Why Now?

I’ve been sitting on the idea of starting a blog and building an audience for as long as I’ve known I want to write for a living. What, precisely, about this moment in time made it ‘correct’ for me to start publishing my writing on the internet? On one level, it’s a matter of confidence; I know I’m actually going to have a finished novel on my hands in the not-too-distant future, and my head is overflowing with other stories I want to tell after that one. I’m naturally skeptical of my own impulses, but if I can finish a novel, I can handle a weekly blogpost, right?

Another reason is deeply personal: I lost a close friend to suicide last year and my perspective on life and death changed irrevocably. Where death had long been an abstraction, a distant concern, something I had the rest of my life to figure out, it suddenly became a more concrete part of my reality. We can just disappear at any moment, so why put off doing the things that could make our brief time in this world more meaningful? If I look at my own life like it’s a story I’m writing, then that’s the ‘why’. That’s my character arc, my motivation.

Reality is so much more complex than that, though. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, and for every apparent cause there are ten unseen variables that could have had just as large an impact on the outcome. I’ll never really know what happened in my brain that lead to the decision to start this blog, because none of us every really know why we do anything. I felt an impulse one day, and I acted on it. We do things, and then we tell ourselves stories about our thoughts and feelings and how they lead to the decision to do the thing we did, but modern brain research suggests that consciousness is too slow to play a role in decision making. A huge part of my enjoyment of writing comes from the discovery of my own unconscious mind; I come up with a scenario (somehow) and then I ask myself how my characters will react and how the conflict will be resolved, and then I wait. I think about it as I’m falling asleep at night. I think about it when I’m getting ready for work in the morning. Eventually, I sit down to write again and, if I’m lucky, the answer just pops into my head.

I believe it’s a feedback loop: conscious ideations become inputs to unconscious brain processes which run in the background, so-to-speak, and those processes in turn give rise to conscious thought. I’ve learned to trust the process, and that eureka moment is the high I chase as a writer. A recent example: I’d gotten my characters into a pretty rough situation, and spent a few weeks thinking about how they were going to get out. I had decided on a deus ex machina, last-minute return of an old character, and while I was unhappy with this solution, it seemed to be my only option. Soon after I sat down to write the scene, however, an alternative solution suddenly materialized in my awareness, along with all the character and plot implications it would have. It was like a stranger had written up a full report for me and slide it across my desk, and it was much better than what I had been planning on writing. The joy of that moment, and the wonderment of being so pleasantly surprised by my own brain, had me laughing out loud and grinning like an idiot.

I don’t think this is some unique gift, or that I’m at all special. We’re all the same species, and we all have the same brain, more or less. I believe that anyone who wants to write can write, and anyone who reads a lot and writes a lot can learn to write well if they put in enough time. My own writing has been strongly influenced by Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, and most of all, Ian M. Banks. I was introduced to his writing a year or two ago by that same close friend I mentioned earlier. We read half a dozen books from The Culture series together before she disappeared from my world forever. Player of Games might be my favorite science fiction story of all time, and it’s a great place to dive into his sci-fi writing if you’re at all interested in luxury space communism. I want to find the time to finish the rest of Banks’ bibliography some day. He died in 2013, the same year his final work was published, and for a time I believed it to be tragic that he clearly had more stories to tell when his time ran out. Now, I realize it couldn’t have been any other way: no matter how much I write I’ll never be finished, and whenever it’s my turn to disappear from this reality, I’m sure I’ll be taking plenty of untold tales with me.

I’d better get started, hadn’t I?