A writing about writing - part 2

I'm not a story teller. That is why I don't think about writing books.

To tell a story, you have to have a story in mind. You have to imagine all the characters: what they do first thing when they get up, what they say to the barista at that local coffee shop where they are a regular, what they wear on a cold Tuesday... All these tiny things that you probably don't even notice when you read a story are what make the characters who they are. They make them imaginable for you as readers. They become alive in the story.

And you have to build the scenes, or the situations where your characters act in. You can put them in a poor house nested in a crappy neighborhood then give them cancer so their life becomes impossibly difficult and they will find the love of their life then but their life has become so impossibly difficult that it makes them cry and the love of their life cry and the readers cry. And then you decide to not kill them with cancer, you kill the love of their life instead. (A good thing about being a writer is that you can kill anyone in your book without getting arrested.)

Once you have the scenes set up, you have to put them together so they make a story. This is important because you shouldn't combine Korean dramas with John Green and a hint of Mark Haddon and call it your story. You can, but I won't read your book. 

Putting your scenes together is what they call "organization" or "structure". Do you remember what they told you about how to write an essay? First your write down a thesis sentence - that is the theme of your essay. Then you write down sub-thesis sentences - each of them is the theme of one paragraph. Then you write down supporting ideas and details. Then you put in transitions to make the whole thing cohesive. Then you add introduction and conclusion and a title. Then, you have your essay. It is organized, smooth, well-supported, easy to follow, and will get an A from your teacher. 

I'm not good at this. Writing to me is just catching thoughts and turning them into text. I don't make outline. Thoughts come and if they have a nice ring to them, I pick them, not in any particular order. It's like writing poetry. You write down a thought, then you write down a second thought. But the second thought has to rhyme with the first thought in some way, so you only have a few choices of how you can write it down. It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. There is only a few pieces that might fit with the one you have out, and there is only one piece that fits best. You try them out and choose the best one. Watch this:

My first thought: "I'm not writing poetry anymore"

My second thought: "Poems are sad"

"Poems" sound sadder than "Poetry", and repetitive patterns are sadder, too, (like when you are watching the rain), so I'm going to replace "poetry" with "poems" in my first thought. That way it sounds really sad.

"I'm not writing poems anymore

Poems are sad"

So now my third thought has to fit in the rhyme and the number of syllables and the stress patterns of the first two thoughts, and because there are not too many ways to fit in all of those things, I don't have a lot of choices to pick, which make it easier. It's like going to a shoe store and you only look at the shoes in your size because they will fit your feet. You don't have to look at the other shoes because they don't fit. If you just move to another country and you don't know your size there, you will have to try a lot of shoes on.

So my third thought could be "Roses are red" and cannot be "The chai latte I had yesterday at Panera tasted like soap" because "Roses are red" is shorter and "red" kind of rhymes with "sad", but "The chai latte I had yester at Panera tasted like soap" is too long and has nothing to rhyme with "sad" or "anymore". 

But I won't put "Roses are red" in there because I don't like this thought. It is like finding shoes that fit but you won't buy them because you don't like them. 

My writing is clear to me because it is my thoughts and I follow them. It is not clear to my readers because they don't know my thoughts. They don't know why I write about poetry after I write about structure of stories. These two thoughts stand next to each other in my head so I marry them to each other, but they look like strangers to my readers. 

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Hi. Thank you for reading again. I'll write more later because this thing is getting very long and I'm trapped in Mark Haddon's style and I need to escape first.