Bryant Delafosse's Blog - Posts Tagged "experience"
Stop Planning and Just Live
While I was at work today at my non-writing, better-paying full-time job, an errant yellow balloon literally rolled past my cubicle entrance from another co-workers birthday celebration. I confiscated it and stowed it away for my toddler waiting at home.
It was a simple object that cost me nothing but the time it took me to tuck it away and transport it home. But the joy it brought to my son was indescribable. That level of laughter and fun I couldn’t have bought him even if I’d wanted.
Simple pleasures are what make up the body of our living narratives as human beings between the climaxes and the resolutions.
To paraphrase John Lennon’s song “Beautiful Boy,” “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”
I always thought that particular line was genius. Not only does it point out the foibles of ambition, but the line itself seems to offer a solution. It’s as simple as this.
Stop planning for a change and just live.
After all, he was the Walrus, right Ferris?
That’s good advice no matter what you do for a living, but it got me thinking that as a writer we have to step back sometimes and live our lives so that we have honest material to write about. That’s why older, more experienced writers tend to write dense, layered narratives. To use an old literary metaphor, they have “full wells.”
One of the reasons why we as readers buy some of Stephen King’s more fantastic elements is because he often creates vividly real characters that we believe in when he takes them out of their mundane surroundings and puts them in haunted houses and alternative universes. Those characters came straight out of the life he lived before he ever touched pen to page.
And that’s where the simple pleasures come in.
If you, as a person, don’t live and love and hate, the characters you create will not feel “lived-in.” They will be hollow constructs that you hang stories around. I don’t know about you but I know right away when I don’t invest emotionally in a character, because I don’t care if he achieves his goal.
So here’s your assignment for this weekend. Step away from the word processor and go on an adventure outside your office.
Hey, it doesn’t even have to be real fun. It just has to be real.
Live a little, so you have something to write about.
(Bryant Delafosse is the writer of the supernatural thriller The Mall, now available on Amazon Kindle)
It was a simple object that cost me nothing but the time it took me to tuck it away and transport it home. But the joy it brought to my son was indescribable. That level of laughter and fun I couldn’t have bought him even if I’d wanted.
Simple pleasures are what make up the body of our living narratives as human beings between the climaxes and the resolutions.
To paraphrase John Lennon’s song “Beautiful Boy,” “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”
I always thought that particular line was genius. Not only does it point out the foibles of ambition, but the line itself seems to offer a solution. It’s as simple as this.
Stop planning for a change and just live.
After all, he was the Walrus, right Ferris?
That’s good advice no matter what you do for a living, but it got me thinking that as a writer we have to step back sometimes and live our lives so that we have honest material to write about. That’s why older, more experienced writers tend to write dense, layered narratives. To use an old literary metaphor, they have “full wells.”
One of the reasons why we as readers buy some of Stephen King’s more fantastic elements is because he often creates vividly real characters that we believe in when he takes them out of their mundane surroundings and puts them in haunted houses and alternative universes. Those characters came straight out of the life he lived before he ever touched pen to page.
And that’s where the simple pleasures come in.
If you, as a person, don’t live and love and hate, the characters you create will not feel “lived-in.” They will be hollow constructs that you hang stories around. I don’t know about you but I know right away when I don’t invest emotionally in a character, because I don’t care if he achieves his goal.
So here’s your assignment for this weekend. Step away from the word processor and go on an adventure outside your office.
Hey, it doesn’t even have to be real fun. It just has to be real.
Live a little, so you have something to write about.
(Bryant Delafosse is the writer of the supernatural thriller The Mall, now available on Amazon Kindle)
