How sometimes our writing scares us

I'm just fresh off reading THE SHINING by Stephen King (started part 3, The Wasp's Nest) in preparation for reading his new novel DOCTOR SLEEP, and after chit-chatting with folks on Twitter on what to blog about next, fellow writer Laurie Lyons gave me this brilliant idea to write about how our writing scares us sometimes, because folks said (somebody somewhere said) that Stephen King was scared to do edits on THE SHINING, having to mentally prepare himself for it. And I said, well, I was scared a little too, when I was editing ROSEHEAD, which I just finished yesterday (finished the 2nd draft, that is). There were parts that spooked me. It was so weird, like, hey, I wrote it myself, it wasn't not someone else, it was me, then how come I get scared? I mean, it came out of my head, right? Where is the logic in this? I'll attempt to ponder about it here.

Every piece of writing is simply an exaggerated version of the writer's life. Since I'm a Stephen King fan, I have read a lot of his books, and a lot of stuff about him, including his book ON WRITING, and I've noticed peculiar patterns (people told me it's nothing new, but to me it was a revelation), as in, there are certain fears he has (insect bites, for example) that he injects them everywhere, they must have come from personal experience, as in, something happened to him when he was little, something bit him. I have stuff like this too. A lot of nasty stuff happened to me when I was little, and so it crops up in my writing, of course, because I think that writing is simply an inflated version of our lives and what they could be, if... this happened, or that happened, or something else happened.  After all, we only know what we know. We may invent anything we like in our heads, but we will stubbornly come back to the strongest experiences we had, consciously or subconsciously. In light of this, we, of course, like to exaggerate our fears. Who doesn't? It's our favorite pastime. What if I get fired? What if I run out of money? What if nobody will buy my books? What if I fall sick and have no medical insurance (this is a whole another topic altogether). What if...? What if...? What if...? And so it goes on, forever. But we only think about these things. They are fleeting mirages, and they soon leave us. But if we happen to write them down into stories, these inflated fears, they start looking very real, and I think the possibility of them being real is what scares us.

The inventiveness of our minds has no bounds. And that is scary, especially when it concerns darks matters, like matters of life and death. And every story usually has a clock, a birth, and a death, because these are major things we're dealing with in life, it's what makes stories real. When we imagine double-winged butterflies coated with layers of crocodile-skin-patterned plastic concocted from nano particles that let said butterflies grow into spaceships (I totally just made this up), we go, WHOA!, that's cool. But when we suddenly invent an alien apparatus for torturing humans to extract knowledge, we get so carried away that by the time we reread the descriptions, we go like, HOLY JESUS, THIS IS SICK! And we look at ourselves in the mirror, thinking, did I really just write that? It can't possibly be true, I'm not a psycho, why would I even come up with something like this? But we do, all of us do. We all have imagined, at one time or another in our lives, how we would really like to kill that one person we hate, slowly, perhaps cutting them open, or cutting them to pieces. I'm borrowing here from my own fantasies concerning my father who sexually abused me (he was kind of disciplining me against me ever wanting sex when I grow up, at which he almost succeeded). I imagined some pretty horrible things done to him, and they made it into early drafts of Siren Suicides, completely gone now from the books, but nonetheless. When I reread those parts, I shudder. I think it's this limitlessness, this boundlessness in my mind that gets me scared, this possibility that my mind could even think about something like this.

