Blues

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.