It has been a nice lazy Saturday here in San Jose. The weather is perfectly balmy outside, blue skies with a high cloud cover, temperature hovering around 75 degrees. The morning was marked by enjoyable conversation with a variety of folks, online and off. Breakfast was fresh oatmeal with brown sugar and biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were excellent, fresh from the oven, cloud like carriers of a rich country gravy.
After breakfast I ran a couple of small errands and then circled home. I spent most of the afternoon alternating between playing on the computer, reading (finishing “Monster”), napping, and swimming. I am going to go out and see the newest Batman movie in about an hour with some friends. I haven’t yet decided if I am going to go out tonight or if I will just spend a relaxing evening at home, maybe watching a movie on DVD, maybe reading, maybe writing. It is nice not to feel the pressures of time – not to have to do anything by a certain deadline, not to have the next weeks worth of work rushing in on me.
I thought I would take a little time today and write about how the process of writing works for me. I have been idly writing all day today but it has yet to take any specific shape or form. Ideas and moving around and I have been jotting notes, but nothing definitive has arisen from those notes. As I write I will take a great many things and let them float around in my imagination until one of the rises to the top. It may be a subject that I want to write about, or an emotion that I want to explore, or a characters whose story suddenly emerges and needs to be told.
To a degree I can prime the imagination – I can prime it with a free writing exercise, where I simply sit down and start to write and see what thread or theme starts to dominate the writing, or I can prime it by deliberately picking a subject or a phrase and playing with it. These exercises to prime the writing core almost always result in the eventual discovery of a key. With that key I can then open the box a particular subject is stored in and pull it out. Sometimes the box contains just the barest of a thought, an idea, a phrase or a character. That is one end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum, I open the box and something leaps out – something nearly full blown, something nearly complete, something that only requires frantic writing and then careful re-writing. It is hard to say which I enjoy more. I like the actual craft of writing, but I also like the feeling I get when something leaps out of box.
I think a lot of times the exercises I go through to start writing are more of a mental process of clearing out the obstacles, clearing out the things that clutter free expression. There are a lot of them that get tangled up in there. There is that powerful self censor I spoke about earlier. There is simply the clutter of all of the dozens of things we consider and act upon in the course of a single day. There is the tendency of the imaginative portion of my brain to be either one step behind (contemplating something I have already written) or one step ahead (wanting to move past the immediacy of writing to the next story). Sometimes I find myself starting on one writing and them immediately jumping to the next. Something in the current writing sparks something that is more immediate. That is a cool feeling when it happens.
As I was driving to breakfast this morning I thought about how much we, as individuals, are stories. All of our lives, all of our experiences, they all take the form of stories that we tell. Stories that we tell to ourselves and stories that we tell to others. Personally, I love that. I love the way our stories evolve and I am always amazed by people who can tell a good story or who can lay out a descriptive phrase in such a way that it rises to the level of prose poetry. People tell stories so vivid and powerful that they are experienced by the listeners as they are told.
I think that is one of the reasons I enjoy the virtual online communities so much – they are a modern extension of the ancient traditions of sitting around the campfire at night and telling the stories of our tribe. Now, our tribe is virtual and our campfire is the glow of a hundred monitors. But the stories remain the same.
One of my friends this morning did something to me that was a form of subtle torment. She started to tell a story…and then decided not to. I immediately urged her to continue, even begged her. LOL – I sensed there was an amusing story underlying it that was, as she said, mostly true. Fortunately, to my merciful senses, she finished the story. It did bring a good laugh to me as the follies of humans. It can be a form of torture for me when someone tells me just enough of a story to interest me and then…never finishes the story. I will often spend days wondering how the story ended.
I wonder if that is what makes us decide who is our friend and who isn’t. The simple state of being someone whose story we are interested in, either as an observer or a participant. I often see the role of friend as being the role of a support character or part of the technical crew working for the story teller. We may not be the central portion of the narrative. We may not even have a vital role in the narrative. We may simply be that silent servant that brings the cup of coffee while the story teller pauses and then we fade back into the wings, barely noticed.
That is kind of cool. I like that. So we all tell our stories and we all play our small part in each others stories, even if that part is simply the audience. It is the story itself that matters. Perhaps those we choose to love in this life are simply those who story most interests us. Certainly we hope that we are playing a major role in the story of our lovers and our friends. But, we may not be. That is okay too.
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