Obviously, this is then a work in progress and anything you might find on this page is rough draft. That means its open to editing, critique, scrapping (or even bouquets if that's in order!)
When sitting down to tell a story, there are several things you need to keep in mind. You need to be able to tell the story accurately, so you need to be able to describe what is going on � whether you pay a lot of attention to the details, or just let them slip by is a stylistic choice, but you do need some details in order to tell it like it is � otherwise, it sounds like your story exists in a vacuum, and that doesn�t make for good literature.
You also need to have interesting characters, or at the least, refer back to the first point and construct good descriptions of your not so interesting characters. No matter what you�re writing about, there has to be a reason for the reader to keep turning the page, there has to be a good reason not to go to bed, or get back to work, or go mow the lawn, or any of those other things he or she should be doing instead of indulging in the pleasure of your story.
On second thought, you might not even necessarily need interesting characters if you have a captivating plot. There are plenty of books written with cardboard characters, but they find themselves in such interesting circumstances that you keep reading to find out what will happen next. In that case, the reader is less interested in what will happen to the character, as what you will cause to happen in the story. That�s what so many of the fantastical stories do � you�re more interested in what will happen to the sword of power, than who it is who wields it (unless of course the person who wields it has an interesting role to play in the story). It might be more accurate to say that what interests you is what will happen next with the sword, and not necessarily what the person who wields it is thinking or feeling about the fact that they do wield it.
So bare minimum, you need to either have interesting characters, or an interesting plot. Anything else? Well, yes, you do need to be able to write well enough that people will follow the gist of what you�re saying. If your language is too obscure, or your sentence structure too complex, it becomes difficult to hook a reader into starting the book. So a simple and direct style is the best thing to use. And you need to be able to ignore the squiggly green lines on the word processor if you�re using one. So much of our use of language doesn�t conform to the rules. It�s no wonder it�s so difficult to learn a new one!
Okay, so you know you either need interesting characters, or an interesting plot. Where do you find these things? The short answer might be, in your head of course! Makes sense, since writing requires you to think about what you�re going to write before you actually start forming the words. But where those ideas come from is the more urgent question. The ancients believed that ideas came from the muses. These were actual entities that gave a poet good ideas, presumably only if he deserved them. We commonly talk about someone being an inspiration to us, and in their books, writers still write dedications to the people around them. So we have this idea that the writer gets material from outside of him or herself. In that case, the brain just acts like a filter to weed out the uninteresting stuff, and to put together the bits that it chooses from experience in a way that will interest other people enough that they will want to read about it.
Okay, so if the things a writer writes about are found in his or her environment, then what is writer�s block? Does the writer suddenly go deaf, blind and become an amnesiac? Does she go into a different dimension in which external physical stimuli no longer exist?
Obviously not, so writer�s block must be something else. It must have something to do with that filtering process in between the experience and the writing. It seems that the brain is more than just a filter then. It must perform a very important role. Or it must be a really big and complex filter. Which makes sense when you think about it. After all, in a single day, how many things do you experience? Thousands upon thousands of sensations, thoughts, actions, interactions, images, sounds, emotions, events. They become so numerous that to tell them all would require another lifetime. And who would want to hear about all the details of your life! Some of them are so boring and mundane that no one would ever want to know about them. Hell, sometimes we don�t even remember them ourselves they�re so mundane � and we�re the ones who have lived them!
We frequently get bored with the details of our own lives and our brain stops paying attention to them. Have you ever walked or driven home from some familiar place and realized once you got there that you can�t recall the details of the trip? Same thing when you first move and find yourself halfway home, but it�s halfway to the old place and you have to remind yourself that you live somewhere else now. That�s �cause your brain has a file labeled �the way home� that it accesses when five o�clock hits and the only real effort you need to make is to remember to access the file. After that, it�s like you�re on autopilot. Your brain does that for lots of other things, some of them you wouldn�t expect should be put on autopilot, like how you respond to the car swerving out of its lane next to you, or how you treat your little brother. You�re not actually responding to what�s happening; you�re just on autopilot. Something really unusual has to happen before you pay attention, and even then, your brain is still pretty lazy (scientists would call it efficient) and tries to match what�s going on to a pattern that it already has programmed. So it stops paying attention to the details.
Maybe instead of calling it Writer�s Block, it should be called Pattern Recognition, since that�s the part of the brain that is getting in the way of telling a good story. Instead of paying attention to the details, you�ve fallen in to a habit of pattern recognition. (Hmmm..didn�t somebody already write a book by that name?) You need to change the patterns in order to shock yourself out of assigning everything to an already established way of understanding the world. You need to create new conditions for telling the stories. A new place to write, a different job, a different house, a new location, it might not have to be big.