Our books are our mirrors, and we have all have a dark side.  I think one other aspect of being scared by your own writing is realizing that that thing in there, that monster, that hideous parasite you're writing about, is you. It's part of you, however inflated and distorted, still, it's you. It came out of you, you're the one who conjured it, and that's a mortifying thought. We like to think that we are mostly pink and round and fluffy, with a permagrin on our faces and a permahappiness in our hearts. Bullshit. We all know it's not true, only we're afraid to admit it. It's much easier to hide behind an artificial manicured facade than to show yourself to people in all of your ugly disgusting glory. That is why we write fiction in the first place. It's only on the pages of our books we can be anyone, anyone we ever wanted to be, or didn't want to be, or dreaded to be. It's safe, it's not real, it's fiction. Only it isn't, it's very much a part of us, and that is scary. We want to escape, but we can't, we come full circle. Instead of escaping, we inflate our ugliness to such proportions that we see it for the first time, looking in the mirror. It takes years, and tons of practice to be okay with our own ugliness, to accept it for what it is, namely, part of human fabric, the hatred, the envy, the anger, the lies, everything we ever despised about ourselves, and wish to get rid of but can't. How would this not scare you? Of course it would. It would even scare you into a writer's block, into that lovely paralysis when you are unable to move forward, because you don't want to look deeper. It's scary shit, and you're done digging, you want to go on a walk, to bask in the sun and to smell the flowers. To hell with stirring up your own moldy guts. I get that, because I've been there. I chose to stir it, and to get rid of it. Was it scary? You bet. Am I done? No fucking way. I have so much more to spill, it's not even funny. And it's terrifying.

Wow, what a topic. I found my fingers flying across keyboard, trying to keep up with my brain. I also feel like both SIREN SUICIDES and ROSEHEAD were a preparation for IRKADURA, my next book, a very dark literary novel about growing up in Soviet Union, with all the gory details. I'm scared to write it, scared to dive back into my previous life, yet I know I need to do it. I need to look in that mirror, in order to show it the tongue, to make faces at it, to stop being afraid of it. For a while. Because I'm sure as I dig deeper, I will discover a new layer of nastiness, asking to get out. It never ends, does it?

Does your age affect your writing?

The reason I'm writing this blog post is because one of my readers, Zandile Funde, wrote me this awesome loooong email that was sort of a review of SIREN SUICIDES, sort of a commentary on writing in general, and it had one very important question:

"...the reason I brought up being a student (I'm turning 22 in 2 months) is that earlier this year, you wrote a blog post about how you feel that writing at a young age should rather be avoided (that people should live longer before they decide to write, that's how I understood it). I then pretty much felt as if I were a modern-day Sisyphus, participating in 'futile writing.' It made me stop and think maybe I'm not yet mature enough to be writing at this point because I haven't been through half the ordeals that you have..."

I must apologize to those of you who read that blog post and walked away from it with the impression that just because you're young, you shouldn't be writing. That would be the worst thing to do. What I meant there was what I have heard from other writers and what I have experienced myself, namely, the fact that the more life you have lived, the more stories you have to tell, the deeper they will be. Let me expand on this thought here, and hopefully, if you feel like you're too young to write, or if you're afraid to write because you think people won't take you seriously, you will walk away from this empowered to write, no matter what your age is.  I will sort of break down your life into 4 learning stages that I have heard at some business workshop at some point in my past life, as it was applicable to growing employees, or teaching employees, or some thing like that. Since then I applied this principle to my own life and writing, and it works. Also recently Michael Gruber, my mentor and author of 20+ thrillers, reiterated it in 4 writing workshop concepts of stages every writer has to go through. I will combine the two here.

Stage 1, MADMAN: You don't know that you don't know.  This is the glorious time when you're young, green, naive, have no care in the world, and just jump into things without thinking. Anything is possible. Why? Because you don't know that you don't know. Or, in the writing workshop terms, you're a madman. You just do stuff. Can you write a short story? Oh, that sounds exciting, totally! Can you write a novel? That sounds cool, sure. Do you wanna participate in a flash fiction contest? Of course! Wanna help us write a script for this new amazing sitcom we're trying to produce independently? You got it, I'm in. Basically, you can apply this principle to anything. Remember yourself when you saw a neighbor kid who rode a bike, and you just got your new bike, without training wheels, and you rolled it out and you watch that kid in fascination. It looks so easy, what he does, you decide, you can totally do it. You hop on the bike like that other kid, you pedal, and for a few seconds you're happy, you can do it, yes! Then you crash. BOOM. This is the second stage. (I have to tell you a story. I did this stupid thing not too long ago, a few years ago, actually. I was skiing. I'm not a pro, and I saw those kids jump off a ramp, and I thought, oh, that looks easy. Next thing I know, I go down the ramp, I fly, I fall, and I break my leg. But for a few glorious seconds I was airborne and it was awesome, also, being taken down the mountain on a sled was awesome too.).

