I’ve snooped through essays and interviews of my favourite authors, and from this I’ve whittled down their advice down to five convenient mottos that make sense to me.

Please yourself. If you don’t like what you’re writing, why should anyone else?

Explore every possibility. Consider that characters have minds of their own, and they might not react to a situation exactly how you might expect. Let them surprise you.

Reveal or advance. In a story, every word is important. You want to get to the point as quickly as possible, so every single sentence should reveal a character or theme, or advance the plot. Respect the reader’s time.

Kill your darlings. When an author comes up a story, it often comes along with specific ideas they want to incorporate, like a character, some dialogue, or even an entire scene. As the story develops and they don’t quite make as much sense in the story, they’re hard to let go. Kill them.

There are no rules. This is kind of a writing advice wildcard. Do what you want. Colour outside the lines, think outside the sphere, let your imagination loose. That’s what a reader really wants.

And indeed, there are some curious things in there.

For example. King James version. Genesis 1:26 reads, in part, And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Immediately following that, Genesis 1:27 reads, So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.

Did you catch that? I cross-referenced this passage with another version too. In both, God refers to himself as “us” and “our” whereas when God is referred to, he is an individual. This is well prior to Jesus ascending to Heaven, so we can exclude the Holy Trinity, although perhaps the “us” in question refers to God and the Holy Spirit? The dualism is a possibility. But I don’t think so, I think it’s a concession that man created God. And I think it’s an admittance that even if man didn’t create God, man interpreted him how we could.

There are other things I found interesting. From Genesis 1:27 (again), let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. How convenient this is for us that our God put everything on the planet for our disposal. It’s a free pass, especially when we find out later that God will forgive anything else we do!

I always thought that Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge; in actuality, it’s the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Quite different meanings. After God curses them, they have two boys, Cain and Abel. In Genesis 4:2, we learn that Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. After the two men bring forth their offerings to God, the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. So God curses him, the brothers fight, and Cain kills Abel.

Seriously. If you’re Cain, you have got to be pretty pissed off at God. It’s only a few decades after creation, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there. Gardener or hunter, that’s it. And since hunter’s taken, you bring God the best you have and he gives unto you not respect? That’s gotta sting.

So then Cain is cursed, he has a bunch of children, and his children have children, and all these children are named, until finally we get to one named Noah. That’s when everyone drowns and humans take a mulligan. We’re left with one family that starts everything. Assuming the logic that in the beginning there was one male and one female homo sapien that formed our species, so far the Noah story holds up, even scientifically.

Now keep this in mind when I say scientifically, the human mind has an instinct towards art. It has been suggested that without creating fiction, we wouldn’t have been able to evolve as we have. So it’s quite possible that two parents told their children a fantastic story about their grandparents. Whether or not it’s true is not the point; the myth is what is important. We live by principals established in part by myth.

As curious as I am, I may not read the whole thing. I started with Revelations, so I know how it all ends. Pretty lousy ending, really. Almost like this one, but without the locusts and disease. Well, the locusts anyway.

For the unaware, I have began yet another blog. It is called A Result of Reason, and this is where I’ll be posting more bits like Awakening. This is where I will inflate. Lucky you, world.

1. I don’t consider myself a writer, though I do write. This difference isn’t a slight dissimilarity, it’s the equivalent of calling myself a cook because I can make dinner. No, there is one thing that I do that allows me to live, and it is not writing.

2. I am a writer, because wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I think about work. Actual work, that challenges and satisfies me equally, is constantly being creative. If it weren’t for writing, I would have no shield from this world, and it would crush me.

How am I supposed to define myself in this way? Is this extension of identity reflected by what drives me or what helps me to drive?

Truth is, I don’t care, I just want to be moving.

I hope so, but suspect not.

The narrator is a man hiding from himself. Despite seeming – to some – content and satisfied with everything he has, he is not. Meaning in life eludes him. He cannot identify with society. He is a prisoner in a body only associating with civilization out of habit and necessity. He does not know how to laugh, how to enjoy anything.

What I am learning from this novel is that whereas I do not understand each sentence, it is not beyond me. Despite being lost in phrasing, I am not lost of the story because I am lost in the character.

While being wonderfully eloquent, I never believed it was love. It was a journey of distasteful imagination for the narrator, and I know this is exactly accurate because the last several chapters proved it. The last several chapters proved me right for not believing the narrator’s perversions; and in fact, it was this, the last several chapters, that made the first few hundred pages beautiful. Nabokov made me believe with absolute certainty in remorse.

A horrible thought, because after all, he was exactly right. There aren’t any original ideas; not in the context of the point he was making. All stories have beginnings and ends, conflicts and resolutions, love and death with fighting in-between. I even helped him prove his point, since Treasure Island was just a story about pirates, and pirates existed long before Stevenson wrote about them.

And then he asked me why I’d want to write; what satisfaction could I possibly get from creating unoriginal stories?

Once again, he was right. Most writers don’t actually make a living from it. Like Kafka, he didn’t write anything publicly acknowledged as brilliant until well after his death. So what, then, is the attraction? Vanity, ego, the desire to be remembered?

No. The truth is, there aren’t any original ideas, and we write to prove otherwise.

Other things going through my mind lately are appearances. I’m trying to perceive how the devil would look if he was human. Tall, dark, and handsome, of course; but how would his hair look? What shoes would he wear? How well would he fit in to society, if he were walking downtown? What prominence would he stand with, or would he slink into shadows and hide? Would he appear among plagues of rats and snakes, would he have an aide?

It would be easy to create this character if only I’d done it first.