As someone starting a blog just for the practice of writing, I seem to find myself thinking about it an awful lot since I started it recently (yesterday). I got here through author advice and through over-working the front half of my book. Having provided a bit of background and history in my first blog, I’m going to vaguely setup how “the book” came to be. My hope is to add to the narrative of why I’m here blogging with you now.
“The book” doesn’t have a title, for one. I’ve gone through a couple since beginning it years ago, picking it up and then putting it back down…all in different seasons of my life. This yielded a lot of different takes on what the focus of the title should be. I will say this, though, the book began with a single directionless sentence.
“The dust had settled.”
That’s not to say that those words are still the very first in the book as they are not. But the whole project started there while I was bored on a second gen Chromebook before the band I directed had to perform at a football game. School ended at 2:45 with the football game beginning at 7. Band call time was 6, so I often found myself with lots of empty time such as this.
If I remember right, I had just finished the entire Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Besides feeling utterly betrayed (no worries as I will not inundate you with spoilers), I constantly found myself remembering the series’ opening line:
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Just…wow what an opening line. It assumes you know things that you, as a reader, definitely wouldn’t know on your first read. For example, the word “gunslinger” helped me to immediately see so much about the world without another single word. The gunslinger, without any description, instantly had clothes, stature, and even a face. And having that sentence set in the desert gave me a climate and even a smell. King made me squint my eyes to sunlight I couldn’t actually see as it bounced off the dunes. I swear that, in the moment I read that sentence the first time, I felt warmer than I had prior. With so few words he made me feel and see so many different things.
Not to make all of my blog posts about thanking authors, but thank you so much for that sentence, Mr. King (though I wish I had taken your in-book warning to stop reading book 7 when you gave it). Anyways, I wanted to to do the same thing, and thus “the dust had settled” was born.
Now, I’m under no delusion that I’ve replicated the effect of that opening line, but I’m also completely aware that, even at the tender age of 43, I’m a complete rookie here…and that’s ok.
The sentence slowly became some paragraphs. Revisions inbetween classes turned into characters and a flow. This all formed a preface and chapter 1 a lot sooner than I had imagined. As I mentioned in my first post, I sit down and write with an attitude of “ok, now what happens.” And as I really started to write back then I noticed something: that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hit with “blank canvas syndrome.”
Whenever I would compose or arrange music for either my choir or band (especially composing), I would run into an almost immediate writer’s block starting out. Half of the the process was finding my way out of that block each and every time I sat down to write music. Arranging was easier than composing as it’s working from already existing material, but it would still happen when it came to voicing or, say, marching percussion parts.
Whenever I worked on “the book” and (as I’ve only recently learned) this blog, I’ve not found this block to happen. That doesn’t mean I would keep everything I did end up writing on any given day, but I never had any trouble writing forward (or even, sometimes, backward). So, no matter what was going on in life, I was always able to pick “the book” up and make progress, even if it was by baby-steps.
Truth be told, that doesn’t mean I was dutiful in keeping “the book” going as I very much was not. School, college, band…I had tons of excuses for not sitting down and working on it. And, honestly, most times I didn’t even need an excuse. Recently, though, I’ve been making an effort to write every day…both in “the book” and here in the blog. Day 2/Post 2…so far so good.
“The Book” is completely outlined and into Chapter 5 is written up to page 75. I even have notes for how Book 2 begins. I don’t mean any of this to be anything but descriptive of how it’s going. I can at least tell you this: it makes me happy to write it and even happier to have my wife read it.
The real trick, I’m finding, is trusting her to be completely honest with me about it. As far as current levels of adversity go, I’ll take it.
Best,
Bryce
OffOfMadison 