Riches Therein

“The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day—every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work. There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind. If you want to finish this novel of yours within a year, you have to get to work! There’s not a moment to lose. There’s no time to wait for inspiration. Getting your words down on the page takes time. How much?

I write three hours every morning. It’s the first thing I do, Monday through Sunday, fifty-two weeks a year. Some days I miss but rarely does this happen more than once a month. Writing is a serious enterprise that takes a certain amount of constancy and rigor. But will and regularity are only the beginnings of the discipline and rewards that daily writing will mean for you. The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this?

I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write to begin with.

The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story. What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel. You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your unconsciousness - moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within your psyche.

When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday. If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you’ll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day. Some days you will sit down and nothing will come—that’s all right. Some days you’ll wish you had given yourself more time—that’s okay too. You can always pick up tomorrow where you left off today.”

~ “Walter Mosley was an only child and ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies". For $9.50 a week, Walter Mosley attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to more comfortably affluent, working-class west LA. He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School in 1970. Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates". His mother encouraged him to read European classics from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He also loves Langston Hughes and Gabriel García Márquez. He was largely raised in a non-political family culture, although there were racial conflicts flaring throughout L.A. at the time. He later became more highly politicized and outspoken about racial inequalities in the US, which are a context of much of his fiction.

He went through a "long-haired hippie" phase, drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. Mosley dropped out of Goddard College, a liberal arts college in Plainfield, Vermont, and then earned a political science degree at Johnson State College. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work programming computers. He moved to New York in 1981 and met the dancer and choreographer Joy Kellman, whom he married in 1987. They separated 10 years later and were divorced in 2001. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem after being inspired by Alice Walker's book, The Color Purple. One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor to him and encouraged him, saying: "You're Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches therein."
~ Wikipedia