I was hanging out my room just kind of chilling when my roommate came home. He asked me if I wanted to come out and bullshit for little while and so we sat down and started talking. After he explained what he been doing at work all day, He asked what I had been doing all day. I told him that I'd been reading this fascinating book about a shape shifter that I hadn't seen anyone else approach in this particular way before.
I started explaining what the world was like and got in-depth on some of the characters backgrounds. I explained how the main character had been forced out of his town because he hurt a bully in rather extraordinary way. Afraid of what the townsfolk would do to him, because of previous incidents of this character getting into trouble as a child, he set out into the great savanna that was on the edge of town.
In the course of running away he runs into another character who ends up cursing him, but it's not as negative a thing as it's first portrayed. The curse requires the main character to live as a coyote, but for three days out of the month he can turn back into a human boy if he so chooses. The main character doesn't often take this choice because in the initial story he doesn't actually interact with that many humans. What he does do is learn how to survive as a coyote out in the world and meets many other creatures. He spends most of these interactions learning that there's a greater breadth of what life actually is in the natural world away from man.
I explained a great deal more of what the specific incidents the main character was getting into, and eventually my roommate was like dude this is awesome what is this book called. I drew a complete blank, for the life of me the title of the book had just completely escaped. After explaining this I told him that the book had to be laying around somewhere I probably just misplaced it. We start looking through the living room and my bedroom trying to find this book when my roommate asked me what it looked like. I told him what made the most sense to me which was I thought the cover had a coyote on it.
After several minutes of frustrated searching it occurred to me that maybe it was a e-book I had downloaded on my iPhone. So I pulled out the phone and opened it up. In front of me was the text that I had just been talking about. However this text was not an e-book, it was a document file that I have been writing all day. I had literally forgotten that this story was the one that I was writing and that's why I didn't know how it ended yet. Needless to say after I explained what it happened we both got a good laugh out of it.
So that is my story about writer immersion and how sometimes we can get very very lost in what we're doing.
Do you remember when you were about 10 and I was writing my book? For months it was very difficult for me to interact with reality. I also believe I was in a seriously depressive episode at the time. Things in the story were so real to me that transitioning to everyday life and dealing with common things (like laundry) was nearly otherworldly. It was very weird. Maybe that is why some writers put themselves on a regular daily schedule so they don't get lost.
ReplyDelete