Thursday, August 13, 2009

Normal Doesn't Run in my Family

This has been a great week for writing. I’m in the middle of a scene, my hero is shot and bleeding all over an old buffalo hide, and I have to stop and go eat lunch with friends. Sometimes this is a hard-hearted job. I can almost hear him yelling at me to just write a few more lines before I go.

I guess that’s what all writers have to put up with, their characters following them around. I may be trying to cook supper, but one of them is yelling inside my head that she’s not going to do something, or I go to a movie and one follows along complaining about what a pickle I got them into. I sit in church and one character tells me he’s an atheist. I go for a walk and an 1865 cowboy comes along telling me he’d rather be a poet than a rancher. We get in an argument and I have to go home because people mistakenly think I’m talking to myself.

I would get worried, but normal doesn’t run in my family, so I think I’m safe. Some say writing is a lonely job, and it is, but most of the time I’m traveling through life with a crowd in my head.

Have a great week,

JTSiggie

4 comments:

  1. Ha! Glad to know I'm in such good company. It's a rather bizarre way to go through life, but someone's got to have ears to hear these characters.

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  2. i often wonder if the characters are milling around in the scene, if i have to set the book that i am reading down in the middle of a chapter. are they just talking to each other about how long i will be gone? or what i am doing? or what is taking me so long?

    i just read your Blue Ribbon short story on your website. i loved it. thank you for your stories, i love all of the ones that i have read.

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  4. It's interesting that your characters are so real to you, because they seem so real to us readers as well. I find myself thinking about your characters and their stories weeks after I've finished the book. Thanks for so many great stories!

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