Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme
– Rush from their hit song “Limelight”
In case you haven’t noticed there’s a lot of distractions in life. From politics to family to relationships to work and health, there just doesn’t ever seem to be a shortage of endlessly urgent issues that are vying to dominate your mind, worry you, and pull you away from your writing. How do we handle these very real and normal affairs and still juggle our writing into the mix and make sure our stories and characters don’t suffer? Well my friends that’s exactly what I want to talk about with you today.
I think there are two ways to look at life – going through things or going away from them. Neither one of them is bad or good more than the other. They are just different ways of approaching life and yield different results in different scenarios. It is the wise man who can discern when it is best to go through something or to go away from it. These are the challenges each of us must face on a daily basis in our lives. The same goes for our writing, and how we are holding our writing inside of ourselves.
I have a lot of stories, ideas, and characters in my head, and more seem to keep coming! The same is true for nearly every writer and novelist and artist out there. And yet we, just like everyone else in the world, have to pay our bills, hang out with friends and family, and just basically take care of things in life. These other tasks are often viewed as distractions to many writers and artists. They avoid them or live secluded and unusual lives. I read a biography of W.H. Auden that was written by the man who was his personal chef for a time at the University of Michigan. They became lifelong friends, and the book is a fascinating read. You can purchase it here if you’re interested. The reason I bring this up is that there are many ways to handle these things, many ways to “skin the cat” as they rather strangely say. But however it is done, it is vital for us as writers that we always reserve a special place within us for our writing. Our characters must have some free space within us to roam and frolic and explore without any inhibitions of the “real” world we also inhabit. Our stories must be protected like a newborn fawn learning to walk for the first time or some rare and exotic orchid that requires precise temperatures and climates to thrive. This means then that as writers we must always have an inner sanctum within us that is pristine and protected from the outside world. It can, and is, of course influenced by the world around us, for all fiction is really fact, but it is facts undistorted or contaminated by the world and our everyday lives.
For example, I love politics. I have strong political views, and I like to share them with as many people as I feel appropriate. As you can imagine, especially these days, things can get a bit dicey. Tensions can rise and conversations can get lengthy. Now I for one must be a masochist or something, because I honestly love these types of debates and discussions. But I really work hard to compartmentalize this aspect of my life away from other areas, particularly my writing. I must keep some portion of my mind free and clear of all things of this world so that I can wander unencumbered in the stories and worlds within me. This, I am finding, is important. It’s important both for my writing, but also for myself personally, as well as all for the other areas of my life too. How can we better compartmentalize these worlds inside of us? In other words is it better to go through these issues or to just go away from them? Personally, I tend to err on the side of going through things. I like to dig into the meat of things. To quote Henry David Thoreau, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Yes indeed! And honestly the reason I tend to like this approach to life so much is often simply because it is there before me. If I am aware of something, then it must be important to me, and therefore I want to go through it, to discover it, turn it around and over in my hands, understand the nature of it. Only then can I let it go, store it away, or share it with others. But it usually must first be understood. I must first have the thing before I can give it to you. This to me makes sense, because it actually feeds into my writing. Our life experiences, relationships, thoughts, and observations all feed into us and will naturally ooze into our writing, even when it’s protected and harbored away from the world outside. We cannot escape ourselves, and ultimately our writing cannot escape our world. It is this point that I want to expand on, because I think it is vital for writers when approaching their works.
