Now, on the one hand, this makes perfect sense to me. I have a difficult time summarizing my books or telling people in casual conversation what they’re about.

But that’s more about coming up with an elevator pitch, and that’s not what I’m getting at here.

No, I’m talking more about the mindset new authors have of deciding ahead of time who is going to like or hate their work.

At first I think one’s audience is a very specific thing. I’ve spoken on here a few times about how impossible I believe it is for the human mind to visualize or grasp large numbers, like a huge crowd. Instead I believe we substitute in a random group of people, and that’s a crowd in our mind. But even the most random people you can come up with aren’t very random. They’re probably people you know and people who have similar backgrounds. Meanwhile, an actual crowd of people will be totally freaking random with some of them thinking things you can’t possibly imagine because they’re so outside of yourself.

But we only have that starter crowd in our heads, and that comes to be identified as our audience, a very specific thing…at least early on. And so the brain, in all its stupidity, defines our audience using this horrible metric we made up. This can cause you to assume with near-absolute surety that Person A would never be a fan or that Person B couldn’t possibly like your book, all because they don’t fit into your definition of your audience.

And so we come to yet another reason for me to give out my absolute bottom-line piece of writing advice: Write more. Finish things. Get them out there.

Why?

Because the reactions people will have will surprise you.

There have been two instances of writing in my history that have utterly baffled me in their reception.

The first was the short story “You’re Allowed to Order Take Out.” The second was Kyo’s section from Probability Angels.

Both of these pieces of writing I finished, published online (I was working under extreme deadlines so I didn’t have a lot of time to sit and ponder them) and then sat back and said, “Well. That didn’t turn out at all how I wanted it. There’s really nothing there. Nobody is going to like this, especially Person X.”

What were the responses?

They were absolute shocks and went against everything I expected.

“You’re Allowed to Order Take Out” was called a “perfect short story” and I’ve been told that I connected emotionally with my readers in that story in ways that I had never done before.

And Kyo’s section from Probability Angels was deemed: “One of the best written bits of historical fiction” that Person X had ever read.

I should add that both of those pieces have become personal favorites of mine.

See, the more words you get out there the more varied an audience you’ll come to see. And the more varied an audience you come to see, the better chance you have of remembering that life, people, and your own writing can surprise you sometimes.

You shouldn’t decide ahead of time who will like and not like your work.

You should let your readers decide that.

You should just shut up and write.

You would think that I would be getting more confident in my ability to portray these concepts in my fiction. However, an odd trend has started popping out at me where, when I get a little bit of a handle on a subject, I actually lose all my confidence in being able to write it. It’s almost like I’m better off going in with zero knowledge and winging it, rather than taking a peek at something and then trying to write it.

I get rattled that my knowledge isn’t complete enough. A little research only serves to show me how much more I need to learn. This is because I forget one very important fact: fiction is complete and utter bullshit.

No one who has ever written a work of fiction has had complete knowledge of their story. That is literally impossible. They may have first-hand knowledge of one or more of the subjects, but that just isn’t the same.

Tom Clancy has been heralded for his research, mainly for The Hunt For Red October, during which he spoke with naval experts the world over. The book used so many terms and had such intimate knowledge of submarine that it seemed real.

But it was complete and utter bullshit.

See, Tom Clancy may have been able to learn all the names of the doodads on a submarine, but he couldn’t possibly have known how the water in the shower smelled or the food in the mess tasted. Only actually being on board could bring that sort of knowledge.

So you’re saying, fine, what if a submariner had written The Hunt For Red October? Well, there was also a lot in there about helicopter piloting and Russian subs and Arctic water and I don’t even know. Plus, there were parts from the point of view of a number of different ranks and crew positions. And you can’t possibly know what every point of view is like. So even if a book was only about the inside of one submarine having zero contact with the outside world, it still would be impossible to know everything.

