Coffee With David

I remember reading an article a few years ago that claimed writer’s block was an excuse for not writing. While some will claim writers block as an excuse not to write, there are other reasons for the block. This weekend I have been wrestling to hear my muse, which led me to think about what I know causes me to have writer’s block.

Frustrations of the Outside Life

Life is filled with its frustrating dramas. The last several weeks have been filled with them. Thoughts are flooded with concerns dealing with the storm of crises that prop up. Energy and time is spent correcting them, fixing the problems, tying down the lose ends. I am of course referring to the elements of life everyone must deal with—work, family, and friends. It is a delicate balancing act to maintain the relationships that are important in most cases, but when things fall out of balance then the muse’s voice cannot get through.

Frustrations of Emotions

Art –good art that makes the reader’s soul ache—comes from the soul of the writer. I won’t claim to have achieved this yet, but what I will claim is that I write from the soul. Sometimes the emotions are pleasant, others not remotely in the same galaxy as pleasant. It are these painful emotions and memories that can gag the muse. Not long ago, I wrote about how writing can be therapy. How many patients got to a therapist and right away tell the therapist what is causing them the pain? Admittedly, I have never been, but I have had plenty of friends who are psychologist social workers. All of there answers to that question has been “never!” The reason is simple, people don’t like facing pain if they don’t “have to.” When writing from that painful experience—even when you know you are fictionalizing it—can bring about writers block.

Frustrations of Instinct

Every story has a method it is to be told. Sometimes that method is not natural to you. The recent short story I wrote, “The Last Friend” was originally written from my normal distant third party voice. In that telling of a story where the Angel of Death has fallen in love with a woman and now faces having to take her life and never see her again, my method failed. I struggled with how to tell the story for months. It wasn’t until a conversation with a fellow writer that challenged me to write a story from a female point of view that the muse knocked me in the head to start writing. I wrote the story in a first person narrative, changing prospective between the Angel and the woman. It is not a style I was use to, but it flowed—the writers block was broken. At this time I do not know if the story will be published, but it did show me another cause of writers block

There are many reasons for writers block. Would anyone want to share their reasons?

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for up to date information about the stories, novels and blogs I write.

I could ask this question of a thousand “horror fans” and get back at least as many different opinions. One of the biggest reasons for the differences is due to the number of sub-genres of horror. Some horror fans love tales of bloody knifes and slashed, hacked, and mangled bodies. Other fans enjoy stories of vampires, ghosts, golems or other supernatural monsters. A third set enjoy stories of human beings acting in horrific fashion as they commit monstrous acts.

What I tend to write falls into two of these categories: the tales of the supernatural and the tale of human beings acting monstrously. Yet, these categories do not truly define “good horror.” For that we need to look at the works of the genre (short stories, novels, and film) that have stood the test of time and ask ourselves why they have. Some of the common reasons are:

Identification with the characters
This is true for any story, regardless of genre. The characters have to be identifiable and believable. They have to feel like they are real and their fears or hungers shared with the reader. I don’t know anyone who can sanely claim to know the hunger for blood or flesh. These hungers are metaphors for other desires that are tangible to the common reader. They may be the addiction to a drug, suppressed lust, greed or a any other dark emotion. They can just be as easily the search for salvation, the sense of being lost in a hostile world, or even the desire not to have to grow up and lose naivety.

Suspense
There are tomes written about suspense. Despite all the volumes of suggestions on how to be suspenseful, it is an art that can only be produced with the foreknowledge of the author as to what kind of suspense is desired.

In a romance story, the suspense is hung on the relationship. In a mystery, it is on the question if the killer will escape justice. Each genre has a foci point regarding suspense. Horror’s suspense focus is on survival, escape, and –sometimes—salvation.

Fear
Fear is critical to a good horror. There should be scenes that engross the reader, seduce them into the story, and send shivers of fear across their bodies. Fear should be used in such a way that the reader feels like they are watching a train wreck as it unfolds. They are helpless to stop it. They want to turn away and cover their eyes, but if they do they are peaking between sprayed fingers in fascination.

Morality
Out of all the genres, horror is truly the tale of morality. How can this be? It is a study into the darkness of man. With great intention it looks upon the painted doll like facade of accepted societal morality and behavior and then pulls the mask off to show the maggots that lurk in rotten flesh just underneath.

