A moment arrives in your life as a writer when you realize writing, editing, sitting and staring at the last sentence, wondering when the next will arrive, all of it, is beginning to thrive.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
The bad news and writers stash bad news away for scenes in writing, is to write well is to practice, and to practice means to take the time required to write, and that means there’s time you’re writing when other things are not being done.
In 1994, I called in sick one day to write. It was cold outside, and I had an idea for writing. I spent the entire day banging away at the story. By the time the sun had set, I realized the writing wasn’t that good, and I had blown off work for a day. Then I realized writing was eating away at my spare time.
The answer to this question of whether it was a worthwhile endeavor was to try to write better. That’s been the answer ever since that day. I want to write better. It’s costing me time and opportunities, relationships with people, housekeeping, okay, never mind about the housekeeping, but if I am going to do this and spend as much time as I do, I want to be better.
Someone asked me where the ideas come from or where the story is born. I get that question from people who do not create but never from someone who does. If your heart and soul is in tune with the Universe at large to be creative, inspiration never leaves you, and it never stops.
Those who claim Writer’s Block may be tired or may not be able to discern the signal, but they are not blocked. It arrives with each beat of the heart, loud and strong, and the creative person has only to listen.
There are ten million, five hundred seventeen thousand, six hundred and forty-two reasons not to create, given to you by the outside world every moment of your day. There is only one reason to do it; it feeds your soul. It defines your humanity. It is who you are.
I have dreams about familiar places and houses that only exist in dreams. The people there are dream folk, appearing only in certain dreamscapes, never cross-pollinating in the night, and this is the way it has always been. But fatigue lessens clarity, and I have only flashes of the space and time of the dream. I awake a few hours before the dogs, and I listen.
Lilith Anne snores, old and fading; her body is like an ancient engine, still running, with fuel and will, but her time on earth can not be long, and she will not suffer. Wrex Wyatt is in the chair curled up, breathing deeply, easily, and strongly. Near my left leg, a small, soft, warm spot is silent in the darkness. But the night is not still.
Coyotes begin their yammering, the sounds echoing through the woods, skating across the pond, skipping from lily pad to lily pad, snaking around the ground quickly, whipping and winding around every tree trunk, and this awakens Wrex. But just as suddenly, the noise stops, Wrex puts his head down, and he sleeps again.
The warm spot near my leg moves up and towards my face silently until the purr begins, loud, rumbling down through the mattress of the bed and up again. Was it a coyote who almost killed Aqaba? There is real fear in his body language. I pull his body to mine and put an arm around his tiny body. The purring grows louder.
The rain has pushed the pond deep into the woods, flooding the trail entirely on the east side and isolating the path to and from the house. Coyotes are creatures of paranoia and surety and would not come into an area so closed and narrow now. Budlore Amadeus is large enough to be proof against one and loud enough to stand down more. No, too many dog teeth, too much barking, too much to lose and little to gain, accountants in their pack point their noses elsewhere.
But Aqaba Thomas pushes closer to me, his purrs strong and his volume up. Is this the first time in his life there has been true safety? Is this his primary experience with a guardian, inside a home, and comfort? The purring eases away, and the pack sleeps again.
I hated every moment of every day of public school. Each and every hour lasted an eternity. One of the side products of this journey through block and brick buildings where every movement was timed and orchestrated was my sense of time became totally distorted.
At age nineteen, I spoke with a landlord about renting an apartment. The standard lease was for a year. A year? A whole year? That was an eternity. Who knew if they would be alive in a year? Planning that far in advance seemed ludicrous to me. I lived in a world where only books lasted, and everything else was momentary or temporary.
Budlore Amadeus wanted to walk in the woods this morning, with just enough light to see, and because the weather is cool, I’m ready. Bud runs ahead, dips into the bushes like a bird diving for a fish, and then back on the trail again. I haven’t dragged the hurricane debris out, and perhaps won’t. What falls on the ground becomes part of the ground, having once been a part of the sky. Some trees shed big limbs, and others dropped smaller offerings.
