This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley Page B

these years. Sexual lust, hate for her own children, the desire to taste the blood of her enemy—all these things and many more must, at times, crowd the writer’s mind.
    Your protagonist, for instance, may at a certain moment despise his mother. “She stinks of red wine and urine,” he thinks. “And she looks like a shriveled, pitted prune.”
    This is an unpleasant sentiment, to be sure. But does it bring your hero’s character into focus? This is the only question that’s important. And there’s no getting around it. Your characters will have ugly sides to them; they will be, at times, sexually deviant, bitter, racist, cruel.
    “Sure,” you say, “the antagonists, the bad guys in my book, will be like that but not the heroes and heroines.”
    Not so.
    The story you tell, the characters you present, will all have dark sides to them. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.
    Our social moorings aren’t the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon. Many writers come to the discipline after having read the old, and new, masters. They read Dickens and Melville, Shakespeare and Homer. From these great books of yore, they develop tics and reflexes that cause their words to become stiff and unnatural.
    Many writers, and teachers of writing, spend so much time comparing work to past masters that they lose the contemporary voice of the novel being created on this day.
    You will not become a writer by aping the tones and phrases, form and content, of great books of the past. Your novel lies in your heart; it is a book about today, no matter in which era it is set, written for a contemporary audience to express a story that could only have come from you.
    Don’t get me wrong—you can read anything and learn from it. But your learning will also come from modern songs, newscasts, magazine articles, and conversations overheard on the street. A novel is a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints.
    Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it. Many writers use themselves, their families, and their friends as models for the characters they portray. A young woman who has had a difficult time with her mother may render a tale in which the mother seems overly harsh, maybe even heartless. She (the writer) wades in, telling the story in all its truth and ugliness, but then, feeling guilt, she backs away from it, muddying the water. Maybe she stops writing for a while or changes her subject.
    Whatever it is she does, the novel suffers.
    This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day.
    This form of restraint is common and wholly unnecessary.
    To begin with, your mother is not reading what you have written. These words are your private preserve until the day they’re published.
    Also you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words—so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.
    Don’t let any feeling keep you from writing. Don’t let the world slow you down. Your story is the most important thing coming down the line this year. It’s your year—make the most of it.
    avoidance, false starts,