps I see ‘blogging’ as more of a Diary concept than as a marketing tool. I’d much rather discuss the mundane elements of my day, idle thoughts – and restrain myself from getting too graphic. (As Constant Readers will have noticed, I don’t filter my words. When things irk me, I tend to talk about them.)
So that’s my Diary entry for now. Currently, I have characters waiting for me out in the Nevada desert. Naturally its night time, a big full moon in the sky…
Time to tell some story.
