Dangerous · Reflections

 
 

Back in the day, before I stopped playing guitar, I wrote songs occasionally. It started with some lyrics, then I'd work some chords around it and feel out a melody. I thought I did all right coming up with catchy melodies -- I suppose every songwriter thinks that. They were folky, Dylanesque things, and even now some of them go through my head at times. My singing voice is rather inconsistent, so I didn't share them with many people... only those friends whose singing voices were worse than mine. ~laughs~

When I started playing guitar again back in February 2007, ( Read more... )

 
 

Time is a funny thing. It can be forever ago that something happened and at the same time seems like yesterday. It feels like I’ve been in Ohio for ages and yet the three weeks of my vacation are gone and I’m flying back to California tomorrow.

Every time I come home, I get together with relatives and friends who will always be important to me. They remind me who I am – and it becomes obvious how I ended up this way (joke).

Because I don’t see them as often, we reconnect more honestly than if we lived in the same town and exchanged words about the weather when bumping into each other in the grocery store checkout. Maybe I remind them of who they are, too. Maybe seeing me touches that place deep inside themselves we all have in youth but gets buried with age.

Whenever I visit, it’s like a spiritual pilgrimage into my past. I refresh my perspective of what it’s like to live in the “heartland.” It grounds me.

It’s different here. People are mostly resigned to their lot in life. They all want just a bit more money to make life easier, but all-in-all, things are the way they like it. A little mundane. Uncomplicated.

Unchanging.

I think that’s why I left.

I know it’s why I come back.

 
 

Sometimes a person travels through life totally off the track from where they should be. This can occur for a variety of reasons: insecurity about the self, trying to please people close to you, having to get the bills paid. At the beginning of the journey, some have a better chance of being in the right place and finding their path, because they haven't had the sheer number of twists in life’s road that could lead them in the wrong direction at one false turn, stranding them in the wilderness.

Sometimes from these errors of judgment they find their way back to their path. Sometimes they don’t.

Then there are the ones who have never known their true road. They don't have the courage or the insight to be honest with themselves. Sometimes, their situation from birth has been against them and opportunity has eluded them. Sometimes they are just afraid.

These are the ones who will always be lost and never able to be shown the way. The rest of us – or, at least, the ones who bother to care – find ourselves helpless in the face of such despair. All that's left between us and that person is a hastily whispered, There but for the grace of God, go I. And we have no choice but to let them go their way, and hope their suffering is not too much to bear – at the same time wishing to ourselves that universe is not too hard on us for choosing self-preservation over charity.

Because we’re looking for our lost road, too.

I’ve found mine again, after wandering for many fruitless, unhappy years. For this I’m eternally grateful to whatever higher power showed me the way. It’s like coming home again – to that place within where I feel aligned with the universe.

As if by serendipity, good things have been happening for me. As soon as I found that center of myself, life feels right again.

I’m reminded of what Joseph Campbell said during his “Power of Myth” interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS:
 
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.
BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

 
When you do, at last, find your rapture…your bliss…your path…that is when the magic happens.

 
 
In Jane Smiley's book, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," she writes:

A novelist has two lives – a reading and writing life, and a lived life. He or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

It's me she's writing about there. I live as much inside my head as out in the world. Maybe more so. And what a relief it is to discover I'm not the only one.

I'd venture to say, however, that those of us who fit Smiley's description are a minority in terms of percentage of the human race – especially in the extroverted and conformist reality of American society.

It's rare enough that you meet someone you actually click with, as if you've known them all your life (and perhaps in a past one as well). For most people, this experience doesn't happen that often. At the risk of sounding like a poor misunderstood writer, I'll come right out and say that in my entire life perhaps one or two people ever comprehended the fundamental truth that my "inner life," as Smiley describes, is essentially what makes me tick. Having once worked as a journalist, I've had discourse with many people and formed many acquaintances and made many friends – yet very few of these have really known me. I find it difficult to reveal too much to those who so obviously have a drastically different mindset from my own and view the world through a lens that would render me nearly blind.

But while it's painful to reveal myself to those who cast me strange looks, it's frustrating not being able to express myself.

And the truth is, through fiction I can express myself. But it isn't me, is it? It's my characters, all of them created of little bits of me, but at the same time wholly their own. I'm there, but I'm diluted. If someone is going to give me funny looks, they'll have to sort out what parts of what characters result from self-insertion.

In the non-fictional world, there are very few places I can be myself. These include the familiar comforts of my parents and their home (2,500 miles away) and the isolation of my daily commute with the rock music of my youth blasting the egalitarian and anti-authoritarian sentiments that have never abandoned me (despite my daily immersion in the "military industrial complex" that has become my "career").

