Notes on the Craft of Writing

Dear Readers:

All life is not politics.

I find myself, too often, trapped by inertia and expectations into writing about whatever new political development crosses the screen here. And I am trying to get away from that. So today, if you want to wade once more into Bolivian politics, look elsewhere. If you want to read the story of how a MAS founder is accusing Evo Morales of heading a government of thieves, read here. If you want to read about the weekend meeting between Morales and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, go here. If you want the latest AP report on the "were they assassins or were they assassinated" story, here you go.

As for me, I took a week off recently to head off to a secret spot in Bolivia where I go to from time to time to practice writing of a different sort, my half-crazed effort to write a novel. In the midst of that week immersed in a story that was born in my head and seeks to make its way onto a printed page, I took a moment to write a Blog post reflecting on the craft of writing. Here it is for you to either hate, enjoy, or skip altogether, as you like.

Jim Shultz

Notes on the Craft of Writing

I'm staring at the keyboard of a Dell laptop, waiting for my fingers to invent something. I am sitting in a hotel room carved out of a building that was already old a century ago, a former "mercantile house" (whatever that is) built in the 1800s. The ceiling is probably twenty feet tall. The wallpaper is gray and probably older than I am (I am old). It has tiny white flowers on it. The floor is made of painted red brick. The double bed sags in the middle, giving one an experience roughly akin to sleeping in a bowl. The shower is luke warm. Parrots occupy the overgrown courtyard. I have a small balcony that overlooks the street below. A woman has a small store there. Her apples are covered with a plastic sheet because it has rained all day. Mud coats the streets. Under the mud are stones cut in this shape ( I ) that fit together.

I pay $5 a night to stay here, cold shower but not breakfast included. That costs extra. I am not going to tell you where I am. If you guess right I'll deny it. I don't want you to come here. This is where I come to live out the lunacy of trying to write a novel. If you're a lunatic try it. If not, then don't.

Nonfiction, I know how to write. I have a process. It works. I teach it to other people. It works like this:

1. Gather all the information you'll need to write what you are going to write.

2. Organize the information in some way that seems coherent and understandable.

3. Write it a piece at a time.

4. When you are done with the writing, edit it. Edit the #$%& out of it. You've written too much.

5. When you are doing any one of the above don't try to do any of the others. It won't work. Do only one of them at a time and in that order.

This is my process. It has served me well through three full-length books, a half dozen major reports, and more short articles than I could possibly remember. There are other tips too, like having your audience in your head, but that's more detail than I want to get into here. That's not my point.

My point is this. Writing fiction is a whole other deal, a whole other deal together.

For that you need to sit in a $5 a night hotel room with no Internet or cell phone service. Then you need to stare at the keyboard of a Dell laptop (other brands work as well) and at your fingers and will them into creating something out of nothing. Try it. If you are a lunatic. I think that I mentioned that earlier.

Here's another fiction tip. Pick your reading material carefully. I brought one book to read when I am not writing. It is a book by Isabel Allende, one of her better ones. That might have been a mistake. It might be better not to bring a great book, or even a good book. It might be better to bring a crappy book. If you bring a great book then every five seconds you will say to yourself, "What am I doing? I am a lunatic. I can’t do this. I can't even come a little close to doing this. My writing sucks." If you bring a crappy book then the whole time maybe you'll say, "Hey, I can do this. I can do even better than this." Crappy books are easy to find. I think Amazon has a whole subsection dedicated to them. But I am not sure about that last part, the part about Amazon. It just seems logical.

Did I mention that it has been raining all day?

So here's the deal with writing fiction. Don't get in the way. Don't map it out. Invent some characters that you can really love, some for their goodness, some for their badness and especially ones trying to sort the difference in between. Then put them in some situations that seem interesting and see what they do. If they're good characters and if you love them they'll sort it all out without much help from you, the writer. They will either be noble or ghastly, stupid or smart, flamingly inspirational or deadly boring based on their own free will. You are the writer. You are blameless.

Your job is to bring the laptop, put your fingers on the keys and get the hell out of the way. And occasionally you should leave them alone for a while and get some coffee, maybe read a book (a crappy one, don't forget). Unless your hard disk crashes or someone breaks that little black padlock on your door, neither of which is likely, your characters will still be there when you get back. The really good ones will have jumped off the screen and typed something up for you while you were gone. Mine aren’t that good. I bet Isabel Allende's characters type for her. They seem like they might.

Okay, I cheated. Before I left to come here I laid down 15 Bolivianos for a bootlegged copy (don't tell anyone that part please) of a movie on DVD. It was called "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I watched it one night when I couldn't get my characters to do anything interesting. It's a remake of a movie from the 1950s that I liked, a science fiction classic about a well-dressed man from space who has a big robot with him. After he lands on the Washington Mall soldiers get nervous and shoot the man. The robot gets ticked off and shuts off all the electricity in the world, just to show off I think.

In the new version Keenau Reeves is the well-dressed man from space. He seems a little stiff. Could have been the long flight, or the acting, I'm not sure which. In this new version he lands in Central Park in New York instead of Washington. Maybe this was a statment about where aliens think the power is, or maybe it just looked cooler. Now the people from other planets are ticked off at us about global warming. Before they were ticked about the the Cold War. Aliens get ticked off by different things now than in the 1950s.

That's all I want to say about the movie. You might buy a bootlegged copy too and I don’t want to ruin it for you.

But I'm glad I watched it. Because it inspired me to get back to writing my novel. I thought, "Hey, I can write at least as good as this." Lots of movies are badly written. So if you want to get your confidence back up about writing fiction, watch a movie, especially a remake. It will help.

Okay, I have one last point that I want to make here. If you have read through this entire post and are feeling now that you have wasted ten minutes of your life that you will never get back, well I have no sympathy for you. You should have known what you were getting into back around, "I'm staring at the keyboard of a Dell laptop, waiting for my fingers to invent something."

When I finish my novel it will probably be on the New York Times bestsellers list for 57 weeks. Isabel Allende will probably give me a blurb for the back cover. It will read: "Better than the remake of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still".

You see, once you start writing fiction, you can invent anything. That's the beauty of it.