But if it goes on for too long, then you start to run into the fear factor. After trying to write and nothing happens, you start to fear that you have nothing else that�s interesting to say. You start to think that you have used up all of whatever creativity you might have had by pouring it onto the pages of the last thing you wrote and now the well is dry. As if creativity were part luck, or as if it was a finite resource, and you�ve just used yours up. And you know it�s not like it hasn�t happened to other people before. Look at all the one book wonders. Sure, they may have gotten a publisher to print many books after that good one, but after it, there just doesn�t seem to be anything left. (Seems to me there was a movie about this as well�)
But then again, there are those writers who seem to have an excess of talent, who just keep pouring out book, after book, after book, and while they may have some dry spells, it never seems to end, and they keep producing interesting things to read. Regardless of the differences between writers, and what kind of virtue you might want to ascribe to their ability to avoid writer�s block or not, the fact remains that the inspiration for the story must essentially come from without � it is the writer�s experiences, and the people she has met that are the fodder for the imagination. You still need the filter of the imagination in order to translate all the ordinariness of everyday into something more interesting, but the ancients had it right, the muse lives outside of us.
So, you either need an interesting plot, or interesting characters, or maybe the very best combination will be both. So, for example, you could have a rather ordinary character, say, a young woman who works in an office, who finds herself in an unusual situation. Maybe she�s not real young anymore, she�s approaching forty and wondering what that might mean in her life. And this job of hers isn�t necessarily an interesting one, but simply one of those myriad white collar jobs that women perform that are a bare step above pink collar. Instead of nurses, teachers, and waitresses, they have traded their stethoscopes, chalk and aprons for the business suit, a cubicle, and a telephone headset. They are the benefits coordinator at your work, the shift supervisor, or maybe they�re something a bit better, at least on paper, than a secretary, the administrative assistant. So, our protagonist has one of these respectable, but unexciting jobs.
Let�s also say that our protagonist, perhaps we�ll call her Sarah, a nice honest and ordinary name, has an ordinary life at home, a husband and few kids. She and her husband really only wanted one child, but a few years after their oldest child was born, a son, she learnt she was pregnant. It was a shock, to be sure, but after the initial shock wore off, they began to accept that their family would contain four members, not the three they had anticipated. Sarah was comfortable with her new family arrangement, when the ultrasound revealed that she was carrying twins. And she and her husband needed to re-evaluate their family plan yet again. Although it only took a few months for them to accept the surprise of an additional family member, it took much longer for each to come to terms with their even more expanded family, and Sarah has always suspected that her husband, although he says he has accepted their family as is, has always blamed her for a too large family.
But Sarah�s family is one of the last things on her mind most of the time at work. Her life at work and her life at home seem to belong to different spheres. Sometimes the difference isn�t so small, as when she has to listen to Elaine from two cubicles over, who is much younger and still single, complain about her boyfriends. Sarah has difficulty understanding how Elaine can seem to have such bad luck in choosing men. Sarah never had a problem deciding on her husband as the man to marry, and it really was inconsequential that sometimes she daydreamed about Kevin, the attractive supervisor who worked on the other side of the floor. It was nothing serious, just the kind of harmless mind wandering that most everyone who�s been married to the same person for long enough engages in. After all, she�d never dream of acting on it.
But even Kevin was the last thing on her mind on Wednesday afternoon when the fire alarm went off.
She was finally getting to some of the filing that had been building up in the corner of her desk and was looking forward to an uninterrupted half hour so her desk would finally start to look a little neater. She still had plenty of the old benefit materials, pamphlets, schedules and such piled in boxes in the corner of the office, but if she could just catch up on the filing, at least the top of her desk would be mostly clean. Or at least a bit neater. So when the fire alarm went off, her first reaction was one of annoyance. Stupid fire drills! she thought. She was puzzled though. She was part of the Operations team, the department that was in charge of scheduling fire drills, and she hadn�t heard a thing about it. She tried to remember if she had missed a meeting, but she couldn�t recall being away. Well, perhaps the Operations manager had decided to schedule a drill on short notice.
