How I Write?

                When I was little, I had a dream about a mountain that divided two lands. One was a vast sandy desert with tall rocky cliffs and bluffs of red stone. The other was a forest of redwoods, slipping down the rocky slopes towards a vast bay riddled with grottos and locks, with hidden depths and white sandy beaches. A road curved among the trees, and I and my gypsy family rushed along it in our wagon, chased by an angry mob. They were angry because they were plagued by a witch, and when we tried to save an innocent woman from their wrath, they threw all of us out of their town.

                Deep into the forest we followed the trail, closer to the shoulders of the mountains, until around a bend and below the roots of a tree, the sounds of pursuit growing closer, we found a hidden doorway just large enough to let us pass through the mountains. We walked through, bright torches illuminated Egyptian hieroglyphs all along the long straight tunnel through the mountain. Finally we reached the other side, but the desert was vast and unwelcoming to travelers like us, and we had to turn back.

                It was while we were trekking our way back through the mountain that we discovered to our horror we had brought the witch with us. I shouted at the others to keep going, but the witch tackled me, her fetid flesh and rasping claws filling my vision, her weight pressing on top of me like a vice.

                That is one of my favorite dreams and one of my absolute worst, most horrifying nightmares. For days after I wrote pages of stories about the dream. I drew maps of the places I had seen in my mind’s eye, developed the characters I had envisioned, a storyline, and a destination. Slowly the nightmarish aspect was submerged, hidden by fairy children and dragons and dwarves. I created an entire world around that dream, and over a dozen stories to take place in it. Hundreds of characters made their way into that world, but the witch is not one of them.

                That is how I write. Something gnaws at me deep in the night and I wake up fever-slick with fear or worry or guilt, and I write about it. I develop characters that stand in my place, and backstories for them. I develop magic systems to give them power, draw maps and describe the places they go and the people they visit. I once spent two summers detailing a map with hundreds of cities and dozens of kingdoms, all connected to that one dream of a beautiful country and a woman raping me. I buried the nightmare in layer upon layer of adventure and fairytale fluff.

                That’s not how I write. My dreams are beautiful things, of flying above light posts, of fighting dragons and cities of light in the darkness. I write reams about customs, and research customs, and research tribal systems and write about tribal systems. I love fantasy, but most of the time writing fantasy I was trying to hide some secret that worried at me in the middle of the night.

                A lot of what I write is background information. I have a hard time making my characters go through horrible circumstances, probably because I like them too much. I give them harrowing, sometimes incredibly horrible backgrounds, but that is in the past, and they’ve gone through and survived that. As a result, my plots are fairly weak, and I haven’t finished any books beyond a couple dozen pages.

                I write alone, and quietly. I’m too easily distracted by friends, or Facebook, or sometimes even catchy music. I write late at night, and in the early morning, and when I’m trying to avoid other things, and when the thoughts and ideas crowd my head so much I can’t think of anything else.

                Sometimes I would wonder if others could see the darkness hiding behind my empty words. Do you see the vacant smiles? I wonder in my head. What do you think when you read about how each person ends up with someone, about worlds where disease is nonexistent and people live in sterile space and dream of the life on dusty Mars? What do you think when you see the picture of the boy running with a unicorn? Or the way I draw eyes without pupils, vacant and beautiful and plastic. What do you see in that?

                I read once about how to build excellent characters. You take all you remember, like the Giver distilling memories, and push it out of your palms and fingers and into the paper. You write about the good memories, but in a much more important way you write about the bad memories too. Of course you can disguise them, you should disguise them, because you don’t want your naked soul on the page for every vagrant reader to gobble with his hungry eyes. But you write your pain and intimacy into your characters, and that is what gives them life.