Stage 2, CARPENTER: You know that you don't know. Since we're using the biking allegory here, I say, let's continue with it. So, you get up, and you're like, fuck, this hurts! Well, I mean, depending on your age, of course, you might have said something like, ouch, I need a band-aid! Whatever you said, you have just crossed the line. Now you know that you don't know how to bike. It's the same with writing. You start writing a story, a short story or a novel, doesn't matter, and somewhere in the middle, or maybe even somewhere in the very beginning, you get lost, you don't know how to continue, you realize there is more to writing than just writing, you lose the storyline, you're not sure about your characters, it's too much too fast, you get overwhelmed, and you realize that you actually can't write. Not yet. This is the stage where many people quit. DON'T!!! You have to write through this, in order to get to the next stage. This is where age factor comes in. If you've been through life, you've been beaten up by things, you know that giving up is not the choice you can make, you have a certain maturity about it. But when you're younger, you just tend to throw your arms up and yell, FUCK IT! and walk away. I was like that too, I remember I did totally stupid things and gave up on things. For example, I wanted to become a translator at 16, but then my father told me that I would suck at it (despite the fact that I knew German like a native language back then), so I NEVER EVEN TRIED TO APPLY. Yeah, talk about giving up easily. Not now. Now, if you try to sway me from my path, I will plow over you like a bulldozer. The term "carpenter" applies here in the sense that you sweat over little things, because you don't dare think you can build bigger.

Stage 3: ARCHITECT: You don't know that you know. This is a fun stage. Basically, if you have got to the 2nd stage, now you are stubbornly writing a lot of shit. Or, you are stubbornly practicing biking every day, throwing jealous glares at that neighbor kid, pressing your lips together, and trying, and trying, and trying. You fall hard on your ass, you scrape your knees bloody, but that other kid pisses you off so much with his biking skills, that you just want to beat him, you want to be as good as him. You want to bike like a god. So you drag your sorry ass out on the street every day after school. Same with writing. You read something absolutely genius, and you go, man, I will never write as good as this. If you are younger, you tend to get depressed and you again are tempted to give up, but with age and with life you gain this ability to persevere, because you know that nothing good in life comes easy, there is no mom or dad to wash your socks or cook you dinner, you gotta do it yourself, so you persevere. You write, and you write, and you write. Then something magical happens. People who read your stuff (your friends at this stage, or your mom, or writers from your writer's group) start telling you that they like your writing. But you're still in the frame of mind that you don't know shit, so how can they like it? Because, you're getting good. You simply don't know yet that you know (I'm somewhere between this and the carpenter stage, I still doubt myself a lot). So "architect" term doesn't quite apply here, but it also sort of does. You do know what you're doing, and you do it on a big scale, you just haven't accepted it yet.

Stage 4, JUDGE: You know that you know. This is the level that you might reach somewhere down the path of writing 20 novels, or more (I'm guessing, of course). This is when you for the first time see that you can do it, and you know that you can do it. Like that kid with the bike, it's the first time that kid rides and sees that he is better than that other kid, and feels like he can actually do it. It usually takes someone else to point it out, so maybe he goes to a biking competition or something like that, and wins the prize. This is usually attained by senior writers, by people who have lived life and have written a lot. I hope one day to be here, I wonder what it feels like, to know your craft and do it. It must be exhilarating. Or maybe it isn't? Maybe it's the stage when you go like, FUCK IT, I want to try something new now because I know this writing thing inside and out? Stephen King has been announcing his plans for retirement since 2002 and still hasn't quit writing. I just downloaded his latest novel DOCTOR SLEEP, the sequel to THE SHINING. This leads me to believe that once you hit the "judge" stage, you get so happy, that you swim in your own ability to write, you thrive in it. I wonder what that feels like, knowing. I can't imagine. If I will ever get there, I'll let you know.

