Stop me if you’ve heard this, but I fancy myself a writer. It has its moments, for sure. There are times that I sit down and pound a keyboard like Ben Stiller playing Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight (high five to the three people who saw that movie.) I’m talking about a full on state of ecstatic madness. Slamming keys, staring straight up at the ceiling, glancing back later to see a few hundred words of GOLD. Fucking gold, I tell you.

Then I have to connect it to something, usually a story. According to the rules, one of those has to have:

  • A beginning
  • A middle
  • An end

Blame Aristotle. Anyway, that’s the bare minimum. In addition to that, I’ve discovered to my chagrin that a story also needs to have characters and tension and some kind of cohesive theme that ties everything together. So after watching my word count shoot sky high, I have to go back and make sure that every word that I’ve fingerpooped onto the page acts in some way to reinforce movement or characterization or theme or some other such thing.

I can’t claim to have figured it out or anything, really but I’ll tell you what works for me: writing around it. It goes like this: read and re-read what I’ve written, pull out my notebook, and write about what happens next. I don’t write a bunch of questions like “What if the police captain had a talking tapeworm?” I write things like “The police detective’s tapeworm starts talking about how many drugs he’s been taking.” (Actually that’s what I would do if I was Irvine Welsh because that little scenario is in Filth which is a wonderful book that you should read.)

But the point remains. For some reason, putting pen to paper and writing about what happens next seems to be a pretty effective way for me to waddle through those vast expanses where I really don’t have any fucking clue what I’m doing.