I realize this is a fairly absurd length to take this point to, but it’s currently what I’m wrestling with. And this mental exercise helps me to remember that writing something smartly often trumps tons of research. If I can see, really see the story through one of my character’s eyes, then that will fill in a lot of gaps. I may need to look up when something was invented now and again, and brush up on who was wearing what, and what buildings were made of, but really, confidence in my scene tends to override any goofs I may make due to lack of knowledge.

Now I’m not saying you do zero research and then try to pass a scene off in a place and time that you know nothing about.

But sometimes I hit a plateau of research and I start to freak out because I don’t know enough and I might be using the wrong word to refer to Romanian nobility in the 1600′s (they were known as voievods or boyars depending on the region).

But then I remember this one simple tip and it helps me to relax again and move on with my work.

Because in the end, I don’t have to actually know what I’m doing. I just have to know enough to convince you that I know what I’m doing.

So, critical mass is the amount of fissile material needed to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Duh.

But what does that mean exactly? Well, oddly, nuclear chain reactions are pretty easy to understand. Not the nuts and bolts mind you, but the general concept.

You have a heavy atom. You shoot a neutron into it. When the neutron hits the heavy atom in a certain way, the heavy atom blows apart into 1) a lighter atom 2) another lighter atom 3) a neutron 4) another neutron 5) yet another neutron.

Again, we’re going with a bare bones explanation here. The type of atom needed is pretty important to the whole process. Also this is a fission chain reaction. A fusion chain reaction is possible as well. And it’s probably worth mentioning, seeing how it is the entire point, that this fragmenting of atoms creates energy…somehow.

But ignore that. You wind up with those five things listed above. Two new, lighter atoms, and three neutrons. The first two aren’t important. The last three are very important.

Note, you started with one neutron flying along which struck an atom. Now, after that happens, you have three neutrons. Why, what would happen if each one of those neutrons struck yet another heavy atom? By god you’d then have the same reaction three times over and would produce nine more neutrons, all of which could then strike their own heavy atoms and on and on and on and you have a runaway reaction capable of producing just crazy amounts of energy.

So where does “Critical Mass” come in?

Well, the critical mass is so critical because if you don’t have enough mass, your chain reaction fizzles out. Imagine this extreme example: you only have one heavy atom. You fire your neutron, your heavy atom splits, produces three more neutrons…and then they have nothing else to collide with because you only had the one original heavy atom. Thus, no chain reaction.

If you don’t have enough mass, enough of your fissile material, it’s possible for your initial event to only split a few more atoms and then the neutrons produced will miss striking other atoms and you’ll get no surge of energy.

Thus, critical mass.

Now, when it comes to marketing, this term is used to describe the audience an author tries to gather in order to achieve a real breakthrough.

The analogy is both good and bad, and pondering how well it works led me to some thoughts on the subject.

For starters, the analogy implies that you need a certain number of readers, a certain amount of mass, before your marketing can be a self-sustaining entity. This part makes perfect sense to me. If you give five copies of your book to readers, and they all love it, well odds are that still isn’t going to produce a giant runaway marketing surge. Those five people might decide to tell other people about your book, thus firing their own neutrons into new heavy atoms, but two of them might not have many friends who like that genre, and one doesn’t usually give out book suggestions so it kind of gets lost in the noise, and the last maybe gets two new people to read it. But then those two fizzle out.

On the other hand, if you get ten thousand people together to read your book at once and then let them loose to tell other people? Well…it’s quite possible to visualize just how different that event would be compared to the previous example of five people.

In other words, the number of readers your marketing efforts produce in one place and at one time is very important.

But this is already straying into the area where the analogy breaks down.

See, one heavy atom is another heavy atom is another heavy atom. They will all be structurally exactly the same. They will all undergo the exact same reaction if their nucleus is struck by a neutron. It will either produce the reaction described above, or nothing will happen.

This is very neat and pat.

People, however, are butt-ass crazy ape beasts that have no rhyme nor reason to them.

