I have been writing stories for as long as I can remember.
I wrote my first novel when I was 23 years old, living in Paris and in love. What a
better setting, better start?
I am now approaching 60 and have written a half dozen more novels and a
few books. So yes, I write.
But I’d also like to say something about how I perceive that
writers approach life and live it differently than others.
Our present culture – capitalism unbound – is constantly
bombarding us with information about how we should live: what our sex lives
should be, how much we should weigh and what we must look like, and even things we should live and
die for, like wars.(Every American coming of age in my lifetime, including my own generation in Vietnam, has had to face this grim issue.)
Therefore, a writer in the modern world must possess a
state-of-the-art and functioning bullshit meter. When the meter alerts us to,
we must be aware and alive enough to follow its direction and move out of the
ubiquitous piles.
The difference between a hermit, monk and a writer moving
out of the junkyards of imposed desires and false choices is that the writer will eventually feel
compelled to write about his or her experience.
In my own life I can site the example of being bombarded
with information and rational justifications for why my 86 year old mother with
Alzheimer’s should be placed in a nursing home. I listened to the arguments,
but deep down my writers mind could decipher in exacting details what the
experience would be like in real life terms: the feelings of confusion and
abandonment; the hours upon hours of loneliness; the sad little group
activities that would never satisfy the need for meaningful interaction.
I saw all these things as vividly as if I was living them
because I had trained myself, as a writer, to look below the advertised to the
real. I paid a heavy price for doing so, as I relate in my latest book.
When I am not writing I enjoy leading creative writing
groups where I get to share what I’ve learned over the years and also discover
young potential writers.
My first experience with this, a few years ago, was among
incarcerated youths, male and female. Many of these youths had such vile
upbringings – emotional and sexual abuse were standard fare – that they were
quite willing and eager to express themselves to anyone who was willing to
listen. Given the demographic and
background, many of them preferred to rap their stories rather than to write them. Some were fiercely
talented and might make a career for themselves some day in a quasi musical poetic business
that values ‘street-cred’.
Most of the others were quieter and wrote painful and
heartbreaking stories of abuse and their attempts to deal with it and go on
living. For them, I did not wish for, or envision, writing careers; I simply
prayed that giving them an opportunity to express what they usually held
hidden deep inside would somehow allow them to gain a sense of control over what
had happened to them.
But we all write, whether on paper or not – it’s the voice
in our head that sees things not as we are told they are, but how they actually
are.