The storm killed three trees. Two red maples broke, one in half and the other with a twisted break, and one water oak broke in half. They will return to the earth where they landed.
We walk around the area, still flooded from all the rain that’s fallen in the last two months, and Bud spooks a rabbit into fleeing. I see the white flash of the tail; Bud leaps after the bunny and then stops. It’s a sign of aging, for a much younger Bud would have pursued this prey. Bud’s muzzle is greying, his run not as swift, and his will to hunt diminished. Of all injustices on earth, losing Lucas before he had a chance to age, to grow old with me, to be the dog I would retire with, is a sharp one. Lucas and Lilith should have had the chance to be together for many years instead of just five.
The sun rises above the horizon now, and the light is clear, the shadows retreating. Bud snuffles a bush, then looks up at me, wondering which direction I will take. Like so many dogs before him, Budlore wants not to be in the woods but wants to be in the woods with me. I walk the edge of the flooded firepit and see ripples as frogs flee. Bud ignores the water, and I remember dogs who would have gone in no matter the temperature.
We return, the sun clear in the sky, its track more and more southernly as Solstice draws nearer, and Bud races to the house as if I might give chase.
Ever it may bring, I have the dogs that I have, and those I have lost are gone. These too, will go, and others will arrive in due time. Then one day, I will leave, just as all the dogs have, and someone else will walk the trail in the woods with dogs, looking at the sun and seeing seasons and light change.
I swore off burning a few years ago, and things went well. I composted much of the limbs and stuff, so burning seemed a waste of material. But things begin to pile up. Storms blew down some larger limbs, I had three trees too close to the house taken down, I cut them up and added all of this to the firepit.
In the meantime, it rained and rained and rained. The firepit became an island. Then it rained some more.
And then the hurricane hit.
Room for limbs, branches, and tree debris has run out, but the firepit is flooded, and I mean over knee-deep in water.
It’s not like I can start a fire on a pile of stuff that’s surrounded by water, can I?
It’s the Equinox. I want to build a fire.
I need to build a fire.
Here’s the firepit. Water, water, everywhere. And it’s deep. Right there in front of the pile, there’s a drop off and the water is waist deep. Hmmm, but approached from the side, it’s only a bit over knee deep or so.
Here’s the issue: This pile is fine where it is, but I have a yard full of stuff. Wading out to the island to add more stuff is going to be no fun, and if I can’t burn it, that means when the water goes away, the pile will resemble a nuclear bomb going off when it burns. The trees around this area are my primary concern. I don’t want them harmed by a giant fire. If I can burn enough new stuff, and enough old stuff on the Island of Branches, that’s best case. But can I even get a fire started out there on the island?
Okay, I got the fire going. How much can I do with it? I have to carry the branches over my head to get them into the fire. But the fire has awaken my inner Firesmith. I feel a yearn, a yearn to burn.
Laborious, is the word of the day. Grab a branch, hold it over my head, wade out to the pile, try to toss it in at the best point, wade back out, rinse and repeat. But I figured out the path in and out, shuffle instead of trying to lift my feet too high, and go slow. The fire goes better than expected. I really though the embers would fall through into the water, but there’s enough fuel in the pile, and it has been compressed tight enough, the fire build up enough heat to feed. And feed it does. The third or fourth trip it I see some of the larger pieces of wood burning brightly. I can feel the heat. This is working. More fuel, please.
After an hour or so, I take a break and move around for some photos. The fire is building up and it’s time to stop. I can feel fatigue setting in. The trip back and forth through the water is wearing me out. But it feels good to get rid of two different piles of stuff, and dent the old pile, too.
Finally, it was time to stop. But I welcomed the Equinox in a manner befitting the change of season, reduced the piles considerable, and had a lot of fun playing with water and fire. This is the type of thing I would have loved as a kid, and love it still, I do. How many of you have stood in thigh deep water and felt the heat of a fire you built on an Island of Branches?
How many of you remember wanting to do things like this before you became an adult?