With a last, quick glance at her desk and the unfinished filing, she pushed shut the drawer, turned the key in the lock, removed it, pulled open her lower desk drawer and grabbed her purse. She pulled the open door away from the wall, reaching in behind it. She pulled out a pale blue cardigan and a bright orange vest. A frown momentarily creased her forehead as she saw the vest, but she grabbed it anyway. She swiftly pulled the cardigan on and tugged the vest over her head. Luckily it was too large for her and slid easily over the sweater. She slung her purse onto her shoulder as she pulled shut the door.
As fire marshal for this half of the fourteenth floor, it was Sarah�s responsibility to make sure everyone evacuated the building. She turned to the left, facing the long hallway. Most of the doors were closed and as Sarah advanced, she opened each, scanning the room to make sure no one remained inside.
When the firemen had come to give a presentation to the building last year, Sarah had been surprised to learn that many people try to avoid fire drills. Sometimes they did so out of fear, but more often, people just didn�t take them seriously. She was surprised that some people would be so dedicated to their job that they would be willing to risk their lives if the alarm wasn�t a drill, rather then lose an hour evacuating and returning to work.
Sarah was certainly much less enthusiastic about her work. As she walked down the hall, opening and shutting the doors of now empty offices, she began to enjoy the idea of having a good excuse for not getting her work done. As fire marshall, she might even have extra leverage and be able to make the excuse that even more of her time was wasted than anyone else. She might be able to get away with only worrying about the filing for the rest of the afternoon. She smiled involuntarily at the idea.
Sarah continued opening doors until she came to the corner of the hallway. As she turned to the right to continue following the hallway, she saw ahead of her several of her coworkers were still getting their sweaters or coats on and exiting their offices.
Figures, though Sarah. She was heading into the higher echelons of the company. Not the big wigs, no, they were on a separate floor. But everyone in this hallway made far more money than she did. Sarah figured that if she was going to run into any resistance to leaving, it would be in this corridor.
She advanced to the first door. It was a storage closet, wedged into the awkward space made between the big offices of this corridor, and the smaller ones in her own wing. She felt a bit ridiculous opening the door, and almost passed over it, fearful of the teasing she might receive from co-workers who might see her checking the broom closet.
But Sarah had been paying attention to the firemen when they had made their presentation. One veteran firefighter with a huge mustache that Sarah kept staring at, wondering if he ever worried about it catching fire � it was so big, a real genuine handlebar � said that every large building has what he called a �hider� someone who becomes so irrationally afraid of the possibility of fire that they hide in a closet instead of evacuating. Which was why he stressed to the fire marshals that it was critical to check every door, even the ones that led to unused spaces or closets.
So Sarah dutifully pulled open the door to the closet.
All that faced her was a couple of mops and shelves full of cleaning materials and spare toilet paper. Sarah shrugged again and laughed. She felt foolish, but at least her conscience could rest easy.
She continued along the corridor, pulling open doors, sticking her head around them to check to see the rooms beyond were empty and then pulling them firmly shut behind her.
The firemen had also said that it was important to close any doors behind you as you left the building. Even though they were made of wood, something that obviously burned very easily, the fire had to work to burn through them and access the room beyond. The firemen had been concerned about slowing the progress of the fire, but Sarah had imagined that closing doors also figured that if a closed door protected a room long enough to slow a fire, the firemen might douse it before it could get at the contents of the room. Sarah had imagined how much work it would be to recreate all the files in her office if they had burnt. Sure, most of the paper was duplicates of electronic files on her computer, but the back up tapes for the server were only transferred off site once a month. She might potentially have to redo the work of an entire month. And in a different location.
At the thought of all that extra work, Sarah started walking faster. She only had three more doors to go. Two more. One more. As Sarah swung the door open, she was preparing to swing it back shut right away when she realized there actually was someone still in the office. It was Nancy, the accounting assistant. Or whatever it was her actual job title was. Sarah swung the door back open, all the way this time.
�Nancy, we need to evacuate� she said.
Nancy looked at her with a strange look on her face. �Are you absolutely sure?� she asked.
�Well, yes, um, we do. We have to leave.� Sarah readjusted the purse on her shoulder. �I�m sure it�s just a drill. We�ll be back to work in no time.� She added, hoping that it was only a heavy workload that was keeping Nancy at her desk.
Nancy sighed. �Well, okay then.� She pointed at the space behind the door. �Can you hand me my crutches?�
Sarah leaned farther into the room, hanging onto the door handle as she twisted her body around the door. There was a pair of shiny aluminum crutches wedged into the small space. For a moment, Sarah just stared at them. Then she shuffled farther into the room, retrieving the crutches and handing them round the desk to Nancy.
