In years to come those four digits will become a slur, a curse, an excuse, an utterance of camaraderie or a begrudged toast. It will be a call back to a time like no other.
2020 was a year of madness the world over. It was a year of fire.
No life was untouched. Some got burned more than others, but we all felt the flame. Race riots, militias, quarantines, and lockdowns for a plague killing hundreds of thousands of people and a country set on fire by the man elected to protect it. What a fucking year.
When one looks back at this time they can add, “In a pandemic,” to everything they say.
“I went to work…in a pandemic,
I went to school…in a pandemic,
I cared for family, I wrote a book, I traveled, I parented, I taught, I loved, I lost, I dealt with pain, extreme back pain and heart pain and the pain of past-trauma-while-living-through-a-fresh-new-national trauma, a worldwide trauma where the numbers of dead kept climbing and climbing.
I grew in a pandemic.”
I survived.
We did it all while our country was at war with itself and our president told us to drink bleach.
Take that ‘Greatest Generation.’
“2020.” Drop the mic.
What will we say years from now?
2020 is perfect vision, 2020 is hindsight, knowing now what you did not know then.
What did we learn?
I’d say we learned that human beings are weaker than we thought, but that we’re also stronger.
We found out a lot about ourselves. We learned about our frailties, our strengths, and we learned a lot about our vices.
Maybe the most important thing we learned, was who our true friends were.
Despite all the rage, fear, sorrow, and hate that inundated our daily lives, I learned that 2020 is the year when I loved more than I have ever loved before…
I told stories to a 5-year-old, every single day.
I have never made up so much on the spot in my life as I did for him. In the summer, at the pool while cities were on fire we floated and looked at the shapes clouds could make. Or we were fighting sea monsters in the deep sea, or we were the sea monsters. We were superheroes, and supervillains, we were pirates searching for sunken treasure. We went on walks and searched for the perfect stick to be a sword, or rocks that could be valuable gems. Every day was a quest, every walk an adventure.
There really is magic in the world. It’s in the expression on that 5-year-old boy’s face when he says, “You gave me an idea!”
I do not know what he will recall years from now when he looks back on this time, the time he knows as, “The Sickness.” Perhaps those stories helped to keep the wolves of fear at bay, for all that was going on in the world around us.
I thought the stories I told would help protect him from the world and all that was happening,
“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I generally write fantasy fiction, but right now, it is difficult to escape reality when reality is so desperately in need of escaping.
About forty-six years ago, when I was three or four years old, my mother tells that if I’d fallen, scraped my knee, or otherwise came to her crying she would ask me, “Where’d you get hurt?” Rather than show her whichever part of my body was in pain, I would take her by the hand and walk her to the exact location I was in when the injury occurred.
I grew up in Colorado Springs, when I was in second or third grade; I sat with a girl, A.B., at my homeroom desk. I still remember her eyes and her smile. She was beautiful. We were good friends, as good as two kids no older than six or seven can be. We drew each other hearts, giggled a lot, and shared sweet smiles. I was a little white boy with buckteeth and she was a little black girl with good penmanship. We were children who shared innocent affections, until one day the teacher separated us. Other white kids in the class had started talking. They called her names. They called me names too.
I didn’t know what their words meant so that night, I asked my father. He was well into his bourbon, his eyes glassy with that liquid haze. When I asked him what the ugliest word in the English language meant he snapped to, and sat up straight. I was in trouble. My father said, “You ever say that word again and I’ll knock your fucking head off.”
Moments later, he asked me where I’d heard the word, and I told him about A.B. and what my classmates were saying. My father, a Vietnam vet who’d come from an affluent family back east told me that it didn’t matter what color someone’s skin was because, “We love who we love.”
As long as I live, I will never forget that moment. As long as I live, I wish I could forget this moment, the one we are all in now.
Compared to other countries the United States of America is a toddler. It is the child of a time in history, when people landed on these shores fleeing tyranny. Yet, in our quest to be free, we became tyrants ourselves when we wiped out the people and culture that was here before us. Then we became enslavers, and mortgaged our humanity for free labor. The unbelievable world of pain brought by that may never be healed entirely. The tyranny of that pain has endured through centuries, and it is not yet dead.
