writing: not like reading

Remembrance Day: so a holiday here. There was no alarm, but I was awake anyway by 5:20, no doubt due to the early collapse last night (before 10:00 p.m.). Fine: I like getting up early on days "off". I lay about awhile, then made coffee for Kimmie so she could read her latest Anita Blake vampire-hunter novel in bed.

I got right to it and opened up chapter 19 notes, and dove in, tussling with the character motivations. This depends so much on what's happened before. So: on to the history. What do they know about each other? What have they been doing with their lives these past months and years? Often the answers to these questions are quite straightforward--but one needs to ask. One needs to ask because the writer must be conscious of the answers.

It's strange, but the answers were already all there in material I've come up with before. It's just the packaging of the answers--which answers--that is somehow hard. I experience a weird reluctance to look clearly at a character. There is fear: fear, I suppose, of not being able to come up with answers, or fear of the effort involved. The same thing that makes one procrastinate starting on a long run.

The writing session, which consisted only of note-making, went well. I felt things crystallizing: I felt motivations I can believe in, and can therefore write. When things go well I don't need much time. I can accomplish more in an hour than I can in three hours on another day--or indeed more than I can in a week of such days. But that week is primer: I can't just come up with the goods.

Even the experienced writer has a hard time shaking the idea that writing should be like reading: relatively easy, with fresh original material arriving steadily as you scan your eyes along the page. You expect the text to be there already.