Writing with the blinds closed and the door shut.

Where characters are born and die.

Writing is a lonely art, and every writer has their favorite sanctuary, and ritual, for productive writing. Some prefer being holed up in a hotel room, preferably during a snowstorm. Others need neutral views: office buildings, a slit of sky, a glade, the sea. J.K. Rowling prefers a private table in a café. I prefer writing in the wee hours, in bed, or at a desk, when it is quiet. I love libraries with private quiet rooms where no talking is allowed. I used to write a lot in the main library in downtown Eugene, Oregon. You simply had to sign up for one of their two private rooms. Each had everything I needed: a long wide table to spread out reference material, plenty of outlets, no telephones, a view of a row of books, and silence. I found that the library itself inspired me. I noted the conditions of the chairs, the patrons, the  weary and alert faces of the library staff. I noted the library was the haven of the homeless during inclement weather. I recorded my observation in my amusing and poignant novel, "The Frogs are the First to Go." In the novel, my protagonist, Fran Stefel, is on a journey of self-discovery, much as I was in the declining years of my marriage. She was undergoing metamorphosis akin to a certain frog species that once was commonplace in the Willamette Valley of Oregon (the Oregon Spotted Frog). Fran is led, by a voice in her head, to save the frog in her backyard pond, that herpetologists believed had gone extinct decades earlier. She believes the voice is due to a chip in her head, placed there at an early age by an advanced race of amphibians, the Vargoolians, who regularly abduct her to enlighten, probe, and instruct her. I have felt this way about my life many times, and I could not resist putting myself into the characters, and also from people I have met. I like tangents in writing. They call this style of writing "literary writing." I do not know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is simply the way I am and there is only a slight chance I will ever change, Probably slim to none, and never as much as the characters I create.  I wrote in my novel:

Listen; the Eugene Public Library in downtown is a sanctuary for the homeless.  Outside, standing on the front sidewalk, a hysterical teenage girl with meth sores on her face was screaming to no one in particular: “I just miscarried!”  Inside, on its three floors, homeless men and women sit in soft orange chairs.  Except for obvious things, like rolled sleeping bags, it isn’t easy to tell who is homeless.  Many of the homeless once had homes and careers.  Some had jobs as engineers and journalists.  The terrible economy, addictions, and bad choices brought them down.  Most are middle-aged; some are teenagers.  They are the lucky ones who can still walk and talk, but the things they say are frequently full of anger and frustration.  A few appear to be wearing clothing mostly composed of dirt.  When they fall asleep in the orange chairs they often snore and people from the library staff come and knock on the arms of those chairs and say things like, “You can’t sleep in here.  This is a library, people come here to read.”  The homeless know this of course, but they depend on human charity.  But charity in Eugene and most cities is in short supply, so the homeless have learned to hold paperbacks in their hands while they sleep to avoid being hassled.  This ruse works well because the library staff knows there are many books in the library that can put people to sleep.  The library’s janitorial staff copes with the problem by disinfecting the chairs each day.  But the smell never goes away entirely.  Nothing can be done about that because the smell is one of the most powerful pheromones on Earth.  It’s a unique scent, the odor of primal man, and smells like apple cider vinegar, mushrooms, fermented cotton, and damp earth.  It’s an organic scent: Mother Earth’s perfume.  Homeless men and women find each other in the night, like moths, with its help.  To the homeless the scent whispers: I am like you; I am lost, forgotten, and unloved.  It says, I won’t judge you.

I like to write in the hours before dawn because I am a morning person. Others are night owls. Sometimes, if I am really cooking, I write until noon and then I take a nap. I wrote most of one novel in a tiny bedroom that had no phone. The room isn't important; for most novels the room goes away once I get into the narrative. On one I was no longer in the room; I was on an undiscovered island in the Caribbean, on Santa Isabella Island, seeing the aqua blue and azure waters of its reef, the Spanish style buildings, the peculiar characters.  This phenomenon is not unusual. Teleportation is required to be a good writer. The fictional characters become as real as actual human beings. They do not age or die unless I say they do. They are immortal until I kill them. In a sequel, usually. Or the next chapter, or when I rewrite the book because it would be a better story if the character dies. Or kills someone. But I am not a big fan of murder. I did write a film noir where a duplicitous woman named Nora kills several people and tries to pin the murders on her ex-husband, Alden, who is a career postal worker with a penchant for making small films in his spare time.  She was the perfect femme fatale, and he was the perfect foil.  These people are out there, and I have met some of them. Writers, good writers, must get out into the real world. I have been a carpenter, commercial fisherman, ditch digger, newspaper reporter, artist, a sports nut, a culinary aficionado, a songwriter, a pole-vaulter, runner, an extra on a TV show, a husband, a mail processor, an advertising copywriter, an art director, a father, a liar, a good deed doer, a devout Christian, a lover, a film buff, a tango dancer, a rock hound, a cross-country driver, and a soldier. I have lived in Texas, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, California, and London. And these experiences inevitably influence my stories. Where you live is where the story might gestate. Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird" had this sense of place. Her childhood friend and collaborator, Truman Capote, had a talent for making multidimensional characters, and the knack for good journalism, as evidenced in the novel, "In Cold Blood." In the title of his anthology, "Music for Chameleons," (1980), he sums up what writers are: chameleons. We blend in to get information. We are the flies on the wall.