We cannot continue to overlook or undervalue the fact that white Americans have benefited from hundreds of years of oppression.
As a white man in America today, I can interact with the police without fearing for my life. I can shop anywhere without fear of being seen as suspicious. I can vote without issue, and do so many things I have taken for granted because I am not suffocated by racism. I can simply live my life, so many cannot.
I had a collapsed lung once about twenty years ago. It was awful. It happened spontaneously and subtly at first. After a few minutes, I started to feel difficulty breathing and after a while, I drove to the ER because I could not breathe fully. I have no idea what it’s like to be a person of color of any kind, but I imagine it is something like having only one functioning lung. It’s hard to do things when you cannot get enough air. It is hard to live that way.
White privilege is the air we breathe.
Our forefathers destroyed the native peoples of this land and purchased their own luxury with the blood and sweat of black men, women, and children. That happened and we cannot erase it. In doing this, they created a caste system that has endured in the halls of academia, our government, our courts, and our minds. What is happening today in America is a part of that story. Regardless of whether or not we were alive when it began is irrelevant. We are alive now.
America is a beautiful country, but we have scars. We have open wounds, and they will not heal until we let them. We need compassion. Though we cannot change our past, we can grow beyond it. We have to acknowledge it, the damage it has done and continues to do. We have to stop hiding our scars, or pretending they are not there. Let them be known, understand them. We cannot change our skin, all we can do is live in it.
If America’s mother were to ask you, “Where’d you get hurt?” take her hand and walk her to the sidewalk Trayvon Martin died on, the spot in Charleston, where the grass felt Walter Scott’s body fall, take her to Cleveland, where Tamir Rice was gunned down, or the street in St. Anthony, Minnesota where Philando Castille was shot in front of his son and girlfriend, take her to the shoulder of the Loop 101 in Phoenix, where Dion Johnson was shot in his car, take her to the street in Minneapolis where George Floyd gasped for air, and begged for his life before he died.
Take her to all these places, and then take her to the many, many, many more. Show her where they all died and say, “That’s where I’m hurting.”
This is not a war, but it is a fight. Humanity is uniquely bonded through a single event as this. We are all affected. We are all at risk. So this is one time we truly are in it together. Everyone. So, love the people you love and maybe listen a little more to the people you don’t. We are going to get through this. Follow the scientists and the medical experts. This is what they do, this is their time. My best to everyone. Be safe, be smart, and be sane…as best as you can.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ― Winston S. Churchill
I have a map on my wall
of my world I created back in 2008. I look at it and the several updated
versions that I have tacked up around it every time I sit down to write. Every month
I go to the bookstore and take a picture of where my books will one day go on
the shelves. Ever since I caught the fire of writing in my soul, I have never
stopped. I never will. I cannot imagine what I would do with myself if I did
not write. It is the thing that wakes me up in the morning, most mornings. Sometimes
it’s the need to pee, or that I have to get to work so I can continue paying
for a roof and the comforts of a place to write.
Going months and months
on end without hearing a single word from any agent that I have queried, or
literary magazine or contest I’ve submitted to can be depressing. Tack on events
such as: having your car keys, and your wallet stolen, your writing notebook stolen,
(full of a year’s worth of ideas you wanted to keep), getting a rejection
letter, having a bird poop on your head as you walk to your car in the morning,
the coffee grinder breaking (that was almost the last straw) and being stung by
a scorpion on the tip of your middle finger. Is the universe trying to tell me
something there? All of these happened in seven days last month, starting the
day before my birthday. No joke.
Note: people tried telling
me that bird shit was good luck, but I remain skeptical.
Through a week of
comical and not so funny happenings and all the other things that have happened
in my life in the last few years, I write. As you do, as anyone who has the
passion to do anything that has taken their hearts captive and won’t release
them until we die. It is a beautiful thing, having that thing that drives you.
