Author: onlydavesmith

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The Curse of the Comically Common Name

When I tell people my name, they don’t laugh, usually, and they don’t ask me how to spell it.

Usually.

They do pause, almost as if I had said my name was Harry Ball or I.P. Knightley. Well-trained people keep their comments to themselves, while others conjure up something like, “Well, that’s an easy one.”

When you Google “David Smith,” more than seven million results show up. Lots of professionals, politicians, even show-biz types. Amazon gives me more than 20,000 results, and 6895 show up in Goodreads. I’m in there somewhere, sure, but it’s hard to find me among all the actual accomplished people.

No problem. 

Of course, that’s not always true. I have had problems – a job that should have been offered to me was offered to a different Dave Smith, cops are keen to know when I was born just in case I am the badass Dave Smith they are looking for, and I used to get email intended for the Dave Smith Centre, an important place which does important drug treatment work. 

A common name is a curse for anyone who wants to be discoverable, searchable in the contemporary connected context. It’s like having no metadata for your novel. You just put it out there as a novel and people have to look through all the other novels to find it. Or maybe just 6895 of them.

So maybe I need a new name. And you’d figure that might be fun, as I’ve had this bland name my whole life and I have the chance to change it, not legally, but just in this one little part of life. But it’s not. Fun, that is. It’s a minefield of names that remind me of people I already know (so I can’t be a Greg or a Mike or a Steve), names I can’t stand (not listing any here, as I don’t want to piss anyone off), and even names that might be cultural appropriation (no matter how much fun it is to say Jorge, I cannot be Jorge).

And the choices are complex for other reasons, even if I just wanted to change my first name. For example, Xavier Smith might be distinctive, but there are a few U.S. football players with that name and they might be cool and I am not. It seems dishonest. Search Beauregard Smith and the results are horrifying. Look it up yourself if you want to.

We all know that my first name is not the issue, anyway. Undoubtedly, the Smith is the thing. Out it goes with a suitable plop.

Still, while I might use my first name, maybe it’s smarter not to. Using initials might also give me that S.E. Hinton advantage, temporarily disguising my gender. She wanted boys to read The Outsiders and I might want to write for an audience that would rather read what a woman has to say (which is most audiences for novels today). People always say not to judge a book by its cover and we all know that people ALWAYS judge a book by its cover and that the author’s name is a big part of it. Gendered names are the first thing many people notice after the picture of the heaving bosom, and even before the title.

I have initials that might work. D.S. And I have a middle name that I never liked but that might be useful. And it’s kinda still ME. 

D.S. William. 

A cursory Google reveals no novelist. A peremptory Amazon search has the same result. 

Thinking about it.

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Writing what you WANT to know … sort of.

I was very young when I was born. 

So, I didn’t know very much and understood less. My observations were neither precise nor witty and I didn’t know what a metaphor is … for. 

For quite a few years a lot of life was a bit of a blur.

And the way I lived it, life was not that interesting. A lot of the people were frankly narrow-minded and dull, and those who weren’t probably escaped my attention because maybe I was a little dull myself.

Perhaps that’s why my experience then cannot inform whatever I might like to write about now. 

Some people say, “Write what you know.” Many people do.

Fair enough. I get it. Experience informs creativity.

But it seems to me that most of us who try to write fiction live in our heads. We don’t necessarily know things, but we WANT to know. And because we want to know we create. Without direct experience, we try to create a way of knowing by discovering or imagining things that we are curious about or people we can empathize with. And then we either have to do as much research as we can stand or just invent everything.

Having been creative does not mean that someone else has not already said what you said and said it better. It’s terrifying, and it’s really a good idea to research what you want to know starting with its treatment in fiction. To see if it has been done to death already.

Now, I’m not taking a big risk here with my little blog that no one will read, but by conducting the briefest of checks, I see that Dan Brown has said exactly what I have, but without my self-deprecating charm. 