I dream of a world in which you can hand five people your book and get the exact same reactions out of all five of them. Even an “on or off” proposition sounds fantastic: nothing happens or the same exact thing happens. Great! Wonderful!

Alas, this isn’t even close to the case. You give five people your book and one might hate it, one might love it and want to tell everyone about it, one might love it and want to keep it a precious secret, one might be overloaded with that particular genre and turn their nose up at it despite absolutely devouring and loving three books right before it of lesser quality but similar flavor, and one might…I don’t know…decide that the cover is dumb and throw it out.

The point is, the reactions your work will instill in people will be all over the place. This is not an either/or prospect like neutrons hitting an atom, it is a spectrum of prospects.  And even if you only look at the positive end of the spectrum, the reactions will still be all over the place. Some people love to talk about books. Some people love to put their favorite books on their bookshelf and never talk about them. Some people can’t remember book titles. It’s beyond nuts.

And then you have to take into account what, if any, influence these people have. Maybe all five of them love your book and want to tell the world, but all five of them are soft-spoken and not really viewed in their social circles as places to go to obtain ideas for books to read.

Well then you’ve successfully turned on five readers, which, don’t get me wrong, is the point of writing, but as far as marketing goes you’ve produced nothing.

It’s confusing.

And annoying.

People should act more like heavy atoms.

But they don’t.

And then you have to start thinking about location and timing. How much does it matter that your readers be near each other be it physically or socially? Does it matter if they read your book at the same time?

Yes. I imagine these things do matter…

…but that’s maybe for another blog post.

I managed to write this new character’s name down, then a sentence or two after that. Then I became completely and totally stuck. I knew nothing about this character. I knew nothing about her average day, or the color of her hair, or whether she likes to laugh or enjoys torturing puppies.

All I knew yesterday was that she existed.

That’s about as tiny an opening into a character’s world as you can get. You are aware of their presence, but that’s it. Usually you get a little more than that. You get flashes of what someone looks like, or you have an ear for their dialogue, or you know how their appearance effects the mood of a story. In those cases when you bring a character in for the first time it’s not too bad.

But every once and awhile you just know that a body with a conscious mind inside of it exists somewhere in the world of your story…and that’s all you get.

This is a terrifying situation to be in.

The amount of laboring that something like this presents is, I think, where the fear comes from. Every sentence has to be thought and rethought. Dialogue has to be held up to constant scrutiny (and generally during a first draft, anything held up to scrutiny gets pooped on). Since this character is appearing in a totally new setting that means that you’re going to have to come up with a bunch of new names and secondary characters, because odds are this character doesn’t sit around by herself until she enters into the main story line.

The entire life of a human has to be crafted out of nothing, and I mean nothing, simply because your brain tells you that it is time to switch to a new character.

Terrifying.

And so I wrote a few sentences and then I stopped, because I had absolutely no freaking idea where to go with this person.

But then I had a thought. A very simple one. I thought, “Meh, I’ll be going back over this plenty and I’ll be thinking about it constantly. In a week I’ll know more about this character’s world than I ever thought possible.”

It’s important to remember that all of the stories that you’ve written right up to this very moment have been exercises in a craft. Because writing isn’t really about typing. Not always. Typing is the edge of the forest. Writing is what you’ve trained your brain to do. Writing is constantly sucking up information, throwing it together, filing away what you think works, and then doing it again and again and again. Writing is knowing how to approach a subject you know nothing about, and in a day be able to act like an expert at it.

Writing is creating a world as an additive process, so that even if you are terrified as you lay it down brick by brick, you will still be able to look back after a period of time and see that a structure has formed. Maybe it will still need a lot more work, but it will be there.

Her hair. What she eats. Who lives with her. What she’s doing when we first meet her.

These simple things are what I worked out over the course of last night while I was watching TV. I wasn’t trying to think about them, but I was writing even though I wasn’t typing, my brain was at work, and some decisions were made. And as I made those choices, they stuck, and they combined, and when I sat down to write her today I had an opening scene.

