New blog, same ol' Dan

Hi there!

I would say that this author blog is long overdue -- because it is -- but then again, as an author, I've been active online for the better part of two...almost three...decades.  Gods, when I say it like that, I wonder where the time has gone.  Then I think back, and look through the dates of files in my writing folder (which, itself, has migrated from more computers than I'd rather not think about), and I realize that I've been doing this for a long time.

How long? 

That's a good question.  I'm glad you asked. 

I've always been a writer.  I've been a writer since before I could write.  It's kind of a weird thing to say, but there's no other way of looking at it.  Being a writer isn't something that's alway easy to define because, in part, writers are made up of lots of interesting things.  The old rhyme for little boys and little girls goes:  Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, and Sugar and spice and everything nice, respectively, of course.  Writers are like that, except the recipe for them isn't nearly as rhythmic. 

Writers are made of the obvious collection of words and phrases.  Regardless of the genre or style, writers have to be able to wield the language as tools of their trade.  They can get away with bad grammar, poor structure, and any number of other crimes against literature and propriety, but only as long as they connect with their readers well enough to convey, not the concept of what they're writing about, but the mental imagery of what they want to say.  Any good writer -- from a fiction author, to the finest literary geniuses behind the greatests classics, to a newsroom reporter, even to a lowly blogger -- has that inate ability to turn words into a connection to a reader. 

That is not, however, all a writer needs, especially one who wants their connection to the reader to delve deeper than into the eyes.  A writer needs to have vision, an ability to see truth in the world. 

Now, when I say truth, I don't exactly mean true or false, in the binary kind of way that computers align their zeroes and ones.  A writer's truth is more a function of resonance, of an ideal or concept that rings as clear as crystal, or burns as bright as the sun.  It's the thought, not of life on a whaling ship, but of what trauma and obsession can drive a person to do.  It's the whisper, haunting us, making us wonder if our reality is a simulation and if our world is a darker and stranger place than we imagine.  It's the fascination of the burning flame on the end of a matchstick and the despair of a life lost to its allure.  It's the horror of watching the world die, with the even greater horror of having survived.  Writers see these truths -- little ones, big ones -- and they understand the heart of what makes them real.  They understand what makes them tangible, interesting.

If they're lucky, they can also see a story that spins out from the truths.  If they're luckier, still, they can actually put together words that make the story real, not just for them, not just for the readers, but for the truth itself.  A writer's truth doesn't have to be real for our world:  it has to be real enough to make the truth...well...true. 

I once wrote a story about a guy who was a slave to his obsessive-compulsive disorder.  I wrote it from the lightning-bolt idea (okay, I'm lying...it was more of a static electricity shock from a doorknob idea) about what might happen if this guy happened to get all of his OCD's just right.  If all the lock pins lined up for him because he performed his sequence of OCD's so flawlessly that it gave him drastic power over the world around him.  The concept rang true for me, but the story I saw from it, the story I wrote from it?  Not so much.  I won't say it was awful, because it was worse.  The idea was okay, but it wasn't quite right. 

Another time, I got a mental image of an older man, waking up alone in bed to his wife's alarm on the day of her funeral.  I saw, not just the man alone, but the way the process of dealing with death takes the surviving family out of time, insulated from the pain and the demands of the rest of the world for just a moment, before time starts again and the pain and grieving really digs its claws in.  That short story, Loss, won the Kansas City Regional Arts Council's Art@Work competiton for Best Short Story Fiction.  The truths I saw there were cleaner, and more connected to the story.  And to the readers.  But the story for me wasn't the words that came later.  It wasn't the characters I imagined to fit into it.  The story for me was the heart of loss:  not the big, crushing drama of unexpected death, but the tiny, devastating details, that we who have faced the death of a loved one stumble over, again and again, while we learn to leave that loved one behind.

Long sojourn into my theories on writing aside, I'll try to drag myself back to the original question:  How long have I been a writer?  The original answer:  Always.

I've always been able to see the interesting truth behind something that, to me, it seemed like the rest of the world took for granted.  My earliest memories include me wondering about something I found interesting, then making up the most logical, or perhaps, realistic, way that would explain what I was seeing in a way that made sense to me.  The process of seeing the idea, and solving for it, is so ingrained in the way my brain works that I honestly can't remember a time when I didn't have it.   I believe that my facility for words came easier for me because of the need to be able to express what I saw in the world.  So...yes, I've had the pieces of being a writer forever.

Even so, I didn't start actually trying to be an author until my thirties.  I'd written a few short stories that failed rather dramatically to make it into the few traditonal publishing paths for short stories that  still existed in the mid-to-late 1990's.  I stumbled into an online e-zine -- one of the first, and one of the few still in business today.  The e-zine, Anotherealm, published flash fiction and short stories from new writers.  I learned a lot about constructing stories that people would want to read there, but better still, I made contact with writers who spread out, not just across the Internet, but also across time.  The publishing success I've had, over the course of my writing career, owes itself to the pathways and friends I've made over the years. 

If you're still with me..if you're still here...thanks for reading.  I'll be posting more, about my most recent work and, well, whatever else strikes my fancy. 

Cheers!
Dan

Welcome...

The world is a dark and glorious place, full of stories, full of wonder. 

Author Daniel L. Naden has always been privy to the stories that hide between the pages of the books of our ordinary lives.   He's always seen them, the whispers of what could be, the permutations that follow the question, "what if?"

Here, on this page, you can ride along with some of Dan's random thoughts and ideas.  You can find links to some of his books and stories, and keep track of what's coming next.