Writing is Funny

I swear, there is a point to this picture. Kind of.

The other day I cut my thumb while I was making dinner. It wasn’t anything serious, but I still probably should have put on a band-aid so I didn’t bleed all over our salad. Instead, the first thing I did was grab my notebook and make extensive notes about how the blood ran down my thumb, how it stung when I rinsed off the cut, how long it took to stop bleeding…

Writing is weird. 

I noticed this when I was starting to learn to paint, too. Suddenly, trees weren’t green. They were a million different colors. It makes you see the world just a little differently.

The whole world is like that when you’re a writer. The sound of the wind isn’t necessarily “howling,” like you automatically think. It’s a whisper one day, and it might be a scream the next. There are so many nuances that you just…hadn’t noticed before.

And besides this, doesn’t writing just make you do strange things? Like I realized that my last two Google searches were “Paris to Istanbul flight time” and “Paul Wesley shirtless.” (Research, people. Research. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.) 

And then there’s when I’m writing at Starbucks and the person at the table next to me gives me a funny look. I realize that I have my notebook open to a page entitled, “Possible ways to kill people.” In the context of my book, makes sense. In real life, not so much. 

Or sometimes I’ll find myself having conversations with my husband that start off like, “So, Jack needs to have his shirt off in this scene. What logical way can I get him to take his shirt off?” Or to do some research of my own, I have to put on a miniskirt and try to climb on some furniture to determine just how difficult Avery’s escape is going to be in this scene. 

Or my favorite: out at happy hour with some friends the other night, I realized that I had “hung out” with my characters far, far more than I had hung out with these real people recently. 

What weird writing things have you done recently?