Then sometimes, through
all your swinging at the world you finally get a hit, you at last make a mark. Even
if it’s just a little mark, only one that you can see if you look in the right
light, you know you hit it and maybe that’s all you need. Back in April of this
year, I submitted to a contest one of my favorite stories, The Wandering Oak. It’s a origin story of sorts for the main
character in my first novel, Mother Made
of Iron, for which I am still seeking representation. I got the news
recently that The Wandering Oak
finished in the “Top 2 percent,” and received Honorable Mention in the L. Ron
Hubbard Writers of the Future 3rd Quarter 2019 Contest. The contest
features writers from around the world and the anthology has been around for 35
years. Though my story is not being published in their anthology as they have
finalists and semi-finalists to publish, I am posting it here on my website in
the Fantasy & Other Fiction section. I hope you will read it and maybe even
leave me a comment or two.
I got a hit! It’s not a
big hit, but I can see it, and that’s enough to keep me going. Happy writing to
everyone!
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” – George Orwell
Being an unpublished
writer is working two full time jobs and only getting paid for one. Add to that
a couple of the following things: being part of a writer’s workshop and/or a
writing friendship with someone who you share your work with, and they share
theirs. The value of this is immeasurable. Writing is solitary work and
sometimes you need to have your work looked at by someone you trust. So now,
you have two full time jobs and a part time job, and again, you’re only getting
paid for the one. (If you are being paid for your writing on the side, more
power to you.)
Throw in your query
submissions for the book you spent the last several years writing, rewriting,
writing again, and then revising another time. Assuming you’re going for the
traditional publishing route, you have to find literary agents to query. You
have to research what they are looking for, what they like and don’t like. You
have to write query letters tailored to each specific literary agent. Write a
synopsis then, which is a one to two page description of every major happening
in your book. You have to distill all six-hundred pages into one or two.
Once you’ve done the
above, you have to deal with the rejections. They will come if you’re lucky.
Every one of us will get some rejections, but many agents you query will never,
ever respond to you. It’s like offering your hopes and dreams to one of those
machines with all the stuffed animals packed in and you have to lift them out
with some impotent claw device. No matter how many quarters you put in you’ll
never get that fucking stuffed hippo. Querying is another job.
Okay, so what? Every
writer who ever wrote a book has gone through this right? Yep. I am not special
and neither are you. This is what we signed up for this is the writer life.
So now, you’re working
basically three full time jobs as a writer (not including your current writing
project / short stories / outlining / drafting / brainstorming and researching
for your next one). Then add maintaining a social life and relationships with
friends. If you’re a parent, add one job per child. I have no children, but
I’ve seen them up close, I’ve seen what parents have to do, at least enough to
have an idea that it’s crazy. How anyone can be a parent and also write is
miraculous, kudos to you. If you are a single parent and you’re working and
writing, you should get a medal and you should probably stop reading this
because your house may be on fire.
Add to all this the
fact that nowadays if you’re an author or an aspiring one, you need a social
media presence. You need a webpage and/or a blog. Agents want you to be known
already. You have to have followers and friends and people who might
potentially buy your book if it gets published. Maintaining a social media
account can be exhausting. You find things you agree with and things you don’t,
you find things that you never imagined anyone would broadcast and yet there
they are. That’s the way it works now, as I’m sure you know. As it turns out, Twitter
and Instagram are the top two social media platforms for writers.
Oh, don’t forget to
read. Read as often and as much as you can. That’s crucial. We have to keep an
eye on the competition right?
Also, we need to exercise.
Go out in nature, run, jump, and play and do something to burn off those extra
calories and keep from dying too young. We can’t survive on coffee alone.
Okay, now add some tough times or some pain, or a surgery recovery, a death in the family, a resurgence of childhood trauma or whatever else life might have in store for you. Anxiety, loneliness, and depression over the aforementioned rejections all come with the territory; the other stuff is extra. Speaking of trauma, if you are afflicted with an incurable loyalty to a perennially doomed sports franchise, that takes time too.
Now, if you live in America and you tune into the news and are concerned about what’s happening you have to carve out time for that as well. It can be challenging to keep from getting derailed by the maniacal orange crusted hobgoblin who goes around starting fires everywhere he can just to see what will happen. Keeping up with the Trumpster fire and not sinking into despair is another part time job. But, if you’re a fan of the lunacy, well, I guess keep writing your manifesto. But do us all a favor and show it to someone before you do anything. Maybe take it to a writer’s workshop and get some feedback. Writing is thinking and vice versa, and it doesn’t hurt from time to time to consider a little revision.