�Do you mind grabbing my purse for me?� Nancy asked, pointing at the bottom drawer of her desk. �It�s difficult to balance it with these things� she motioned at the crutches that she was positioning under her armpits.
It was then that Sarah noticed that it was a large leg cast on Nancy�s left leg that was the cause for the crutches. �They say I�ll be able to get a walking cast next week, but for some reason I can�t walk on this one, so they say I�m stuck with the crutches. Stupid accident really. I was watering the plants hanging off my back porch, you know, the hanging kind?� She waited for Sarah to nod her head in recognition, which Sarah obligingly provided. �So, I was leaning out against the edge of the porch and the damn thing was so rotted, it just broke away!� she laughed, �I didn�t even fall that far. But I guess I fell just the right way.� She paused for a moment as if thinking. �Or I guess it was the wrong way!� She laughed again.
Sarah thought it odd that this woman could take the time to crack jokes while the building was potentially burning around her. Did she not consider that it actually could be a fire? Sarah shook her head almost imperceptibly, and unconsciously. The folly of the young. Her children had the same kind of attitude toward life. Lived as if nothing could ever go wrong.
It was Sarah�s turn to sigh.
After a minor struggle figuring out the best way to proceed to the exit, caused mostly by Sarah�s attempts to help Nancy rather than just getting out of her way, they made it to the lobby. It was empty, and the fire alarm seemed louder here. The alarm echoed in the small space and in Sarah�s head. It sounded like there were fifty alarms going off simultaneously. How odd, Sarah thought.
Sarah stopped her musing in time to see Nancy shouldering open the stairwell door. She rushed over and grabbed the door, preventing it from opening fully. She leaned in next to Nancy�s ear so she�d be heard over the din of the alarms.
�No, Nancy,� she said, �You�ll never make fourteen flights on crutches. We�ll stay here, next the elevators. The firefighters will come up the central well of the elevators and evacuate us from here.�
Nancy seemed not to hear her and kept pushing at the door.
�NO!� Sarah shouted above the sound of the alarm. �You need to stay here!�
She violently tugged the door shut, displacing Nancy back into the lobby. �WE NEED TO STAY HERE!� Nancy finally seemed to understand and leaned against the wall.
At least here the alarm is too loud for the girl to keep chattering, thought Sarah. She wasn�t sure she could take too much more talking right now.
In fact, at this point, all Sarah could think about was getting out of the range of that horrid alarm. But as fire marshal for the floor, she was responsible for making sure everyone got out.
And there was no way she was going to try to hobble Nancy down the stairs with her cast. Not only would the hold up anyone else who was trying to get down from higher up, but at the rate Nancy could likely travel, they�d burn up before they could get out if there really was a fire. And if it was just a drill, Nancy would�ve risked injuring herself, and possibly Sarah, worse than she already was. Best to follow the protocol and wait for the arrival of the firefighters.
Besides, the air conditioning units were still operating, the building wasn�t filling with smoke, and if there was a fire, it didn�t seem to be anywhere near them.
But it could be right below you, the little voice inside Sarah�s head was saying. Any moment now the floor below you could collapse and you fall into a raging inferno. You�ll be burned to a crisp!
Sarah took a deep breath and told the voice to be quiet. She calmed herself by thinking about what the firemen had told them. The safest place of a building was at the elevator core. It was usually made of solid concrete, forming a huge fire resistant chimney in the middle of the building. Sarah had thought it funny when the fireman referred to it as a chimney, but she guessed that was as good as word as any, even though it was more like a reverse chimney, with the fire on the outside and the inside protected from the flames. Most of the buildings services also were routed through the elevator core, so until the building was literally collapsing, the elevator mechanism would likely continue to function.
Sarah considered what she would do if it became apparent that the fire was approaching before the firemen. She supposed they would climb the final two flights to the roof and hope for evacuation from there.
She was spared any further worry about the possibility by the elevator doors opening next to her. The lights inside didn�t seem to be working, and Sarah peered into the dark interior. From the gloom emerged a couple of figures in some kind of big suits. But they didn�t just have masks on, their headgear seemed to cover their entire heads, almost like a helmet. And the glass or plastic in them was dark � Sarah couldn�t see any features inside. She experienced disappointment momentarily as the image of the fireman with the huge handlebar mustache flashed through her head. If she could see inside the helmets, she might see how much room there was available for a moustache.