Now, to close this topic. Age affects your writing not only in the aspect of simple life experience and maturity in the face of failure, but also in the amount of material you can write about. Basically, writing is not about things that you have seen in your life, it's about things you have felt. It doesn't matter if you have traveled the world since age 5, and you are 15 now and want to write a novel about a character who travels. Have you had the highs of utter joy? Have you had the lows of dark depression? Are you able to paints the bouquet of human emotion vividly, to pull your reader in? You can fake anything else in your writing EXCEPT emotions. It's why we read books, to feel. You will notice this. You have read a book that has been masterfully plotted but have left nothing in you, didn't touch you, right? And you have read a book that had flaws, that wasn't perfect and even got you pissed off at it, but it left a lasting impression, an emotion was stirred inside you, and you remember it, right? That's it. That's what writing is about, about us connecting on the emotional level with each other, across time, space, and other boundaries we have erected and are now suffering because of it. Literacy, books, that is our bridge to each other. So how can you write about what it feels like losing a loved one, if you have never experienced someone dying in your family? You can't. I mean, you can fake it, of course, because you remember how sad you were when your pet had died, but it's not the same. This is where age is completely irrelevant. You could have lived more life at 16 than others have at 60. So, please, WRITE, no matter what your age is, just don't give up and write, and experience life to its fullest, to make your writing richer. 

Picking character names

As much as writing a book seems like a grand idea that requires a major effort to fulfill, it consists of little things, like writing a little every day, until it's finished, and picking out particular details that will make the book one final beautiful organism that hums with life. It seems big to the reader, but it's really comprised of carefully chosen tiny things. And one of those tiny things are character names. They don't seem important at first, and yet, in a well written book, character names match the story, tell the story, and leave memories in the reader's head long after the book has been finished. Take, for example, the name Harry Potter. It's a household name now, right? There is hardly anyone on this planet, and I mean, planet, who doesn't know who it is. So what makes it so memorable, apart from the fact that Harry Potter series sold like hot cakes all over the world? Well, let's examine it, shall we? Because I'm as curious as you are, having battled this whole naming process in the past year and having developed my own idea about how to do it (and it's not far away from branding which I did for work before I quit my career).

Each name has to be easily spelled and spoken out loud. You may contradict me here, and rightfully so, because there are countless examples of big famous authors doing the exact opposite, but what I learned from being a foreigner and writing in English is that ease of pronunciation rules. Ideally, the first name has to be easily spelled, and the last name has to be, or sound, like a proper English noun (for the sake of this post, we will be talking only English language here). There are two kinds of these names, the actual names that exist in the real world, and made-up names. Let's take a look at actual names. Try saying these out loud and see how they roll off your tongue: Harry Potter, Jay Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, Scarlett O'Hara, Bilbo Baggins, Peter Pan, Yuri Zhivago, Jane Eyre, Lisbeth Salander, Roland Deschain. Do I need to go on? Do you see the commonality between them? They all ring loud and clear, and, for the most part, they are easy to spell. Now, a made-up name has to follow the same rule, it has to sound like a proper English noun, even if it isn't. Take a look at these names: Tarzan, Pip, Tintin, Gandalf, Hamlet, Lolita, Aslan, Dumbledore, Dracula, Haroun, Coraline. I can keep going, but you see how they are all drawing attention to themselves when spoken. I have, perhaps, made a mistake by naming my main character in SIREN SUICIDES Ailen Bright. Many people misspell her name. I went too deep into research. Ailen is a boy's name, it means handsome in Gaelic, and Ailen's father picked out this name because he wanted a boy. I liked how it was close to the word "alien", because this is who she is as a character. In ROSEHEAD, however, I named my main character Lilith Bloom, because it was simple, it was the first thing that came into my head, and it was about flowers, about blooming out of childhood into adulthood, which brings me to my second point.