There are other common grounds that define good horror, but this makes up my list. I would love to hear from others what might be on their list.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on blogs, stories and novels that I am writing.

On December 19, 2008, I wrote a blog based on an article I had read in The Writer Magazine asking what kind of writer I would rather be. (http://davidalanlucas.com/blog5.php/2008/12/19/) I had written that blog in shock and surprise as I read about how James Patterson wrote his novels. The article provided the impression that many of his books were ghost written or co-authored with Mr. Patterson simply providing the idea, the outline, and giving another author who would write the actually story an editor’s review for quality before having it published under his name.

This was not quite the whole story, as I have learned from a recently published interview between Writers Digest magazine:

“You’ve been working with co-authors, how and why did you begin?

“I just have too many stories. I couldn’t possibly do them all. People sometimes get wise-assed about the co-authors, but if you saw what happened . . .! For example, with Sundays at Tiffany’s. I worked with a co-author, and then I wrote seven drafts. And that happens a lot.

“The ‘factory’ comes up occasionally as a phrase. If it’s a factory, it’s factory where everything is hand-tooled. If you came here now, you would see just stack upon stack – manuscript, screenplays, etc. – and almost nothing comes out of here that I don’t rewrite a lot, in addition to outlining.

“How does it work?

“With the exception of The Quickie, every idea has been mine. I come up with the idea. I write an outline, about which one of my agents says, with this outline I could write a book. Usually, with a co-written book, somebody else will do the first draft and I will do subsequent drafts.” (Diana Page Jordon “Trademark Success ,” Writers Digest, Volume 89, Number 2 (March/April 2009)

In light of this, I apologize to Mr. Paterson. It is still not a method I would choose to use, but it clearly works for him. I wish him continued literary success.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates to the stories and blogs I write. The website will be updated tomorrow night (GMT-6).

I remember when my parents took me to my first circus. I do forget exactly how old I was, I know I was under eight, and the name of the circus troupe. What I do remember most was the high wire acts. The men and women flying across the air on their trapeze or walking the tightrope doing various arrangements of acrobatics always enthralled me. To this day those acts are still my favorites, yet it is not until as an adult looking back at them that I realize that they represent life—or at least mine anyway.

I find myself performing the high wire act of life trying to balance two careers (the one that pays the bills and the writing career), the various community groups I have my hands in, my martial arts, my social life, my family, my relationship with God, and still make “me time.” Having so many things going on at once is a way of life for me. I fly from event to event, project to project (or in my “bill paying job”: crisis to crisis) trying to catch the next trapeze and praying it is not the one I will miss. When I am not flying then I am walking the tight rope trying to maintain the balance between it all—and keep the stress of one career out of the other and the drama of any one relationship out of the others. I stumble. I miss the trapeze. I fall and hope that there is a net this time so I can get back to my life.

I know I could cut something here or there that would make more time for this and that, but honestly I cannot “be still.” I believe with all my soul that if I just sat and did nothing my head would explode. Maybe it is the “only child” syndrome of wanting to experience it all or maybe I am insane. I don’t know. All I do know is that life is as much of a high wire act that requires finding and constantly adjusting balance in order to pull it off—and keeps providing me with things to write.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the blogs, stories, and novels I am working on.

“Why must you always write so darkly?” I was asked a few weeks ago.
“What do you mean?”
“You write about horror, death and crime. Even when you write about the future, it is not a happy place.”

They had a point. I do not write stories that could be turned into Disney cartoons or that might be seen as a light hearted comedy. To quote an interview of one of my favorite crime writers, P.D. James, when asked something similar y her own mother: “If I was to write a hospital romance, I would start off with a doctor and a nurse in love. By the end of the third chapter, the doctor would have been murdered and it would turn out the nurse did it.” I may have slightly misquoted the current British Queen of Crime, but that is how I remember her describing her response. I remembered it because I was nodding my head in agreement with every word.

I write darkly for a few reasons. One is because I have a fascination with the dark and trying to understand it. I always have. I would find myself wondering what caused “bad people” to do the things they do. My eyes would look at all the popular and powerful “bad people” who have gained their power from less than honest means and people love them for it. Here is an example of what I mean: Hitler. Look at his charisma, his charm and how the people seemed to adore him. Look at how he rose to power. Look at the evil he did with that power, at the death and the destruction he brought not only on to those who loved him, but upon the world itself. When I look at people like him and see the depths of potential, I have to wonder “how did it go wrong?”