Note: Four hours later, this thing is still smoking.
You either can or you won’t. That’s the story, isn’t it? When you’re doom scrolling on social media, could you be writing? Writing is waiting while you watch some video of a half-naked twenty-year-old who is doing Yoga poses you won’t see me in unless I get hit by a log truck while I’m in a Volkswagen Beetle.
Hopefully, you will not see that anytime soon.
But you could be writing. A video game entertains you idly, and by idly, I mean it’s not your creativity behind the storyline, scenery, or characters. It’s not the same as getting down to the soul of someone only you can bring forth into existence.
You have a scene in mind. It’s nagging at you to do something with it. Why wait? Why wait to see if it functions? Mary is walking down the dirty sidewalk, stepping over used condoms and plastic whiskey bottles. A puddle of puke spreads out from a man passed out, face down, and she keeps walking.
Mary is going somewhere, doing something, but what? Who is she? What does she look like? What timeline is this? London in 1888?
See how easy that was? In the space of a paragraph, we have an idea of a woman with a destination and scenery.
Mary looks up at the numbers on the building and hesitates. This is a hovel house where men with money rent women who need it. The building looks reputable in front, with a barber shop, shave and a haircut for a few pennies, and a shoeblack works out front. But the main draw for the men are the women who work inside the building, who enter by the back entrance. Mary has been given the address by a woman who sets up these meetings. Mary must keep the appointment if she wants another, but this is the first. She’s never sold her body before.
And here we go. Now we know it’s London, back in the late 1800s, and we know Mary is young. We have to go back and change the way the story began to wooden walkways and get rid of the plastic bottle, but the feel of the scenery will be the same, won’t it?
2.0 let’s go! Mary is walking down the dirty wooden walk, stepping over apple cores and chicken bones tossed from the upper floors of a tavern. Puke spreads out from a man passed out, face down in the muddy street, and she keeps walking.
Unless Mary is heading into unknown territory here, we know she’s a denizen of the poorer sections of town. Then we add the next part, but what does Mary look like at this point? How do we find out in a time when Mary doesn’t take a selfie?
Walking into the back door of the Hovel House, the woman who hired her waits, “It’s you then? I gots to make sure the new ones show. He likes fair hair and fair skin from what he tells, and your eyes are pretty enough blue. If’n he messes you up some it’s paid extra unless you need a nurse. Ain’t you eati’n regular, missy? You need some meat on your bone other than what the men put on ya. Up the stairs, second floor, stay off the lift, go to room seven on the right, get undressed and in bed and wait for him’n to show. Don’t say nothing less you asked and act like you like it, right?” the woman hands Mary a key and walks away.
Dialogue is an interesting tool, no? In the space of a short paragraph, the unnamed, unformed, and temporary character describes much about what is going on. Twainesque, the dialogue also demotes Mary to uneducated, poverty-ridden, second-class citizens not allowed to use the elevator. A little dialect goes a long way unless you write superbly, and I’m not there yet.
As a side note, in the wildly popular television series, “The Walking Dead,” characters would be introduced speaking in dialect, yet after the first two sentences, switch over to more standard speech. The story’s writers dialect slows the story down.
Now Mary is walking down a long hallway, the key clenched in her fist. She’s never sold herself and wonders if it will hurt or if the man will be cruel. Will he demand she do things she does not know how to do? Fear slowly builds into terror, her thoughts cycling through faster and faster.
She gets undressed, gets into the bed, admires the clean sheets, soft pillow, and warm room. She hopes the man doesn’t keep the appointment, and she can nap here. But he arrives on time, says hello absently, and takes his clothes off. Mary lies still, terrified, yet unable to resist as he climbs on top of her. Seconds later, it seems, he gets up, dresses, and leaves without a word. Mary is lying in the bed, wondering if that’s it, and gets up, cleans herself off, picks up the coins he’s left on the table near the door and leaves.
