“Write about what scares you, what inspires you, and what turns you on.”
Laurie Bland
This whole last sorry two years of writing (or not writing) have all been leading to this. It just took me this long to get over myself.
Two nights ago, my wife and I went out for our first date night since the baby. On the second or third toast, we raised our glasses and she looked at me expectantly, and a funny thing happened. Being a Quaker, I am well-versed in what it feels like to give vocal ministry. One is moved, there is something rising out of your soul and toward your lips, with immense pressure to be spoken, through you, and you have to work harder and harder to not say it, though you have no idea what it even is. I felt it behind my soul then, pressing on my teeth, and I opened my lips.
“I vow to write most of my SF/F/H either by Bradbury or as written ministry.”
We clinked glasses and I broke out in a cold sweat.
I’ve spent the better part of two years unable to write anything. No stories. No revisions. One or two drafts that are lifeless, inert, and enervating. Stillborn stories. Ever since I burned out in the post-NaNoWriMo funk two years ago, that’s been my life, with occasional outbreaks of radioactivity near the things I used to love. I’ve slowly regained freedom of movement there – cleaned out the radioactive storm near Marybeth, cleaned up the crater of Doña Ana Lucía. But actual writing? Or even revising? Just because I can reread now doesn’t mean I can produce.
But then I wrote something funny.
Or, rather, I didn’t, but the Divine did. The Muse, God, what you will, I believe it has no name and refer to it as “the sound of distant laughter” most days.
I wrote a story for Unidentified Funny Objects, a humor anthology, the day before it was due. I watched the days tick down, couldn’t get away from wife and family to sit down to compose something as I used to could. So I woke up early, the morning before the deadline, went downstairs, opened my computer, opened a document, and prayed. “The God who inspired ‘Suit of Mirrors,’” I called, “let your words flow through me, I’m ready to stand aside and give the written ministry.”
The story was done two hours later. It needed no revising, just a better title.
Being a humor story, someone provided the better title five minutes after I sent it off, but that’s why my God is the God of distant laughter.
It’s a damn good story, and I had nothing to do with writing it. I just allowed it to write itself, using my hands, my computer, while my playlist played through my earphones. And, just like ‘The Suit of Mirrors’ all those years ago, it came out almost perfect on the first try.
The next night, we had our date night.
It’s terrifying, what I propose. I propose to write most of my SF/F/H this way, stories new and old, shorts and novels, even blog entries. This is written ministry, right now. I planned none of this, don’t rightly know where it’s going. But I know, and trust, it’s going somewhere, it will get there, and then if I have any sense in my head, I’ll shut my mouth and sit down and let the Quaker meeting go on.
It involves giving away control of my writing, my precious writing, the place where I should by rights have the most control over my life. But God afflicted me with another sickness of the soul two years ago, same as God did years ago at our Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers. And now I realize why. We Friends speak of “tender” and being “made tender,” and I was being made tender, so this way could open before me, this opening arise. So that my writing itself is dependent on the still, small voice that I, as a Friend, am supposed to listen for.
Bradbury is just another road to this place. He wrote those lists, one of which I shared last week, let a prose-poem arise out of one of the words, let a character arise out of the prose-poem, let a story leap out of the character, with only the barest control over any of it. And it’s what made him Bradbury. I’ve Bradburyed story after story through the years.
What I’m giving up (not permanently and not entirely! But giving up) is the other way, the way you know: the careful construction, the assembly of tropes like troops and drawing-up of battle plans to occupy the territory of a pre-determined story. The self-led, rather than Divine-led or subconscious-led, way. The violent way. Instead, I am to turn to the garden way, allowing things to grow in my garden and run wild and then harvest them in delight and anticipation.
“The Suit of Mirrors” is the best short story I’ve ever written, and I never wrote it. I should have learned my lesson then, but it took some humbling for me to give up having my own way all the time on these blank pages.
I wonder where the Divine will lead me next. I think I hear the still small voice in one ear.
Recent Comments