Writing tips: Getting Started

Think of a high concept. For me, that’s the ability to tap into the internet with your mind. So you can surf the internet the way you peruse your own memory today.

Try to remember the lyrics to a song. Might take a few seconds, then you remember. You find that information in your brain, obviously. Sort of a local hard drive, to use computer terms.

Now imagine you’re transparently tapped into the Global internet 24x7. Try to remember the lyrics to a song. They’re there instantly. Feels like you found them in your brain, just like before. But you didn’t. You found the words on a server in Germany. Doesn’t matter, all transparent to you.

Even further back in time...

And what of the ten years before that? Now we’re talking twenty years. But I can conceive it, I can feel it. I can hold it in my mind.

And what of twenty years before that? I was around, walking and breathing and always looking up. It was the early sixties and my parents and all of their friends were at the top and then my brother and his friends were up there too and I was at the bottom. Looking up to the people in my life and also looking up to the culture, always looking up and observing and accepting everything as reality, my reality, the reality.

Now I’m holding forty years in my mind. I know what its like to live through that passage of time.

And what of forty years before that?

Now I know what it’s like to be in the nineteen thirties. I can feel it.

And what of 80 years before that?

Now I’m in the eighteen fifties. And it seems impossible, that’s so long ago. Everyone is dead. And everyone who knew them is dead and its all just distant names. I mean, how many of us even know any of our great, great, great, great grandparents names? I don’t. But they all lived. Way back then. Just like we live now. Days were long and twenty times a day something really pissed you off, something that seemed so important at the time but seems so trivial today. Beyond trivial. Less than trivial. Meaningless.

And what of one hundred a sixty years before that? And three hundred and sixty years before that?

In moments I’m back to ancient Rome and they had lives exactly like ours today. They thought they were in a post modern error with unbelievable technology capable of aqueducts and coliseums and cement and all the other conveniences of what seemed to be a modern life. It always seems modern. Until you look back.

I’ve probably lost you by now, I think I’ve lost myself. It’s tough to play this game with someone else. I’m not a writer, if I were a writer I could probably play the game better with you.

10 years after

I like to play this little game in my mind. I think about something that happened, I don’t know, ten years ago. Something real. Vivid. I shut my eyes and there it is, there I am. Everything’s the same but different. It doesn’t have to be anything special. Maybe lying in a bed, looking at the paint on a window and thinking, realizing at that moment that time is just a weird bitch of a thing. You hold a worn black and white photo, turn it over and see a faded stamped date and it seems impossibly distant, unreal. A prop to support present reality but not something that actually happened, not people who actually lived and breathed and had twenty four hours in every day and considered their world, their reality to be an actual present. Merely a prelude to a future present that is all about the now.

Some say the world couldn’t possibly have been the same back then. Something’s been lost. I say the world couldn’t really have even existed, right? I mean, where was I?

But right then, right there, in my decade long memory I remember, I mean I was there and I remember everything was the same. The cool feel of the air on my skin, the softness of the flannel sheets against my back, my eyes resting on brush marks of paint on the window sill it was all the same and I knew in the future I question the reality so I stared, ten years ago, to indelibly imprint everything and it worked.

So ten years have gone by but I can connect the dots seamlessly from one present to another.

Writing Tips: First Draft

My initial draft took 3 months to write. Then finishing the novel took another 3 years.

Oh – and don’t let ANYBODY read that initial draft. It will suck, indeed.

I finished the first draft and put it down and thought – hey, this has got to be one of the best books EVER. The agents will be beating down my door when they get so much as a whiff of this manuscript! So I set it aside and took a little break. Felt like I was on top of the world.

A month later I opened the manuscript and started printing and reading (you must print and read to get the full effect. Not good enough to read a word doc directly from the computer. Better yet, print and read out loud to understand how the dialogue really sounds – helps avoid unrealistic speech. Example: “What is up with that” quickly becomes “What’s up with that” when you’re reading aloud).

Anyway, I started reading and was horrified at how bad it was. Thus started the 3 year polishing cycle.

Creating the initial draft is the hardest. The initial overall idea of what your book is going to be about. Who are the characters, what’s the high concept, where will the conflict come from.

Once you get past that and start writing, it gets easier.

And once you get that initial draft completed – then it’s fun. Truly. From that point forward, you only need to polish. Just pick you’re your gem every few days and polish for a few minutes. Hear someone say something funny at the mall, consider a tree limb in a park and how you might describe it, smell a familiar smell and let your mind run – all of these ‘experiences’ … feel them and bring them back into your novel as you polish and make it shine and breathe life into it. That’s the best part. Oh, it’s so hard to get that gem established at first. But once you do, it’s your gem. And it may never sell, it may never make millions of dollars – but it’s your gem and you can publish it and you can get it in print and you can show your friends and one day your children and one day, many years from now, you’ll read that work as a different person, as an older person. You’ll wonder who wrote that? You’ll be amazed all over again.

It's all good

All technology has a downside and people have been afraid of it all through the years, hand wringing about the potential abuse of the technology. Everything from Caller ID to Nuclear Power.

But overall, the upsides from these technologies far outweigh the downside and that will be the case with inSyte.

What other sorts of things could we do with inSyte? (3)

Of course, hacking happens today, every day. But it’s your computer or smart phone that’s getting hacked. Not your mind.

You have to have a way to turn it all off.

Skype with avatars – so now someone virtually flirts with you and they look like Marilyn Monroe and you look like Clint Eastwood. Who knows what you both really look like.

Who cares?

Think of a hydraulic suit, the kind used in the military. You slim it down so that being paralyzed is not something you would necessarily notice.

So man is melded with machine.

And inSyte does the same for the mind. Blindness? A thing of the past. People can see through a camera smaller than a button in resolution that exceeds natural sight because it includes infrared, a larger spectrum of light becomes visible.

So long flashlights.

This is all possible in 10 to 20 years. What about within 50 years? 100 years?

At what point does the machine take over?

What other sorts of things could we do with inSyte? (2)

If you’re in an accident then you can call for help. Telepathically.

Pretty neat.

You’re in a critical meeting and you have transparent access to your engineers back at HQ. Better than that, they are literally attending the meeting through your eyes and ears. Talk about driving efficiency.

You’re about to say something insensitive at a dinner party, your wife doesn’t have to pretend to change the subject or kick you under the table. She just tells you to shut up through your common feed.

Let’s reverse it – how do you protect your thoughts. You don’t want your wife to know that you don’t like her meatballs, or how cute you think the waitress is. Or if she’s telling you about her day you don’t want her to know you’re really watching the ballgame.

So you have to protect your thoughts. OK – no need to reinvent the wheel. One approach might be to leverage so called demilitarized zones. Create DMZs just like we have on networks today.

So only your thoughts that go into the DMZ can be picked up on.

That would be fine for business and for general interactions with people.

But what about your spouse? Is the person you love going to be OK with that? Now you’re hiding your thoughts intentionally?

Could the authorities get a warrant to explore past the DMZ based on the Patriot Act?

Does probable cause enter the equation if the authorities find actual physical proof of premeditation only as a result of reading your thoughts?

Well, if they could prevent another 911 then of course you would want them to.

So – could they insert this into your head to read your thoughts? Beats waterboarding.

I’m sure this would spawn massive legal questions that would make it all the way to the Supreme Court.

What about hackers? Someone could hack into your mind to steal critical information. Business info, credit card, passwords. Or insert, ie push, a nightmare image. Cause a hallucination. Take you into a virtual reality. Maybe during a business meeting. Or a robbery. Or a date.