Writers, whether we know it or not, and whether or not we embrace it,
are the voice of our time. Some of us will be heard and some of us will
not. Our duty is to write our part in the long and winding scripture of
humanity. Regardless of your genre, if you write articles for a local
magazine or political commentary, fantasy, erotica, horror, or good
old-fashioned fiction, we are all a part of this world and our voices
should be heard, at least by someone.
“Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.” ― Zig Ziglar
I have a new respect
for bloggers since I started writing for my website. It keeps me busy. Before,
when I was writing my book I was more static, stationary in terms of where my
writing mind was. Now, I have to be able to move from one thing to the other,
be it writing about writing or working on a fantasy story or something else. As
a blogger, I’m still “filling out” so to speak. I enjoy it, but the freedom of
it can be daunting.
I spent so much time
every day writing my novel, which I am pitching to literary agents that I rarely,
if ever, peeked out of that world to write anything else. Now, a little over a year
away from finishing the book and working to get it traditionally published, I have
found new latitude to play with as far as writing goes. I think blogging, or at
least attempting to, has improved my writing agility to some degree. It has
given me better range.
Some days it feels like
I’m typing my life into some great, yawning maw of obscurity. It’s a bit
frightening. To think all the work you’ve done, all the time you’ve spent and
words you’ve strung together over the years might be for nothing. It might be a
tad dramatic to say as much, but I think the fear itself is legitimate. But
isn’t this what every writer ever has had to go through? Is this not what I trained
for? Am I not entertained?
I remember when I got
my first rejection from a literary agent, I was telling a friend about it, and
he said, “You’re in the game now.” He’s right. It took me a long time to get to
that point, where I was ready to throw myself into this massive Thunderdome* of
literary proportions, but here I am. “Two men enter, one man leaves?” No. It’s
not that easy.
Writing is like being born
or dying, you do it alone, and it’s painful. Querying though, that is something
else entirely. Being a writer is a funny thing. You spend most of your time in
your own head, up in the clouds or down in the dungeons but rarely with
everyone else around you. Then, when you’re done putting what you’ve seen on
paper, you have to become an outgoing introvert. You have to ask a stranger who
has never been to your world to enter it, understand it, and be your champion.
The game has changed
over the years, even in the years I’ve been writing, training, and honing my
ability to get to this moment. I don’t know for certain if it’s better or
worse, harder or easier, it’s just the way it is. One thing I am sure of
though, is that it takes a certain kind of mettle to keep going. Whether it’s
straight out bravado, confidence or insanity I don’t know. Whatever it is, I have
it and so does everyone else who knows what I am talking about.
Fifty years ago,
writers typed their manuscripts on a typewriter, had to go through them page by
page, make their edits, and then retype it. When he was writing, On the Road, Jack Kerouac famously taped
a string of pages together to feed into his typewriter so he could continuously
work without stopping to put in a new page.
Back then, once the
edits were done and their book was ready, the writer had to mail it to an
editor (actually put the manuscript into an envelope, take it to the post office,
and mail it.) There was no world wide web then. There were no bloggers,
Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In those days, social media required people to
be, well, social. You had to go
places and meet people. Back then, there wasn’t anything but a newspaper,
magazine or a book that would connect the minds of writers with the rest of the
world. There was just a man or a woman in a room tip-tapping the keys and
slapping ink on paper. Nowadays we can post content on our websites by phone.
Back then, you had to physically go to a phone, not carry one around in your pocket.
Today, there are so
many platforms to post your work, whether it is your writing, your art, or random
thoughts and observations. It’s a great way to get your words out there and I
am glad for it. I came a little late to the social media game though, and it is
still an adjustment for me.
I wonder how well
Shakespeare would have done with Twitter. He wouldn’t be able to send sonnets,
he’d have to settle for haikus.
Shakespeare changed everything.
He brought common English to the elites of the world and made it legitimate. He
brought high art to the common folk. He united the people of the streets with
the people of refined society and their lofty heights. He tied heaven to earth
and now we all have the same language, though our economical demarcations
remain.
How would the world be
different if history’s great authors, poets and playwrights had social media? What
would T.S. Elliot be like on Facebook? How about Van Gogh on Instagram? Had he
been on social media, a man like Charles Bukowski might have ruled the world.
