I’ve been having trouble for the past week getting back into the flow of my writing—if Darin takes any more vacations (and then promptly falls ill), I’ll probably be done for.
Beyond that, however, I had the weirdest experience last week while writing.
I described it to a friend of mine this way: You know how when you’re driving, you zone out, and suddenly you come to and think, Why am I in Pasadena? (She lives in LA. It’s far more likely she’d end up in Pasadena than, say, I would.)
I had the same thing happen to me last week while writing.
I had the weirdest feeling of suddenly “coming to” and realizing that everything I was writing was MADE UP.
This was not my usual self-flagellation—I wasn’t on my own case for untrue stuff. This was more along the lines of suddenly realizing that writing fiction is the act of making shit up.
I’ve been writing fiction since I was 4. (Yes. This is true. I wrote—in my own handwriting—a short story for my grandparents about a magic well.) And only last week did I have any sense of how deeply odd this little occupation of mine is. These images in my head? Not really there! These words I put down on the page? Describing things that are beyond not true—they’ve never happened!
It was easily the weirdest out-of-body experience I’ve ever had.
I’ve gotten over it. Well, not the point where the words are flowing again—more like being expelled, one bloody painful syllable at a time, instead of my usual typing mania—but I don’t feel quite so strange about it.
Still: I remember the sensation of looking at the screen and thinking, What the hell? No wonder people believe in possession. When your POV switches like that, it’s deeply disconcerting.
Piers Anthony comments at the end of his ‘On A Pale Horse’ book that he never suffers from writers block. Apparently he churns stuff out, and *even* as his mind wanders, he continues to log the digressions, with flags so he can trim them out, or save other story ideas for future use….
This wasn’t a problem with writer’s block so much as a sudden realization that writing fiction means you’re just making it all up. I don’t know how to express it better than that (and me a writer…sigh). I am reminded of the Peanuts cartoon where Linus is suddenly aware of his tongue and he can’t do anything because there’s this *tongue* there.
I never have writer’s block. If I have a notion of what to write about, I can write for pages and pages. It might not be any good, but I can write. Of course, there are the times when I have no confidence in my ideas, and maybe that’s what writer’s block is about. But if I have the slightest notion of what to write about, I can.
This made me laugh tonight. I know exactly what you mean. I had a philosophy professor once who commented that he had absolutely zero ability to producer “imagery” in his mind. That if he hadn’t seen it, he couldn’t picture it, even if it was described in words. I was 100% certain he had to be making that up, because how on earth could he not make up imagery? I didn’t realize that some people really can’t just conjure up entire worlds and scenes and be in that image. When I am writing, I am there in that scene, and it’s as real to me in that moment as any other real scene that I can “remember.”
But yeah, we make shit up. And that is kinda amazing that the rest of society doesn’t just label us pathological liars and toss us collectively into an institution.