I recently was advised by a fellow blogger to offer a few writing tips on my blog as a way to painlessly market my writing. Okay, I’m a writing teacher, so I can do that. But in my own writing I have hit a snag. Yes, there are things much, much bigger than my humble skill as a writer.
My current novel project, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius has grown into a science-fiction monster. It is not only about a scientist who has secret government connections, but about time travel and people changing into rabbits… or rabbits into people… or boys into girls… dogs and cats living together… No, that is Ghostbusters.
But it has reached a point where the most important theme is incredibly clear and difficult to deal with. The theme I find myself weaving into this story is; “All men are basically good.” Gongah! Wotta theme to try to write! Do I believe it? Of course I do. Can I put the story together in such a way that I illustrate it to the reader’s satisfaction? Of course I can’t. So what do I do? This story has some of the best villains and evil people in it that I have ever written. I can’t kill them off to solve the story’s plot problems (Well, I can, but I don’t want to). I have to show how evil can be redeemed.
My cast of characters include the scientist himself, calmly dealing with time travelers, invading aliens, government assassins, and a group of young boys known as the Norwall Pirates. There is a time traveler who appeared in a book within a book in my novel Catch a Falling Star. There is also an alien space navigator who has been shot by a local Iowa Deputy Marshall and stranded on Earth. Another character is an artificial man, an automaton who has been crafted as a government assassin made from alien technology. Okay, I know you don’t believe I can make serious science fiction out of such crazy-quilt characters, especially with a primary theme like the one I’ve claimed. So, I have to confess that it is not serious in any way, shape, or form. It is a silly fantasy comedy.
So, how do I generate a theme as big and bold and important as the goodness of all men? Well, here’s a secret recipe;
- Take one genius who has lost all the people he loves and has to start over with new friends and, eventually, new family.
- Add a brother-in-law with mental health issues and financial dependency.
- Add a group of young boys hungry for adventure and new experiences and a little bit short on common sense.
- Add a paranoid evil government that has secrets it will kill to protect (the factual part of the story).
- Mix well.
- Add vinegar.
- Boil at 350 degrees for a year.
Of course, if you thought I was giving you real writing advice, then SURPRISE! It turns out I have been making it all up as I go along. That’s how you do it. You write and write, knit it all together tenuously, and then edit the heck out of it, hoping to make sense of the whole thing.
Catch a Falling Star 
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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