Another reason I write darkly walks holding hands with the reason I just gave. I firmly believe the philosophy of George Santayana who said, “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” When I look at the history of man, I see that this theme can be found in every fabric of human progress and recession. So I do not look at the future with the rose colored glasses of some, but rather with a jaundice eye and see where we might go. I then write that story with two things in mind: 1. Warn about the possibilities and 2. Remind the reader that there is hope, even in the darkest of days.

A third reason is one that I share with P.D. James: I like to bring order out of disorder. The darkness that surrounds most people in real life, the darkness of murder, or the darkness of any future or fantasy world is created in the chaos of disorder. It is in this disorder the people find themselves lost and that they feel the center of their world has collapsed. It is from there that order must be built. As it is built, it grows like the light of a candle to that of a torch and then to a bonfire. As it grows, the light pushes back the darkness further and further away from the heart of the flame. In order to write about the flame, one must be willing to explore the dark.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information about the stories I am currently working on.

When last I wrote any blog, it was in here on Saturday (my time). I apologized then for falling behind and explained that I had been lethargic without knowing the cause. Well, I got my answer violently shortly after I posted—and really wished I had not. I had picked up a virus that had been building in strength all week. I will spare my readers the details, except to say the lethargy grew to so oppressive that I was awake maybe a total of 9 hours in 48 hours. There were a lot of other symptoms, including a fever that finally broke on Monday morning. It has taken me this long to catch up on work at my “bill paying job” and a mountain of emails (somewhere around 1000-no exaggeration). But, I am finally back.

My writing schedule is now behind, but I am happy just to be feeling like I can get back with the muse. I will start writing “The Indebted” between tomorrow and this weekend and then redrafting “The Tower” next week. After that, I will get back to work on the novel “The Guardians.”

I do apologize to all my readers for not posting. You brought a smile to my face when I looked at my stats earlier tonight. I expected to see a sharp decline over the week since I had not posted anything. That was surprisingly not the case.

Thank you for reading and I will be updating my website with new information on the stories I write soon. For information about the stories, please visit www.davidalanlucas.com.

I don’t know the reason, but my readers can see the symptoms. You can see that the last three days have not had any new blogs. My writing has come to a near standstill. It is not because of the lack of ideas. Instead, it has been simply been very lethargic. I normally live on four hour of sleep, but lately it is as if I have not been able to get enough. It has thrown me off completely.

What is causing it? I don’t know. It could be my concern over various things at my “bill paying” job, or it can be concern if I will have my “bill paying job” in a few months. If I lose it, I have skills I can fall back on. It may be some stomach virus I picked up a few days ago that has not finished running its. It could be something in the air, as my allergies and asthma have been playing “merry havoc” with me this week as well. I simply don’t know the cause. It has thrown off a few schedules, but I will adjust.

I hope to be back to my normal schedule next week. So, I ask for your forgiveness for not updating the blogs like I should.

Meanwhile, I did finish plotting “The Indebited,” which is truly a dystopic science fiction story and very fitting for the world we live in today. It is not a future I would want to see, but a story about what could happen—if humanity is not careful. I will blog on how plotting this story made me feel later today and on the story itself this Tuesday.

To all of you, thank you for reading. For the latest on what I am working on, please visit www.davidalanlucas.com

Ray Bradbury use to rent a typewriter to write his stories. He would deposit money into a coin deposit and it purchased a certain amount of time with the machine. While I do not know how the timing mechanism worked, it taught Mr. Bradbury how to write fast and stay focused. It forced him to write to a timer.

I am no Bradbury and I am beyond grateful that the days of the “no spell check“ manual typewriter has been replaced with the laptop. However, since I write whenever I can steal sometime, I find myself writing to a timer of sorts. The timers I write with has been more the “lunch hour “ timer –really about 40 minutes since my laptop came with vista and it takes about 10 minutes to boot up and bring up word and an equal time to shut back down.

Yet, even this can be a distraction. So, I have been trying a new experiment. I have set an egg timer and raced my muse against it. It seems to work, though I become more crabby when I am interrupted. It is a race against time to get the best writing I can do out in a short amount of time. I am thankful that I have a fast typing speed, but the method should work with any form of writing.

If you are a fellow writer, have you tried to write to a timer? What have been your results?

