Day: April 17, 2021

The difference between good writing and ho hum writing is in the details–not the character details per say, but the moments a character has an introspection, and they create a world view that the reader can identify with. It is through the eyes of the characters that we see the world and the story and even the characters themselves develop and unfold. I tend to forget this important slice of minutiae on the first pass of a story. It is usually during reading, Minecraft meditations, moments of silent reflection on the characters, etc that I find myself remembering to include the tidbits and then quickly scribbling them down on my phone in the form of a text. This is why writers ought to carry notebooks. This is why writers need to think about their characters outside of the story and outside of the context of the story. A reader can feel such things. A reader can feel when a character only exists in that moment on the page and never before or again.

Another recent trick I’ve discovered is thinking about a single scene from each characters perspective–even writing it down if time allows. I believe I will put that into play for the next CRW workshop I host. Take a scene that features more than one character (or in the case of only one character, make the space around them a character and tell the story from its perspective as a second form) and tell that scene from the perspective of each character, taking into account history, motivations, and especially world view.

I have my partner to thank for a lot of this. I am working to see the world from her perspective and see my own actions through her eyes. It is not a pleasant view. It hardly ever is. However, it is important to see the person you are if you hope to achieve the goal of becoming the person you want to become.

Lodestone

There are over 1400 biochemical stress responses ranging from behavioral, to physical, to psychological. It is said that the things we see in comics and movies–thew so called super powers are dreamed up ways that people wish they could respond to stress. A lot of things ‘are said’ and I often wonder who it is that is saying them. I wonder who ‘they’ are that gets in everyones head and helps us to maintain this shared hallucination of a reality. I wonder if ‘they’ are like me. I suspect that they must be in some fundamental way, just as I suspects there are more people like me. I know this because I’ve read the stories. I’ve seen the many pieces of fiction in cultures dating back to before BC. I’ve felt ways I know I should not be feeling, but I’ve never found the source. I’ve never found another one of us.

Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Solomon Jackson and I have a very serious problem.

I was born in New York City. I only lived there for a short time. I remember the tall buildings and all of the people. I remember walking around as fast as I could among all of it and never being able to keep up. My mom would carry me down flights of stairs into the bright tunnels of the subway where it smelled like my diapers used to smell when she didn’t change them for a very long time. Down there people would stand in these tunnels and sing or play music or dance on a sheet of cardboard, always pointing to an open cup when they were done. When the train came it drowned them out with sound and people and I would get swept up in the wave. My mom would hold on to me or sit me on a bench high where I could see above their waists and she could see me and feel safe.

I hated this. I hated going down into the tunnels. in spite of how large they were and how small I was I always felt trapped. I always felt like everyone was watching me, if not with their eyes then with another secret part of themselves, knowing I was there and hating me for it. When I closed my eyes I could imagine them moving around me as a swarm, each individual leaving a small part of themselves in the space I filled and I would collect that part of them. It wasn’t until I was in fourth grade and Mrs. Miller did her unit on magnetism that I built a frame of reference for what was happening. In that class shw showed us a metal egg. She laid the egg down in a bed of paperclips and rolled it around. The paperclips stuck to the egg, building a shell around it. That is how the emotions that people left on me would would stick to me.