Writing Right with Dmitri: Inner Resources

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Writing Right with Dmitri: Inner Resources

Editor at work.

What do you do when you have to spend time alone with yourself? Do you:

Whatever you do when you're alone, you're drawing on your inner resources: what you know, skills you have, your own thoughts. Your story characters do this, as well. Be sure to give them some inner resources. If you don't, be ready to demonstrate why they don't have them, and what that does to their position in your narrative.

Have you ever read Robinson Crusoe? This guy has tons of skills. He's very well-organised. He has a work ethic that won't quit. But he has no inner life to speak of. When he finally stops running around, storing stuff from the wreckage, finding food, building a shelter – it takes him almost a month – he gets really depressed. He also has some very strange, and possibly predictable thoughts.

Well, but then it came on strangely, if God has made all these things, He guides and governs them all, and all things that concern them; for the Power that could make all things must certainly have power to guide and direct them. If so, nothing can happen in the great circuit of His works, either without His knowledge or appointment.


And if nothing happens without His knowledge, He knows that I am here, and am in this dreadful condition; and if nothing happens without His appointment, He has appointed all this to befall me. …. Immediately it followed: Why has God done this to me? What have I done to be thus used? My conscience presently checked me in that inquiry, as if I had blasphemed, and methought it spoke to me like a voice: 'Wretch! dost thou ask what thou hast done? Look back upon a dreadful misspent life, and ask thyself what thou hast not done? …' [I] rose up pensive and sad, walked back to my retreat, and went up over my wall, as if I had been going to bed; but my thoughts were sadly disturbed, and I had no inclination to sleep; so I sat down in my chair, and lighted my lamp, for it began to be dark. Now, as the apprehension of the return of my distemper terrified me very much, it occurred to my thought that the Brazilians take no physic but their tobacco for almost all distempers, and I had a piece of a roll of tobacco in one of the chests, which was quite cured, and some also that was green, and not quite cured.


I went, directed by Heaven no doubt; for in this chest I found a cure both for soul and body. I opened the chest, and found what I looked for, the tobacco; and as the few books I had saved lay there too, I took out one of the Bibles which I mentioned before, and which to this time I had not found leisure or inclination to look into. …I took up the Bible and began to read; but my head was too much disturbed with the tobacco to bear reading… but, however, the words made a great impression upon me, and I mused upon them very often. It grew now late, and the tobacco had, as I said, dozed my head so much that I inclined to sleep; so I left my lamp burning in the cave, lest I should want anything in the night, and went to bed. But before I lay down, I did what I never had done in all my life – I kneeled down, and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me, that if I called upon Him in the day of trouble, He would deliver me. After my broken and imperfect prayer was over, I drank the rum in which I had steeped the tobacco, which was so strong and rank of the tobacco that I could scarcely get it down; immediately upon this I went to bed.

No comment. You will no doubt have some.

Daniel Defoe was a great observer of humanity. He noticed what people did, how they reasoned, what conclusions they came to: he even wrote about paranormal experiences. The more we observe behaviour, in ourselves and others, the better we will be as storytellers. Our stories will be more helpful to our listeners and readers, too.

Remember that we can use any experience to grow our skills as observers and narrators – even something as frustrating and anxiety-making as a quarantine. You might use your downtime to read some Daniel Defoe. I recommend The History and Reality of Apparitions, because it is fun and better escapism than Journal of the Plague Year. But hey, take your pick.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

06.04.20 Front Page

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