Never forget that you are always doing two things while you write. You are, obviously, creating whatever your work in progress is.

But you are also honing a craft. You are strengthening a muscle. You are training your brain to do tricks that you’ll be able to pull on for your next work.

You are always growing.

But whatever could that mean?

And, it is also mentioned that Gregor’s work brought down the only official punishment ever meted out by The Council.

But whatever could that mean?

I also have a large story-line taking place in the present day.

And I have Epp as a human, which seems like a large section. Plus I have brief hints of Matthew, Madeline, Mary, and Bartleby as humans, which seem like brief little flashes of sections.

The thing is I have no idea how to fit any of this together. I keep moving forward with Gregor, and I keep coming up with things that make me laugh like an insane person, and those usually translate into really good scenes. But I have no idea why I’m telling Gregor’s story. It doesn’t want to dovetail with the present-day story.

And the present-day story is also shaping up to be really good. But it doesn’t want to be tied to Gregor’s story.

And then I start thinking really weird thoughts. The Gregor section is getting to be as big as the rest of what I have written so far. That’s part of what has me worried, Gregor’s section seems to be taking over and I’m not even sure I understand the point of it. But, and here’s where it gets weird to me, isn’t the point of writing a good story just just to write a good story? Isn’t that why I do this? Can’t I just have a few disparate story lines that are all interesting on their own? If they’re good they’re good, right?

I don’t know, but I feel like for a third book that would sort of be crap. If this story has nothing to do with anything at all, then it isn’t really a part of the series. So I’m obsessed with finding a common thread through all of this. I have some decent ideas for tying Gregor in. But why on earth we’d go back to hear Epp’s story is a bit beyond me. Unless…again…don’t we just tell stories for the sake of telling stories?

Why am I telling any of this story?

I mean, there are tons of episodes of shows or movies in a series that are heavy on the past just because that’s the story they’re telling.

Maybe I just feel inadequate. Like who am I to tell you that these characters are so interesting that you’ll want to know their past? Or, maybe if it’s written well enough, and I find enough of my mojo in these stories, and I cackle like a madman enough times, I’ll be able to say to myself, “Yes. This is worth handing on to my readers simply because it’s worth handing on  to my readers.”

Or maybe there’s more than three books.

Ugh.

Winters in New York are difficult. We are a walking city and when you have avenues that are miles long, the wind can whip down them at horrible speeds. Overcoats and hats and gloves can feel like they’re made of lace when you turn a corner and hit a negative twenty degree windchill.

Going out is curtailed. People’s faces are hidden by scarves. There’s a blind, zombie-esque trudge underlying everyone’s movements. Colds and flues move into your apartment and make themselves at home. I know families that didn’t have a single day this winter when everyone was healthy.

Summer in New York is…a bit of a mixed bag. The summer is fun but smells can abound and, frankly, fuck August. It’s too damn hot.

But Spring? Ah, Spring.

Suddenly the light has a different feeling and we change our clocks so that the sun doesn’t set at four in the afternoon. Suddenly the parks don’t look like cemeteries for trees and restaurants set up their outdoor seating. Suddenly you can see people’s faces as you walk around and the sound of free concerts fills the air.

Suddenly it is Spring.

This time of year has long had a significant impact upon the human race. All of our holidays hinge on the turn of the seasons. And from pagan rituals to organized religions to festivals and celebrations, there has always been a desire to cheer the end of winter and the beginning of warmth.

For me, I choose to celebrate whenever National Sundress Day rolls around. In some regions it is known as National Skirt Day. Were I into the male body it might be National Bicep Day or National Shorts Day. Were I more interested in myself it might be Feel the Warmth on My Skin Day. And were I in the Southern Hemisphere I would just be fucked.

But, as I said, for me it is National Sundress Day.

