“Art is what you find when the ruins are cleared away” Interesting quote. I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but I first heard it while viewing an interview the children’s author, Gary Paulsen. There’s a guy who had ruins to pick through if anyone did. He said that a writer has to be willing to “go there”. I guess he means the dark places that lurk, mostly unseen, in everyone. I think that is my problem right now. I know what it is I want to write about but I am having trouble “going there”, and I am looking for anything that will distract me from the task. Trouble is a story is like a child. It never lets you alone. And unlike a child, you can’t turn on SpongeBob to get a little peace from it. And even though I have plenty of rubble to pick through, I am not sure that I would call myself an artist. A technician maybe. Writing is skill as much as it is a gift. I remember the first story I ever wrote. It was about pirates. I got the idea from one of those storystarter cards the sisters would give us to keep us occupied during language arts classes. A clever way to teach the mechanics that they surely came to regret as they plowed through dozens of awful flights of nine year old fancy. I was so proud of that story. I had been making up stories in my head from the time I could remember but had never thought to write one down. Sister didn’t think much of it. It was returned without a star and bleeding with red ink. I was an awful speller (never made it past the K list) and had comma addiction. Fortunately, I thought Sister was an idiot. I kept on writing stories. Notebooks and binders full. I still can’t spell but that hasn’t been an issue since the advent of the PC. I still like commas. I stopped writing about ten years ago though. I can’t really say why. Well, okay, maybe I can. I wanted to quit teaching and go back to graduate school at Iowa. Get into the Writer’s Workshop. Got rejected. A real writer wouldn’t have let that stop her, but I didn’t consider myself a real writer. Which is funny because I am nothing but a writer, always have been. I stopped listening to that nine year old inside me and that was a mistake because she had a much clearer grasp on who we were. So, here I am. Back in the ruins, shovel in hand and hesitating. Real writing is work. It is not all manna from heaven, although that does happen sometimes. Mostly though it is sitting and searching for the words that will connect thought with reader. Recently I caught a rerun of a Charlie Rose interview with George Lucas, and Lucas was talking about writing. Something I am sure that some people would argue he shouldn’t do to much of. But, he talked about the difference between his style and that of Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola, he said, just believed that you should write as quickly as possible and get it all down and done. Come back to it and write it again. And again. And eventually you have a finished work. If you didn’t. If you spend too much time worrying about every choice of word or phrase or placement of puncuation, you would never finish. Lucas made a good point, even if he never really did explain how he wrote a story. Summed up my current dilemma nicely. I am worrying too much. I need to just write. The faster. The better. My nine year old self was correct when she came to the egocentric conclusion that critics were stupid. Let he who has picked stones from the ruins be the first to cast them at me.
writing skills/profession
It’s the biggest room in the entire house. The bedroom I shared with my two younger sisters would have fit into it twice. My dad had the builder design it that way probably because he was trying to recreate the kitchen on the farm where he grew up which nearly ate the rest of it in terms of square footage. We had one of those formica tables with the vinyl covered chairs, and the seating was assigned. Even today when we are all present, everyone sits in the same seat. There is a crucifix over the store. Brown. Plastic. It may be built in because I have never seen it move. The clock, in its many incarnations, has always hung over the sink, and the radio has always set atop the refrigerator set to KDTH, the only station that my father listened to. We kids preferred WDBQ, and God forbid that whoever dared to reset it for Casey Kasem’s weekly top forty countdown on Sunday afternoon didn’t reset it in time for our father to catch the news and weather Monday morning. The smell of of coffee, Pall Mall’s and toast woke me in the mornings. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, simply because it lacked the drama of supper. Supper. Not dinner. Breakfast was my mother’s domain. She short-ordered cooked for us, toast, six different kinds of sugar drenched cereals, eggs, steamy Cream of Wheat and all the while yelling for my sister, who believed that eating of any kind was bad, and at my brother, who rarely was up and dressed in time to eat at all, and shifting back and forth between breakfast and lunch boxes that she filled with variations of the cheese sandwich and Hostess products. Supper belonged to my dad. And Walter Cronkite. I truly believe that if it weren’t for Uncle Walter, we would never have owned a TV at all. It was white. Plastic. A 13-inch colorless window to a world where bloated bodies floated lazily down Cambodian rivers and astronauts disrupted afternoon cartoons to walk on the moon. It was a testament to the fact that everyone was not white or Catholic, and there actually was a world beyond our Midwestern haven bordered by corn fields and the Mississippi River. “You’re sitting in my chair.” It was a pronouncement. A statement of fact. And, a threat. “I was here first,” he stuck out his chin, folded his chubby arms and peered at me over the top of the black plastic frames of his glasses. He knew that I couldn’t hit him. Dad was there. “Get up,” I hissed and tipped the chair ever so slightly, but he simply grabbed hold of the seat. “Mom!” “Dad!” And the stage was set. It never occurred to me as a child that most family meals are not punctuated with screaming, tears and some variety of corporal punishment. I assumed that the calm that reigned when I was in other people’s homes for dinner (not supper) was decorative. Like dressing up for church, it was just for show. At our house supper (not dinner) usually ended with someone in tears (mom) and someone curled up under the table in a ball trying to avoid the yardstick (my brother). Thirty-some years later we still can barely manage an entire meal together without a verbal altercation though I suppose the lack of actual physical violence is indication of growth of some kind.
So, today I did something mildly social. I went to the Taste of Des Moines. It is like Taste of Chicago only smaller, much smaller and not as cool. My husband and I used to work one of the concessions there years ago when we belonged to a local Jaycee chapter.
I went with my friend, Vicki. Going anywhere with Vick guarantees that I will pay at least partial attention to my surroundings because she pays close attention and it rubs off. We ran into people I had not seen since the wake. Before that I had not seen any of these people in two years or more. Most since before Will got sick.
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