It’s No Good to Anybody In Your Head
If
you haven’t seen the film Amadeus,
you are instructed to stop reading and go rent it right away. You won’t regret
it.
Still
here? Great. Amadeus is a biopic of
the flamboyant Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose flame flared brightly enough to
burn him out at a young age and still echoes in concert halls today.
Toward
the final chapters of Amadeus, an
opera director comes to see him and asks to see the pages for The Magic Flute, the opera Mozart is
writing for him.
“There
aren’t any pages,” Mozart says.
The
director is upset, thinking of payrolls and schedules, and says, “I asked you
if we could start rehearsals next week and you said yes!”
Mozart
nods. “It’s all here,” he says, pointing to his head. “The rest is just
bibbling and scribbling, scribbling and bibbling.” Mozart is quite drunk, of
course. And we hate the opera director for his next line, because we’ve come to
care quite a bit for Mozart and his creative craziness by this point.
“Finish
it,” he snaps. “Write it down. On paper. It’s no good to anybody in your head.”
I
think of that scene when speaking to aspiring writers. It doesn’t seem all that
long ago that I was hoping to land my first book contract, asking questions and
listening intently to the authors. Now I’m the one they ask about
self-publishing vs. traditional publishing, or how I find time to write with a
day job, or where I get my ideas. It’s a thousand questions that boil down to,
“I want to write. Tell me how.”
Sometimes,
I tell them about my friend Joe. Joe was a wonderful storyteller. We’d have
lunch, and he’d tell me the latest story he’d concocted: dark fantasies full of
drama and angst, color and magic. I’d listen, and then start grinning until he
asked me what was so funny.
“Did
you write it down?” I’d ask, and he’d give me the half-smile that says, “I
know, you’re going to tell me about Mozart and the opera director again.”
The
turning point for me was an issue of Writer’s Digest. The cover article was an
excerpt from Stephen King’s memoir titled On
Writing. The cover showed King’s face, a little less lined than it is now,
and the title: “Stephen King on how to get ten pages a day.” Elsewhere on the
cover was the title of an unrelated article: “What’s keeping you from success?”
I
cut out that cover with King’s image and those two sentences only. I knew what
was keeping me from success – on what still keeps me from success, as I measure
it. King writes every day of the year, and I do not. Life intervenes, as does
the day job, the requirements of being a wife and mother, the other thousand
obligations that nibble at the hours.
But
that keeps me from success. One day off turns into two, turns into a week, and suddenly
the dust has fallen in the mind as well as the keyboard.
You
see, the opera director was right – you knew I’d get back to him. He was harsh
and selfish, but he was right. If Mozart had never put pen to paper, none of us
would ever have heard The Magic Flute.
It would have vanished into the ether with his untimely death, and all his
songs would be unsung.
What
are your songs? What are the stories
you have to tell? Why do you keep them locked inside you where no one can see
them? What is keeping you from success, whether it is commercial, critical or
creative? What is required to get you what you want, and why do you let it
slide one more day?
At
the risk of sounding like a harsh opera director, I can only tell you what I
have learned. Write it down. On paper. It’s no good to anybody in your head.
Your stories will be unheard and your songs unsung as long as you let that hard
work of putting pen to paper slide for another day, and another, and another.
It
is the only answer to “how do you write those books?” I’ve ever come across.
As
to where the ideas come… well, if you listen closely enough, in the dark place
between awake and asleep, your ideas will speak to you, in what dreams may come.
Please, share them with us.
Elizabeth Donald is a dark fiction
writer fond of things that go chomp in the night. She is
a three-time winner of the Darrell Award for speculative fiction and author of the
Nocturne vampire mystery series and Blackfire zombie
series, as well as other novels and short stories in the horror, science
fiction and fantasy genres. She is the founder of the Literary Underworld
author cooperative; an award-winning newspaper reporter and lecturer on
journalism ethics; a nature and art photographer; freelance editor and writing
coach. She lives with her husband and her son in a haunted house in Illinois Memphis
Website: www.elizabethdonald.com
Blog: literaryunderworld.blogspot.com
Twitter: @edonald
