Okay,
let me wrestle the spotlight away from all these jokesters—and king
jokester himself, Dervish—to say something for a minute. I know
Dervish believes he could exist without me, and it’s hard for him
to realize I created him.
Which brings me to how stories and characters come to life in the
first place. I never set out to do this—it just happens. A small
snippet of a possible story will pop into my head while I’m
walking, driving, or even doing the dishes. Then I have to figure out
how to shape it: What kind of vehicle will carry the idea? How do I
resolve it, twist it, make it funny, or make it real?
Sometimes, you have to leap into the abyss and see what comes out.
You shut off the logical part of your brain and just surf the wave,
letting go of the usual locked gates that hold you back. I think they
call it flow. You can’t force it. That’s why my first stabs at
writing are messy—I don’t worry about grammar, just the thoughts.
As for characters, they come from a place called
“ation”—exaggeration, extrapolation, imagination, amalgamation.
They’re tiny pieces of things you’ve heard, things you’ve felt,
people you’ve known, something someone once said. But they’re
never just one thing. It’s like making a stew—if you get it
right, it tastes good. And if you get characters right, they feel
real.
Writers, artists, musicians—we do what we do even if no one ever
sees, hears, or reads it. It’s a force that feels like magic, and
that’s why I keep doing it. Maybe it’s like a runner’s high,
but I’m too lazy to find that out. I’ll just walk and look at the
trees, thanks.
All those years in the corporate world, dreaming of getting home
to do the things I actually wanted to do—only to be too tired to do
them. And yet, somehow, I still did them. Because of that force.
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