In today’s arena of
self-published authors, it is a little intimidating trying to publish through
the old ways. Getting an agent is not so simple. It certainly is not as easy as
I had initially thought it would be. This has been quite the learning
experience for me. Then, how often is something as easy as you thought it would
be? I may have to self-publish. It is a thought that has occurred to me. I am
still holding out for the traditional way, which is a testament either to my
stubborn resolve or to a fear of the unknown. It’s still too early to tell.
Every day on Twitter or
Instagram, I see new notifications of authors who have published their novels and
hold up their brand new, shiny books for all to see. There may be more writers
in the world now than there has ever been, and that makes the Thunderdome
decidedly more crowded. There’s more competition, more fellow writers vying for
the page. That makes it harder, yes, and easier for my voice to get lost in the
clamoring cacophony of voices. That just means I have to be sharper, I have to
be better than I was yesterday.
Writing is exercise for the soul. It can make you stronger, deeper and perhaps more fit to be human. In the end, having more writers ultimately makes for a richer world, and maybe that is enough.
If you enjoy 80’s pop culture references and movies as much as I do, then click below for a treat. Thanks for reading!*Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
“Our lives begin to end the day we
remain silent on things that matter.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Around
the world, about 225 countries have a day they claimed their sovereignty in one
form or another. More than 160 of them celebrate that day annually. 243 years ago,
America became an independent country. It was the rise of a new nation. We claimed
our freedom from our English parent with the rousing words, “All men are
created equal.”
All people are created equal, but they’re not all treated equal. That is true of the human condition the world over throughout all time. We have it all here. We are a country of contradictions. We fought for our freedom from an oppressive monarchy and wiped out the people who lived here before us. We enjoyed our freedom as we took it from others and forced them into slavery. In some states, men can marry men and women can marry women. All over the nation people of every creed, color or religion can work together, live together, love, hate the same things, and argue without killing one another, usually. We can get better though, and I believe even through these times we live in now, we will.
America is a great country. I believe that with all my heart, but I also know it tends to be greater if you’re white, if you’re male and if you’re heterosexual. Even greater if you’re rich.
We are a complicated people. As we celebrate our freedom today, little brown-skinned children, whose parents were seeking a better place for them to grow, rot in cages in Texas and Arizona. In some parts of this great nation, a woman who is raped must not only live with the terror of being raped, but the sentence of the life growing inside her. In America today, a man or woman of color who gets pulled over runs the risk of getting shot to death, even if they run away.
No heterosexual has ever had to hide that fact. No straight man has ever had to worry that his liking women would get him beat up, ostracized from his family, or murdered. People want to be free to determine the course of their own lives and to do so without fear.
America
is a great country. I love it, but my love is not blind. We have problems. We
are not perfect and what country ever is? Loving requires open eyes. We have
been the hero at times, and at others, we have not. We are going through a
tough time as a nation and it is at times such as these that we need to think
about what we are doing, about what we are allowing. I love this country for
all the things that it can be. I believe we can be better. We’re by far not the
worst place in the world, but that shouldn’t stop us from improving. Yes, we
can be great. If we don’t look at ourselves honestly, see where we were wrong
in the past, and where we’re wrong now, then how can we even be good?
When
the idea of something is greater than its reality, raise the reality to meet
the idea.
Some
people might be angry with what I’ve said here, yes. I understand that. I don’t
like looking at my flaws, I certainly don’t like them pointed out to me. I don’t
think anyone does, but you don’t strengthen the foundation of your home by
ignoring the cracks. You see them, you point them out, you see how deep they
are and then you fix them. We have been great, yes, but only for some, now
let’s be great for all.
But
this blog is supposed to be about writing right? It is. All of it is. Writing
is thinking. Thinking is freedom. When a person can think for him or herself,
then they can act for themselves.
Naming
something is a form of writing, even if you never put a pen to paper. When you
assign a word to identify someone, you are naming and you are writing that name
in your mind and in the mind of everyone else who uses that name.
When I was in second grade, I had the nickname, “Chip.” School kids loved it. I hated it. I was teased and taunted, and not being much of a fighter at the time, I decided to handle it a different way. I went to my mom after school one day and told her I wanted to be called “Chad,” instead of Chip. I made my case and to my surprise, it worked. The next day, my mother and I went to the school and told the officials I would go by “Chad” from then on. We were only changing my nickname, my legal name, which didn’t seem to fit me then, would not change.