There are hints of warm weather leading up to this wonderful day, and then, after the mercury has stayed north of 70 degrees for a long enough period of time, everyone breaks out their warm weather clothes. Suddenly the human body exists again in all its wonderful glory. Suddenly skin does not need protection just to be outside.

It is a celebration, it is a time for drink and song.

It is National Sundress Day.

Get out there and celebrate.

This year I finally decided that trekking downtown for haircuts was silly, sort of, and built up the courage to go to a barber where I live now. Which was confusing. I haven’t had the “How do you want it cut?” conversation in ages. Plus, the last time I had it, it was with the aforementioned Korean lady who spoke no English, so I don’t even know if that counts. That was mostly expressed through mime. Add in that most of my haircuts were dictated to me while growing up and I really never know what to answer when someone asks me how to cut my hair.

The guys in front of me in line had a number system down. They’d get “3 on the top and then 2 on the sides” or something. Which means that those are the number extensions to use on the electric razor.

No. Just no.

The only thing I’m sure of is that attempting to treat me like a person with a normal head results in me looking like a fetus.

Plus…I don’t know, most males my age seem to have given up on the notion of hair. Just getting it buzzed is fine. I’m not even sure that would work for me. I have to pay extra at my barber because my hair is too thick and they have to use scissors.

It’s complicated.

Shut up.

So I was sitting there while the scissors went snip and I started thinking about taste and subjectivity.

I mean, you take something as basic as hair cuts and they’re capable of making me feel lost. I mean, have you ever looked around at all the different hair cuts out there?

Good, bad, freaky, in need of, fake, shaved.

By the time you’ve reached the age of 30 you probably have a haircut that you generally stick to. People, unless they completely need a change, just keep on getting that same old haircut, as long as their hair allows them, for years at a time.

So those people you see walking around out there are all wearing something close to the haircut they want, and the solutions they’ve come up with are infinite.

How am I supposed to approach this situation as a book writer? How on earth do you take into account the broad arrangement of tastes that people have in this world?

I just don’t think you can. I really don’t think the human brain actually fits that many different tastes into its data bank. I think you convince yourself that you have an entire world contained in your head, but you don’t. You have your taste, which you know well, and then you have some sense of other people’s taste, and then you have “all that other stuff” which you think people don’t, you know, really like, but it still exists for some reason.

People will listen to someone list their favorite books, and then assume that they don’t really like those books if they conflict too much with their stored sense of the world.

It’s a profoundly difficult concept to grasp, but one person’s “crap” is another person’s “absolute favorite book.” And both of those people are right. The second person isn’t joking that it’s their favorite book, they really mean it. It honestly produced in them a sought after effect of stimulation in some mental or emotional form.

But try to tell someone that a book they hate is actually beloved by someone and the reaction is priceless.

It always makes me amazed to hear discussions about “what’s hot” and “what people really want” and “what will go mainstream.”

Take a good look at most of those predictions and you’ll see that they’re really just drawing obvious conclusions from hindsight.

Taste is nuts.

You can look at this situation and despair at ever managing to fit your work into an audience that is so amorphous.

But I like to take heart from this.

Anything can fly. Anything can be great. Anything can catch on fire.

So, please, just write your heart out.

And stop laughing at my head…

Last Friday night a school I had never heard of, Florida Gulf Coast University, beat a school I once applied to, Georgetown, in the first round of the tournament. FGCU was a number 15 seed, Georgetown was a number 2 seed. This was supposed to be a rout, a massacre, Georgetown was supposed to walk through the game, win, and  move on.

But FGCU won, and it was awesome. While watching the game on Friday night I found myself caught up in the story being played out. The underdog against the sure thing. The unknown versus the dominant. The tiny versus the giant. It’s a common story theme, and Friday night’s game played out as the best of stories (unless you’re a Georgetown fan) with this out-of-nowhere school shocking everyone and beating a  team that was a landslide favorite.

