posted: November 5, 2005
I caught up to one of my favorite writers last night at the University Village Barnes & Noble. OK, I admit, once again, that I'm a huge, silly fangrrl when it comes to Richard K. Morgan. Not that I've found his work to be entirely peerless or without fault, but it's been brain-fillingly satisfying to date, and that's not something I can say about every writer I otherwise enjoy, either in person or in print. He is definitely among the SF nobility these days, while I am still in the muddy proletariat with a huge grin on my face. As I said at the time, it's always a pleasure to talk to Morgan and hear him read--which he did twice last night, so we fans got a taste of the next book while it's still in manuscript. The downsides to the evening were that, it being the Friday of my first week back in an office job, I was too dodo-headed to be articulate and interesting, myself, and the huge pile of books to sign and early-morning flights hanging like the Sword of Damocles over the author's head killed any hope of buying him a drink and blithering about things the rest of the audience would have found dead boring.
Morgan is among the writers to whom I address the mental admonishment, "Goddamn it, write faster!" at the end of every book. After meeting him for the second time, though, I realize that "faster" simply isn't possible. Morgan revealed that he writes messy, organic, mental road-trips, pounding out chapters driven by instinct and imagination toward a general destination and he'll find the right house when he gets there. It's a technique that allows for sudden twists, side trips, dead-ends, unexpected treats, disasters and improvisations as hair-raising to the writer as to the reader. It also means a ton of editing, revising, re-writing and "hum a few bars and I'll fake it." It's not fast. It's not efficient. But it's a hell of a trip. And that's why I'm a fan.
I've written that way, too, and it's a lot more fun than the safe highways of structure and process (even though I'm sticking to those a lot these days). It's the fast-cars-and-roadhouses school of writing. It's exhilarating, exhausting and can be a bit dangerous--to the writer. There's always the chance that you'll end up in a corner or be unable to meet a deadline. And, of course, there's the risk it will be bad, boring or self-indulgent and of no interest to anyone outside the writer's circle of cronies. There are boxes of this sort of thing taking up space in my storage unit and a few too many occupying covers on bookstore shelves. Mine, I hope, won't see print. So far, Morgan's trips have been terrific--my one reservation being Market Forces which I found a bit too wandering.
Road-trip writing is an art of instinct, like throwing a great party, or improv acting. It has rules, but if you are too conscious of them and try too hard, you can't do it. This is the phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink--the ability to know through instant recognition by an experienced mind (plus a good bit of scrubbing and polishing once the rough form is out of the mold.) But there is always that lurking specter of possible failure....
I readily admit to my fear of not making the next mark, though Morgan's not so worried for either of us. He's got an admirable cool about it all--not to mention the infectious grin. He even inscribed my copy of Woken Furies: "Breathe deep + trust yourself (and don't look back)".
Sportswriter Red Smith is usually credited with the quote "Writing is easy; you just open a vein and bleed." But sometimes it seems more like a writer's pentathlon of mental running, creative jumping, obstacle hurdling, shooting myself and my ideas in the head, and swimming through a pool of razor blades to the end, to drag myself out, collapse onto the settee with a bottle of whiskey and an indulgent spouse and bleed until the wounds close up.
But, it is kind of fun. So, Richard, I guess that pool full of razor blades doesn't look so bad.... Besides, there's something neat and sparkly at the other end.
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