Becoming a Novelist - A Work in Progress

I’ll start off by saying that I don’t really think that writer’s block is an excuse, but at the same time it’s also not broken fingers. The psychology of the situation is beyond me, but it’s also not like trying to type with broken fingers. Although there may be some real manifestations of something like a “writer’s block”, it may in many cases be something more like “writing well block”. Since “writing well” is something I don’t necessarily feel pressured to aspire to, I have yet to encounter something like writer’s block. If I feel afflicted some time in the future, though, I’ll be sure and document it here.

So what’s my excuse for not writing these many decades I’ve stumbled the earth?

Writer’s fugue is what I call it, and I’m guessing that every good writer has it. The problem for me is that I hate the feeling…

You sit at your computer, notebook, smartphone, or parchment, dip your feather in some kind of berry juice and start to compose. You start with a few words but by the second line you are gone… in another world… experiencing life as your characters… fuguing so to speak.

Interruptions fail around you, nothing can push its way through the thick clouds, the thick smoke product of your creativity, until it lifts and your left with a few pages full of words, an empty mind, and an appetite for sushi or some other food unobtainable in a timely manner. That’s the fugue that takes you away into your writing, and from the perspective of a novelist work in progress, this should be a very good thing.

… unless of course you like to have control of your mind and faculties. Hell, I don’t even drink, but who needs drink or drugs when sitting down to write can take me out of reality like crack could only dream of.

My excuse, fellow novelists and novelist works in progress, is that the fugue scares the shit out of me. It makes me envious of werewolves to whom a kind monster hunter will say, “Hey man, I’ll just lock you up in here so you can’t hurt yourself or anyone else, and I’ll come get you when all is well and your episode has passed.” Maybe a good 2 hour a night lockdown with no cares and no fear of the fugue is what I need to get things done.

For now though, it’s a matter of trying to manage the fugue well enough to get words on paper and make magic while keeping sane, even if it means keeping a toe in the cold real world while “going in”.

EPILOGUE

Successfully avoided any reference to “Inception” thank you very much… I believe I even managed to avoid the words “deep” and “deeper” though I won’t deny that there was a slight temptation given it’s elite meme status.

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