The Strange Case of Dr Me-writer and Mr Me-logician

So I have this peculiar problem. I spend an afternoon typing up fiction, and it's all good, I move the plot along, increase the page and word count appreciably, yadda yadda yadda, fun and games, etc. Good news.

Comes five o'clock--generally it's five o'clock--and I'm not written out, but I choose to quit. Usually I choose to quit due to the encroachment of this living colors thing. The parts of my life with realistic commitments attached, like eating, peeing, and socializing. The stride that I feel like I've hit in the afternoon doesn't feel strode out yet, but I decide that "quit while you're ahead" is a good strategy. Take a break is a good strategy. Come back to it later is a good strategy.

Around then the logician begins to push in on my creativity. After these encroaching, living color commitments are all took care of and all, I think to myself, "Hey, I've got some stride left. Why not go back to fiction land and play for a while? I haven't messed up the lives of these imaginary characters yet. It'd be fun, and further my whole 'want to be a novelist' outlook on life. Make me feel professional, and justified."

But I remember those times when the writer in me ran dry. The logician in me remembers those times the writer got confused and the goat in me pushed through the muzzy eyes and produced unpleasing prose, which the critic in me got bored of, and the cynic in me used as justification to stop writing altogether for quite some time. Telling the lamb in me that I obviously had written myself into a corner, that I no longer had inspiration, and I should wait for the artist in me to rejuvenate and reassert itself.

Such multiplicity. I'm so confused.

Recently, the craftsman in me is stronger than the artist. Artistry, to me, has come to be so much unimaginative, feel-good morallity, important because it provides the gut reaction to the living colors trying to screw with my opus, but useless as a driving force or a forming ideal or any kind of well of invention. The craft of the thing is of greater, more interesting, and more potent reality....

And the logician says, "That is so much over-impassioned hash."

Thus most of my evenings are spent quietly waiting for the dawn, when the circumstances will again be right for the writer in me to assert itself once again over the mathematician, and rise to create those things which will be my legacy.

In the meantime, I'll be writing blogs as if they were monologs by various characters from Andromeda. Go me. Woot.

Voice Screpency Restoration

Ah, Blue Oyster Cult. Equilibrium begins to be restored.

Voice Indescrepency

So I'm trying to write the next bit of "Don't Get Wet in the Shade" and I've got Eddie Izzards voice running about in my head talking about jam!

My life as a writer has officially become stressful.

Cleverness and Fright

Q: What effects do cleverness have upon your reader, when your reader reads the things you wrote?

A: Ask someone more studied than I.

Here, however, are my thoughts.

The story is: rundown carnival. Chain saw weilding demonic clown wants to kill everything.

Cleverness is personable. If your characters, your narrative, is clever, funny, flippant, quippant, and all around hee-hee to read, your audience has something human with which to associate. Make them feel that what they are reading is about and by real people, who like to laugh, and they have an immediate excuse for why the scary things are not real. If they see that, at the drop of a banana skin, everyone--bad guy, good guy, narrator and all--will dissolve into chuckles, which the reader is sharing in, then your reader is able to step back and say, "Hey, this isn't real. The demonic clown with the chain saw is fake, and will not come and get me, because he is, in fact, a good natured comedian, just play-acting at being loony scary. Tra-la-la."

Remove cleverness: Reader becomes afraid of the dark. Without occassional laughs, for no reason but a turn a phrase, without that personable quality, there is no escape. There is less humanity, and the reader sits when the tale is done, and they know that clown is just waiting inside Santa Claus, or their Dad, or in their closet.

The narrative voice knows everything. Cleverness is a sign that the narrative voice knows everything is going to turn out alright in the end, that the story is about the ride and the reader can relax because it has a happy ending. Without cleverness, with a narrator who is frightened, who cannot be clever because he knows the end is messy, your reader doesn't know what will happen, but knows to be afraid.

Yep. Cleverness and fright.