Pick the first name that comes to mind, literally. This I learned after realizing that whatever my subconscious is telling me is always right, it already knows. I learned to turn off my brain and listen to it, because as a writer I have to stay true to myself, and for that I have to dig deep. There are certain emotional connections that formed in my mind at one or another time in my life, and it's important I tap into them, to make my story ring true. In this sense, use the names that pop into your head, even if they seem outrageously simple. Therein lies their strength. Lilith was a name that perhaps got lodged in my brain after reading something somewhere, or maybe it was because I liked lily flowers, but something about Lilith sounded softer to me than Lily, and I decided to use it. Bloom was a very simple choice because almost the entire story of ROSEHEAD happens in a rose garden, so it just fit. I also like to use names that hint at the appearance of a character, as do many other writers. For example, Lilith's faithful talking pet whippet Panther has been named that because he is sort of a cat in a dog's body, and because he is black and lithe like a panther, and because he is trying to seem a bit bigger than he is. Ed Vogel, Lilith's friend, has been named Ed for the sake of simplicity (but I will never name another character Ed, because when I search my document for "Ed" to make edits, it gave me every single verb ending in "ed"). Vogel means bird in German. Ed looks a bit like a bird, and that's why his last name is Vogel. Because I just got done reading Harry Potter series, the names are still fresh in mind, see how J.K. Rowling does it: Sirius Black, Fenrir Greyback, Olympe Maxime, Alastor Moody. George R. R. Martin likes to do it too: Eddard Stark,  Jon Snow, Davis Seaworth, Asha Greyjoy, which actually brings me to my third point.  

Don't try to invent unique character names, stay true to yourself. Whenever you lie as a writer, the reader will sense it. It goes for everything, even inventing character names. If you go out of your skin and invent something crazy that sounds cool, but you yourself are having trouble spelling while writing, don't use it. Drop it. Rather pick something that feels comfortable, that makes sense to you. Because if it makes sense to you, it will make sense to your reader. You can go as simple as Alice in Alice in Wonderland, or The Cat in the Hat, or James Bond; or you can go as far as Cthulhu. Whatever rings true to you will ring true to your reader. If you happened to have an affinity for a strange name that is complex because it's taken from a different language, so be it, just make sure you let your readers know how to pronounce it correctly. If, however, you absolutely have to invent a name because you're writing fantasy or maybe sci-fi and it's a character from another planet, I suggest you read a book that is far away from all other books any writer has ever suggested to you. It will take you only 2 hours to read it. It's called ZAG and it's a book on branding. Once you read it, you will be able to apply those lessons to creating character names properly, because the logic is the same. Where businesses create markets, writers create worlds. Both have to live in people's minds to take root there and blossom, and I find it that books that are less wordy on the subject are the best ones to follow. At least it's the book that was my branding Bible before Stephen King's ON WRITING replaced it as my writerly Bible. 

Now that I'm writing this post, I realize that I have barely scratched the surface on this topic. It turns out, there is a lot more and I can't cram it all here, like why writers use names starting from same letters like Bilbo Baggins or Humbert Humbert (and how about double names?) or how to pick first names in a family of characters, or how to pick nicknames or names for pets or monsters or... Oy. Please, feel free to chime in. Remember, I've only been writing full time for the past year, so what do I know? I'm sure I missed a bunch of things.

Introduce your characters in 1 PARAGRAPH OR LESS

Photo by Adam Bronkhorst

I keep getting e-mails from folks sending me their excerpts or whole manuscripts, to read, to sample, to give them my opinion. And I keep seeing the same problem over and over again. It's not the writing, the writing is usually pretty good. It's not what the story is about, stories are usually very interesting. It's not even style or setting or sentence structure, even suspense is often there, meaning I actually want to know what happens next after reading the first few sentences. The problem is with the characters. No matter how you turn your story, no matter how amazing its events are or the premise or the plot, it's about the characters, period. And if you fail to introduce your characters properly to me at the very beginning, chances are, I will toss your book. You have to make me care about these people, the people your story is about. Then I will keep reading. So, exactly how do you go about this? Actually, it's not that complicated. Here are a few patterns that I picked up from reading big awesome books by big awesome authors.

