Eric Hook's Blog

It shocks me how bad at writing successful writers are sometimes. I’m currently watching a very popular show with my wife and the writing is so awful sometimes that I hope to God it’s AI. But I know the truth. It’s not AI that’s writing the show, it’s a kid straight out of college. AI is, therefore, probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but ultimately it’s the kid that’s reading his or her copy at the end of the day and saying to themselves, “yep, that’s definitely the way human beings talk to each other. Also, this plot definitely makes sense.” It makes me think about my own writing from when I was in high school or college, and how utterly cringey it is to me now. I had no idea how to write people of different ages or personalities, largely because my experience with those kinds of conversations was so limited. I also couldn’t write a logical or interesting plot because my life had yet to follow a logical or interesting path. I had limited experience with complex sequences of events because school is a simple, sometimes illogical universe. It’s not a real place, with realistic consequences. You can get in a fistfight in a classroom and it’ll result in detention. If you bomb an assignment, you don’t get fired, you get a bad grade. School isn’t a real place, and the people in it, including the teachers, frequently have no concept of the real world. So, the fact that the entertainment industry keeps churning out drivel shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. How do you expect to have a realistic storyline with actual human dialogue if your writers all go from college (not reality) to the entertainment industry (also not reality). Say what you will about the alcoholic writers of yesteryear, but most of them lived a real life before they landed a job as a writer (that’s why they’re alcoholics). That real life experience transfers directly into interesting storylines and compelling dialogue. And, I’m not saying I’m one of them, but I can say definitively that the rather complex life I’ve lived to this point has shaped me into the best version of a writer I can be. I’m not saying that I’m great, you can judge that for yourself by buying my book, dangit, but I am saying that without all that life experience I would be a whole lot worse.

This one has nothing to do with my journey as a writer, it’s just a pet-peeve. I can’t stand the current trend on the internet of censoring words about death. Look, I get it, you wanted to do something about cyber-bullying, and you weren’t smart enough to actually target the root causes in a realistic way. Just because you can’t do a thing, doesn’t mean you should create another problem all in the name of “well, we had to do SOMETHING.”
No. You didn’t have to do ‘something.’ There’s no good solution, so you just deal with it. You couldn’t be happy with that end result though, nooooo. You had to take some action, so you made it against the internet law to say some of the mean words that bullies say.
“We blocked cyber-bullies from saying ‘kill yourself’ and ‘die’, our job here is done.” No. All you did is introduce something utterly moronic into our language: ‘unalive.’ People can still communicate hateful, cruel statements, they just have to contribute to the further bastardization of the language to do it. The word itself doesn’t matter, only the meaning behind it. In your utterly childish attempt to solve a problem, you introduced the stupidest possible solution that embarrasses us as a culture and creates socio-cultural problems all its on own. And all without remotely addressing the original problem, by the way. Sure, you’ve forced cyber-bullies to be more creative; but they excel at that. Meanwhile, you also force news personnel on the internet to describe victims of natural disasters as ‘unalive.’ How utterly embarrassing. I heard another online reporter describe a victim of sexual assault as a ‘grape victim.’ How does that benefit anyone? Remove the weird censorship, stop patting yourself on the back for pretending to address cyber-bullying and go back to the drawing board.

