Disease

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.” -William Carlos Williams

I learned early that there was a place called the writer’s world and I began to explore that geography. The place was marked by the momentous and the picayune and it was salted with dialog, phrases, scenes and observations, additions, subtractions and re-readings. The land was bounded in language and the environment was intense and variable. In this land of nuance and change it was important to acquire certain skills that helped you capture meaning and some semblance of truth that would assist navigation. Years later, I think the most important survival skills are few…but hard to acquire. First, intense observation and a love of the meticulous are necessary. It also helps to have a very broad definition of the miraculous that includes the knowledge that the seemingly incidental can be truly momentous.

Every story begins because something happened and that something prompts a daisy chain of events that is narrative. In the beginning of my writing journey, I only wrote beginnings, the simple re-telling of events. I wrote from the margins and simply observed the actions of humans without interpretation or empathy. As the years went by and I began to understand the mystery of the human condition I began to venture into the psychology – the emotion – that came with the events I was describing. Eventually, I grasped that we have ONLY beginnings because our lives are so improbable. Joyce Carol Oates once said, “an unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart.” The mystery is shared by all and so is the thorn.

I tried all the exercises: paragraphing for speed, automatic writing, descriptive exercises, sample dialogue…the lot. Today, I simply keep a journal because I fondly believe that my observations may someday lead to a type of truth and I try to remember the words of Albert Einstein – ” Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

I have arrived at the place where writing is fun and fun demands variety. I give myself the right to go on about anything that interests me from the subtleties of human foibles to the dimples on a golf ball. In a way it is all worth noting. I have also learned the lesson given by Edgar Rice Burroughs: “if you write one story it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.” I keep whacking away.

Finally I want to thank the person who asked me a very important question…

“Why do you write a blog?”