For twenty plus years, I was Chad, and Chad was an angry, narrow-minded man. I moved to Arizona where I met a woman who was into East Indian meditations, Zen meditation. I was attracted to her so naturally I decided to try it. I had a lot of unresolved issues at that time and I didn’t know what to do with them, or in fact, how to identify them. Meditation changed my life, and I changed my name again, (though not legally). I was editing myself and I didn’t know it.
I meditated every single day. It was tumultuous time for me mentally. I had a narrow view of the world then and my place in it. Despite the meditation I was still stuck, trapped in a room where the walls closed in. I couldn’t get out of it. So I did every kind of meditation, cathartic, dancing, and sitting in absolute silence. I watched my ego dissolve to some degree then. I was hungry to learn more so I submitted my name and my photo to an ashram in Poona, India and received the name, Kranti Chaitanyo. The name was meant to be a message for me, its meaning; “Revolution of Consciousness.”
Asking people to call you by a different name several times in your life is, of course, a bit drastic and a little ridiculous. But for me, at that time in my life, I felt it was necessary. As strange as it sounds, I never felt like me. So I took the message of that strange name to heart and changed from Chad, to Chai. The meditations helped me become more aware, and helped me to identify my anger and how I was projecting it onto others. I learned to take ownership of my pain and to learn from it. None of this was easy.
I went by Chai for about ten years. Then I went to college, where I rediscovered my love of writing and took all the courses on it that I could. When I graduated and began working in the professional world, I was ready to accept the name I’d avoided my whole life, the name I was born with, Albert. As I rewrote my name, I rewrote my life. A constant work in progress, but one for which I could be proud.
What does my changing my name have to do with America or writing? Everything. Each and every one of us here lives a journey uniquely American. Regardless of how we got here, whether we were born here or brought by our parents or moved here seeking a better life. Our lives are written in the story of this country, now and forever.
For so many years, I was not free in my own head. despite all that meditation, despite all the ways in which I’d learned to examine my thoughts, my feelings and my impulses I was still so often a little kid stuck in a room. Writing made me free. It makes me free.
Writing is the sword to slay monsters. It can break the chains of the mind.
Our ideals must be continuously earned. Freedom, like consciousness is an ongoing exercise in staying awake. I had to become independent from my past self, and even from my projected future self. We are in constant rebirth from the moment we come crying from our mother’s wombs. We write and rewrite our lives every day.
We
are all America, and each of us has to fight for the freedom to be ourselves. Sometimes
the best freedom is escaping your own mind, or getting away from bad habits,
the thousand tiny strings that tie us to where we were and keep us from being
where we want to be. Freedom is not letting something or someone else define
you. Only we can determine who we are. Freedom isn’t a song, or a salute, it’s the
heart of every living thing. Freedom is being alive.
We
are all America. This is our time to acknowledge our failures, our
shortcomings, look our fear in the face, and move forward. Freedom isn’t
afraid. Freedom is about being knocked down and getting back up again. It doesn’t
matter how many times we fall, or how many times we fail, we have to get back
up. Just get the fuck back up.
We are all America. Freedom is always do or die. It’s when the odds are against you, when all signs point to failure, that’s when you get back up. Independence is not about winning and losing, it’s about standing up when you want to sit down. It’s about rising to that moment when you think you can’t do it, that you can’t make it, or that you can’t be the one.
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury
In the early 1980’s when I was in fourth or fifth grade the teacher showed a film titled, Legend of the Boy & the Eagle (Disney, 1967)*. It’s the story of a young Hopi boy who’s banished from his village and befriends an eagle that teaches him how to hunt. One day he returns to his village but is rejected and mocked by other boys who tie eagle’s feathers to his arms. The Hopi boy flees to a high cliff. When he jumps, he changes into a golden eagle and flies away. It’s a beautiful story and one that has stuck with me all my life. I remember rooting for him in the movie. I dreamt about that film for years. When I was a child, my big take away was that a boy could transform himself into something else and rise above the world he knew.
