Storytellers October Prompt (Boo!)

In honor of Halloween ...

Going Big

The Storytellers writing prompts have taught me something about my own creative process ... believe it or not, I usually have no idea what I'm going to do when I put up one of those prompts. So there's always this period of mild panic, when I'm walking around and thinking, "What the heck am I gonna do with that?"

Ideas pop in, they get rubbed a bit to see if there's a genie inside ... and during this process, I've noticed that I'm always asking the same thing: "Yes, but can I go bigger?"

You know what I mean? I'm not the kind of writer who tells intimate stories of people's lives (and actually, I kind of envy those writers with all their emotional insights and clever dialogue). I like to tell BIG stories about BIG EVENTS. So it's not enough to have a kid recover a stolen jewel ... I want that kid to have to fly off a skyscraper with homemade wings and recover it from the New Year's ball in Time's Square on the afternoon of New Year's Eve. I want hot air balloons, explosions, creaky old mansions, bulging eyeballs and muscles, genius inventors with wild hair, mob scenes, demon babies ... hyperbole and cartoonish caricature. Mostly, I want it to be big, big fun.

So what about you? How do you blow up an idea?

Thank You

I've spent the last two weeks entirely in my own head. It was a nice little vacation, I suppose, and I had a few things I wanted to straighten out before I started writing again.

You know what I like about writers and writing in general? That we're all passion driven. I mean, let's face it, the last thing the world really needs is another million or so writers. Even among successful writers, there's very little money in it, and then of course, from what I hear, the entire publishing industry is about to POOF and vanish in a haze of dust.

But you know what? I'd still write.

I remember once I got hired at a real estate office to answer phones over a holiday weekend. They also wanted some filing done. I was in seventh grade, I think, and I sat in that empty office at the secretary's desk all day. Right in front of an IBM Selectrix typewriter, which at the time was the height of technology. And I wrote a story. I typed like mad all day. I still have the story, actually, and it's not too bad. Not great, but hey, I was 13.

You know why I remember that day? Because it was a great day that stuck out in the middle a lousy year. Since then, I've written, what, 100,000 pages? A million pages? I don't even know.

I was speaking with my mom recently about money, and I remarked that I don't really miss having lots of money because I spend pretty much every day focused on things that excite me. My hobby is my job. What would tons of money buy me that I don't already have? Money can't buy me time, can't buy passion, and it can't make me better at my craft. Money doesn't buy patience and it doesn't teach me how to dig for the heart of a story.

I've heard a lot of awful news lately. Heartbreaking financial news of people losing their homes, suffering through massive income loss, people who are scared and angry that the future we're heading into will be worse than the past we're emerging from. I get anxious and pissed off like anyone else, and sometimes it's so suffocating that I just want to run in any direction, as fast as I can, until I'm tired and collapse.

So I still haven't figured out the Big Thing I'm working on. Basically, I have three projects (two fiction and one nonfiction) that all seem deserving of attention. And I don't know which one to work on first. How do you know when you're working on the right thing? How do you choose?

I suspect the answer is probably obvious, probably right in front of my own face. But for today, I just wanted to say thank you to the universe and karma and kizmut and God and Buddha and whatever else, for giving me the opportunity and inclination to write for a living because, despite everything else, there is no joy like the joy that comes from creation.