Say, Say, Say What You Want...

I've always been immensely impressed with writers who seemingly have the talent to ramble on intelligently about anything - especially newspaper columnists who have to do it on a regular basis.  I don't know about you, but when I'm forced to think of something on the spot, my brain tends to completely shut down, and the only thing I can focus on is the fact that I can't focus on anything.  So, once you've come up with a good reason to write, and you have the time to sit down and do it, what do you write about?

Well, speaking as a professional (I can say that now!!  I've been paid!!!), it helps a lot when you have clear, concise instructions from your client.  So far, I've written about automotive products and how to get rid of a certain household pest.  Not quite as glamorous as I thought it was going to be, but it's a start, and I can call it "experience".

But what if you don't have someone to give you instructions, and you're writing just because?  When it comes to writing in general, they tell you to write what you know.  Unfortunately, the things I know best at the moment are limited to: the inside of my house, having a teenager and two kiddos under 3, the fine art of one-handed multi-tasking, and how to clean up previously inconceiveable messes.  If I was being logical about it, it would really make more sense to write about what I don't know - there are, for sure, MANY more viable options in that category!  This, however, presents one of the more profound instances of irony I've ever encountered.  How do you create a flowing prose regarding things beyond your ken?  So, my optomistic side chooses to see this as an opportunity to find out about stuff.  I actually have a working list of the stuff I'd like to learn about:

• pool functions and maintenance (see previous post), 
• Scotland (thank you, Diana Gabaldon!), 
• antiques (I believe that anything over a hundred years old is fascinating just by virtue of its age and has at least one interesting story to tell), 
• herbology / ethnobotony  (again, thank you, Diana Gabaldon!), 
• the ins and outs of regular and ebook publishing (books are cool; knowing how they come about can only be a plus), 
• and I've also always been extremely fascinated by the Elusive Duck-Billed Platypus.  (I'm mostly kidding about that last one, but that is always my husband's go-to answer for trivia questions, regardless of the topic, so I thought it sounded good.)

Hopefully, one of these topics, or maybe a combination of them, could turn into the next New York Times #1 best-seller.

I'm thinking that maybe a platypus who lives in Scotland could be a pool-boy by day and a botanist by night and he stumbles across an antique with a shadowy past....

I've previously mentioned my hopeful assumption that a Great American Novel was somewhere inside me just biding its time.  I was thinking that the inspiration would hit me, and it would be a perfect, unique idea -  sheer brilliance - and I would just sit down and write until the story was told.  The idea for Twilight came to Stephanie  Meyer in a dream.  Why can't I ever dream cool stuff like that?

It doesn't quite happen that way.  A couple of years ago, I got tired of waiting for inspiration to hit me over the head and decided to just go looking for it.  So I sat down to write, having absolutely no clue what I was going to write about.  And I discovered that, well, writing is kind of hard work!  But I also discovered that the key to unlocking the fantasy world I had wanted to create was to be proactive and just do it!  The ideas that I had been waiting for so long to just come to me were actually there all along - but I had to purposefully go looking for them!  Amazing how that works, huh?  Little did I know the can of worms I was opening with that, though - I've now got more characters, plot twists, and flashbacks than I can shake a pen at.

So now I've got an Official Work in Progress.  There's no telling when it's going to be done or even how often I'll get to work on it.  So far, the process has been pretty cool - some things, I have to work for and struggle over, but sometimes the characters just take over and write for themselves.  And I've even had some other random ideas spawned from all this extra brain activity.  Whether or not it will all be remotely interesting and / or captivating to the General Public remains to be seen.  I sure hope it is.

And so, to tie it all in (because that's something that good writers do!),  knowing what you want to say and being able to translate that into what amounts to good reading is, essentially, the key to any writer's success, whether it be a novel, a text book, a newspaper article, or a sales ad.  And whatever it is that you want to "say, say, say", just sit down and do it already!  It sure as heck isn't going to write itself!

*Thank you Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson for one of the best duets ever!
Say, Say, Say

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