A few sentences is all you need. But those sentences are crucial. Think about introducing yourself to people who don't know you. What's the first thing you say? Your name. Right. And what usually follows? Typically you say where you work, what you do, as in, I'm a writer. Okay, we got that covered. What's next? Well, you start chit-chatting about mundane stuff like weather and whatnot. But you don't have that in your book, in your book something has to happen, right? So you jump into it and off we go. WRONG. You forgot to give us those few details that we get if we meet you in real life. All we need is a few paintbrush strokes, we don't need a whole page of detailed clothing description (though I've seen some examples of this being brilliantly executed.) So, spend another sentence on how the person looks, and remember about age, gender, size, and race. You'd be surprised at how many people forget to do this. Who is your character? A woman, a child, an old man? Tall, short, light skinned, dark skinned, red haired? What's your character wearing? And, again, only give enough detail to let us fill in the picture. Maybe it's a weird hat (mention specific things that helps us draw conclusion about what kind of person your character is). And after that, give one more important detail. You decide what it is. As a rule, use 5 senses, pick one that is most important about this character. SIGHT. Is he tall, short, fat, limping? SOUND. Does she cough a lot, and perhaps coughs up blood into a fine silk kerchief? SMELL. Does he reek of sweat or fine perfume? TASTE. This one rarely used, but you still could use it in the sense of a person appearing bitter from disappointments of life, or innocent and sweet as honey. Or, in case of magical creatures, a person could really taste like something very specific. TOUCH. Is her skin rough to touch, cold, warm, are veins on her neck pulsing? There, try it. 

Pick out character descriptions when reading. This is why I read a lot, because the more I do, the more I see different ways of doing it, because of course there are a million bazillion strategies. I would say, the rule of thumb is, to make the reader fall in love, and not necessarily with the character itself, but with the possibility of a story that could develop out of this character. Here is an example I stumbled on today, which partially inspired me to write this post. Stephen King (of course, because I'm a fan) is one of the masters of doing this, and I'm currently reading Book 7, the final book from The Dark Tower series. He takes liberty to introduce a bunch of completely new characters in the book, and this one struck me as so disgusting yet riveting, that I had to actually close the book and marvel at it in my brain. See how he doesn't mention the age, nor body size or even hair color, but notice how you end up filling in the details anyway, almost smelling him (but he does mention name and occupation right off the bat):

"Pimli Prentiss, the Algul Siento Master, was in the bathroom when Finli (known in some quarters as The Weasel) knocked at the door. Prentiss was examining his complexion by the unforgiving light of the florescent bar over the washbasin. In the magnifying mirror, his skin looked like a grayish, crater-pocked plain, not much different from the surface of the wastelands stretching in every direction around the Algul. The sore on which he was currently concentrating looked like an erupting volcano."

There. BAM! Are you in? I'm in. Is it disgusting? You bet. More so makes you want to find out what he will do, right? See how he also cleverly twists in the description of the setting, Algul Siento. There is no embellishment here, pure character. This is enough to give us points to hook our interest on, but also leaves out enough for each of us as readers to fill in the rest of the details. You know why? Because everyone has known a disgusting guy like that, and we formed a strong bond with that person, a teacher, a relative, you name it. It's that person we imagine when reading this, and King cleverly taps into our imagination and roots us to what we know already. Because we care about what we know already, and that's the hook. It works like this. You know how the scariest movie is not the one where you see the monster, but where you don't and only hear it? You imagine the scariest thing you have even known, and it makes the movie scary for you. Same principle works here. You imagine the most disgusting person you know and you think Pimli Prentiss is that person. Brilliant. 

Take your time to describe the character. In the end, if you can't fit the entire description of your character into one paragraph, feel free to stretch it into 2, or even more. It's better to explain everything to the reader than to leave the reader infuriated by being confused. Think about it. How many times have you set a book aside that got a little slow in places, as opposed to the book that you couldn't understand? I bet you it was the latter. We're willing to put up with wordiness if it leads us somewhere, but we can't read a writer's mind. As Kurt Vonnegut said: "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages." And since all stories are about characters, that's what you have to do, introduce your characters. You might argue with me that characters are also introduced via dialogue. Of course, of course they are. But before they even open their mouths, we need to know how their mouths look like, at least give us a glance, insert a dialogue line, and then continue description. And we will happily buy into your story.