Growing up, I read a lot of good writing. You might not agree with that statement once you go through my shelves, but the point is that the writing was good enough to intimidate me. I had bestsellers recommended to me by friends and family and classics thrust upon me by English teachers. Between the two categories, I believe I received a decent education on high quality writing. My writing style may be heavily influenced by the ‘good’ books of that education, but I also came away from those books with an overwhelming feeling that ‘good writing’ was pretty well handled. I never finished a Stephen King book and said to myself, ‘damn, I should become a writer.’ I was left by my own bookshelves with the impression that the category of ‘writer’ was quite full, and I was never inspired to try it myself, not even as a hobby. I remember I wrote a paper for Biology class on the disease Kuru and began the paper with a dramatic scene of some villager dying of it in a hut deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. My teacher pulled me aside and told me that I had a gift for creative writing, and I should keep doing it. I was very thankful for the compliment, but nothing clicked in my head. I still wasn’t inspired to pursue creative writing, to write short stories or novels beyond what was required for English class.
But then I got married. I won’t get into the very understandable collapse of my first marriage here, but what I will say is that she had a taste in books that was very… hit and miss. She loved anything popular, and that meant that yes, she read Harry Potter and even gave the Dark Tower series a shot. It also meant that she read – and loved – the Twilight series. Now, sometimes in a marriage, one does things that they don’t want to do just so they can relate with their spouse, and reading Twilight was one such endeavor for me as a young husband. I was working a 3rd shift security job in a Chemical plant at the time, and started reading Twilight so she and I could have something to talk about together. I hated it. Now, Stephenie Meyer isn’t going to cry herself to sleep over the people that dislike her books, she’s doing just fine. Twilight wasn’t written for guys like me anyway, but I just couldn’t get over what she was doing to vampire lore. In a way it was positive. When the Zzz monster would come for me at 3am, I’d be too busy raging to myself over her vampire design to get so much as a droopy eyelid. However, that mental spiral also continued when I was trying to sleep. Insomnia was already an occasional problem, so the last thing I needed was to compound it.
One day, I rage quit reading one of the books, spontaneously pulled up a Word document and started writing. I found her vampire novel so offensive that I felt I needed to balance it out with some writing of my own. As much as I disliked the entire premise of her book, and most of the literary elements of her series, she also inspired me to write. Through reading this book series, which I disliked immensely, I learned two things:
1. If Stephenie Meyer can be a professional writer, so can I. The world of fiction writing isn’t nearly as saturated with geniuses as I thought. There’s plenty of mediocre hacks who make a living writing, and dammit, I could be one of them.
2. As much as ‘good writing’ had influenced my style, it took the absolute RAGE of having to read a book I hated to inspire me to create something.
So, I kept writing. I wrote about 36k words that first week, and kept writing steadily until I had a decent little novel. I’d never written anything longer than a short story for a Creative Writing class, and I had a full novel in a couple of months. I learned a lot from that book, and one of these days, I’ll actually publish it. In the mean time, I wrote another book, ‘Denithor the Librarian,’ which has pretty well consumed me, and now I’m trying to make my way through the murky waters of trying to find success as a self-published author. And, as much as that process is scary, the writing has never stopped. The words continue to flow, because at the back of my mind I know that if I ever get stuck, I can always just read some bad writing – something I absolutely despise – to get me back on track.

I love writing, I honestly do. I got started with novels somewhat late, but writing, even in small ways has always been there for me when I need to work through something that's bouncing around in my head. But, now that I'm an 'author' and not just a guy who writes stuff for fun, I'm discovering an awful lot of 'not-writing' within the overall category of 'writer.' It would be lovely if I could do only that: write. No press releases (that writing doesn't count, don't be pedantic), no Quickbooks, no learning about Sales Taxes in Massachusetts. Just me and the thing I love to do: write. Because the thing is, it's not like I can turn the writing off. The book doesn't go away just because I have to set up my Square system tonight. The book doesn't care at all about the not-writing that has to be done, and it isn't overly patient. When I'm writing at an acceptable pace, the book whispers. It's whispering about scenes that are coming up, conflicts that are boiling in the background, blockages that must be cleared. Even when I'm putting in the work it doesn't ever go quiet. But when I'm not-writing? First it starts talking.
No more polite whispers in the quiet hours when I'm pouring my coffee or waiting for my daughter to be asleep. Talking at a normal volume. And the more I not-write, the louder it gets. The double edged sword of writing is that I started doing this thing to try and deal with sleep issues. Eyes drooping when I should be awake, mind racing when I should be drifting off. But now that the writing has established itself, it's gotten a bit cocky. Bold. Assertive. It knows its value to me and it can absolutely throw its weight around when it needs to. It can start talking when it's being ignored, and it can absolutely raise its voice if it is not attended to after that. And that's when I find my mind racing again at midnight, and I have to get the words out of my head. I have to write. I have to make the yelling become talking, become whispering. So, I have to find a balance here. I have to find ways to slip the writing in between bouts of not-writing. It's not easy. I'm not a professional writer yet, and so I still have a job. I have bills to pay, a kid to raise and a wife to love, and so both the writing and the not-writing have to slide into the spaces in-Denithor the Librarianbetween. As long as that is a necessity, the whispering will continue. Hopefully, I can keep the volume at an acceptable level.