In these very juvenile environments, I feel nearly as secure as I did in my childhood. For reasons best left unsaid, I don't even feel comfortable in my own home.

Only in writing do I have control over my life, my environment, my associations. Only in writing am I able to avoid the censure I have come to expect for being other than the norm.

I don't mean to say that those whom I count as friends don't care about me. They do. They care for what they know of me, what I allow them to see. It's not their fault I don't let them see the rest. But my views are not typical ones, or popular, and are, in fact, admittedly odd at times. Having been burned by those I once believed had my best interests at heart, I'm extremely cautious who I allow see my vulnerabilities, my flaws, my inconsistencies – my humanness. These things have been used against me so many times, how can I help but be cautious?

Perhaps I need to grow a thicker skin.

It's much easier, however, to live vicariously through writing. And I have to wonder if writers are compelled to write because we can retreat to our internal worlds without feeling the lack. Our brains are put together differently, allowing us a vividness of memory and imagination that most others only find in the external world.

Who wouldn't prefer an ordered world to a chaotic one?

 
 
As part of a shocking trend this year of getting gifts that were actually on my Christmas list, I received Jane Smiley's book, "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel", which includes Smiley's impressions of novel writing gained over the past twenty years.

I've been involved in writing a fan fiction piece and have posted it chapter-by-chapter at an archive for this type of story for the past year. In this time, it has gathered nearly 500 reviews from readers of my particular corner of fandom, most of them enthusiastic. The work unexpectedly has grown to novel length, but at last I'm nearing the end.

Smiley had this to say about the creative process and works in progress (WIP):

"...I advise against rewriting, except for grammar and clarity, until you have the whole arc of the novel complete. The desire to get each scene "just right" works against productivity because it allows you to get in the habit of ruminating upon your self-doubts. In the Victorian period, when novels were published serially in monthly or weekly installments, authors got in the habit of letting forty or fifty pages, thousands of words, go out into the world before the novel was finished or even, in some cases, fully worked out. Publishing serially, for the sake of an income, served as a spur to invention -- the luxury of writer's block was out of the question."

The boldface is mine. I totally agree about the necessity of writing the next installment as "a spur to invention." Surprisingly so, at times.

Smiley continues, "Dickens told his friend John Forster about going into a shop to buy paper, and overhearing a customer ask for the next installment of the book he was working on. He knew that he hadn't even begun to write it. He reported being stimulated rather than intimidated by the incident."

This is exactly what happens to me when I receive reviews for my WIP, with readers urging me to write more soon.

Smiley again: "Other authors, such as George Eliot, found publishing serially more difficult than Dickens, but as a group they rose to the challenge and produced an unprecedented body of great literature."

Case in point: I thought I'd be tying up a few loose ends and posting the epilogue to my WIP in the near future. Instead my muse is rising to the challenge and spurring invention, thus inspiring me to produce nearly 4,000 words in the past few days.

So does the WIP, and the back-and-forth between author and readers, result in a better piece of fiction?

 
 

I finally believe I'm a writer.

Although I've written stories since the age of 11 (about zombies), and poems beginning at age 12 (about wolves).

I'm a writer by nature, and a writer by profession. It's in my soul and in my bones. Honestly, the smell of ink wafting through a printing house quickens the blood in my veins.

I can admit now that writing is my strongest talent to become a fulltime novelist my most cherished dream.

So why has it taken 36 years and nearly 500 reviews on a fanfic archive to convince me that, yes, it's true, I make the grade, I'm a writer?

I went to college to learn how to earn a living from it, scratched a living doing it in the real world for more than a dozen years, paying my dues with mundane assignments and low pay at a hometown newspaper.

Yet through all that, I felt like I was posturing. Perhaps it was because I grew up in a middle class factory town where most of its residents thought reading a book was a awful lot of work -- why not watch TV? Or get real and take up a sport.

Maybe it's because when I finally did get a job writing for a living, the newspaper I worked for treated its reporters like the lowest lifeform in the foodchain. Or maybe it's because I relocated from a Midwestern factory town to a Western factory town, where the prevailing attitude about writers and artists is that they're a lot of left-wing foo-foo's who might die if they worked a hard day's labor putting together widgets or digging ditches or assembling 1,000 burgers in a day at McDonald's.

There's really no denying it anymore. I have a million original words scratched in notebooks and a million more in electrons scattered through my living space. I'm happiest when my mind is anywhere but in the moment, be it a fantastic universe or a magical world or 1884.

I'm tired of people telling me what I shouldn't think or do. I want to accept what I am and be happy with myself for a change. It's my talent -- God's gift, some would say. Shouldn't I make the most of it in the time I have left on this earth?

Of course, I should. And finally, finally, I believe it.