When the Thrill Is Gone19 May 2003 "Passion is the hardest taskmaster." -- Stephen King, From a Buick 8 I've been a storyteller all my life. The only reason I bought my first PalmPilot, so many years ago, was to help with my writing. I've spent years preparing to be a novelist, organizing story ideas, reading books about writing and writers, doing everything but what really counts. I'm not writing. Well, I'm not writing fiction, anyway. I've been writing this column for three and half years, only missing a couple of weeks in that time. In the interest of keeping current on my column's subject matter, I spend dozens of hours a week reading, researching and talking about mobile technology. But not writing fiction. Fiction is something I try to make time for, but never seem to actually do. It's a constant source of frustration, that I'm not getting around to working on my book. Working. Maybe that's the problem. Fiction is work. For me, anyway. Mobile tech is play. Given the option of writing a new chapter of fiction and seeing what's new on the forums at Brighthand, I'll pick the latter every time. Recently I got hit over the head with a clue-by-four, in the shape of the King quote above. From a Buick 8 is an interesting book about obsession and our fascination with dangerous things, but I've read enough King to know how he thinks and that quote's as much about his view on writing as anything else. He's right. If writing fiction were really important to me, if I had a real passion for it, I wouldn't need to make time to do it. I'd do it without consciously planning or prioritizing, writing instead of doing other things, like paying bills, that I really ought to be doing. Writing is, and should be, an intensely personal thing. When I wrote Between Heaven and Hell, I had a very specific reason for doing so. I was looking for a specific kind of story, a mixture of horror and SF where nothing was what it seemed and all the preconceived notions of the reader were turned on their ear. I was really into Babylon 5 back then, and I'd also been wowed by Christopher Golden's vampire books. I wanted more, and I couldn't find it. (Dan Simmons's Hyperion was incredible, but not what I was looking for.) Since I couldn't find what I wanted, I wrote it. I was, in a very real sense, telling myself a story. While Between Heaven and Hell eventually got picked up by Palm Digital Media and has done fairly well for an ebook, and I've made a moderate sum of money from its sales, all of that is just gravy. What really matters is the story I told myself. If I'd never published it at all and just filed it away when I was done writing it still would have served its purpose. I experienced something similar with Do Over!. That story was intensely personal to me, damn close to autobiographical. There should be some of you in all your characters, but Rick Preston was about 90% me. We all ask, "if I knew then what I know now, what would I do differently?," but I'd wondered for a long time if my largely miserable high school years could have been better if I'd only been more prepared. Do Over! was my way of finding out. Since then, the fiction projects I've tried haven't caught me with the same passion I had for earlier works. I have, if anything, more opportunity to write now than I had while writing Between Heaven and Hell -- which was mostly written longhand in a paper day planner -- but I write less. Well, less fiction. I'm still writing as much of my column as ever, and it keeps getting bigger all the time (did I ever really think I could fit each column into a single 4k memo?). The guys in my writing group think that I may be trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. Maybe I'm not a novelist at all. Maybe I'm a columnist. It's an interesting point. I love a good story, but do I really need to write them? Let's face it, if I spent four hours a day reading just the ebooks I have on my Palm Zire 71 right now, it'd still be a year or two before I finished them all. And I'm sure by then the good folks at Baen, Palm Digital and Fictionwise will have more books for me to devour. But I do seem to have an unique perspective on mobile technology. Writing this column is a joy, not like work at all. And with the pressure/guilt of not-writing a novel off my mind, perhaps the oft-started but never finished rewrite of Writing On Your Palm will finally be completed. Or, and I have to consider this as at least a possibility, I might be BSing myself. Writers, especially novelists, are notorious for finding excuses not to write. Fiction is hard, but that's what makes it so rewarding. So which is it: am I a columnist mistaking a love of reading fiction for the need to write it, or am I a novelist who should quit using a technology column for psychotherapy and just get back to work? Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |