What Fuels Your Writing?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Why do writers write? Because it isn’t there.” – Thomas Berger

So how can you get gas these days for under $4?

Eat at Taco Bell.

Ba-dump-bump.

And where do you get fuel for your writing? That’s today’s question.

Some of the ways are as follows.

Caffeine

Not everyone begins the day with a cup of joe, but it has been a mainstay of many a writer, starting with Balzac. He overdid it, of course. Drinking up to 50 cups of heavy-duty mud during his writing time, which was generally from 1 a.m. to 8 a.m., he produced nearly 200 novels and novellas before succumbing to caffeine-induced heart failure at the age of 51.

But the benefits of moderate coffee intake are now well known. It wasn’t always so. I was looking at a 1985 edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which had a headline about how a couple of cups of coffee posed a danger of developing heart disease.

Which reminds me of that scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, where a health-food store owner is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and wakes up 200 years later.

There he sees doctors smoking and talking about the benefits of tobacco, steak, and hot fudge.

“Those were once thought to be unhealthy,” a doctor explains. “Precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”

That’s coffee for you. In moderation, caffeine boosts alertness, powers up short-term memory, accelerates information processing, and increases learning capabilities.

I have a multi-published friend who favors diet, decaffeinated Coke. To which I say, “What’s the point?”

And to you I ask:

Do you have a favorite beverage to sip when you write?

There is also inner fuel that motivates writers.

Something to Say

There’s an old axiom in Hollywood: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Meaning story comes first. A “message picture” can devolve into preachiness or propaganda if one is not careful.

Same for fiction. If you’ve got an issue you want to write about, go for it. But don’t let your characters become one-dimensional pawns in a hobbyhorse chess game.

My advice is to give your hero a flaw, and your villain a justification. Remember, a villain doesn’t think he’s pure evil, except for this guy:

Write a “closing argument” for your villain, as if he’s arguing to a jury to justify everything he’s done. This is great psychological backstory, and you can drip some of it in. Believe me, this will make your villain more chilling and the reading experience more emotional, which is your goal.

Fun

Brother Gilstrap has said on more than one occasion that he is tickled he gets paid to “make stuff up.” That’s not a small matter. When you have joy in writing, it shows up on the page.

“In the great story-tellers, there is a sort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative; and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader. Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, “the joy of living”) the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales which shines through Treasure Island is perhaps the main reason for the continued popularity of the story. The author is having such a good time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a good time in reading it.” – Clayton Meeker Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction (1919)

A Healthy Brain

Another reason to write is to fight cognitive decline. This has been mentioned here several times, by Sue and myself.

When you exercise your head through the rigors of writing a coherent and complex story, you keep it in fighting trim.

Last Friday was the 98th birthday of Mel Brooks. He and his partner, the late Carl Reiner (who died in 2020 at age 98) were trained in the Catskills style of improv comedy. Always on, always with the word play. At parties they started doing an improv skit about a 2000-year-old man, with Reiner as the interviewer. It got so popular they made a comedy album that became a huge hit, and they did their skit well into their 80s. Here’s a bit:

That’s why I’m skeptical of letting AI do your creative thinking. Every time it makes a decision for you is a time when your brain is lounging in a hammock, getting fat.

Money

Yes, some people write because they want to make money. It’s a hard gig for that, but if you treat it as a job and approach it like a business, you have a shot.

The old pulp writers knew this. They had to approach writing for the market like going to work each day, because they needed to put food on the table during the Depression.

But to do it, they had to know how to write stories that pleased readers. It’s a simple, capitalistic exchange: the product (a good story) sold to a customer (the reader) who is looking for a respite from the angst of the current moment.

“In a world that encompasses so much pain and fear and cruelty, it is noble to provide a few hours of escape, moments of delight and forgetfulness.” — Dean Koontz

Legacy

Mr. Steve Hooley has talked about writing for his grandchildren. My grandfather on my mother’s side was like that. He loved history, and wrote historical fiction that didn’t sell to publishers, so he published it himself for his family and friends.

He was especially interested in the Civil War. One of his stories was titled, “The Civil War Did Not Necessarily End at Appomattox.” Yeah, he need to work on his titles. But I’m glad to have the stories!

Without fuel, our writing is flaccid, uninspiring, boring. So I ask:

What fuels your writing?

