Why write? Why write for public consumption?
Writing is how I make things real, and I choose to live in
the real world.
The indescribably joyous moments which seem almost too
fleeting and precious to put into words.
The fears that keep you awake in
the middle of the night and the frustrations that bog you down during the
course of the day. The things that make
you shake your head when you get a look at your local newspaper’s front page,
or the incomprehensibly stupid conversations you overhear between the Stepford
moms in the schoolyard at five minutes to the bell.
“Write what you know” is usually the first rule we hear when
setting out on that journey. It’s the
easiest thing to write, or is supposed to be, because writing is an act of
introspection, of instinctively trying to capture thoughts in words on paper, and
the question of whether or not they can be coerced into making sense verbally
is never one that needs to be answered. The
act of writing is one way I have come to know myself and the way I feel about a
growing variety of subjects, and in the privacy of the pages of my notebook or
the Documents file on my laptop, I have permission to experience a range of
emotions which are not always permissible to share with others in as raw or as
untenable a state as they can appear there.
The fact that I choose to share some of them through blogging is to me a
measure of my growth as a writer, and is a source of pride, though tempered still
with a measure of self-doubt.
The act of writing is something I voluntarily separated
myself from for many years, and when I took it up again, after marriage and
three children, thanks to a friend who encouraged me and wouldn’t take “no, I
can’t anymore” as an answer, I struggled for a time to find my voice. I wondered why I was having such a hard time,
because, especially through university, writing was a joyous act in
itself. I took Liberal Studies, English
literature and medieval history, I knew all my professors by their first names,
and because of the informal nature of many of our class seminars, I was able to
explore a creative avenue even in essay writing. I wrote my eight essays, at ten thousand
words apiece, for my Shakespeare class as a series of undiscovered pamphlets,
which you may know was a common way of being published at that time, in a reasonable facsimile of Shakespearean English. My eighteenth
century poetry professor was delighted with my final essay on
Alexander Pope, written in rhyming couplets.
Eighteen years later, I could not understand where the ability, once
second nature, to express myself creatively on paper had gone.
As much as I hate to say it, the condom in the seminal act
of creative expression was my living situation.
I say that I hate to say it, because for a long time I would have
described myself as happily married, but in retrospect, I realize that it
wasn’t so much that I was happy with my life as it was that certain aspects of
it gave me happiness, my three children paramount. I understood finally, and it was a long and
difficult process to arrive at that understanding, that my husband and I hadn’t
had things in common, as much as that we had common goals, a laundry list if
you will, and that once those items had been ticked off, we had very little to
say to each other. A stay-at-home mother
who didn’t drive and lived in a rural community, my world became a very small
place. Making my computer a friend became
a natural thing, and so I began to write again.
Write what you know.
I knew I was struggling to understand how I felt, and why, and that seemed
like a good place to start. That was the
birth of my blog, or Notes, on Facebook.
My friends list, which began as people from school or work, came to
include strangers, friends of friends who read my pieces through comment links
that appeared off my profile, people who liked what I wrote. That was a huge boost to my hungry and
fragile writer’s ego, because it finally convinced me that I COULD write...they
had no need to stroke my ego because they weren’t “friends”, therefore their
praise was independent of any personal relationship, and somehow more
trustworthy. Does it sound stupid to say
that their appreciation was more valid?
Stupid or not, that was how it felt in the beginning. My ego is a little sturdier now.
Finding my voice, as I said, was difficult at first. I resisted the first person narrative for
awhile, because even when writing fiction, it appears at first blush that you
are writing about your own experiences, and that is never more true than when
writing erotica, especially when a jealous spouse is one of your readers. Once I stopped fighting that natural
tendency, it was so much easier, and I tentatively started posting erotic
vignettes on LiveJournal. A teacher of
mine once encouraged me to compose a complete character sketch of anyone I ever
created in my head, right down to a birth date.
Once that character comes to life in your brain, he told me, once you
can immerse yourself in that headspace, the story will be easier to write. A
reader once told me, months later, I have never met you, and I have no idea who
you are in real life, but I have made love with you dozens of times in my
imagination...you move me to passion with your words, and for that I thank you.
About four years ago, I got a brief and shining opportunity to be a paid ghostwriter
for an elderly lady who believed she had a story to tell. I interviewed her for hours, took miles of notes, and she was
excited about what I produced, but in the end, she decided not to
continue. She had suffered from
depression, been hospitalized and underwent shock treatment, abused drugs and
alcohol, felt that she shamed her Christian family by having sex when she wasn’t
married. While I respected her choice, I
told her that I wished she’d made a different decision, and she told me that if
I ever wanted to use the material she gave me as the basis for a story to feel
free to do so. And someday, I will.
I choose to live in the real world, and writing helps me to
do that. Without my pen and notebook,
without my computer and my blogs/notes, without the opportunity to work things
out in my head to achieve a measure of peace and acceptance, without the
ability to capture feelings with words to prevent them from swamping me in
mental miasma, I would not have made it through the disintegration of my
marriage and feeling guilted into leaving my home and relocating away from my
children.
I would not, without the willing punching bag of my laptop
and a few friends I would trust with my life, have been able to deal with the
revelation that my oldest daughter, now fifteen, was molested by my
father-in-law when he lived with us, the summer she turned eight. When I thought about that filthy f**king
bastard putting his hands on her, defiling my beautiful innocent girl, I was
incoherent with rage and nausea. I burned to write it, to get the noise
of the buzz saw out of my ears, to help choke back the scream that was just
behind my tongue.
I deleted my LiveJournal account when I realized my
ex-husband was reading it. I don’t post
very frequently on Facebook anymore. Now
that my daughters have accounts, it is no longer a safe place to write the
angry things, the selfish things, the depressed things, the frustrated things. I’ve
written a lot of frankly incoherent things over the last couple of years and
chose not to put them anywhere at all.
That is, was, has been, reality. I could ignore it, submerge it, and go
mad...or I could write about it, and stay sane.
The choice is obvious, isn’t it?
