On Writing

(Twilight and Shadows, LOTR soundtrack)

A strange thing happened in my attempt to resume the writing of a story I started almost 5 years ago. I hadn't touched it for well over a year, leaving it aside as I grew busier with such things as exams, and then work. I remember thinking to myself at the time that a break from the story itself could only be a good thing, for it would show me whether it was worth pursuing or not when I did decide to carry on with it.

In the last couple of weeks or so I began to take shy looks at the story again, wondering if I could slip back into the story's universe by editing the first part, which constitutes the first book of a... three-part story. And that's when I realised how much time had passed since I'd last touched the story. It used to be so close to me, and I felt so much as though I was immersed in that universe I was creating that ideas and words used to flow out of me without restrain. That's how I was able to write over 300,000 words in just about a year, pretty much writing a chapter a day.

There was a first draft, clumsy and missing many 'in-between' chapters, where most secondary characters stood more like vague shadows than anything else. I remember reading back that first draft and seeing names pop up in one place, never to be seen again in the rest of the story, or the name of one particular character would end up a different one in a later chapter. I remember this prompted me to start tracking the names of all characters, but also that of places, until at some point I felt the need to start drawing up maps, too. I found myself trying to draw each character, intent as I was to make them 'grow' as much as possible so my writing would flow the right way when describing them. Needless to say, the task also involved an insane amount of research sometimes pertaining to the most minute details you would never care to know in daily life. But in a story, each minute detail counts - the equivalent of a tiny stroke of paint in a very particular mix of colours on the canvas, without which the whole of the painting would be missing its depth.

There was less and less room for free flow writing and mere imagination - now I had to start catching the loose ends, and the more I did that, the more the story itself was taking a life of its own, meaning that I could no longer just freely add occurrences in the story because everything needed to follow certain patterns and chains of events. And that's at that stage that one starts to see all the obvious plot holes emerging. You can't just erase them and replace them, though. Sometimes it requires a hard look back at the story's unfolding process, its structure, before you can have a better idea as to what to do.

Anyway, I had faced all that and found myself stuck in a corner when I began to feel as though something else was missing. At that point, I was just about to take my final exams at university, so I decided to take a break from writing to concentrate on those exams. That break turned into an almost 2-year break before I knew it. It's not like I'd forgotten all about the story I'd written... but the more I left it alone, the harder it was to bring myself to look at it again because every time I would be reminded of the many plot holes, and all the other things that bothered me about the writing of that story so far.

These days, I have a better idea as to what else I felt was missing. My own voice, or rather a strong enough conviction as to what it is I want to convey. Without that underlying voice woven into the story like some invisible thread, the story itself remains the equivalent of an empty sack. A random amalgam of events that might look like some adventure with no real purpose or sense. No underlying messages, nothing beyond the unfolding of clichés following the well-trodden route of fantasy stories. And that has been bothering me SO much that it made it easy to leave the story alone for so long.

A part of me still thinks I'm wasting my time, but the reason I stubbornly attempt to work on that story again is simply because, if anything, this constitutes much needed practice.

How else can one learn to write well if not through the sweat and growing pains of practice? Just as I discovered that real journalism is best learned by practising it hands-on in the real world rather than within the confines of a lecture hall full of theories, a writer is only a writer when writing. The more practice, the better the writer.

Anyway...one big mistake I made out of sheer laziness was to stop reading - not reading merely for pleasure, but reading to observe and learn from the masters the same way a painter will learn. One of my favourite pastimes, I discovered, was to read the dictionary, jotting down words and expression in a little notebook without really caring whether I'd remember to use those words or not. Out of a 100, I knew at least 10 would stick. But it's a pastime I gave up right around the time I stopped working on the story out of sheer laziness and mental exhaustion.

And now... Now I've started editing the story all over again from the very beginning, and though it still remains very much close to my heart, I realised that I, myself as a person - my mind and ways of thinking - have changed in the past of 2 years... so much so that I found it incredibly difficult to slip right back into the story to add more, mainly because I am no longer able to slip back into the mental and emotional state I was in when I first wrote that story.

It's a very odd thing to experience, I have to say. There you are, still enjoying the story you've written so far despite its many shortcomings,  but you are no longer in the same frame of mind and even your 'voice' has changed somewhat, or your style, if you like. I spent most of the last  two days editing the first chapters, until the weight of such a mammoth task got to me. I went out for a long walk, my mind fully occupied with trying to come up with ideas and thoughts on how to improve the story. The fact that this occurred is a good sign - it's a first step towards slipping back into the writing mode, I think.

By the time I got home and sat back in front of the computer, I didn't care to continue with the editing itself. Instead, new ideas had burgeoned ever so shyly within my mind and I found myself opening up a new word document where I started typing up a scene as it unfolded in my head. I just kept going, writing what turned out to be a dialogue that would fit more in the middle of the story than its beginning, and before I knew it I had written a full chapter and had spent 4 hours straight typing away. I read it back to myself and realised that perhaps it wouldn't even go into the story at all. It was like...

An 'in-between' to allow me to explore the story in so much more depth. So that's where I'm at now. Writing what looks like extra chapters whose sole purpose is to help me explore not just the story itself, but its characters. Imagining it all in the detail 'in-between' the main events contained in the story.

We always talk about 'writing', but when it comes to it, it's really all about rewriting - over, and over again. The process really is just like painting or composing a piece of music, or even akin to building a house with Lego blocks. One layer at a time, starting over for as long as it takes till the whole thing stands steady on its feet.