I always marvel, when something like that happens in real life, how difficult it is to pull that off in fiction, how hard it is to create a character, or group of characters, that really seem unable to win and then have them go on to victory.

It’s made doubly hard in fiction because the reader knows, in the back of their head, that the people you’ve been following for the whole book are probably going to win. Whatever the struggle, whatever the tale, unless you’re reading some dystopian nightmare story, odds are that the downtrodden good guys will triumph. Maybe they won’t win fully, and maybe not with every single piece of their story coming together, but somehow they will win; certainly they will overcome the obstacles in their way.

The reader already knows what’s going to happen. Watching FGCU play Georgetown, I knew in the back of my head that the outcome probably wouldn’t be interesting. That Georgetown would probably come back. And that made the surprise so much larger and the story so much better. Real life isn’t scripted, so I wasn’t primed to expect anything.

But how do you accomplish this in fiction?

How do you create real worry about the outcome?

As far as I can tell there are two main point to focus on: a well structured story to fit the conflict into, and mastery of craft during the actual conflict.

A good story can cause the reader to let go of the notion that what they’re reading is a construct. They can sink in and forget that someone else is in charge and treat the story as an account of actual events. Even if you’re writing about a space war 10,000 years from now or a love story 2,000 years ago, if the characters are engaging and the story is tightly told, then the reader will submit and the veil will be lowered and you can sneak surprises in that much easier.

And good technique? Forget about it. Good technique can make anything happen. I’ve read plenty of books which have contained one or two masterful scenes that have had me on board with what was going on entirely. Even if everything else is lousy, when a good scene comes along it reaches out and grabs a hold of you.

Knowing how to pace your beats? Knowing how to describe a room so that the reader can see, feel, hear, and smell it? Knowing how to get the reader’s adrenaline flowing with a villain being an asshole or a hero stumbling in a pain? Knowing how not to linger too long so that we start to disengage from the scene? You can craft real emotion with words if you take the time to write your scene correctly.

So how is real drama created?

It’s easy, just have an overall engaging tale written with flawless craftsmanship from scene to scene.

Oh.

Well no wonder it’s so freaking hard!

Anyway, in New York it is an absolutely massive drinking day for those who partake. I actually was out at nine in the morning for a breakfast and beer buffet. Which was…interesting. I like going to bars and I like drinking, but it has occurred to me that maybe I like going to bars and the drinking is a secondary action that I also enjoy which follows from the first.

When I’m out, the drinking itself isn’t usually the absolute focus of all my mental prowess. On Saint Patrick’s Day, though, the streets are overrun with people for whom drinking is the primary goal. It’s like amateur hour all day long. I guess there are places that are more reigned in, though on Saint Patrick’s Day I’m not sure what that even means, but the places I wound up at were full of twenty year olds. Hell, there were definitely some seventeen-year-olds mixed in. So basically from nine o’clock on I was surrounded by kids who wanted to cram as much booze as possible into their pie holes as quickly as possible.

Usually when I go out, by the end of the night there are a few people at the bar who are obnoxious as shit; sometimes I’m one of them. You nod and you ignore it because it’s a small number of people in a large crowd and it goes with the territory and, again, sometimes the guy being ignored is you.

This weekend every bar was full of people like that by noon.

And, as always, some part of me was trying to figure out how I would go about capturing what I was seeing with words.

Basically I came up with nothing. Zero. No clue how to write anything I had seen.

By the next day I was forced to ponder the question: How often do scenes from reality exist that are simply unwritable?

I mean at one point someone threw up on the bar. Right on the bar. They disappeared, the vomit was cleaned up, and then the offender reappeared to get his credit card back like nobody would notice him.

