Writing About Writing... A Plan Creates Itself

 

     If I told you I noticed what was happening and specifically planned to do so the way it has unfolded, I would be lying…

True Story© has created itself as its own host, as a perpetual virtual novel, if you will.  It was “officially” born on September 1, 2016 as an exercise, a place for me to flesh out ideas and keep my pen game up on the chance that one day I might realize my dream to write for a living.  Comments on The Bookface and a push from a then-girlfriend-now-wife and three other friends who I love dearly caused it to become “a thing.”

     “A Thing” became, as is my nature, something I became obsessed with the very production and presentation of to present every available Thursday and I did just that for almost two years before a surprise week in the hospital and the resultant fallout in 2018.  I still WANTED to write, but sometimes being benched can throw things askew.

     Two years of sitting still does NOT make a creative mind rest.  I still had ideas.  I still wanted to have time to sit down and write. As is my creative process, I was STILL mumbling shit to myself in the shower, during workouts and while my now-wife thinks I was spaced out at the other end of the couch playing Words With Friends.  A random idea pops into my head and I crack open my phone and it becomes a Gmail draft until I can get somewhere to make something more of it.  All I needed was the time to sit and put thought to vision.
Enter 2020…  We are ALL at home with a ton of spare time.  Yes, even those of us with kids.

     I had time to write again, two years of ideas in the bank and a support system right here in the house with me now.
But I needed to read back through some of my old work to make sure my “voice” has not discernibly changed during my hiatus.

I noticed something…

     The years of my stories committed to this website have read back as one huge-ass hellscape of somehow connected stories.  To let you in on a secret, I build an “out” to my stories when I am reaching for creative fuel sometimes.  Pop culture and current events are my go-to moves.  Other times, picking up on something I put down in an earlier story gives me JUST the spark I need to pick up and make a new story in a dearth of new ideas.  I noticed that this made for a set of stories that is connected, can be jumped into at any spot (except the Santa Story, you gotta read THAT shit in order) and referred back to and through as the story continues.

     I did not plan shit this way at any point.  Frankly, there IS no plan.  I sit down and when the fingers hit the keys, what comes out is what comes out.
Sometimes I just don’t feel like it.  I have my own laziness, or my method of getting ahead of writer’s block, to thank for the escape valve that allows me to work even while I don't wanna.  I have created a generous few characters that are not me and my wife for a reason.  It almost feels like one of those “special episodes” of a black dramady show in the 90s when I have painted myself into the corner of needing one, but the feedback I get from people with nothing invested in lying to me is that those are some of the funnest rides in this thing.

     All of my characters are based on people I know personally and love dearly.
Except Moe Phillips…
Moe is based on me; the shit that I would do and say if not for the constraints of human decency.  Moe is literally the best of my creativities and the worst of my proclivities.
[Phlip Note: BARS, bitches!]

     I’m rambling.

I have no real point to make or prove, it is Sunday so I am just Writing About Writing™.  I really guess my greatest hope is that one day someone who wants to write will look and see these as a look into a way of getting their own juices flowing.  If application of my methods leads them to greener pastures than I have found using them, I am okay with that.  I want everyone to do good, even if that means someone is doing better than me.
I don’t think I am reinventing the wheel.  Hell, where and how I was raised left me short of access to things to allow me to know if the things I say in some of my Writing About Writing™ is even “new,” but what I have made of my life in the in-between allows me the access to say it anyway.

I’m at 823 words including this sentence.
I’mma leave y’all to it this week, we already discussed last week how I am doing this for the love of it.  I work to pay these bills.  No worries, though.  The "Indefinite Novel" will continue.