Sarah realized that one of the figures was motioning to her to enter the elevator. She reached over to Nancy, tapping her on the shoulder. As Nancy levered herself away from the wall, Sarah grabbed for the crutch that was falling to the floor. As she straightened up, she realized the two figures had separated, one remaining in the elevator, and the other joining her in the lobby. As she and Nancy, which her crutch restored to its rightful place underneath her arm, stood staring alternately at the suited men and each other, Sarah felt her stomach twist. It gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach. As the firemen waited, Sarah motioned for Nancy to precede her into the elevator. As Nancy�s crutches cleared the doors, Sarah felt herself tugged backward in time to avoid having her arm caught in the closing elevator doors. She looked quizzically at the fireman holding her arm, but it was impossible to see what kind of expression he had on his face underneath the head gear and she let herself be led to the next elevator in the row.
The doors opened, and Sarah stepped in. Unsure of whether this was the right thing to do, she looked back over her shoulder at the fireman, and upon seeing he had entered the elevator as well, she relaxed a bit and moved to the back wall. She turned, facing the elevator doors, a habit that she, like all the other people who do it, was not even aware was a habit.
The fireman moved in front of the elevator panel as the doors slid shut. His bulky suit hid Sarah�s view of the buttons. He must have had a key, or had to enter some kind of override � Sarah thought she remembered the visiting firemen telling the fire marshals that they had the power to override elevators that were otherwise frozen out of service when the alarms first go off � because he took an awful long time fiddling around with something before she felt the elevator begin to move.
Sarah felt disoriented. It felt as if the elevator was moving up, not down.
When she looked at the display above the doors, she confirmed that her sensation was correct. They were coming up on the fourteenth floor. Another spasm twisted Sarah�s bowels ever so slightly. She calmed herself, telling herself that it must be a real fire and that it had grown to the point where they would have to evacuate from the rooftop. Nothing to worry about. After all, she had just been considering the possibility a moment before. Sarah tried to make eye contact with the fireman, but his back was turned to her, and the suit was so large and bulky that she couldn�t see his face. She told herself to relax.
A moment later, the doors slid open onto a small, metal walled room. It must be the little room on the top of the roof, she thought. She followed the fireman into the small space, most of which was taken up by the suit he was wearing. She wondered whether Nancy and her companion had already gone out onto the roof.
The fireman swung the door open, out into the wide space of the roof. The fire alarm seemed louder out here, as if it was coming from all around. After the interior lights of the elevator, and the dim room at the top, Sarah squinted in the bright sunlight. Feeling pressure on her back, she automatically began to walk forward.
As her vision cleared, Sarah gasped. Across the street, a large something hung in the air, just above the building. Something was the best was Sarah could describe it. It didn�t look like a helicopter (which she was expecting), but more like a hot air balloon. No, Sarah thought, it wasn�t that either.
Space ship. Her mind whispered. Sarah shook her head. No.
She turned around to the fireman behind her. He was still standing in the doorway.
Before, she had hardly taken notice of the head gear aside from its opaqueness. She had just been so glad to see someone come up to the twelfth floor. Now she realized, that head gear was no ordinary respirator. There was some sort of antenna that spiraled out the side. And the suit. It wasn�t the usual yellow of the firefighter�s gear but a grayish-brown color. And there were what looked like pockets, or at least bulges, all up and down the sides of it. As her gaze wandered down, she realized that where a pair of rubber boots should be there was instead a couple of large, almost block-like, what would she call them? Feet? They didn�t look very foot-like.
Sarah spun back around to look at the whateveritwas. The something on the roof of the other building. She became aware that she was standing in shadow. Looking up, she saw nothing but metal. Or plastic. Or something like that.
A part of Sarah�s brain realized that �something� was becoming a bit useless as a descriptor. Kind of like �thing.�
As her mind pondered the semantic difficulty in describing unfamiliar objects, she again felt a pressure pushing gently but firmly against her back. She was being propelled toward a disk. A disk? Something else? She almost giggled. A disk then. On the rooftop. She looked up, to the rooftop across the street in time to see someone�s legs and a disk disappear into the whateveritwas over there.
Sarah glanced quickly to the left and right. She realized that every building she could see in the downtown core had one of those whatchamacallits suspended overtop. She saw more legs disappearing into the somethings. The whatevers. And she suddenly realized that she could hear alarms, many of them, set at different pitches, going off all around her.
She glanced back at the opaque mask of the�the what? behind her. Maybe she didn�t want to know. The gentle pushing began again.
Sarah thought of her husband and the children. He wouldn�t like this. Not one little bit.
She stepped onto the disk.