See? Robert Downey Jr just loves Human Nature
I think it’s established I love Margaret Atwood & Negotiating With The Dead. There’s something so powerfully poetic in the way she describes writing. I’ve also found Norman Mailers’ The Spooky Art. The one book I’m missing & would so dearly love to find is Stephen Kings’ On Writing. I find it ridiculous I haven’t found it yet. I own practically every other thing he’s ever done, but not that. What intrigues me though is how these books have a similar concept of writing being ‘otherworldly’, spooky as Mailer puts it, involving a double like Atwood puts it, or that it has some fascination with death.
A friend of mine suggested on Human Nature’s Facebook page – join it if you haven’t already. There’s discussions and the like – that perhaps it was because it took a little out of the writer each time to write. Perhaps putting the words on paper draws from our own life force, or that we literally make it our blood, sweat and tears. The urge to write ‘beer’ instead of tears is overwhelming. This is due to an obsession with TNA Wrestling & the tag team Beer Money. There’s an untapped field of subliminal messaging there I tell you.
I appreciate the insight but I don’t find it drains me to write, or that it takes anything out of me to put something down on paper. A lot of people have said they find it amazing I wrote a book while studying a full time degree. The truth is, it’s my release. When I have to write 2500 words on childbirth, infarctions or why childbirth shouldn’t involve infarctions then it’s not being creative. Its regurgitating someone elses information and synthesising it. I’d come home, become an insomniac and write Human Nature. Maybe it was because there’s no word limit, maybe because no-one was insisting I reference or just because it’s something I have my whole life wound up in, but it was relaxing for me. It still is.
I recently read an interview with Sydney Somers about how she writes & why she does it. Her answer is probably the closest I’ve ever seen to my own. She explains that she ‘sees’ scenes, just like from a movie, they play out and she writes. I write in much the same way. I get flashes of scenes, or entire scenes that play out in front of me. I can press play or pause, zoom in or flip the camera to see someone’s’ face, their reaction etc, but the scene just appears. When I’m sat there actively trying to think, then I know it’s time to stop writing. It just doesn’t flow then. And I hear voices. In a completely sane way naturally. Don’t call the men in white coats just yet. I hear my characters, most notably Santangelo, like a voice spoken next to my ear. I really don’t have any control over it, when it comes or what happens. But listening to Santangelo & Ronnie got Human Nature completed and I couldn’t be happier with it.
Maybe that’s why I don’t think writing has to do with death
or drawing life from the writer like some kind of succubus. It calms me and inspires me to write. I see these things, these scenes in front of my eyes and my jobs’ to record them the best I can. Sometimes it can be frustrating, when you can hear the creaking floorboard but not describe it. When you know the expression on a man’s’ face but can’t replicate it, no matter how many words you use. Maybe it’s because of that, because it’s things that I see, that given to me, that the muse feeds, however you want to pass it by is fine with me, that I don’t feel it drains. It comes from somewhere else and I’m just the scribe.
I hold with Atwoods’ description still. While writing isn’t spooky to me like Mailer suggests, it holds an element of the dark & giving ‘over to the other’. I’ve sat and asked what I’m meant to be looking at and have locked off every other thought to open my mind up to the story. So it does seem like giving over to me. But not spooky. Revitalising.
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