When it comes to writing, there is one thing that I have always loved to do. I have always loved to create the history of the world, of the characters. I suppose that the RPG fan in me coming out. Whenever I play a character, the history of the character, whether relevant to the game play or not, is essential for me to be able to play. In fact, I will often play even computer games and narrate, in my head or otherwise, to myself the thoughts and feelings, and history of the computer avatar I’m using.
I’ve always been thankful for that gift. Being able to write the history is almost as important as being able to write the story itself. Even if you never tell anyone else the history of a world they’re going to be getting a glimpse of, it’s allows the writer to keep the common things in mind.
Sometimes I take my sons to the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara Falls. It’s a beautiful, crowded yet peaceful place with thousands of jewels fluttering through the air all around you. They love it and I love it. I like taking my camera and seeing just how many varieties I can capture in still while we’re there.
I’ve always been a spiritual person. I meditate daily; about life and the Universe, which I ultimately worship. Writing, however, is its own type of meditation, where time and place make little sense. I remember being able to start a particular album or movie and sit and write, not paying attention to any of my other senses. When it got very good, I could write twenty or thirty pages worth of writing in a few hours. 
Writing evil characters has always been a passion of mine. In my not-so-humble opinion, the most boring enemies are the ones that are portrayed as evil for no other reason than to be evil. There is no urgency or sense of purpose with an enemy that is essentially just doing things for no discernible reason. I also don’t consider mental illness, in and of itself, a valid reason for doing anything, and I get frustrated with stories built around someone doing something because of whatever chemical balance they might have. It is unimaginative.
“Fire your creativity” or “fire your imagination” or any other use of “fire” always strikes me as deliciously ironic in its accuracy. My muse has always been as far for me. Fire breathes, eats, procreates, thinks, kills, fights for survival; in so many ways, it seems to be alive. It’s a classical element for a reason, after all. However, I am also very much a creature of fire, so I find it equally the “source” of the brilliance of writing and the destruction of it. Fire is the best metaphor I have to writing.
This post is somewhat of a review of sorts, and is also a bit of a “spoiler” to the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. In that regard, I’m going to hide it so that you know not to look if you haven’t read the series and plan to.
There comes a point in every long pursuit where the hunter must ask if she still remembers the reason the hunt began. It can be the same thing with writing. There comes a point when you’ve “hunted” that story for so long that it turns you into Ahab. In my opinion, there are few writers that struggle with that hunt successfully. For those that do succeed, some make the process look effortless. An example of this would be J. R. R. Tolkien. For a work like The Dark Tower series, the length of time it took to get from the first novel to the final illustrates an author who never gave up the long pursuit and saw the hunt to the bitter end, for better or worse.