The Physical, Mental and Spiritual of Writing

It hit me like something of a sledgehammer after listening to one of my favorite songs.

Playing Sammy Hagar’s “Three Lock Box” gives me nothing but sheer joy every time it pops onto my music player. However, I never really knew what the song was about. I just figured it was a great rock jam with obscure lyrics often written by musicians while they are hysterically high. However, I found this quote about “Three Lock Box” by Mr. Hagar that gave me something of an epiphany about my writing. I’ve bolded the breakthrough:

“It’s got to do with deep sea diving, when you look for a buried treasure. The ultimate treasure would be a sunken treasure with three locks on it, because that means it was the most valuable stuff that the queen had on that ship. And you need three different guys with keys to open it, that way no one could steal it. So a ‘Three Lock Box’ to me is within yourself. If you unlock the treasure of your physical, and your mental and your spiritual potential – those three in balance – you are a real human being and almost godly.”

We heard different versions of this growing up in the military, too — take care of your physical, mental and spiritual sides. I’m a big believer in that, though I admit to not doing it as well as I could have over the course of my life. But it occurs to me that in writing — fiction and nonfiction, these three facets exist. Without at least two of the three, the writing fails. Let’s look at how all three work together.

Physical. The nuts and bolts of the manuscript have to be in place. Knowledge of language and vocabulary. Sentence structure. Spelling. Punctuation. Grammar. Rhythm. Pace. It all has to be there before I can even submit the manuscript for query to an agent or a publisher. Without those things, the writing will never get a sniff, let alone a review. The better the “physical workout” I can give to the manuscript — writing, editing, reviewing over and over again until it just cannot be done anymore — the better. This starts with a foundation of education and research. It continues when the thing actually gets written. For this bit, Harlan Ellison rings true: “People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it.”

Mental. The work has to be smart. While there are no hard fast rules, editors and readers will uncover poor writing. So it’s about research research research because there are few things for which I am a subject-matter expert. That also means understanding my genre. It means understand police procedures, how a court of law works, how a B-52 flies, the ins and outs of military ranks, or whatever I’m writing about. There’s also the notion that being mentally prepared means a better than avreage plot twist, following the three-act rule or other notions (though I am a believer in the no hard and fast rules rule, as mentioned). Still, once you start laying down particularly colored paving stones in a specific arrangement, your readers want to know where you’ll lead them and they’ll want to to eyeball everything along the journey.

Spiritual. While not necessarily mandatory,I like my writing to have a certain passion. Soul. Mojo. There’s something to being invested so wholly in a work you get lost in it. Yep, there’s a mechanical process to writing (the physical), but there’s something about believing the work will matter. To someone. As author Jean Houston said, “Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth.” Now, not every piece of writing will incur this sort of emotional tariff. However, I’m a believer that the more sheer energy I exert on behalf of a written work, the better a chance it has to see a reader’s eyes.

As always, I’d refer you to the Absolute Write forums for some guidance from agents, published authors and those who’ve bloodied their hands with this.  I’m a big believer that the best balance of all three of these things gives a work it’s best chance at success, and I’m glad the Red Rocker gave me a chance to say it.

So, what do you think? How do you see your writing habits fitting into this?

Popularity: 9% [?]