Write What You Know

I'm doing a fair amount of writing these days. It's amazing how many hours there are in a day when you have nothing to fill them. It's equally amazing how easy it is to piddle those hours away with useless, meaningless crap. Facebook, I'm looking at you.

I'm also getting in a lot of reading. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Sparrow and Children of God, Good Omens, Of Mice and Men. And the odd book on writing or acting. Or both.

The book I'm reading right now, The Blunt Playwright, is proving both enjoyable and thought provoking.

In particular the comments on knowing what the protagonist wants. This shouldn't require that much thought, should it?

But when I often don't know what I want in real life I guess it's not that surprising that I have trouble writing characters who know what they want too.

I mean, it works. Sometimes very well, because I think a lot of people go through life not knowing what they want. The trouble is that when you're writing a story, it has to go somewhere.

The people in the story have to want something badly enough to change their lives for it.

Which is also something I don't think I do on a regular basis. I don't know if I want anything outside my current sphere badly enough right now to change my life.

The wonder and beauty of writing, though, is that I am provided with catharsis and voyeurism on a daily basis. I live a dozen lives a day, lives where I do want something, badly enough to kill; where I fight, am angry, am gentle and soft; where I make sense of a confusing world and where I succumb entirely to the chaos, to the moment. Lives that end and lives that keep going. Moments captured and moments lost.

It's a challenge. It's an incredible release.


Even with this post, I don't really know what it is I want to say.

Just that I'm writing, I guess. And it's wonderful strange and hard all at once. I am so lucky to be able to just sit at home and write.

I should put that as my status on Facebook. Be right back...

Like Mother, Like Daughter

My mother is a writer.

All of my life she has called herself a writer. I must admit that during most of my growing up she only wrote in her journal. Before she began her blog I actually didn’t see much concrete evidence of her writer status. However, she has always been a writer and I never doubted that.

I didn’t have a title until I went to acting school. After a few years I felt comfortable calling myself an actor. Well, actress – I don’t like the whole politically correct thing of everyone being actors now. I had my own title, I had my own life, things were good.

Then about a year ago I took a playwriting class.

God forbid I ever call myself a writer. I have always written, but it was more of a hobby. An interest, nothing more. I kept a diary from the age of 6, on and off, wrote several skits with my brothers, wrote a children’s novel in my teens that I never did anything with and I have at least half a dozen unfinished stories in my head and in my filing cabinet, but I was not a writer. It was an interest, an acceptable interest for an actress. Supplemental income and all that rot. So I took the class.

Within two months I began to wrestle with my titles. My teacher was calling me a writer. My classmates were calling me a writer. The other instructors in the school were calling me a writer.

I refused to accept it. Even though I was writing and nothing had ever felt so perfectly natural to me, I rejected the title with all the strength and stubborn willpower in my body.

I struggled and procrastinated like I had never done before in my entire life. The things I would do instead of writing! I suddenly found a passion for my annotated bibliography, the most pointless course I take here; I don’t think my room has ever been so clean and orderly. I vacuumed. I hate vacuuming. I washed other people’s dishes. Anything so that I could avoid writing my play.

I put an astounding amount of energy into avoiding writing. My ideas would come, my spirit would whisper to my muse, and I would evade eye contact. “If I can’t see you, then you aren’t reeeallll,” right?

I can only live in denial for so long, but it took a lot of wrestling before I broke down and called myself a writer. It did break me, even though I was alone that first time.

I go for walks when my thoughts get too jumbled up to the cemetery up on the hill, an old cemetery full of old graves of long forgotten people. I walked around the dead, watching my feet swish through the grass, scaring the grasshoppers into their rain-pattering flight. I was railing against God. Against my play. My idea, the only one I’d been given, was too big. Too dangerous. Too painful. It wasn’t fair, and I told God so.

I crumpled to the ground and with tears falling down my face I looked up to the sky and said, “I’m a fucking writer. Okay? I’m a writer. And I hate it.”

I uttered the phrase with a mouth full of resentment and bitterness. It wasn’t fair, I was an actress, I was not my mother, I refused to become my mother, and I knew this was the first step down a long and impossible backslidden slope.

Months later I finally said the words to someone else. I think my passion for writing equals my passion to act. It was strange to hear those words coming out of my mouth. The strangest part was that my resentment had disappeared. It was suddenly okay for me to admit that I could, perhaps, be a writer.

