Flaying and Writing

Back in olden times, when I was more of a day-tripper in words, I tended to discount what writers said about the pains of writing.  Not that I didn't find it difficult and challenging, but the self-rending often referred to didn't really register with me.

Now that I'm pouring significant energies into both a novel and incidental stories and poems, I get it.

It's like peeling off strips of skin, or rather, strips of my psyche.  It doesn't help that I come from tight-lipped German farmers, or that the family I grew up in looked askance at self-expression and emotion, or that my first long-term relationship of 25 years was frozen in the ice of co-dependence.  I spent a number of years failing to write because at every opportunity for authenticity, I blanched. I failed to cross the blood-brain barrier, and everything I created had mind but no viscera, concept but no vitality.  My characters were confected from scratch and, lacking any anchor in real people or real experiences, dissolved like cotton candy in water when they hit the light of day.

I started my first novel something like a decade ago.  I worked at it hard, both the writing and the avoiding, for a good three years.  I finally set it aside when I realized I needed more authenticity in my people and in my story line.  I started a second, where the people were closer to human and the events closer to realistic. I then moved on to a third, where they inched even closer, and now a fourth. The characters in this current novel, and the ones in a few short stories and novellae I've worked on, have more of a ring of truth, and more the honest smell of Earth. Still, though, I continue fighting to open the door to fully real, fully honest characters.

I always knew in the back of my mind that my family would hate my writing (the fact of me writing, not just the writings themselves) - that they'd immediately become fearful and suspicious that I was going to unveil family secrets or besmirch personalities.  That's not true, actually.  I knew my mother would hate it.  She passed away a year and a half ago. I also knew my ex wife would hate it.  She became irrelevant eight years ago.

Well, I have plenty of personalities up and down the family tree to besmirch, truth be told.  Mine included, to be sure.  Margaret Atwood says that to be a writer you must first accept that your words will never be read, even though that's the whole point.  Words to that effect, anyway.  Yes, we have to behave as though they'll never be read - as though they will never alight where they might be seen as they are, and read as openly and honestly as we hope to have written them.  But we have to say them, to put them out into the world, to push our chips forward and say 'yes, I'll be part of this world' as Ed Tom Bell says in No Country for Old Men.

It's hard to hurt your mother's feelings, however misdirected those feelings might be.  That's my excuse fo lying through silence for decades.  And yes, I use excuse in the weakest, most pathetic sense.  Not my explanation, nor my valid reason. My excuse.  As for my ex, well, I spent decades during and after our marriage lying to avoid putting her in a bad light or making her uncomfortable. My sin, not hers.  My past, not my present.

Camus says that for dialogue to occur, we have to remain who we are and speak the truth.  Our truths, anyway.  And if both sides - or all sides - speak their truths, then maybe there's some hope for something somewhere.