If you are another kind of artist, have you tried it? Maybe you paint, sculpt, play music, or something else. I don’t care what your media is, I would love to know if you have tried this and how it worked for you.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for up-to-date information about the stories and blogs I am working on.

What young writer doesn’t make mistakes in their early years of writing? I didn’t have much advice at the time or know where to turn to correct these errors. My high school creative writing teacher didn’t give much insight in to the method of writing beyond his lesson plans and I was ignorant of any writing groups or trade magazines. By chance I ran into some writing magazines and books when I worked in a library for a year. Through my haphazard exploration and the courses I took about of my art, I learned a lesson incorrectly. I learned how to write by formula.

I am sure that there are many writers who may disagree with me in what I am about to write. Clearly those who write and/or follow the philosophy of formula writing would argue vehemently with me. So be it. I was taught that if you follow a certain formula you should be ale to write any story. All plots follow an exact model, all characters are a certain way, and you too can write your novel in 90 days. It works for some people. I am sad that I can pick up one of their books and see the plot ahead of the story’s unfolding because I know the formula.

The formula, in my opinion, is meant to be a teaching tool or a flow chart of elements that you can move about and change. What I should have learned was that the plotting formula is a tool. It is not the end-all, be-all, Lego your story together like you may a child’s castle. The formula is meant to take you down the road and get your mind working on the plot. It is meant to help you create and be certain your story is not a nebulous mess for a reader to walk away from and ask “what happened?”

Despite this denouncement of writing with a formula, I did walk away with 14 questions that I use to start plotting every story. I took these from Earle Stanley Gardner and modified them to fit me. I will answer these questions and then move on to really plotting the story. They are broken down into two sets of questions.

The first 5 are:
1) Who are the story’s protagonist and antagonist?
Protagonist:
Antagonist:
2) Where does the story begin?
3) What are the complications?
4) What is the climax?
5) What is the resolution?

That creates the beginning of the exploration of the story I want to write. A story is about the characters who live in the universe the author creates. These 5 questions define the physical aspects of the story, but to get to the real drama you have to get inside the character’s mind.

After I have written my brief answers to these, I move on to these 9 and go back to the original 5 to modify them so that the 14 questions work in unison and feed off each other:

1) The act of primary antagonism:
2) Motivation for act of antagonism: antagonist resorts to antagonism because of desire for:
3) Having committed the act of antagonism, the antagonist tries to conceal it or escape consequences, or to help carry out motive by:
4) In trying to conceal it or escape consequences, or to help carry out motive, or afterward the antagonist is confronted by complications incurred through:
5) The protagonist contacts an but not necessarily the act of antagonism either by chance or by deliberation:
6) When conflict has been joined and protagonist comes in contact with antagonism (not necessary the primary act) there are certain complicating circumstances which make for character conflicts:
7) The complication become involved with the suspense element:
8) Antagonist feeling the net closing about him tries to escape by some further act which points to a more exciting and dramatic climax when carried through:
9) Protagonist sets solution factors in motion or foils antagonist:

Sounds easy? Not really…not when you want to avoid “cookie cutter” stories. Yet, this is how I begin. This was all I was able to salvage from all the lessons on “formula writing.” It doesn’t fail me and it allows me to get away from writing “formula stories.” It allows me to bring real stories, real drama, and focus on what a story is really about—the characters who are living in the story.

Thank you fro reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates about the stories and blogs I write.

Everywhere you look, no matter where in the world you are, you see that we are all in an economic recession. Every industry is affected by the loss of jobs and revenue, including we who write. The recession causes the publishers to lay off staff, shrink the amount of advertising money that will be spent to promote the work, the amount of work the publisher will elect to publish, and the amount the publisher will pay for the work. Furthermore, bookstores are also reducing staff and inventory because consumers have less to spend on books and magazines.

The recession hits everyone hard, but for writers it is not all doom and gloom. Look back at the Great Depression. During this time we see an outburst of writing that evolved from the social world people found themselves in. Writers adjusted and wrote for whoever they could. People sought out stories to escape or to make themselves feel better. So, while the economics of writing is stretched and strained, the need for our talent beats in the hearts of those who are heart broken.

You must ask yourself why are you a writer? Is it to make lots of money? If that is the case, you might want to find something else to do. Is it to reach others and examine what we see around us? If that is the case, you should have a bumper crop of topics to explore and the need is out there for our stories.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for the latest on what I write.