Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The Pages In My Head

I am always writing. Always. This is not an exaggeration on any level, I am always writing. It’s just not always on a page.

Everything I watch, read, and experience sets off an alternate scene in my head that my brain must follow to one conclusion or another before I can let it go. Visual stimulation is the best because I can take in what I’m watching and keep the brain-edits to a minimum. I disagree here, rework there, and tweak a bit of dialogue as I go, but for the most part I’m watching the movie or television show in front of me with 50% to the maximum 87.4% of attention I can give to anything that isn’t writing.

In contrast, reading is the worst activity. I have to stop every few scenes and work out what I would do differently or how I’ve just been inspired to fix something I’m working on, or how I can now do an entire series based on one throwaway line I’ve just read. This makes reading take forever and so when I have deadlines and other obligations, reading is the pleasure that’s sacrificed first. It’s also the one I fall back to when I can’t write for one reason or another as it’s impossible for me to get through a book, (fiction or non-fiction), without coming away with a story idea. It will fix any block, (read, lack of motivation), of any kind within the space of a chapter guaranteed. Of course sometimes this leads to a feverish writing of twenty pages—on the wrong story—but hey, progress is progress.

Speaking of the wrong story, music is the end-all/be-all of inspiration and the absolute worst and best source in my life for story ideas and head writing. Every song is part of a soundtrack and I can place myself back in a world with just the first note of the right playlist. Which, as you can guess, can throw off an entire day of writing on one story as a song slips in that drags my brain over to another. It usually won’t let go until I’ve at least handwritten a few (dozen) notes so as not to forget this new brilliant twist on things, never mind the edits patiently waiting to get out of the queue and on their way to submission. Yet as bad as it is, I can’t help but foster it by my habits.

I work out to music, walk everywhere to music, wait in line to music, ride the bus to music, read to music (when I’m trying to distract myself from writing to reading), and write to music, which turns my entire world to a music video unfolding in my head. Ten percent of all that will make it to paper and become something others take in and embrace on one level or another. The other 90% just keeps swirling, waiting for a time when something in its depths will work in a completely unrelated story with just the right tweaks.

I have entire fanfic seasons of my favorite TV shows in my head with spin-off shows and other manners of craziness because I couldn’t let an idea go. I have four book series all vying for space with the worlds moving and tumbling along without me as I do other things. My fingers are trying to edit the second short story while my brain is busily constructing the third novel in the same world and has moved on to book two in a completely different world for something I only have a page of notes on.

My Muse prefers productivity over patience and he will leave me behind to keep unfolding things as necessary, hoping I’ll catch up as I can. It’s overwhelming at times because so much is happening in my head that I have to fight to leave it enough to play around in the heads of others and soak in their creativity and joy. It’s a blessing because I know that if I open a document and leave it staring at me long enough, I’ll write something. It might not be the next scene but it’ll carry me through a day’s writing if I let it and leave me to bridge the gaps as the ideas come. It means there’s no fear when it comes to writing for me, just the deep desire that I wrote faster and slept better so that everything could have its day.

With all that said, I’m not a planner and outliner except for in the vaguest sense. I sit down with a scene or bit of dialogue in my head and a story grows around it. Sometimes I have an ending, other times a middle, every so often a beginning, which is nice as it gives you a place to start. But nothing is preordained and I write my stories the way you read them—wondering what will happen next. Yet by the second day of writing, although I can’t tell you what happens on the next page, I can tell you how many books are in the series for the current story arc being laid down and give you detailed background on characters that won’t come up for ages.

It’s all there. In my head. A liquid entity conforming to the shape of a given container on a given day, finding cracks and channels to work its way onto the page when I get that far. Keeping me company as I move through a world that doesn’t look quite the same to me as it does to everyone else. It’s a—well, it’s a lot of things. For now however, it’s another story to be told another time.

Head Writing Ramble Done

~X