All writers – particularly all fiction writers – are fundamentally
good liars. Because it’s their – not even talent, but responsibility to make people believe things that simply aren’t
true. You present a story that never happened to people who never existed and
say, “This is what really occurred.” And if you do it well, your reader will be
swept along without ever questioning the validity of it. The key, though, is to
believe in it yourself. You as the writer have to put on that delusional mindset
that tells you the stories in your head aren’t just figments of your
imagination, but could have been a story on the news or something you found in
a forgotten history book at Goodwill, and it’s your task to tell it to the
world.
If you think about it, it’s really no wonder that creativity
was associated with mental illness. Sometimes I sit back and think, “I just
might be going crazy,” because I have things floating in my head that are as
vivid and real to me as reality itself. The conversations I hear between two
characters that I have created are just as realistic as a discussion I had with
my mom the other day. I can see the kitchen table they’re sitting at, the
coffee cups they’ve filled with Braveheart Scottish ale that awkwardly tastes like grapes, the dead yak in the living room
they’re wondering how to get out to the woods without the neighbors catching
on. That’s half the creativity that goes on in between my ears: scenes,
snippets of “reality” that are completely detached from a fully fleshed-out
story. Which is why I have such a problem writing fiction – who wants to read a
book of scenes that have nothing to do with each other when the writer can’t
figure out how to tie them all together? This is also a problem because that
makes them all the more difficult to separate them from real life. Because if
you think about it, life is nothing more than a series of scenes – you don’t
know the full story until the very end of it, and then it’s not even you
reading the full story, it’s somebody else looking back on your story and
seeing a complete beginning-middle-and-end structure.
Why do I write? I’ve answered this question before and tried
to be very philosophical like so many others have before me. You look up quotes
online about writing (attributed to authors who probably never said such
things, somebody else just thought their words would be more readily accepted
if it sounded like Mark Twain or Edgar Allen Poe wrote them) and you get all
this melarky about “words are the window to the soul” and “record your thoughts
for future generations” and some other such nonsense. And with respect to the
penners of those words (whoever they may be), that’s bullshit. What pompous turd
sits down with his leather-bound volume (only really posh people write in
leather-bound volumes) and quill pen (again, only the really posh people) and
says, “I’m going to write something today that is so profound, so
groundbreaking, that people generations from now, long after I am dead and
entombed somewhere, will still be misquoting it on the internet and
inspirational classroom posters.”
Nobody – and I mean nobody
– thinks like that. Do you know how much pressure it is to sit down in front of
a blank piece of paper and try to fill it up, much less fill it with something profound? No, thank you.
Other than the above universal statement that I have no right
to deliver, I can’t speak for other writers. For me, though, the whole point to
writing is to catch the bees of genius that constantly buzz through my brain
and pin them down in a paper shadowbox. Not for anybody else to examine, not
for future generations to look to for wisdom, not for people to see “the real
me.” It’s simply a housekeeping procedure. How the hell am I supposed to be a
contributing member of society and get done all the tasks I need to in a day
when my head is surging with creative ideas that are neither productive nor
helpful to me or anybody else? I have journals packed full of midnight rants,
loose pieces of paper with conversations, my own quotations in the notepad app
on my phone, sticky notes with ideas of stories that I will probably never
write. Because if I don’t capture them when they flutter onto the tip of my
nose, they’ll fly away and be lost to me forever. And my imagination, to me, is
too colorful and interesting a place to let things like that slip past – like the
little chip in a Magic 8 ball – without being acknowledged, even if they’re
never used.
I am baffled, intrigued, frightened, confused, marveled,
concerned, leveled, amazed by the things that float in an out of view in my own
head.
