Thursday, January 19, 2012

Being Bad

I did a blog post sometime ago about how when I get bored I plan out crimes.  It's something to do for a compulsive planner who gets extremely bored with the mundane aspects of everyday life in a civilized world.  Well, civilized world is stretching it a bit, but for the majority of people in the United States life can get pretty predictable and boring from time to time.  I have to admit I haven't planned out any crimes in the last two years since I have started writing every day, that seems to have cured my boredom.
As in my previous blog post, one of the reasons I started writing was to provide an outlet for my over active imagination and a means of doing the crimes I have planned in the past if only in a fictional sense through the characters in my books.  The problem with me becoming a super criminal is I am a terminally nice guy!
Among the mental hang-ups we all develop about different aspects of doing things, like the tendency to slow your reading down as you approach the end of a book because sub-consciously you don't want it to end because you have been enjoying it so much.  I know I can't be the only person who does that!  Well, something similar is happening with me when I approach a point in writing a particularly bad thing in one of my books.  I slow down, don't write as much, I him haw around because I don't want to have this character shoot that character, or in a upcoming battle scene where I know I need to work out the details of the battle and at some point soon actually decide which ships make it and which ships don't.  I have to decide who lives and dies and it is bothering me on a mental level!
Realistically it's a fictional book.  These people only exist in the context of my books and in my mind.  Yet, because I am inherently such a nice guy it bothers me and causes my work to slow down and I find I have to literally force myself to continue.  This is silly I know but I can't imagine I am the only person this has ever happened to.  I know I imagine my favorite authors bombing the coliseum, assassinating heads of state, or bad guys jumping out of bushes bashing kid's heads in with baseball bats as easy as ever.  Does this kind of fictional work cause them any stress or hinder their ability to get down to work.  I feel bad even typing the last bit about bashing kid's heads in but James Paterson did that in one of his books.  He has by far the scariest bad guys I think I have ever read.  I wonder if it bothers him on some level writing the gory details of these horrible crimes.
I just thought I would share as I try and pass on tidbits of what I learn about writing as I realize them.  Since our writing is an extension of ourselves even if it is fiction, the learning about ourselves and what makes us be more productive and a better writer in many cases is learning about ourselves, our reservations, and our hang-ups.  So tonight I need to stuff the nice guy in a box, get out my red pen and play the part of the Incarnation of Death and figure who isn't going to make it through this book.  I have to grow and get through this because one of my future series deals with a whole new criminal element never before seen in history.  "Stolen Gangs" will be the first book of that series and it will be brutal, and the means of bringing out folders of past crimes I have planned and bringing them to life through the series.
Maybe I should try writing wearing my sons Darth Vader helmet!
May God Bless You and Have a Great Day.

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