On Writing
I write for fun, but like many, I wish I wrote for life. While I wait for the angels and trumpets of my esteemed authorship to pierce through the heavens and encircle me in greatness, book signings, and movie deals, I write periodically in this blog that revels in significantly less readership than its self-centered predecessor.
One of the joys of the low-traffic blog is that you can experiment with impunity. One day I’m writing a black comedy, the next a murder mystery, and the week after that a romance set in a usability lab. I can try my hand at anything, just like I would at a cheap carnival where I can “step right up” and for a trivial fee try to dunk the heckler or throw the dart at the balloon. Perhaps a few onlookers are amused when I succeed or fail, or simply entertained by my comical attempt, but in the end I haven’t caused any damage.
So imagine my surprise when someone dear to me told me he had been “duped” by my beautiful writing, by my relentless adventures, by my sojourns into what he thought was my soul.
Case in point: my entry about Colorado. Everyone who spends their days with me will admit that I do not pontificate so wisely, dramatically, or sentimentally in person. I had FlyBoy say to me once, “Jess, this [insert various writing here] doesn’t sound like you. I like you better when you’re dark and sarcastic.” No doubt, I personify irony and satire much better than I do roses and poetry. Does this mean I’m faking an orgasm every time I write an entry like the one about Colorado? No, if that were true, I’d be in Hollywood already with at least two Academy Awards for best actress, and have left in my wake a lot of ball-swingingly confident exes.
Everything I write is real, but everything I write isn’t representative of me. Good writing involves thinking beyond who you are as a person, considering the many facets of an experience, and sometimes, writing outside of your comfort zone. Take for example, these two excerpts from that book I was supposed to finish writing a year ago.
Excerpt 1:
I can’t say I didn’t have my own romantic notions of what it would be like to drive across the Canadian tundra. My overall ideas about day to day travel were frequently nebulous, but were always dotted with vivid imaginings of chance hotel encounters with NHL players, mountaintop sunset sightings of aurora borealis, and entering lumberjack competitions only to discover with unexpected delight that I’m a natural with a saw.
Excerpt 2:
We were in a giant snow globe surrounded by white mountains and a plastic hotel and a green glass lake with tiny, stirred up snowflakes that alighted on every surface and spiraled down into every crevice. Somewhere someone had shaken my world up, then accidentally dropped it onto the floor where it promptly rolled under a bookshelf, collected a hairy coating of fuzz bunnies, then hit the wall and cracked. Everything I knew and loved was slowly seeping out, and I could cling to my manufactured trees and buildings, screaming as everything washed away, or I could use that crack to escape and find a new world outside the bubble.
Different, right? Is excerpt 2 any less me than excerpt 1? No, but I’m a lot more comfortable with excerpt 1, and excerpt 1 flaunts an attitude that I candidly advertise in public. Excerpt 2 is the type of borderline melodrama I won’t admit to unless someone catches me writing it red-handed.
To me, there is a fine line between melodrama and the zen that my “duped” reader above wants to read about in earnest. Do my travels and adventures change me? I am confident that they do to some degree, that each exploit and undertaking alters my perspective ever so slightly and pinkens or blackens my tomorrow, with every banded shade in between. The struggle is in recording the change history of my soul such that it doesn’t read like the Safeway romances my old landlady kept on her hall bookshelf.
If you’re not really sure what melodrama is, it’s that stuff that makes you roll your eyes when you’re reading a Hallmark card at the supermarket, or REO Speedwagon lyrics, or the part in a spaghetti western where the hero’s been shot but takes ten minutes to die because he’s sputtering and choking an epic about how much he loves his dog.
It goes something like, “As the sun set on the cold, uncaring waters of the mid-Atlantic, Miranda watched as the only man she had ever loved sailed west to discover forbidden and savage new lands. Miranda ran to the edge of the rocky cliff and cried out to him, but the clouds parted and thousands of points of sparkling light on the sea blinded her, and when she looked for him again nothing but the infinite ocean met her small, lonely gaze.”
But you don’t want to sound like an engineer either.
“It was 7:42 p.m. and Miranda went to see John leave on his ship. He had to sail west on business. The sun was at a bad angle, and by 7:50 p.m. Miranda couldn’t see John’s ship anymore because she had forgotten her sunglasses.”
Perhaps now you’re getting a bit of an idea of what I’m up against here. Neither of these is me, so I end up trying to write something in between, which often ends up with some rib jabs here and there and someone inevitably feeling duped or falling in love with me or trying to kill me.
You’d think that with an audience of ten or so people I could make everyone happy. But even with a readership that you’d need a magnifying glass to identify, each person takes away what he or she wants from my stories. On a granular level, sure, there might be a right and a wrong to the interpretation of words and sentences. But at a personal, conclusive level, what you derive from these stories is yours to keep in a way that makes my original intent irrelevant, and for that, I love you.
