Kinetics of the Page, Part I of V
Kinetics is the science of “motion of masses in relation to the forces acting on them,” kinetic energy being “energy of a body which results from its motion. . . ½ mv2 , where m is mass and v is velocity; opposed to potential energy.”1 Please pay attention to the idea that a body in motion has energy and a body not in motion has only potential energy—potential energy, as in potential novel, like the novel you’ll write one day, and as long as it’s in your head, it will always be good and always be a bestseller—potentially.
Back to kinetics. Kinetogenisis is a biological term referring to “the genesis of organic structures by kinetic operations; the doctrine that animal structures are produced by movement of the animal.” 2 Now let’s turn back to fiction (or any other kind of creative writing).
As a global thinker in a linear society, I am chronically bucking aspects of the straight and narrow, largely initiated by Henry Ford and the assembly line, the punch card, the time clock. Fiction does not need to be written in order, from beginning to end. You don’t even need to know in the beginning if all the characters belong in the same book. You sure as kinesis don’t need to know the plot. For one thing, it may not exist—YET. So, how can you know it?
This is not an accusation against writers who like to start at the beginning and write to the end. However, countless aspiring writers think they need an outline, a plot, and must write the story from start to finish. That’s a pretty left-brain approach to a radically right-brain activity. First of all, some novels don’t tell a story from beginning to end. Many a writer has been liberated when given permission to write out of order, bounce around. Many a stuck writer has been pulled free by going someplace far from the mainline or the next scene.
Personally, I write out of chaos. I embrace chaos. Chaos is the gorilla.
1 Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary.
2 Ibid.
Exercise: Look through magazines, catalogs, photograph books, old photos from an antique store. Select some images of characters you want to write about. Begin by making some notes about them and their lives. Then have one of them say something to somebody. Write about what happens next.
With National Novel Writing Month starting November 1,this is the perfect exercise to keep things moving forward. I know how well the photographs work. It was the photo of a middle-aged women holding a wilted pot of geraniums that introduced me to a lead character in my novel!
Thanks Darnell!
This makes me think I may want to go back and re-write some stories from the middle out, so to speak, to get rid of some of that left-brain tendency to go straight from start to finish.
The chaos of that is a little scary but would be
freeing in the long run. Thanks, Darnell for the hit on my self-satisfaction. I fear I needed it.