How About Drawing Your Plot?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Carl Reiner (1922-2020)

When Carl Reiner died recently at the age of 98, I pondered again my theory about comedians and their brains. It’s not scientific or scholarly or anything other than my personal observation, but it seems to me that comedians who daily exercise their brains by being funny, often on the spot, resist dementia as they age. Ditto trial lawyers.

I’ve written about this before:

What got me noticing this was watching Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks being interviewed together, riffing off each other. Reiner was 92 at the time, and Brooks a sprightly 88. They were both sharp, fast, funny. Which made me think of George Burns, who was cracking people up right up until he died at 100. (When he was 90, Burns was asked by an interviewer what his doctor thought of his cigar and martini habit. Burns replied, “My doctor died.”)

So why should this be? Obviously because comedians are constantly “on.” They’re calling upon their synapses to look for funny connections, word play, and so on. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx (who was only slowed down by a stroke), and many others fit this profile.

And I’ve known of several lawyers who were going to court in their 80s, still kicking the stuffing out of younger opponents. One of them was the legendary Louis Nizer, whom I got to watch try a case when he was 82. I knew about him because I’d read my dad’s copy of My Life in Court (which is better reading than many a legal thriller). Plus, Mr. Nizer had sent me a personal letter in response to one I sent him, asking him for advice on becoming a trial lawyer.

And there he was, coming to court each day with an assistant and boxes filled with exhibits and documents and other evidence. A trial lawyer has to keep a thousand things in mind—witness testimony, jury response, the Rules of Evidence (which have to be cited in a heartbeat when an objection is made), and so on. Might this explain the mental vitality of octogenarian barristers?

There also seems to be an oral component to my theory. Both comedians and trial lawyers have to be verbal and cogent on the spot. Maybe in addition to creativity time, you ought to get yourself into a good, substantive, face-to-face conversation on occasion. At the very least this will be the opposite of Twitter, which may be reason enough to do it.

In that post I offered a few creativity exercises to help writers keep the brain primed and playful. Today I want to add something else to the list.

I recently came across a scholarly article published a couple of years ago which demonstrated the effect that drawing has on memory.

We propose that drawing improves memory by promoting the integration of elaborative, pictorial, and motor codes, facilitating creation of a context-rich representation. Importantly, the simplicity of this strategy means it can be used by people with cognitive impairments to enhance memory, with preliminary findings suggesting measurable gains in performance in both normally aging individuals and patients with dementia.

So how might drawing operate as an aid to plotting your novel or scene?

Most of you know about mind mapping. Early in my writing journey I read Writing the Natural Way, which teaches mind mapping as a practice for writers. I use it all the time. For example, I was trying to come up with a great big climax to one of my Mallory Caine, Zombie-at-Law novels. I took a walk to Starbucks, got a double espresso, and sat for awhile. Then I took out some paper and starting jotting ideas as they came to me. Here is that paper (the numbers I added later to give me the order of the scenes):

And that’s the ending that’s in the book.

When pre-plotting, I’ll take a yellow legal pad and turn it lengthwise and start mapping. Now I’m thinking about adding drawing to the mix. I don’t have to be a skilled cartoonist (good thing, for that is not one of the gifts bestowed upon me). But I can doodle, have a little fun, and trigger another part of my brain.

If you’re writing a scene with a closed environment, I can see value in making a map of the place—office, city block, house—and drawing the characters (even stick figures will do) as they negotiate the action. It might stimulate new ideas for the scene you wouldn’t get any other way.

Your friend, the brain. It is quite versatile indeed.

What about you? Do you use any visual techniques for your writing or creativity? (I’m on the road today and will check in when I can. Until then, talk amongst yourselves!)

The Importance of Creativity Time

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I read a fascinating article the other day on how athletes’ bodies age. Using baseball players as an example, the author explains:

[A]n athlete’s physical decline begins before most of us notice it, and even the 23-year-old body can do things today that it might not be able to do tomorrow. Fastball speed starts going down in a player’s early 20s, and spin rate drops with it. Exit velocity begins to decline at 23 or 24. An average runner slows a little more than 1 inch per second every year, beginning pretty much immediately upon his debut. It takes a little over four seconds for most runners to reach first base, which means with each birthday, it’s as if the bases were pulled 4 inches farther apart. Triples peak in a player’s early 20s, as does batting average on balls put into play. A 23-year-old in the majors is twice as likely to play center field as left field; by 33, the opposite is true.

Feeling tired yet?

