Scrambled Eggs

Another dear friend/fellow author posted an article today about "method writing," asking if it's the upcoming trend for novelists, and he and his commenters agree that if you're not researching and/or immersed in what you're writing, you don't have any business writing in the first place. (Read the article here.)

For me, at least, the writing process begins with immersion; it's as if I'm approaching my characters as actual people and eavesdropping on their conversations, taking in their environments, etc., writing down everything I see and hear. Then, some of the characters begin expounding on their relationships, their circumstances, and their feelings about all of it, while describing the subtler nuances of where they are: smells, temperature of the air, the weather, light and shade, all kinds of things.

Once I've gotten a sizeable portion written down, I'll begin my research: like Rob Cockayne mentioned earlier, watching movies and reading articles and history about the area. Almost always, I'm quite surprised by how on point my vibes were about a place, despite never, ever having been there or experienced anything like it.

Recently I've been cleaning house spiritually, questioning and throwing out absolutely everything I've ever known ~ no easy feat for a person raised in a mostly strict, always fanatical Christian-oriented family, in a part of the US notorious for unlimited varieties of Christianity, to the point that state-level government is controlled by Christian morals. That'll be another post, though. I said all that to say that I'm looking at soul-recycling as a viable possibility, and sometimes I wonder if my ability to get at least a basic grasp of foreign cultures (and partially speak or understand some difficult languages) isn't related to that possibility.

What I'm positing is maybe I'm not immersing myself in a story, so much as remembering it, because that's exactly what it feels like. When I write, the character in POV is actually giving me dictation and running narrative, sometimes so quickly that it's hard for me to keep up. The weird thing is that I feel like that character, while being his or her own individual entity, is also me, and what they're telling me is stuff I already knew from another time and place. I can feel his or her agony, joy, apprehension, terror ~ everything. I smell what they smell. I hear what they hear. It's all in real time, no matter when in the story it happens.

It's this very thing that makes an outline or timeline impossible for me. My husband and co-author tends to have a much more structured style, so he's an outliner and writes in a much more linear way; whereas I feel almost guilty taking the credit for just being the person taking dictation from somebody else. The story doesn't feel like it's mine, or that I came up with it. It already happened, and my lowly job is taking it all down and transforming it into a story-like structure.

The closest comparison I can make is when Paul McCartney was interviewed about writing "Yesterday." He said that he just woke up with the melody playing in his head one morning, and it was so intensely familiar that he was convinced that he was plagiarizing it from some other source he had forgotten about. It was so overpowering, in fact, that he had no choice but to go straight to his piano and start getting it down, filling in the lyrics with "Scrambled Eggs" until he could work out what they should be.

So that's it for me. That's how it works.

But here's the really sad part: this voices-in-your-head kind of thing is diagnosed as schizophrenia, which I was in November of 2014, and given medication to make the voices stop, because they're not always past-life creative geniuses. Sometimes they're quite evil and need to be silenced. The medication silenced them, but all other voices were silenced, too.

It makes me sadder than you know. I'm hoping beyond hope that, someday, I can conquer (or at least subdue) the wicked parts that want to kill me, and rescue the actual people that have something to say, stories to tell. Because I have unfinished business, and I really, really miss that scrambled eggs feeling.