Musings And Questions/Short Stories For The Mentally Tired

On The Subject Of Writing - 2020

I want to be clear. My method is a long, and painful one. It's messy, and convoluted, and will make you want to scream out against everything. That said, continue.

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The way you choose to write something says a lot about you. If you choose to write like me, it's because you don't know when to stop being formal, and people grow used to that. If you choose to write like a teenager with too much on the mind, u right like this. you dont capitalize & u shorten stuff sometimes you dont put ends to sentences.

When I write characters and dialogue, I don't try to make them all sound similar. I want them to have the same language, but speak it differently. I get inside their heads. I flesh out what they have been through, done, and seen. If I write about the terror of a girl being chased down the street, I make sure you know what she looks like. How her body feels. Her exhaustion, anxiety, and confusion. I try my best to force her terror down your throat and into your very soul. Because if you don't understand the pure, unadulterated fear, that primal urge to run, because you know that you will die better than you know your hands, then the story was for nothing. You can simply say, 'Well, it's not real. This can't actually happen.' And that is unacceptable to me. If the character feels cocky, then I do too. If they're scared, I am too. If they feel unbridled rage and the urge to kill, so do I.

It's not healthy, to live in someone else's head all of the time, let alone switch between different people's heads rapidly. You need to learn to separate who you are. The You writing the story, is not the same You who is running from that dark figure, and they both are not the You following in abject glee, staring at that woman ahead of you, knowing she will die by your hand. To know how a character with a disability feels, you need to spend an hour at a minimum in their condition. I once spent an entire day with no thumbs to write out a character properly. I spent three days in a wheelchair to understand how bad it is to not be able to walk anywhere. If I can't find the proper feeling or understanding, I will do my best to replicate it. If I need to write an all-knowing character who likes to live life on the easy side, then I'll do my best to put myself in that head space. If I need to write a cold blooded killer who waits carefully to strike their victim, then I will become that person. If I need the crazy guy who went insane because he cracked under the stress of his job, then I will do my best to recreate that.

One of the problems with this, is that those traits can stick around. I have been an unthinking machine of pain and torture before. I have been that man who was so depressed he almost jumped off a cliff. I kept some of those emotions, those understandings. I keep them with me now, and it pains me every day. To not act on the instincts that I forced myself to have. To save that last bit of food so I don't go hungry the next day, despite have the ability to make an entire meal. I write the stories, sure. But I make the people known. The bigger picture's story, comes after the individual's story. 

This can be of benefit to you as well. Say you want to court someone, better known now as flirting. You might not have ever done it before. Maybe you haven't done it recently, or you have very little experience, but experience nonetheless. Thanks to things like the internet and physical books, you can gather hundreds of thousands of stories of second hand experience. You might lose your head in the first second and become a gibbering idiotic mess of flesh and meat. But the experience gained from those stories lets you take a new perspective. Cold and calculating on how to get the desired result, or outrageously kind and flattering and seeing how the dominoes may fall (as a personal aside, I prefer to be flattering to any that I am interested in).

A thing to note about this, is that this doesn't just work for courting. Say you get caught in an alley and someone tells you to put your hands up. You might be about to run, but those secondhand experiences tell you that the best thing to do is comply, until you can fully assess the enemy. If they're small enough you can do your best to walk towards them and snap the weapon around on them and attempt to break one or more of their fingers. If they're too big for you, do your best to memorize how they look and their mannerisms. Study them and keep that information in your head until you can get to somewhere that will let you use it. 

You may be wondering what the hell this all has to do with how you write a story, an essay, or even just a short report. If you're here reading this, then I would assume that you've read at least one other entry in this book. I take long, meandering paths to my eventual goal, which was a short walk away. To write a story properly, you need to feel as though you are experiencing those emotions that you say your characters are feeling. That terror, that joy, that sense of comfort. Whatever it is, you have to truly understand what it means to be that person, flaws and otherwise, in that situation you choose to put them in. For an essay, try and understand what the person reading it wants to hear and see. For a report, be short and to the point. Understand you need to save time and make it simple, easy to understand, but also easy to expand upon.

I f***ed up recently. I tried to be someone that was only partially me, to someone I care for. I forgot my own rules. Don't try and pretend to be someone, actually be them. Having said that, they'll probably see this sooner or later. This whole journal thing is meant for me to put my deep, dark thoughts down, and my secret stories that would never fit with anything else. They are the stories of lives lived and lost, that no one will ever know the face behind, and more. To all who know me in reality, know that I've got a whole lot more hidden behind the curtain. More than anyone should have. More than I want. More than I can keep. And yet, keep it I shall. Pour your secrets into me, and they will never come out.