You see writing a novel takes a lot of time – months if not years – to complete. And in that time span a lot can and does happen to us. We change and grow, suffer, and are overjoyed. As we write, life goes on so much that we are transformed naturally from the time we started writing the piece to the time we are finally finished with it. This process of personal transformation is to me not a mistake or an accident or a problem of some kind. I actually consider it a gift and a key to whatever I am currently writing. I consistently find that the experiences I am having in my actual life are moving in a strange lockstep with the very story I am writing. Somehow the transformations I find myself in, more often than not, tie in directly to whatever I am writing. It is as if some greater force of intention and creativity is guiding not just my writing but my own life as well! And I have seen it with other writers as well as they have shared with me their lives and struggles too. It is truly a magical experience to behold. For this reason, I think there is an even deeper justification for delving into our lives, into the issues of the day, and the conflicts and events that we find ourselves in. The world is not disconnected from us, nor is it separate from our stories. In fact life seems to fuel our characters and the stories being told. Life is the gasoline that drives a good story. As we embrace our lives and all that is happening around us, we are more fully able to take those events, garner wisdom and keen observations about the nature of human behavior, and then turn right around and plop them into our stories and impregnate our characters with them. It is truly fascinating. In his book Letters to a Young Novelist the famous and prolific Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa states the following:
What does it mean to be an authentic writer? What is certain is that fiction is, by definition, fraud – something that is not real yet pretends to be – and that all novels are lies passing themselves off as truth, creations whose power of persuasion depends entirely on the novelist’s skill at performing conjuring and sleight-of-hand tricks, like a circus or theater magician. So does it make sense to speak of authenticity in fiction, a genre in which it is most authentic to be a trickster, a swindler? It does, but in this way: the authentic novelist is the novelist who docilely obeys the rules life dictates, writing on those themes born out of experience and possessed of urgency and avoiding all others. That is what authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.
As Llosa so magnificently states it is “the rules of life” which must be first understood and then obeyed if the novelist wishes for the writing to be authentic. Therefore we must embrace our own life however and wherever we find it. This makes not only good fodder for our writing, but it also makes us better human beings, wiser and more knowledgeable. It is a virtuous cycle where our life and the way we live feeds into our writing and stories which in turn feed back into our life and the decisions we make. It is a feedback loop that regenerates itself and ultimately results in what Llosa calls “authenticity.”
I’m not much of a biologist (understatement of the year!), but I do know about the cell membrane. Basically the function of the cell membrane is “to protect the integrity of the interior of the cell by allowing certain substances into the cell, while keeping other substances out.” This is important to consider for ourselves as well and what we allow into our consciousness, our mind, and our heart. Both as any human on earth and especially for us as writers, having a sort of cell membrane around our inner mind where we store and corral our characters and stories and ideas is a vital, vital practice. For example I don’t typically speak about whatever writing project I am currently working on except to only a select few. And then there are story ideas which I literally don’t tell anyone at all. On the other side, I am always observing the world around me, noticing particulars about places I visit, the people I meet, the way they interact with me and with others around them, and the flow of conversations and ideas. I am always taking life in around me. The way sunlight hits buildings in a city, the sounds of a forest in the evening, the bustle of people in a restaurant. I want all of these things to pass through me and into my inner sanctum. It feeds the life and worlds and characters I am growing in there. Often when I find myself in a rut with where to go next in my story, I consider my own life and what is happening to me personally. I scan my world and look to see if there are any parallels occurring between myself and the characters I am writing about. You’d be surprised how often there are linkages between the two. It is a thrill to discover these connections and find unique and interesting ways to intertwine them together and observe how the story is carried forward to a place I hadn’t expected, and I experience more peace, joy, relief, and happiness in my life too!
Writers are a crazy bunch. And writing is a daunting and harrowing task. But the keys to all great writing lie right under our noses. They are right before us in the lives we are leading, the people we know, the worlds we inhabit, the things we obsess over. It is better by far to embrace your life, to experience more of it, and to turn right around and bring all of that into your work. Impregnate your characters with all that you know. Write what fascinates you. It will surely help to carry you through the more challenging times in the process of composing a novel. But most especially, keep your inner worlds clean and clear. Let them stir awake within you, become alive and grow. Protect those worlds like they were your children. Feed them good foods, the real knowledge and truth of life before you. Give them what you know as well as what confounds you. Give all that you have, and don’t let anyone or anything alter it to something that is not yours. Least of all don’t let yourself do that either! Do not abort your own characters or stories. They are miracles of creation within you. Let them live, gestate, and mature inside of you. As they grow, you are inspired to write them into existence, and in turn they continue to grow and develop. As you progress in this way through your story, you become something like a god charting the life and destiny of all before you, pulling from one creation and stitching new life into the fabric of a whole other universe, etching out the dimensions of a humanity, birthing people into a wild world for all to witness, to fret over, and perhaps even to love.