A is for…Anally Retentive.

The term anal-retentive (also anally retentive), commonly abbreviated to anal, [1] is used to describe a person who pays such attention to detail that the obsession becomes an annoyance to others, potentially to the detriment of the anal-retentive person. The term derives from Freudian psychoanalysis….or I was potty trained at gunpoint…

So a friend of mine, a wonderful chap by the name of Steven Chapman (whose blog can be found here; http://stevenchapmanwriter.com/?p=1510) wondered where my blog was, and it has been a while and then I wondered, well where is it? It came to my attention that an ABC’s of blogging challenge was around, a blog for each letter in the alphabet…so here we go!

I am an obsessive for detail but I am also a paradox (guess what it is!)

You’ll gather what I mean by this as you read this blog…

When I write; even those parts that do not make it onto paper, I wonder about the colour of the walls, the brand of alcohol my characters might drink. Etc. It all boils down to how absorbed you are by the tale and one would hope you are immersed to the point of obsessive, to the point reality and fiction fuse and conspire against your very sanity.

It is better to know the world you have created and I know that seems obvious, but it does go other some people’s heads and the effect is detrimental to both parties of reader and writer because they both miss out on such a joyous experience. The world I am currently trying to recreate would be all the poorer if I did not know every nook and cranny of the world I was trying to create, furthermore, I would have a hard time trying to convince you of its existence if I was unsure of the details. “False Interiorization” is the term it’s a cheap labour-saving technique. The author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, afflicts the viewpoint-character with a blindfold, an attack of sickness, the urge to play marathon games in the smoking-room, etc.

Just lazy writing and sometime bad habit – stop it!

Words are your friend. Use them.

“If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.” H.G. Well’s would say.

Best. Advice. Ever. It is when you sit and think about it.

Dream the impossible! Damn the banal!

But…this can only be achieved with….well you guessed it, by being a little anally retentive!

We do have to be careful though not to burn ourselves out, and yet not end up with a picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular. It’s a delicate balance…. So as long as we have some semblance of where we are going then we’ll be fine. To simplify it all here are some bullet points;

Plot is needed, even a loose one. The more details you know the better.
Well-rounded character research is needed; the more details you know the better.
Rich imagery, or at least a decent explanation of what the hell I am looking at; the more details you know the better.
That’s all folks…at least for now, I wrote this with a one-hour dead line…

But I’ll be back for… B is for Bigger, Badder and Better!