And here we go. The scene of the man leaving, without speaking, without so much as looking at Mary, leaving a few coins on the table, can be pivotal. Mary has gone from a frightened young woman to one who has survived her first encounter with the oldest profession in the world. How does she feel? How has Mary changed from undressing to when she puts her clothes back on? The money is more than she would make in three days in the sweatshops, and here it is, a few moments later. Yet Mary has sold herself to a stranger. How does she feel now?
You sit idly and say you cannot write, but look at this. We’ve wandered through how writing comes together from thought, introduced three characters, maybe four if you count the puking man, and set up a lot of future conflicts.
You can, but you won’t. Is that what you are still saying?
Stephen King wrote a book, “On Writing,” that describes his journey from a creative kid to a struggling artist, to a force to be reckoned with, to an addict, to who he is today. In the book, he dismisses Writer’s Block as a copout, which I agree with. In the film“The Devil’s Advocate,” Al Pacino’s character asks a young lawyer of his skills, “I know you’re good, but can you summon it at will?”
Oddly, this writing was about something, and it turned into something else. I started two days ago, and at a little past five in the morning, on Hump Day, it’s finally getting here.
Initially, I reflected briefly on “The Man in the Iron Well,” which has been a work in progress for a while, but I feel the end is near. I’ve completed it once, going into a rewrite, and it feels good.
The story begins with a man catching his wife in bed with her lover; a gun fires, and the lover dies. It’s an accident, but no one will believe how it happened, so they must hide the body, and in doing so, a murder is born. Tension between the two simmers, but they have to rely on one another. Inserted into all of this is a brilliant and most evil creature, so they also have her to deal with. And, of course, this being in the present day, issues arise, the fallout from being suspected of a crime in the digital age.
But all the two have to do is dodge a murder charge.
I was working on this during the blackout caused by the hurricane. I rewrote two sections, was happy with the work, and thought to myself, “You’re doing good if you can work under these conditions.
Then yesterday, I went to the library to write during lunch, and a woman came in. The library is a beautiful, sprawling education center full of open spaces. Yet this woman had on so much perfume I was choking fifty feet away. Two young women at a table began coughing. I had to bail out.
Hubris, the thought I could write under any conditions at any time, catches up with me. No writer is as good as they hope. No writer is as bad as they fear. We simply are what we are, with whatever we are doing, and if it comes to something, then it is good, and if it only teaches us to write better, that is also enough.
But I didn’t know that we, we could break a silver lining”
“A Sorta Fairytale” by Tori Amos. 2002
The first ten seconds of this song pinned me. I was in my work truck, eating lunch, and just stopped.
The weird thing is that I had no idea who the song was about until years later when a woman came along and slipped into the lyrics.
But before that happened, I was, again, at work, and this song came on.
“2 AM and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me
Threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
‘Cause these words are my diary screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them however you want to”
The song “2AM, Breathe” by Anna Nalick, 2005
If you’ve ever had something inside of you that was fighting to get out, to become, to live, god fucking dammit, this song will stop you. I pulled over and listened. I was on my way to a meeting, and almost there, they could see me as I pulled over. The song’s beginning slowed me down, but the lyrics about getting it all down on paper all full stop.
Three years apart, two songs, and I still listen to them both.
Those two songs are part of my life, like air (jussssst breathe), like red cells, like hearing or vision. They are part of who I am. It’s like every minute that you ever lived, each second, brought you right here, reading this.
No matter how weird or shitty or hard life gets, you have those seconds that carry you. Songs, books, sunsets, moments when you’re alone with a dog and you know the two of you are sharing the moment.
Don’t you quit. Don’t you ever give up. It’s still there, someone is writing a song right now that you are going to love so much you pull over and are breathless. At a party where no one even knows you there a cat is going to come out from under the sofa to rub faces with you, and one day you’re going to remember the way it felt when the cat purred in your lap.
No matter what, there are those moments waiting for you, just you, and no one else ever, and you haven’t the right or any reason not to allow them to come to you.
They’re won’t be anyone to tell us how they felt, if you aren’t there, and we need you.
The Hickory Head Hermit 