The Importance of Capturing the Spark

Laying in bed the other night I was suddenly struck by what seemed an extremely cool idea for a story, so, as I've read I should, I grabbed my iPhone from the nightstand and jotted it down as a note for later.

This is what I wrote,

Soul sipper soul light
Flicker of detectable flame of life of magic user. One is dead steady black flame, etc
Illegal to sip souls, addicted to it was a game for rebellious youth. Now killer...

When I read it now I can only guess what was meant by "etc" or the ellipsis "...". The moment of clarity has long passed. Aside from the obviously vague items, most of this takes a fair amount of reconstruction and imagination to turn into anything useful, and yet it's enough to spark a creative process down a pathway my mind has been once before. The ideas may be terrible, cliche and tired, or impractical for a story of any real length but I certainly can see the value in capturing a moment's creative spark for later.

This got me thinking of the Moleskine I had carried around last year during my writing classes and writing experiments. Hadn't I kept a section as a journal of story and scene ideas? Once I had its leathery cover in my hands and had removed the elastic binding, I flipped it open to the very back and amongst others found these little dusty turds.

A battle or ritual with Prime Evil leaves a mark. Protag now struggling to fight [Prime Evil] climactically discovers the evil is inside him and was all that time. Becomes blured borders between identities IE. Horror Harry Potter

Data heist from High Security data centre, no one expected physical attack, Maybe Botnet DDOS misdirect attack (paid some kid/fallguy)

Encryption with a human key/cipher. Either genetic or something taught/learned.

Maybe nothing special there but some things to get me thinking. Flipping around I found the Scene Ideas/Chance Moments sections and was truly struck by some of the scenes I had seen in my real life or imagined.

Teens raving about "Bees! Bees! They are really important. If they die we die."

Two super goths [Editor's note: I don't know proper terminology] as a couple, him an Alice Cooper, her female Marilyn Manson (eyebrows shaved painted white with drawn eyebrows) and between them, cute normal little girl in My Little Pony clothes. [their daughter]

Near office buildings gust of wind catches yellowed leaves of branches and they dance in a column through the intersection catching the sun and turning into Golden Dancers in the middle of the air over the busy, distracted masses.

Elderly man waiting forlornly, solemnly, at a set chess table in the library/park no longer waiting for an opponent who will never arrive again. Staring at me.

As I read those now, some of them seem interesting, and some of them strike me deeply as I remember exactly what I had seen or imagined. Each of them could help break a spell of writer's block or be included to flesh out an otherwise mundane scene.

If nothing else, these captured little sparks of creativity and observation, so hastily preserved in ink like so much dinosaur DNA in amber, have prompted me to finally break the multi-month draught of postings on this blog. And that alone is proof of the importance of capturing the spark.

Why is it so Hard to Write?

For as long as I can remember I had a knack for putting words together.  My ideas were often innovative and my stories contained a through-line that made them eminently readable, at least for a grade-schooler.  Yet for as long as that has been the case it has also been true that for me writing has always been extremely hard.

When I say writing is hard for me, I don't mean that it is difficult to slap words down or make sentences that work.  What I mean is that the act of writing well, writing to my own expectations, is a lot of hard work. As I start work on a blog post or a speech ideas swirl around in my head like a magnificent maelstrom and it's all I can do to try to capture the essence of a single sentiment, let alone weave that tempest into a coherent tapestry of ideas.  I can see glimmers of the final picture I want to paint in my head, but as I plod through one poorly rendered concept after another I realize how much more work it needs, how far from the path I've deviated.  And at some point I forget what path I was on as I find forks in the road that seem to lead me far from my opening paragraph.

I've never understood how someone can be lacking words in a composition. For me I am always flooded with them.  A half dozen lines per idea and I've prose'd my way into an amalgam of related concepts that spans many pages and, like modern Physics, with no clear Unifying Theory of Everything to help it make sense.  It is hard to write well because it is hard to express the million micro epiphanies I have as I explore an idea in my mind.  It is hard to write well because every line I write is a "little darling", to quote popular literature on writing, and I cannot sacrifice enough of them to earn the cogency that I need to powerfully make the point that plays within the powers of my mind.

It is hard for me to write because it takes so long to do it. I am a perfectionist.  I was inspired to write a speech recently for Toastmasters and instead of jotting down some ideas, I spent an hour and a half researching the barest roots of the essential fundamentals surrounding the topic. Does a normal person when writing a short speech about freedom of ideas and intellectual property research Platonic Idealism? Perhaps they do and they are simply faster at it than me. Despite my own derision towards my approach I yearn to read the results that ultimately await.  I want to see come to life a powerful and insightful speech about the relativity of ideas and ownership contrasted with the concept of underlying truths and greater good.  It would be a speech about society and our futures as humans on this floating rock, which is a lot to evolve from the quote, “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism, to steal ideas from many is research.”.  I become crippled by the burden of that concept, it is too big for me to treat adequately.  My skill is not enough.

Words challenge me.  They challenge me to be used as they pop unbidden into my head from some netherworld of forgotten references.  Half the time I have the meanings wrong and the spelling worse, yet they demand my attention as if they alone can solve the riddle of a sentence.  More often than they should they wend their way into my rose garden and present their difficult barbs to my readers and diverting my careful tending.  It is a weakness I suppose, and one that author's like Stephen King have nearly completely abolished to their great success.  The track record is clear, run without the added weight of complex words and you reach the finish line straighter and faster and everyone remembers how you got there.  Yet, it remains a perniciously persistent predicament which faces me endlessly, needlessly, and heedlessly.

In the end, deep down, I know most of my problem is lack of practice.  Even author's like Stephen King struggled through their first novels and developing a writing system and routine.  Now they bang out a book a year, business as usual, and are having a great time doing it. So maybe I need to take a page from their book and just write.  Get the first draft on paper, even if it is equivalent to what one of my old English teacher's called "Verbal Diarrhea".  At least then that steaming mess of verbs and nouns and ideas has been parked somewhere and I can move on to working with it, flushing it, or starting on something new.

I've written this blog post that way.  Grabbed time I didn't have and blurted it all out.  No revision, no review, no second guessing.  Not even the poop reference.  And aren't we all the richer for it? If you are reading this out in writer/blogger land, let me know how you deal with the difficulty of writing.  What challenges you and makes writing hard?