At one bar the bathroom was filled with a bunch of teenage guys smoking cigarettes. They didn’t want to step outside to smoke because it was cold so they sat there smoking in the bathroom. They were too cool for the rules. They were shit-faced. They felt like they owned the bar, and the bathroom, and constantly tried to throw their weight around in ways that only teenagers can. For them it was a huge deal to be in a bar. They didn’t belong there, so every fucking thing they did was reeking of extraneous bad-assery.

I just wanted to use the bathroom.

At one point, one of the guys leaving the bathroom looked me up and down and then called me “four eyes.”

I actually got called “four eyes.”

I still don’t know what to make of that.

That’s the stupidest insult ever. I’m fucking floored that kids even still know it, and of course to toss that at someone at a bar is like…I mean Jesus I thought I was going to get challenged to a dance-off next or something. Apparently I had teleported to the set of Grease.

How do you write that? I couldn’t possibly work that into a work of fiction. The underage drinking? Okay. The attitude of all the underage drinkers? Sure. Some dude calling a guy wearing glasses “four eyes?”

There’s no way to pull that off unless the glasses wearer has three friends around, and they all take the rest of the scene to wonder what the hell was up with the guy who used the insult from the 1940′s. There is no way to use this very real scene without it becoming a major focal point of the characters nearby. It’s just too impossible an event.

But this was my Saturday! It happened! I was there. It should be writable!

And yet…no.

Reality isn’t stranger than fiction, it’s just really bad at writing it.

How, exactly, it helps one’s inner peace is a little up in the air. I only skimmed the search results, but I’m not sure I found anything I’d deem too scientific. There’s also a lot of different definitions for what journaling even is. Is it a photograph of your day in words? Is it a page of rambling? Is it a structured rendering of your conscious thoughts on paper?

I guess these are all true, but when I talk about journaling, I’m talking about the middle example. The page of rambling.

When I decide to journal I open a blank page in a notebook, put my pen to paper, and I write non-stop until the page is full. My handwriting is atrocious and what I create is basically illegible, but that’s okay. I never intend to reread it anyway.

No, the key concept is forcing myself through an entire, college-lined sheet of paper.

It’s weird. The times that I perform best at writing are the times when I’m not thinking about it at all. Most of my best ideas, if not all, have come about when I’m nowhere near my keyboard. My best ideas often come when I’m cooking, or walking, or in the shower. I’ll be doing something else and then *KAPLOOOF* I’ll suddenly know exactly how to work out a tricky plot point.

The problem is, how do you seek these moments actively? How do you get those ideas lurking in the back of your head to come out? If you try to focus on them they hide even deeper. And it isn’t very practical to stand in the shower for hours on end, hoping for a breakthrough.

Well it may not be a perfect answer, but sitting down and forcing out a page of freehand writing seems to capture those thoughts, or at least clumsy replicas of them.

I’ll start by writing about the problems I can’t resolve in my current project, and then my plans for the weekend get mashed in and a bill I need to pay get written about, after all I can’t stop my pen. And then back to the problem and then I debate how I write the letter Q and then back to the problem and then I’m writing a possible solution to the problem only it’s pretty stupid but what if I took that first part of the solution and tied it in to that scene I didn’t really like from earlier…and so on and so on. For an entire page.

My hand hurts like hell when I’m done but my brain feels clearer. Sometimes I come up with very real answers to the questions I’m forcing myself to think about, but that’s rare. What does always happen, though, is that I come away with some directions I can head off in when I next sit down to write.

It’s a strange mix of absurd pressure and complete freedom. The pen has to keep moving, but I’m never going to read what I’m writing so my thoughts feel that it’s safe to come tumbling out.

Now I’ve had bouts of journaling where I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing. But that’s because, like most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Some effort has to be made to address your current problems, but after that it’s just a free for all.

Too often I hear authors worrying about proper outlining ,or structuring, or knowing exactly where everything is going to go before writing. But what if you’re trying to outline something and you don’t have all the pieces?

Maybe take the opposite approach and let your pen go completely nuts for one whole page. You’d be surprised how many somethings you can produce out of nothing.