Since last I blogged on "Something Spatial" something fairly significant has occurred: I have begun writing "professionally." Why quotation marks? Because we tend to think of professionals as people who get paid for what they do, and as a writer I am currently unpaid, an unpaid professional. I am mooching off the family income in hopes that this may change if I plug away hard enough. Certainly it is wellnigh impossible to write except as if one is doing it for a living, that is, getting up and writing every day. I have tried part-time, I have tried after-hours, but it is a truth universally agreed upon that the morning hours are precious for creative efforts. Likewise, any other creative effort, i.e., teaching a course or running a school, saps precious creative juices needed to put flesh on the bones of imaginary people, and shine light upon imaginary places and things.
Since establishing myself as a "professional" I have finished the manuscript of my non-fiction book Daimyo & Saint and sent it off on its long, long adventure to publication: the first selection of presses having said "no," another one is considering it and soon another will be asked. "Never give up," the agents say, even as they reject you! I will keep tinkering with the manuscript as long as it is in my hands and new information turns up, and have spent months fixing its maps with the help of knowledgeable friends. But meantime one moves on! This fall, years of gathering background research, days of driving across the Roman roads of France, the reading of draft first chapters to fellow writers at Historical Novel Society meetings, the attending of a recent conference of the HNS in Denver to gather vital information and insights, reading about writing in essays by Ursula K. LeGuin and the New York Times, reading chapters aloud to my husband and having expert friends turn an editorial eye upon them... all have "paid off" as my long-prepared-for Big Roman Novel, Ourania, Worthy Daughter of Herodes, has finally quickened into life. Long-established characters have finally popped up in three dimensions, new characters have arisen out of the ether to arrest them, marry them, or bake for them.
People ask me "how do you get yourself to write?" and I say you have to just sit down and do it, but of course that sounds simple, as if what you get when you "just sit down" is the finished product. By no means! You have to think it through, plan it out, decide basically what part of the story you must tell today, THEN sit down to write it so that you now have something to revise, some material. It is like sculpting, say, a bust out of clay: you must make the rough wire armature, you must slap on the proper sort of clay, and THEN you can begin to form the head into something that looks like your subject. I generally call it "laying track," because the first spinning of the story is like putting track into a desert, calling up images that had no existence before on any page. Once the track is down, you can begin to explore the new territory that you have begun to settle, and you will see more and more deeply into it, the more you go, until a full enough picture emerges that you can move on to the next stretch.
And another thing: characters will reveal their reason for existing, if you ask them. When my friend Sue Mote shared her learning that every key character in a story has a secret, I asked mine and discovered the key to the whole plot. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, so many others began with a vision or scrap of poetry that they didn't understand immediately. Learning about it taught them the story they needed to tell. It is mysterious and wonderful!
Just now, all those interesting characters are resting and considering their next moves as other creative projects demand their handler's time: writing newsletters, baking breads, buying gifts, directing pageants... in other words: Christmas. But with the new year of work (no quotation marks there) they will be back, new track will be laid, new revisions made, and who knows? Maybe a publisher will take note, in 2016! All the best in the meantime!