What he said was, “You should write something that you need to go and learn about. Make the writing process a learning process for you.” *

That’s probably the whole point. You have to spend a lot of time living in your head, so you have to spend it with something you’re interested in discovering, not something you already know intimately. We all love our spouses, or at least a lot of us do, but we wouldn’t want to spend every minute of the day with them. And then write about it.

A great deal of my fiction writing is not something I have experienced. 

I would not want to have a lot of the experiences I have written about. I have never had to run for my life from a malevolent antagonist. I have never found the body of a murder victim. I have never used a shotgun, never crossed the English Channel in a 20-foot boat, never watched the receding face of someone I’ve pitched off a precipice, never chased a piece of paper in the wind while dodging steel-toothed excavator buckets swinging over my head. But my characters do all of these things.

I have been forced to research without actually being murdered or dismembered or drowned. All of those experiences can wait … at least until after the weekend.

So for all the successful authors who are pressured to keep churning out sequel after sequel, writing what they know over and over and over, well … poor you. And for all the independent authors who keep writing about things they WANT to know, well, good for us. 

We write for ourselves. 

Unless someone pays us to do otherwise.

And you can always make me an offer.

* Temple, E. (2019, April 5). Should You Write What You Know? 31 Authors Weigh In. Literary Hub. Retrieved December 15, 2021, from https://lithub.com/should-you-write-what-you-know-31-authors-weigh-in/

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Creative Silences

Yusuf / Cat Stevens wrote, “I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul.”

I sing that to myself while I walk the dog on cold, windy days, my Beagle’s ears flapping in a biting northwest wind.

And I listen to the silence that is the wind.

“Where I end up, well, only God really knows,” the song continues.

And listening does take me somewhere.

Because the wind is an unpredictable, sometimes irresistible, and ultimately mysterious force, a silence that takes your mind somewhere else. The wind scrubs everything clean. Then it provides a dynamic canvas on which you can sketch an idea, erase it at once, and sketch another.  

The elements of experience move around each other – aural, visual, kinesthetic and finally verbal – and, without understanding where it came from, there it is – a new formulation, a new context, a new thought.

And it comes from the wind and from whatever other kind of silence you can find.

Away from machines, and voices, away, even, from music, although the silence of some music can be transformationally creative.

There are many silences. The silence of rain on the roof is the one most people recognize right away. There is also silence in birds and squirrels and in the neighbour’s kids jumping on a trampoline. All of it gives your creative mind room to make wind castles and cities of air and drafty moonlit meadows, and, inevitably, villainous farts.

For me, anyway, silence in its many forms is necessary to creation.

Is there silence in social media?

“But never, never, never, never.”

Listen here. The Wind.

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Talking to Myself

In Conversation With Me

There have been many times when someone in my family has caught me. My facial expressions give me away, along with that middle-distance look I get. They want to know what I am discussing with myself. I will never say. Those are my private thoughts oozing out through my face and it’s nobody’s business.

Of course, I’m just talking to myself.

It happens when my sub-vocalized storyteller takes over and I’m making a strong expository point or actually arguing both sides of … something.

People who talk to themselves have always faced a certain stigma. The guy who walks down the street talking into an invisible earbud-based phone gives me the creeps. I don’t want to hear his half of whatever conversation cannot wait until such time as he is in a less public place. That annoying guy is not actually talking to himself, though. It just looks that way.

Really talking to yourself is engaging in a debate so familiar to you that you can easily argue both sides. Add purpose, character, humour, emotion and you have a dialogue. A genuine dialogue between people whose goals are different is the heart of a conflict that can drive a narrative.

That means learning to talk to yourself using different points of view is the essence of creative storytelling. You let your characters do the writing and spill the conflict out on the page and ignore all the clever descriptions of facial ticks and chewed fingernails. Put those in later when you know they won’t get in the way. They will help add hue to the colour the dialogue establishes.

I would argue, then, that I am not weird. Or, at least I am not weird for that reason. 

Talking to myself is something I have to do.

And, like a lot of other things, better out than in.