Day 12: Lester Hayes & Story
April 12, 2001
7:19 a.m.
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800 Words:  I've hit a little roadblock. Or maybe it's just a speed bump on steroids. Doesn't really matter except to the purists, I suppose. Part of becoming a writer is developing a sense about stories. It's a strange capability, a sense not unlike that feeling of connection I used to have when I played basketball with a bunch of guys I had known for years. Back then, there were times I knew where these people would be when they were on the court. They were familiar to me. I understood their quirks, and their comfort zones. I could, and often did, throw passes to guys without looking ... and most of the time they were there. It's a feeling of flow. Writing is different than playing basketball, though. Writing is about creating Story in an interesting way. A friend of mine once asked me if there was a process to writing--he was an engineer, of course--and I said sure. But the process is different every time. And I've come to understand that for me, understanding Story is my way of holding these processes together. It's akin to my knowledgebase, my lessons learned system. Without my quest to understand Story, I would have no valid foundation to compare the actual results of my efforts with. Knowledge of Story is like this gluey web hanging from the dark corners of my mind. At one time there was a defensive back that played for the Oakland Raiders whose name was Lester Hayes. He was a corner, and an intimidator. Lester Hayes used to goop stickum all over his hands and arms and uniform. I remember seeing a picture of him playing up close against a receiver at the line of scrimmage, crouched and ready, his eyes as big as saucers, his hands caked in tan goo. Knowledge of Story is stickum. Bet you never expected to see that sentence ever in your life. But that's how I see things. This stickum grabs things that I would otherwise have missed, and brings them to my attention. Anyway, the fact is that I have a better sense of what I believe a story is than I did when I first started. Perhaps I have more Story stickum gooped over me than I did. And I carry it around with me into everything that I do. As luck or the powers that be would have it, these two things--that court sensation of where things ought to be and this understanding of Story are merging into a realtime diagnostic tool. I started writing this morning, and got a page or two into things before I sensed something was wrong. The flow was off. A character lurched maybe, or a piece of the court grew dark ... heck, I'm stretching this metaphor a bit too far for my own good. You get the idea. Something didn't feel right. And I stopped and I thought, and I used the work I've done in understanding my character set better. Next thing I knew I saw the problem. It's nothing major as far as fixing it. Quite easy to fix, actually. I hope I would have found it when I got to my storyboarding phase, because it was low-level structure. But the fact is that I found it now, and now I'll go back and fix it in process rather than in retrospect. So that was my morning.   Have a great day. See you tomorrow   That's gotta hurt Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"I know some great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much." Anne Lamott |
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