I’ve spent way too much time trying to figure out why I had such a strong negative reaction to being called a writer. I’m no closer to an answer, and no closer to knowing why it became okay. But I can call myself a writer now.

It scares me, but there is a peace in the fear along with an excitement as I explore this newly forgiven aspect of myself. The world seems like an open book, my oyster chock-full of pearls just waiting for me to come along and pick them up.

Like mother. Like daughter.

I’m okay with that now.

Hunger

I was sitting on a deck, letting the sun soak into my face and feeling the Chinook wind blow around my legs, listening to the dripping of icicles and the screaming of gophers. Among so much beauty, I was trying to figure out why bad things happen to good people. I was in the midst of telling God what is wrong with his world when someone walked by and asked me what I was doing.

I’m telling God what is wrong with the world, I said.

Things shouldn’t happen to people to make them jaded and cynical.

He stopped and pointed at me. That is so true, he said.

We shared a moment of silence.

Some people don’t ever get cynical, he said. My mother was one of them.

Then he went on his way, leaving me with that tiny bit of extra hope in a world that was screaming hope and life at me anyway.

Something disappointing happened to S. last weekend. He lost a role that he had earned fair and square because the director changed his mind about casting at the last minute. It’s rough – it’s hard enough to lose a role fairly, but to have it given to you and then taken away is just not fair. It happens here sometimes, although I’ve been told (and I agree) that it’s pretty unprofessional.

I’ve never had this happen before. I’ve discovered that it is unexpectedly difficult to feel the disappointment of someone I love, and to be saddened for them, and to know that there isn’t anything I can say or do that will make it better.

I hate feeling helpless in the face of injustice.

So I spent half an hour outside in the beauty and straightforwardness of God’s creation, talking to him about what isn’t working down here. Sometimes free will is a bitch, particularly when it’s someone else’s free will but you have to deal with the consequences.

At the end of my ponderings and talking, I realized that I am very naïve. So many people have broken themselves down from the pedestals I placed them on – I keep being disappointed when people I respect make choices and treat people in ways that contradict the person I thought they were. I suppose I should learn to stop putting people on pedestals. A part of my soul cries at the reality that in this fallen world I will find no one who will not let me down. Is that naivety, or is it hope, or is it what is left of Eve before she ate the apple?

I can see why it seems intelligent to become hardened and cynical. It protects people from being disappointed by life, by other people, by this big, old, awful sick mess of a world.

I don’t want to be hardened though. I spent too many years as the cynic. It takes so much negative energy to live in that world. As risky as it is to choose the softness of a snail without a shell, I want to hold on to hope. I want to keep believing that there is good out there, that there are people out there who do choose to live according to what is right.

Madeleine L’Engle is one of my favourite authors. Her stories are full of the knowledge that the world is bent and broken, full of hurt and wrong and injustice. Her characters are aware that the world is not how it should be, and they have a passion to see the world whole and healed again – but they all come to a point in their journeys where they have to choose to fight for what they instinctively know is right. It is never an easy choice. They are overwhelmed by the darkness sometimes. They are filled with despair that the world can ever be whole again. And they choose hope, they choose to fight for that little, tiny, almost invisible spark of light, against impossible odds. They fight even though they know they will lose. They fight even though there is no possible way that the world can be saved. They fight because they have to.

Sometimes I feel like my purpose in life is to keep fighting for that miniscule speck of light and hope, like I am here in this life just to keep that tiny light alive, and if all I can do in my life is keep that light from going out, even if I can’t make it any bigger, even if I can’t win the fight, even if after all I do the light goes out – as long as I’ve done all I can to fight for it, that is all that matters.

It hurts. Sometimes it feels like I’m losing, like I’m losing my will to fight because it seems so impossible. I know there is no way that I can win. The dark, the brokenness is too big and too overwhelming and there is nothing I can do to make things better. But the pain of losing that light is so much greater than the despair of never winning that I just can’t give up, even when everything is telling me I should cut my losses and just join the dark winning team already.

I just can’t do that. I just can’t lose that hunger for the light. I hope I never do. It’s the most irrational thing I’ve ever done, but it’s the only thing I can do. It’s the only thing that feels right.

I can’t bear to lose that wild, fierce hunger.

All I can do is hope that I never do.