Some days writing is
like setting out with a wide smile on a world of adventure. Other days it’s like
getting in a boxing ring with one arm and facing a guy twice my size. All I can
do is hope for the best.
What am I going to
write? Why am I going to write? Am I going
to tap the keys for another fantasy, poetry, or story about a lost childhood? What
difference will it make with all that is going on in our world today? What am I
going to say that will matter against all the wars and divisions among us? How
can I have an effect on the political, racial, or ideological walls that
separate people? They say love is the universal language, well so is hate. There’s
a lot of both in the world, and each one tugs at the ears of writers to listen.
How does my voice find its way in the world?
Being a writer is like being
a cartographer for the human soul and mind. Whether we write fantasy, romance, horror,
or non-fiction, we are all marking the way to some collective truth for others
to find.
Sometimes I think of
all those writers who came before. For them it seems, in any period, the world
was as it is today: full of doubt, full of confusion and war, but also full of
grace and insurmountable love. What would they write about today? My guess is
that it would be not that different from what they wrote before. Writing is the
constant sharpening of the mind and the self against the dulling forces of time.
I am just a grain of
sand on the vast shore of humankind and I know it. All writers are. Despite the
futility, the writer, that grain of sand, stands up and tells a story. He or
she knows that everyone else has his and her own story to tell. Yet they tell it
anyway, knowing all the while that deep down that maybe no one will listen. It
might be that only a few will even hear it. Maybe they will love it or they
might hate the story, but all the writer knows, and what is important, is that
there’s story to be told. It has to come out.
According to data
reported in 2017, 7.53 billion people currently live on earth. That means that
there are (more or less) seven and a half billion minds out there thinking
thoughts, making observations and dreaming when they go to sleep. For any
zombies reading this, that’s a lot of brains. For the sake of the metaphor in
the above paragraph, it’s also a lot of grains.
There are more people
alive today than ever before. Isn’t this how it has always been? The world is
full of people, and the number is always more than it’s ever been before. There
are always people making war, making love and writers around to document it all
and everything in between. There are good writers, and bad ones and some who never
get read. What happens to the written word once it’s been read? Does it
dissipate like a trail of smoke or does it plant itself like a seed somewhere in
the garden of the reader’s mind?
All these people and
all the various cultures have points of view and traditions that differ from
one another, but there are two things that ring true no matter where you go;
love and hate. We see this in the headlines every day. People doing great
things for others out of love, and people doing terrible things to others out
of hate.
Where is the love in
your story? If you’re writing, it’s in the words. It’s in every easy flowing
paragraph or thought and in all the mind-crushingly painful lines that you
labor to get down.
As I’ve said before, I believe
you write what story sits down with you to write. I believe in this wholeheartedly.
However, that does not change the fact that I sometimes question the stories
that sit down with me.
“Really?”
I say to the pregnant woman in a suit of armor who wants me to write about her
again. “The world has gone crazy. You want me to write about you?”
“I’m
a pregnant woman in a suit of armor,” she says coolly. “What else are you going
to do with me?”
Sigh.
“Point taken.”
So, I write fantasy,
and generally whatever else comes to mind. What else is there to do? I just
have to keep going, keep tapping away at the keys because that’s what I love. Even
when it’s hard to get out of bed to write or to work or to do anything, and
regardless of whether or not my work is rejected or rejoiced–I have to keep
going. This is no different from any other writer who ever kept trying.
It’s love that makes me
write. Love of words, love of stories, and humanity itself (and probably a love
of my own voice too). Sometimes love inspires me to write about certain things
or certain people. Even when I write something full of anger or sadness love is
at the source of it. Love may very well be what makes this blue marble spin on
the black tile of space.
Or maybe writing is just a way of showing love for oneself. It’s not the kind of love that comes with putting oneself above others, but loving something forgotten, or rather someone. Maybe I write for the little boy I once was, that kid buried under so many layers and years of self-doubt and loathing. In some deep cave, I found him hiding in his mother’s closet, afraid of the basement and giants. With a pen, I can give the boy something to hold onto and crawl out of the dark. With writing, he can become an eagle and fly above his fears.
*If you want to see the video, click on this link to see the ending of the film, Legend of the Boy and the Eagle (Disney, 1967)
