By uncomfortable I’m not suggesting that you write on your snow-packed balcony in Bermuda shorts, although a change of scenery can work wonders. I’m talking about getting out of your comfort zone as a writer. When you’re forced to stretch, forced to try something new and gawky and unfamiliar, that’s when the magic happens as a writer. You should spend as much time as possible not only putting your characters in uncomfortable situations for them—thus building dramatic tension—but also putting them in situations that are uncomfortable for you to write.
For example. I’m a typically repressed American white guy who’s still single at 35, doesn’t know much about women and has never had a serious, long term relationship. You all know the type. In Homeworld, I had to write a sex scene. Okay, that’s a little uncomfortable, but it’s crucial to the plot. Gotta be done. But wait, I have a first person narrator, so I have to write it from that more intimate perspective. Okay, more uncomfortable, but hey, needs of the story. But wait, my narrator is a forty-one year old woman!
I was scared as hell to write that scene, but looking back on it now, I think I did a damn fine job of it. It’s sexy and sweet and vulnerable, just the way it has to be to push the story along. I’ve had other, similar moments of discomfort while writing Homeworld, and they all led to some of my best writing.
My writing partner, Josh Curry, is writing the first book of a trilogy that would scare the hell out of any sane writer, something that rivals Asimov’s Robots/Empire/Foundation saga or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in scope. We’re talking huge. Epic. Something that if he can pull it off, it’ll make his career.
He is, of course, scared shitless. But that doesn’t stop him. He knows that the first draft of this story is really just to find out where the edges are, the spine of the tale. The second draft is going to be so radically different, going in with knowledge of what happens in the first draft, that it will be almost another ground-up first draft itself. This enormous tale is going to take three to six years to write and properly rewrite, and he knows it.
And yet, this state of constant tension and anxiety about his book has led Josh to write scene after scene that he thought impossible for him to write. Being uncomfortable has made him a serious writer for the first time in his life, someone who can finally talk about writing as a career.
Post a Comment