When you get to be my age, you reflect on how you spent your time here on earth, the people you loved, the ones you didn’t, the dreams you wove, and the ones that unraveled.
What you see is a study in personal evolution. If you’re lucky, your life was lived by choice and not mandate, but even that’s too strict a viewpoint. We all answer to necessity, even as we hope for luck to come our way.
Writing is one of a handful of things I find necessary, and I’ve been doing it for forty-one years. Now, seventeen books later, number eighteen is about to arrive, a new short story collection, People Ruin Everything. More about that later.
How has my work evolved? For one thing, I don’t write about myself the way I did in the beginning. Then, every character bore a strong resemblance to me or my circumstances. Gradually, I branched out, put people on the page who were much less like me, though perhaps no happier or in possession of themselves. It was a relief to put myself aside and dig into someone else’s reality, even if that reality were invented out of my own manias and disappointments.
I wrote only stories from 1985 to about 2013, when I drafted what would become my first published novel the following year, What is Found, What is Lost. This means I spent twenty-eight years keeping my fictional world around five thousand words or less. I’m surprised I didn’t lose my marbles! But I did get bored, felt hemmed in, constrained. Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, I wanted a bigger world to occupy, more room to roam. That urge has resulted in ten novels, the last of which will be published next year, The Quiet Violence of An Angry Heart.
I kept writing stories alongside novels. After my first story collection, published in 2011, others appeared in 2013, 2017, and 2020. People Ruin Everything is number five. In 2018, I began writing poetry. There have been several of collections of poems since.
Does it take endurance to write as long as I have? Yes. And mule-like stubbornness. You need a lot of grit to keep going in the face of chronic disappointment, all those “no” responses to submissions. One thing that made that possible was realizing I’m sadder when I’m not writing than when I am. Okay, I thought, if I need to write just to keep my psychic head above water, so be it.
Another thing keeping the grit gritty, if you will, is being able to say anything I want in just the way I want, a skill that took quite a long time to gel. Fluency is essential, it gives you options when you get stuck, and I get stuck a lot. When the work goes well, it can even make me feel powerful.
The twin of fluency is flexibility. It’s easier to get out of a stalled plot by changing a character’s gender, or occupation, or where they live and what kind of family they have if you’re not wedded to your original ideas. There was time, long ago, in those difficult, early days, when my commitment to a fictional concept was hard to give up. Then the story became what mattered more than anything else, and it was easier to move forward.
What hasn’t changed is wanting to be read and appreciated. But it doesn’t sting as much to get a lousy review, or an idiotic comment such as “I didn’t like the main character,” as if writing were a popularity contest. I don’t write for stupid people, people who can’t employ nuanced thinking, and realizing that, reminding myself of that, helps a lot.
So, I’m still at it. Still liking it. As Paul Simon would say, still crazy after all these years.
Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash
