KEVIN CRAIG

A History of Me – Writing in the Darkness Without the Secret Handshake…

My first forays into writing were stories that always seemed to end with a fridge door opening and a head being chilled on a silver platter inside said fridge. I guess when I was seven or eight, I saw myself as a sort of horror writer. After all, who scared us shitless more than Stephen King? Although, for the life of me I can’t recall if I even read his works back then. Could I have simply heard of King and aspired to write like what I imagined he wrote like? Who knows. I just knew a good severed head was best served up, well, cold.

I still remember my first ‘novel’ too. Marjoram. Great title, eh. Yep. Marjoram was a honkin’ huge used-to-be garage band. The main characters were embarrassingly fashioned after Bruno & Boots, the main characters of Gordon Korman’s Macdonald Hall series. Korman had just made an appearance in my Grade 7 or 8 classroom. This was in the late 70s. He helped reignite the love of words that Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl had instilled in me in my earlier life. And, I suppose, Stephen King (in spirit, if not in any other way). Marjoram was painstakingly written in pen. A whole spiral notebook. I actually received an A+ for the story, so some well-meaning if exasperated teacher took pity on my Korman-bedazzled eyes and gave me the mark for effort.

Fast forward through all the trauma, joy, sorrow, bad decisions, good decisions, craziness, zaniness, depression, elation and all the other ion and ness words…somewhere along the way, I well and truly lost my way. I didn’t find my way back to writing until 2002. I’ve been writing ever since. Non-stop. Once you teach the parrot to talk, you cannot teach him to shut up. You merely await his death.

With all that writing, I still haven’t really learned the handshake. I don’t know…maybe it’s the trauma and bad life choices…the lack of strength in my early years that allowed me to fail so totally as a normalian…but something stands in my way. Is it that I didn’t get a card-carrying membership into the League of Writers through some inexplicably random series of college or university courses. Is it that I am blinded by my own stubbornness to accept failure as a default that I don’t see that I’m actually doing fairly well? I don’t know. I can’t pinpoint what feels ‘wrong’ about this. I write every day. I no longer put pen to paper, but I definitely churn words out through my fingers onto the computer screen. Christ, I’m doing it right now. I just…I guess I still don’t know why I’m doing it. I feel as though I’m constantly pushing my books on unsuspecting readers…but as I reach out to them in one way, I pull away from them in another. I hope they won’t read my words. I hope they will read my words.

I’m nearing the end of my umpteenth novel. I use the term umpteenth because I’m too lazy to actually do the counting on my fingers. I haven’t a clue how many I’ve written. You see, I’m fairly disconnected. I’m sometimes so numb, I have a hard time remembering the character names on the novel I’m actually working on. Have you ever had to scroll back to find your main character’s name? I can’t have an intelligent conversation with a reader. They asked me where I came up with the idea for, say, John Doe, and I can’t for the life of me remember what novel John Doe was a character in. I’m hopeless.

Yet, I continue. There is something in the actually laying down of words that seems to get me through. I’ll take it. You know…I’ll own it. It’s better than not writing. It’s the act of writing I need…not the outcome. The outcome is for readers—potential, constant and imagined.

It just gets to be a lot to handle sometimes. This pre-winter time seems to be the most difficult for me. But you know what…I’m gonna just keep writing. Ever forward… then you don’t have to look back at what you’ve written, right. It’s like I’m dropping all these crumbs along the forest path so I won’t get lost in the darkness. Only thing is… some bastard keeps pickin’ up the crumbs. I’m writing…but it’s too dark in here to see the words…

While the Mundane Takes Place – Write, Write, Write!

Unless you’re some all-powerful deity, you have a little mundane in your life. It’s true. Even the movers and shakers of Hollywood and the Tower of Song get to partake from the Table of Mundanity. Nobody is exempt. It’s kind of like dying–nobody gets out alive. You don’t have to be a poet to know that simple truth. Life is dying. And dying is living.

It’s the middle road between birth and death that matters. And not just the glitzy stuff. There’s more to life than podiums and celebrations. So much of our living time is filled with simple moments of non-fabulousness. As a writer, I try to pay particularly close attention to these moments. I always found that it is in the simple less spectacular events where story hides. Like a crouching lion, the details lurk under the surface of our mundane downtime. It is when I’m bored or idle or daydreaming that I ask myself, “What can be found in this time?” “What universal truth, wisdom, parallel, insight, emotion can be found within this moment?”

When a writer connects with that part of us that is universal–that humanness that we all share–that is when the fireworks go off. You don’t necessarily reread a passage in a story where the most exciting seat-of-your-pants action happens. But if you find that one special sentence that crawls down inside you…that sentence you recognize and know could have come from your very heart…that’s the sentence you’re going to read and reread. You’re gonna fully relate. You’re gonna say an emphatic, “YEAH!” or “YES!” It could be a mundane part in the story where the main character slices into an apple with a paring knife. It could be the way light comes into a room and rallies dust motes to dance. These mundane moments captured for one great big universal AHHHH! That’s what I love about writing. About reading. We share the simple moments that go into a life…the moments that connect EVENT to EVENT. Just those mundane moments that are filled with the hidden knowledge and wonder of universal commonality.

Don’t overlook a thing when you’re putting a story together. To capture the heart of the reader, you will need to capture the essence of humanity. It’s not found in the glamorous and intriguing fabulousness of the EVENTS. It’s found in the things we do every day. The minutiae. That will capture your reader and allow them to step inside your story bus…just to see where it is you’re going to take them!

Crash and Burn – Not Feeling Very Writer-y

Sometimes I masquerade as a writer. The costume is cheap…jeans and a t-shirt. Rips optional.

Other times, I almost feel like a writer.

And then there are the times like today. I know I have written. But what does it all mean? If you write every day, are you a writer? And surely you’re an author if you have books published, no?

I’ve been reading over my words and wondering what it is I’m doing. I think it’s time to attempt an outline again. I feel like I have run out of things to write about. I struggled a bit at the Muskoka Novel Marathon a couple of weeks back. I went from speed writing early on to trying to dig up stuff to write about. I ended up writing AND THEN THIS HAPPENED AND THEN THIS HAPPENED AND THEN THIS HAPPENED. It no longer felt smooth. The flow got cut off somewhere during the weekend. I don’t like struggling with words and ideas. It’s not something I usually do. I am going to attempt to outline a novel. I have failed miserably at this in the past. I eventually said that it wasn’t for me…but now I’m pretty sure it just wasn’t for me then. Let the experiment begin!

In the meantime, I’m kind of feeling more like a grandfather than a writer. So…here’s a picture of my grandson, Edward. I took it while we were at the park yesterday.