Let’s take a walk in my mind

-CHAPTER 5-

The first sentence of any story should be seen as an invitation into a new world. Let’s take a small step into my imagination.

Don’t mind the mess, the cleaning lady called in sick this week..

Let the external soundscapes become the internal thought-scapes. Close your eyes and imagine my whole book case as a city.

Now imagine that those books are the houses, and the sentences the components of those houses. Some sentences will be the load-bearing walls, others are the doorways and the rest could be the decorations to welcome you in and make you feel at home to explore and imagine. Others might be trap doors into very dark places, which I forgot to label. My sincerest apologies in advance if you stumble into one.

The difference between a good and a bad writer is shown by the order of his words as much as by the selection of them. Like walking though a library in my imagined city, and carefully selecting and picking up the right words from the shelves to build our sentences.

You don’t just have to live in the house that you are building; you have to eat, sleep and breathe the house, to let it become a part of you. Then beautiful writing starts to become beautiful architecture. Except for the landfill to blocks away from here. That’s where I keep piles of swear words.

To really create something great, you have sit down and force a breakthrough. Like being constipated; it cannot be accomplished by moderation. I was taught to use as few words as you can, be specific in your sentences and make every word count to paint a picture. Try to sound like your best self when you write.

You learn it through osmosis. To be able to write a good page, you need to read -at least- one great book. Preferably more; but actually a lot. Readers will know when you try too hard to sound like someone you are not. It’s the same unsettling feeling you get when you walk all alone at night through an alley and you hear a glass bottle fall over. You wonder if it was just a cat, or Creepy the Clown from behind a dumpster waiting to jump out at you and ask if you are interested in talking about his Lord and Savior Mr. Giggles with a knife in his hand. On the upside, the knife is bright yellow and blue and has little happy balloons on it.

I have learned that every writer is at least a little bit of a narcissist, because you are expecting that others should be aware what’s going on in your mind. But it is not narcissism if you truly hope that others can learn from you.

And then comes the much dreaded editing. After you put the first draft onto the screen, you have to take a second and third look at it to take out all the pointless repetition, poor spacing, and unclear lessons. First, I write the structure and the outline of the building I want to build, which for the most part is informative but not yet fun to read. Then I go through it again and decorate it with as much of my weird dark humor and little notes that pop up in my mind when I read it.

When that whole structure comes out of the scaffolds, I bring in the big gun; The Killer of Darlings; The Fumigator of Bullshit; The Guillotine of Bad Lines. (Not to forget, the Pun Gun). All the stuff I thought was fun or well written, is carefully weighed on a scale just as the Egyptian god Anubis weighs peoples hearts for the truth before letting them enter into the afterlife. Or in my case, clicking Publish and sending it on to my editor.

This is my process to write. I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about it, but this is my way to go about it. You do you, and I do that Voodoo that I do. Do what ever you have to, to tell your story. In order to paint a complete picture of humanity, we need every story to be heard. I like to keep my stories as short as I can. A picture paints a thousand words, but I like my pictures to be less than that amount to leave room for some mystery and imagination: To see the whole picture, you sometimes will have to look between the smaller pictures shown to you.

“Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.” — Benjamin Franklin

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