Saturday, May 7, 2016
I write. I like to write, maybe even love to write. Creating characters and their histories and situations and resolutions to their life’s problems is clearly an addiction with me, or something close to it.
There are seasons when I stop writing, sometimes for months. Not for lack of ideas—if only they would stop! I just get busy with something else, usually something outdoors. But I come back to writing. A story idea insinuates itself into my imagination and begins to crowd up against other thoughts until it unexpectedly pops out in conversation with friends. Or even strangers. The pressure to write mounts and eventually it overwhelms any logic or discipline or self-control and I go back to writing.
Until then, my mind circles back over and over to the one story idea. Then details, back story, side issues, discoveries about the characters lives—they all join the vortex, colliding with ‘reality’, draw my attention to another world (a newly-discovered world!), nudging me toward the inevitable decent.
Finally, my fingers give in, I find a keyboard and disappear from this world into the other world, the new world, a world in the process of Creation. I watch it grow and reveal itself like a slow moving video. I record it as fast as I can. I watch the characters as they move through the story and ask myself their motives.
Eventually the characters themselves answer. The plot thickens. Things get bad. Real bad. And I keep writing. Eventually the worst thing in that world happens to the best character, but he or she, escapes the worst of the consequences and they live—scarred but alive—happily ever after. Unless there is a second book, which is often. Then the future holds a reasonable doubt of new disaster.
And then I can rest. Or revise. Or I get distracted by something other than writing. But, still, I like to write, maybe even love to write.
But I’m pretty sure, it is an addiction.
Gordon DeLand, Author 