Poo Warning: This post reveals intimate details about my writing method. If you or your loved ones hold sacred the – dare I say – art of defacation, and do not want it soiled by my words, please, turn away now.
Whenever I’m writing, it’s usually in a comfort zone. As I’ve stated before, typically, a hotel room does a great service to my creative side. The single best comfort zone that I have, however, is a bathroom. That’s right. If you’ve read any of my work, there’s at least an 85% chance that you’re reading inverted poop literature.
But wait! I can compound the oddity quotient. You see, the main reason writing in the bathroom is so effective for me is that it just became comfortable after so long. The lavatory was a safe haven for me to escape to when I needed a break from anything else, whether that was family, or work or even my other hobbies.
If it was feasible to write in the shower, I probably would.
So it’s been established that I am at my most relaxed when I’m dropping trou. But for me to truly feel absolutely at peace, I need to be as near to natural as possible. That means that I am practically naked when I’m scrawling my brain baby onto paper. Think about it. How else can you be that intimate with your hobby?
Furthermore, breaking down the outside world helps to establish that personal connection that I truly need to find expressive dialogue and emotions in my work. If I had one readily available, I’d find comfort in a nice waterfall – but bees and flies and other things could preoccupy my time, so I find white noise elsewhere: a hair dryer.
Friends and family have taken to referring to it as a dryer poop. It’s my little piece of heaven, for fifteen minutes at a time. I’m relaxed, I’m warm, and I’m naked. But that’s just the point. When I’m in that mentality, I’m as far away from reality as I’ve ever been. It’s in that state of relaxation that I can best displace myself, and write from the point of views of multiple characters. It’s practically an out-of-body experience. Fear me, for I am an almighty poop god!
Now, that’s not to say that I can’t write elsewhere. In fact, that’s the point of this blog post. As I draw closer and closer to the end of a novel, the perimeter of the comfort zone seems to grow. I’m not sure if it’s because the intimacy of the project grows as I prepare to bid it a final adieu, or a need to express myself more often (usually attributed, I’m sure, to the volume of the story that falls into that last chapter or two). In any case, I can write just about anywhere. I’m a veritable Doctor Seuss character as it pertains to scribbles at this point.
This becomes such an issue that – despite the fact that I’ll finish The Enemy Within, with the intent to put it away and not look at it for a month – I will begin writing the follow-up to the novel within the next few days or even hours. When I finished As Darknes Falls, I knew that I was going to be taking a huge step away from my original conceived notion of The Enemy Within. I thought I’d need time to load the new ideas into my mind, but they were already buried somewhere in my mind, and I ended up renting a backhoe without any prior anticipation.
Basically, it all boils down to this: over the next month or so, it becomes incredibly interesting for me as a writer. I can’t wait to see what insanity comes to pass!
Michael DeAngelo
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