About Writing…

Out with the old and in with the new, it’s nice to set yourself out a clean slate every once in a while especially when the old slate had holes and a tendency to act irrationally. So I should say welcome to the new blog which goes along nicely with the new website, www.hollywebsteronline.co.uk the new Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/WebsterHolly and the new Facebook http://www.facebook.com/UnnaturalKingdom . All this newness is of course geared up to promote the new book, Blood Born, which is finally hitting the e-reader shelves on Halloween. Yes, I am that corny.

In order to kick off the new blog, I though I’d come at you with a theory (not the only or the all defining theory, just one among many) about writing, specifically creative writing, where the ideas come from and why sometimes writing the story out is the only thing that keeps you from going completely bonkers (I like the word bonkers, for some reason it makes me think of cats).

It’s often hard to really define where an idea comes from, since in my experience at least, it seems to happen without really any warning. Blood Born, for example, the initial catalyst for that idea was a singular line from a movie (‘there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf’ - Cursed, 2005) within a few seconds of hearing the line two distinct if fairly basic characters and several scenes had popped into my head. I knew WHY they’d appeared but it was impossible to really say WHERE they’d appeared from since there was no conscious thought that went into their creation.

In an attempt to explain the process I took a little break from reality. Nothing new for me. I realised there must be something preceding the conscious imagination that picks the ideas out of the memory and feeds them to the imagination in chunks it can handle. I called this the Process of Uncensored Creativity (PUC). This odd little mind filter is, to my slightly twisted imagination, actually a little character all of its own. A strange hovering mechanical drone like creature inexplicably possessed of some level of independent consciousness. Looking like a cross between a Star Wars probe and something designed by HR Geiger, PUC hovers above the pit of my consciousness, its long jelly fish tentacles siphoning through the depths of my brain scavenging bits from every random sci-fi, fantasy, horror, book film TV show and documentary I’ve spent my whole life absorbing. PUC pulls out interesting strands here and there knits together outlandish characters and plotlines into a demented Frankenstein tapestry before waving it relentlessly in front of my imagination, matador style.

Now PUC isn’t exactly subtle, once it finds an idea it likes the taste of it will keep stitching on new bits to the end until it’s something like a magicians scarf, it just keeps going and going. I must take a moment to state that PUC mustn’t be ignored when it starts doing this, to do so risks being hounded night and day until you just can’t take it anymore. The only thing to really do is start writing, taking what PUC has handed out and moulding it, making it at least slightly believable (PUC doesn’t feel the need to make things believable). Only once an idea is written out will PUC back off and start working on something else.

Unfortunately by that point I’ve started seeing the potential, and I no longer need PUC to keep bugging me about it, I can do that fine by myself. Soon the story starts to take on a life of it’s own, and it seems mean to neglect it. PUC is happy enough to keep supplying extra little bits of information to keep the story ticking along, but the really hard work of fitting everything in, covering all the bases and making it flow isn’t something it’s concerned with.

In the end you’ve got a great little piece of fiction, and maybe a few weeks to recover before PUC starts up again. If you’re lucky.