A Writer's Brain

[Paul Whybrow]

I'm progressing with my WIP, The Dead Need Nobody, though the researching of facts and intensive editing are slowing me down. I don't mind that much, as I either get the facts correct and knock the story into shape as I proceed or have an overwhelming amount to do when the story's finished. I love how alive my mind gets when in the throes of creative writing, amazed at how the grey cells keep working away at the story, even though I'm doing something else and not thinking about it at all; ideas appear unbidden while I'm sleeping, doing the washing up or even when reading someone else's novel.

By chance, I stumbled across a cartoon that cleverly sums up how it feels.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I've found the remedy for being happy as a writer!

 

[Boopadoo]

My head's always like that. I can't turn it off. I call my blog "Tales from a Crowded Mind."

Most people, when I go into Storyland and get the blank stare and "huh, what?" demeanor, ask "Where'd you go just now?"

Mrs Boopadoo, after many years of marriage, learned to ask "You were just writing, weren't you?"

 

[Howard]

@Paul Whybrow I agree utterly.
The noise inside a writer's head is simply staggering. I genuinely hate talking to other "normal" people about writing, now. I dread their "so how's the book going?" questions, or even worse, the "So how do you come up with/keep track of your plots?". It is utterly impossible to answer these questions, and any attempt makes you sound like a crazy person.
A story, when it exists in your head, is like a living thing: an organic fractal. From a distance, it looks like something, but every point of it into which you zoom reveals more detail beyond. Everything is connected, everything pulls against each other and almost all parts of it are in some kind of multi-stage flux that is bordering on permanent collapse.
Trying to explain the noise in our heads to a non-writer is like trying to explain chaos theory to a badger.