A Madman's Way To Write

I imagine writers clacking it out like James Caan in MISERY, their fingers rattling out succinct palabras stringing sentences first heard in the brain. And when they proofread, selah. Narry a discrepancy. The story moves like a river's linear stream flowing into the Pulitzer Sea. The satisfied writers kiss their nimble fingers, drink some red wine, and the editors line up. But it's not like my imagination. It takes practice. Honing, and craft. For all of us. 

My first drafts are skeletons with no meat. Bones lined up on the page with only the rudimentary tissues intact, just enough to give it form. I can tell this is human. I can tell this wants to be a book. But I have to stitch muscle to bones with taut tendon and ligament pulley. Snippets of action act as muscle, a miseducational narrative holds up the frame, but the flow is choppy, a broken mosaic. Takes a lot of sit down and think, adding meat, adding skin. The flesh. And once that is all finished, I realize the body has no organs.

Toss in the Tinker Toys: Subtext, foreshadowing, perhaps a spot of red herring. Tighten the nuts and bolts of plot continuity by reading the whole thing in a day every day for a week. Sheilding melatonin is then added to the skin, descriptive words and running pithy prose, a protective coat against the clip eye of the critic, a nuclear sun radiating kill shafts in degrees Kelvin. Soon, I will make it walk.

I stretch my spine and stare at the jumble, analytical eyes float and land where they will, catching nothing. Stop, and read out loud. Am I sucked in?  Is this tale so engrossing I forget what I'm doing? I'm rushing to the next part like I would if this was someone else's art, and I were impressed. Like pawing over my own fetish doll in ritual praise. Invoke, innervate, Energize.

Blood clots, those tiny misspelled words, finger didn't depress the 'n' key here, that says,  "hm", not "him". Tap, and the vein clears. I see a hundred maddening instances like these. I rummage through words like, "athfer", and, "porbalby". These, the iron joints doing the rice krispie jingle before sunup. But this fucker walks, and will live. It's amazing for I simply puked this guy up and am fingerpainting him into a sexy zombie junky nightmare of a book.

I'm doing this one straight, and writing another straight, but while I do this, I'm digging up the fresh limbs of a book that will not be straight. If my classical style novels are resurrected ghouls, this third idea will wind up more like Lucifer's creative night sweat. Not even his dream, just the gunk waterfall from his pores poured in a bottle and frozen into a mosaic which is then broken into tiny prisms. I get to make all the colors match.

Ah! I can and will. Everyone should say that ten times a day. Maybe this is pretentious, and maybe if one wants to do something like this as more than just a hobby, a tinge of pomp is healthy. We may first believe we are it, work it, then be it.