Your story is right THE FIRST TIME

Photo by Brooke Shaden

This might sound like a paradox and a far fetched idea, considering common knowledge about the amount of rewrites every author has to go through to make final novel readable. Until last week, I was under the impression that true story comes out in rewrites. I felt like I have a vague idea where I'm going and that vague idea is improving with every Draft. What happened last week threw me off and made me rethink this. I started noticing that in Draft 5 I'd edit a sentence, then write a new one, and then discover that the new sentence is EXACTLY the same one I have written before, in earlier versions, as early as Draft 1. That felt trippy. It also felt like I came full circle, back to the original points that I've lost or dismissed in Draft 2 out of fear, in Draft 3 out of an urge to cut everything I could cut, and in Draft 4 out of perfection. Here is what I think this means.

Your subconscious knows better. The very first time you sit down to start writing, the first time you type up that sentence that starts your new novel, in Draft 1, it usually comes from a scene in your head that persistently wanted to get out. Before you get scared, before any thinking happens, it's pure emotion. And it's always right, it's why you want to write it down and share it with the world. But somewhere along the process all of our doubts start shadowing it, putting it in the corner, and then make us lose it completely. I think maybe that's the cause for writer's block - when we feel like the story is lost, that's when we don't know what to write about. This is just a theory, so feel free to disagree with me in the comments, but it feels right at this moment. Moreover, all of a sudden what Stephen King said in his On Writing made sense. He said that a story is like a fossil found underground, and all you do as a writer is gradually uncover it. So that first sentence, or those sentences that I would write again and again are points of anchor for my story that were always there, I just managed to lose them and find them again in the process.

Your story is a small thing, with big details around it. This is something that I have read about Fight Club and how Chuck Palahniuk, one of my favorite authors, came up with the idea. It started out as a short 7-page story published in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness, and only later it became Chapter 6 in the completed novel. The idea came to him after returning from a camping trip all bruised and being astounded as to why none of his coworkers asked him what happened. They all avoided it. Bingo. Remember what Chapter 6 is about? It's about the main character's boss not letting him to present at work because he's got a black eye. That's exactly what Chuck experienced when he showed up at work bruised. Emotion is the same, but scenario is very different. I've noticed the same stuff happen in my writing. Beginning of my Chapter 7 is the same as the very first idea I jotted down for my story way back in 2008. It repeated itself again in another attempt in 2010, then in Draft 1 it migrated to Chapter 4, and now finally it's back in Chapter 7 of Draft 5. How I didn't see this before, I don't know. I can only attribute my blindness to the fact that I'm writing a novel for the first time and am, of course, doubting EVERYTHING about it.

Your story is an emotional being. Every story is really a few characters being thrown into a situation and then dealing with it. Everything about it is emotional, because if it's not emotional, if it's pure facts, why read it? We read newspapers for facts. We read stories for drama. And, like every emotion, the first time we feel it, it's right. Before our brain kicks in and starts trying to make sense of it. So, no matter how crazy your first attempt sounds, it's the right one. Consider this. I don't know if you read Malcolm Gladwell, I do and love every single book of his. In particular, Blink. There he narrates a story of museum specialists who were called upon to identify an ancient statue, to confirm its authenticity. Every single one of them had an iffy feeling for the first few seconds they saw it, but then when they proceeded according to their established process, everything seemed to be legit. Needless to say, the statue was a fake, sorry to spoil it for you. Read the book for yourself, it's awesome. The point I'm trying to make is, all of those people FELT something before their brain kicked in. Evolutionary, we have been wired to feel and trust our intuition, to survive, to detect things and act quickly. Somehow along with being civilized, we lost this hunter-like ability and don't trust our gut as much anymore, yet we should. I think that's why the first time you write your story down, it's right. But it's hard to believe this, of course.

Having said all of this, I still wonder where this idea will take me. I suppose I'll see unravel in my second novel, trusting myself more second time around. But somehow in my gut I knew my story was right from that first moment I jotted down the first line. Then for 4 years I proceeded doubting myself to finally return back to it full circle. Fascinating. Did any of you have similar experiences? I'd love to hear in the comments. Please, please, please, with a cherry on top! So I know I'm not insane.