My world record for the number of pages written in one day, stands at around twenty-one, and was set in July of 2011. I did what a writer should never do: I sent a query to a publisher with three chapters of an uncompleted novel. I didn't mention the novel was only three-quarters of the way done; it is a faux pas to submit without the manuscript being completed. Mea culpa. I just never figured the publisher would go for it. A year and a half had gone by and one day I received an email that read: "I love your novel! It has been occupying corners of several editor's offices for a year and a half. Can you please send the entire manuscript?" So I wrote back that I certainly could, but I had some things to do over the weekend and I'd get it to her on Monday morning. And then I went to work. The story and the characters were already in my head, and I had done a rough outline, but once I got into it I tossed out the outline and went with my gut about what would be a better story. And voila! I sent it on Monday, (80 pages longer than it had been the previous Friday).  Don't do that. EVER.

I do not know how writers who write novels with manuscripts over a thousand pages did it in the days before desktop computers. Like Michener, for example, or most of the Russian writers of note. Or Dickens, or Steinbeck. Most of the great ones. They did it the hard way: they earned it. But the constant thread, regardless of the advances of technology, is that all writers must venture out into the real world and mingle, and eavesdrop on real people's conversation to write authentically. Most people with even the smallest amount of writing talent can become writers if their lives are complicated and colorful. It has worked for Ernest Hemingway,  Sylvia Plath, Phillip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laura Ingells Wilder, Sherman Alexie, and Hunter S. Thompson, and probably every writer in the history of the human race. The maxim I have heard often is "Write what you know." A boring life is not good compost for a bountiful harvest of stories. The caveat is that if a writer uses a thinly veiled retelling of their own life's experiences, they must be careful to avoid libelous narrative. Which makes the aforementioned authors especially good fibbers. The better a writer obfuscates  the less chance they'll be sued for libel. This autobiographical method is referred to as roman à clef. What do we know more than ourselves? We simply change a few names and the point of view and stretch the facts here and there and voila! it can be done. I once met a pretty thirty-something year old woman at a writers group, who was attempting to write a romance novel about a failed TV weather woman living in Salem, Oregon. She described the novel's details with enthusiasm. When she finished speaking I asked if any of the events had happened to her, and she replied, "All of it!" 


Birds have no teeth, and thus in order to digest their food they swallow pebbles. In the gizzards of birds, pebbles do the chewing. Eventually, the pebbles are polished and lose their effectiveness. Then they are regurgitated, or they pass out the other end of the birds. In this way, birds are like writers, and story ideas are like pebbles. Writers, whether they are writing fiction or nonfiction, are adept at swallowing these idea pebbles from their experiences in life. Writing is a grinding process that requires rough ideas. I have several folders dedicated to rough ideas. Most of the ideas  will never amount to anything. They are like mental calisthenics. Eventually they may end up in the trash. Sometimes they come back, like characters. I give them new names, new wardrobes, and new careers. A lovely take on this God-like control writers have was depicted in the film, "Stranger Than Fiction," (2006).  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7OIm2wz8iQ . This comedy-drama-fantasy film, directed by Marc Forster, and written by Zach Helm, stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. It is essentially a romantic comedy with a twist. A famous chain-smoking author, Karen Eiffel, (Emma Thompson), is having a hard time finishing her latest novel. The publisher sends a representative named Penny, (Queen Latifah), to help her finish the novel. She is unsure if she should kill her protagonist, an IRS agent (and auditor) named Harold Crick. When she writes, “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death," Crick, fearing he has schizophrenia, sees a psychiatrist, Jules Hilbert (Hoffmann), who realizes after a time that Crick's life is being narrated by Eiffel, one of his favorite authors. Crick's life does a one-eighty when he falls for Ana Pascal,(Glyllenhaal), the tax delinquent owner of a bakery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MsmVJyHg0s&feature=related .  Similar to the novel by Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions," where Vonnegut, on his fiftieth birthday, decided to clear the junk in his head but assembling his other characters in one novel. Like "Stranger Than Fictiion," Vonnegut introduces himself to one of his characters, Kilgore Trout, a hack sci-fi writer.  In "Stranger Than Fiction," Eiffel realizes Crick is a real person and she cannot kill him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdriF9RlwZU

I imagine this idea struck a chord with many writers, who have felt this wondrous power, this power to create people out of thin air, like God. I have, and I wouldn't want God's job to save my life. Good writing is like cooking. You must choose the best ingredient, in this case, the best word or phrase that is character with the tone of the work. I always have to ask myself, "Would this character say this or that, and how would they say it? What is their point of view?" The characters of a story live and breath just as we do, whether they are living on a distant world and breath with gills, or they live in the Midwest and are used car salesmen. But ultimately, they are people we have briefly met, known well, or heard of. They are ideally people we have spoken to, and ultimately, they are us.