Thirty-three feels so far away, but it’s already happening. The 23-year-old’s lean body mass peaked sometime in the preceding five years. His bone-mineral density too. He’s at the age when the body begins producing less testosterone and growth hormone. His body, knowing it won’t need to build any more bone, will produce less energy. Male fertility peaks in the early 20s, the same time as pitch speed and exit velocity. Athleticism is, crudely speaking, about showcasing what a body looks like when it’s ready to propagate a species.

Had kids yet?

And then there’s the brain:

Researchers in British Columbia studied decision-making speeds of thousands of StarCraft 2 players and found that cognitive abilities peak at 24. Other research has found that perceptual speed drops continuously after 25. The brain is changing: the ratios of N-acetylaspartate to choline, the integrity of myelin sheathing, the connectivity of hippocampal neurons — you know, baseball stuff.

So basically, after age 23 or so, we’re all on the treadmill to decline.

Thanks for stopping by TKZ, everyone!

Well, stats be hanged, I’m a Do not go gentle into that good night kind of guy. Might as well put up the good fight as long as you can with all the weapons available to you.

Especially if you’re a writer who wants to write until they find you with your cold, dead fingers poised over the keyboard.

Which means our brains—which house our imagination, tools of language, and craft knowledge—must be worked out just like a body.

I have long taught the discipline of a weekly creativity time, an hour (or more) dedicated to pure creation, mental play, wild imaginings. I like to get away from my office for this. I usually go to a local coffee house or a branch of the Los Angeles Library System. I also like to do this work in longhand. I mute my phone and play various games, like:

The First Line Game. Just come up with the most gripping first line you can, without knowing anything else about what might come after it.

The Dictionary Game. I have a pocket dictionary. I open it to a random page and pick a random noun. Then I write down what thoughts that noun triggers. (This is a good cure for scene block, too.)

Killer Scenes. I do this on index cards, and it’s usually connected to a story I’m developing. I just start writing random scene ideas, not knowing where they’ll go. Later I’ll shuffle the stack and take out two cards at a time, and see what ideas develop from their connection.

The What If Game. The old reliable. I’ll look at a newspaper (if I can find one) and riff off the various stories. What if that politician who was just indicted was really an alien from a distant planet? (Actually, this could explain a lot.)

Mind Mapping. I like to think about my story connections this way. I use a fresh blank page and start jotting.

After my creativity time I find that my brain feels more flexible. Less like a grouchy guy waiting on a bench for a bus and more like an Olympic gymnast doing his floor routine.

Now, I’m going to float you a theory. I haven’t investigated this. It’s just something I’ve noticed. It seems to me that the incidence of Alzheimer’s among certain groups is a lot lower than the general population. The two groups I’m thinking of are comedians and lawyers.

What got me noticing this was watching Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks being interviewed together, riffing off each other. Reiner was 92 at the time, and Brooks a sprightly 88. They were both sharp, fast, funny. Which made me think of George Burns, who was cracking people up right up until he died at 100. (When he was 90, Burns was asked by an interviewer what his doctor thought of his cigar and martini habit. Burns replied, “My doctor died.”)

So why should this be? Obviously because comedians are constantly “on.” They’re calling upon their synapses to look for funny connections, word play, and so on. Bob Hope, Groucho Marx (who was only slowed down by a stroke), and many others fit this profile.

And I’ve known of several lawyers who were going to court in their 80s, still kicking the stuffing out of younger opponents. One of them was the legendary Louis Nizer, whom I got to watch try a case when he was 82. I knew about him because I’d read my dad’s copy of My Life in Court (which is better reading than many a legal thriller). Plus, Mr. Nizer had sent me a personal letter in response to one I sent him, asking him for advice on becoming a trial lawyer.

And there he was, coming to court each day with an assistant and boxes filled with exhibits and documents and other evidence. A trial lawyer has to keep a thousand things in mind—witness testimony, jury response, the Rules of Evidence (which have to be cited in a heartbeat when an objection is made), and so on. Might this explain the mental vitality of octogenarian barristers?

There also seems to be an oral component to my theory. Both comedians and trial lawyers have to be verbal and cogent on the spot. Maybe in addition to creativity time, you ought to get yourself into a good, substantive, face-to-face conversation on occasion. At the very least this will be the opposite of Twitter, which may be reason enough to do it.

So what about you? Do you employ any mental calisthenics?