(no subject)
I've always processed things by writing. I've announced this occasionally, in a fairly wide range of situations, but I rarely actually state it in writing, and certainly not in reflective-type posts... but it's true. It's so funny to think about though. I mean look: people process things in all sorts of ways, and I do it through writing. How weird is that?! And what's more, I've always done this, which means I have tended to take it rather for granted. I simply can't remember a time when I would look at a thing and not want to write about it.
But over the past few years, I have begun to see how nice it is to not only have it, but to be aware of having it - the propensity for writing, that is. To realize that it's what I do and that's OK, but other people might not necessarily and so I should figure out ways to explain it to them. That writing is both a part of and removed from the rest of my life. The translation between the two isn't exact, but then neither is translating between actual languages. And getting better at real, face-to-face communication is rewarding in a different way than writing, because it means there really is some common ground. It’s a skill and something that can be improved, to which writing is a complement but not the final solution. Writing, for all of its intrinsic power, doesn’t necessarily lead to these types of skills one needs (or at least I need) to work with actual people in a range of situations in everyday life. It can help me process them, but it can’t reassure me or give me the skills I need to actually deal with things as they happen. Only practice can do that.
Like face-to-face communication, part of why it's nice to actually be aware of processing things by writing has to do with having temporarily lost it, and then when I rediscovered it, having gone through the process of learning how to claim it as something that's really my own, rather than just something that - through pure instinct, desire, and luck - was always just, well, there. "I am Sarah, and I choose to write," rather than, "I am Sarah, and - what's that you say? - well, yes [sheepish/scornful grin], I do write.” Actively owning it has also to do with reclaiming some of the uninhibited joy that I tapped when I was younger - almost like becoming aware of it in a more adult sort of way really freed me to embrace it as I did as a child. I look back and see that not infrequently, pieces from that time had little bits of blistering naiveté (particularly when I was trying out a genre or a style for which I hadn't yet figured out what was or wasn't cliché or overdone), but more often, there was this kind of rawness and joy and real observation of, and commentary on, various situations surrounding me. I mean, I wasn't all-knowing; there were definite things I missed. But I also know that there were certain social, emotional, and philosophical themes and ideas that I discerned in writing years and years before I consciously confronted them in my real life. I can go back to certain pieces and reread them and conjure up that previous state of mind, and then reflect on it with what I know now. It's a rewarding process, if one frequently posing more questions than answers. But it's not projecting; it's real.
Furthermore, I don't think the fact that processing-things-by-writing feels so very natural to me blinds me to the fact that other people may not experience things this way, and in fact, might have very different sorts of strategies... but I do know that part of what makes it so innate to who I am is the way the advantages and the disadvantages just so neatly parallel other aspects of who I am. With writing, obviously, you get out of it exactly what you put in it, and I really do believe that if you seek out an audience, you will get one (of some sort), and if you don't, you won't. Accordingly, I don't have one, as I have never really been inclined to see it as the sort of thing I particularly feel like showing to large numbers of people (or indeed, much of the time, to anyone). I worry that if I do, it would become mechanical, like some sort of commodity, and that would just be the worst. But I've begun to think about it in somewhat different terms of late. I think of pieces of writing I really like, writings by authors I really respect, and I wonder what would happen if their authors had always insisted on keeping them to themselves. I try to think about releasing a piece of writing like releasing a child. It's going to grow up and eventually have a life of its own, but hopefully you'll get to raise it a bit first. During that time, you can choose what answers to give, just as you can choose some of the influences on your child, even if you can't ultimately control how it will turn out. So maybe it's worth some thought.
And to be fair, writing - to me, for awhile - was purely mechanical. Not in the same sort of way, though - not in that "cranking out a term paper for school" sense - but rather, as a purely coping and hardly aspirational strategy for dealing with the wider world. This was a period that went on for several years, and one to which I frankly don't ever want to go back. It was a painful adolescence between the freedom of my childhood and the timorous maturity of being a young adult. I wrote reflexively during this period: frequently very biting, scathing, satirical type things. Often brutal, frequently humorous, and at times transparent bids for some measure of attention and control, these things molded me into the person I am, in terms of a lot of social (and especially political) pursuits - but they weren't really part of a higher cause. They were funny, dry, sarcastic, biting, and droll, but they weren't ultimately what I'm meant to do. And I knew this while I was writing them. They were a temporary (and very colorful) bridge to a larger and more complete whole. I still like them; occasionally, I will indulge myself and write one. But they aren’t enough any more than cookies for dinner or coffee and cigarettes will ever be enough. They’re perhaps a useful way to work with the actual world we live in, maybe even get some attention and legislation passed. But I’ll be damned if they’re actually what I want to do.
I finally got back into the sort of writing I was born to do when I realized that, quite literally, I was creating people. Creating characters, who were in fact little people who could be born and leap out of the very recesses of my mind. Yes, doesn’t that sound poetic, but it’s true. As it happened, this came about (as do many things) because of my contrarian urges. I based some characters in one (reflexive, very accidental) writing thing on real people from my real life, and told some other real people in my real life that this was what I was doing, and then when I was done with the thing, I showed it to those same people, and much to my surprise, they insisted on connecting all of the characters on the page with the real people I had told them about from my real life. And I thought it was really astonishing, the extent to which they were doing this. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it made me wonder if they would, if they could, perhaps have objected to some of the compressions, the tweaks, the changes, and the different shadings I had given to a range of different characters and circumstances and ideas. How much they would have lamented the fact that it wasn’t “real” in terms of the actual things that had happened to me in my actual life had been, had they been able to somehow access the actual scenes stored somewhere between my own memory and the universe’s own imprint of what it was that happened. I thought about this, and it made me feel unwell. I had been open about the fact that many of the characters and situations and things were based on my real life, but I also thought it was more than obvious that they weren’t my real life, and never could be. That there would be things that would also be just the products of my own mind.
But the people didn’t see it like this. They drew their lines between the real and the fake, and then they asked where one line went because it seemed to wither off in the distance, with no sign of an eventual connection to its (real-life) mate. At least three separate people asked me this, from a wide range of places in my real life, and I looked at each of them in turn and said, I don’t know. I said things like, She’s a composite character. I said, Not all of the things are 100% real, you know. And at least once I shook my head and said, Wouldn’t you like to know. And they smiled and nodded their heads and tried to come up with ideas for where she could have been born. That character, that is. And that made me sit and think.
I hadn’t, you know, given myself much credit for that thing. Sure, it had helped me process some things I hadn’t been able to process in any other way, and yes, I had been pleasantly surprised and deeply satisfied at the refined and eminently pleasing way it all came together at the end. But I didn’t credit myself with any really deep powers of perception. I had only taken the things given to me in a jumbled and incomplete whole and put them together in a way that made sense to me. Filling in the gaps, filing down the corners, but not really switching any of the pieces or realizing that they could shrink or grow exactly as I imagined them to fit into the larger rules of the game. That’s what I thought I had done. But as people began to insist on examining the pieces, often in startling detail (even those who hadn’t known me during that particular period of my life on which the piece was based) - well, I kind of flared up, a bit (in my real-life, not writerly way), and said, now look, I created her [the character without a real-life mate], because she had to be in certain places and do certain things to make everything else work. I said, she doesn’t have a real-life mate because she’s not real. She came from in me. And because she could interact with all the other characters “with” real-life mates, well, maybe they aren’t so real either. Maybe none of it is as real or as clear-cut as you seem to expect.
And so I explained this to a few people, and blithely ignored a few others, as I went home and sat down and pondered what it meant that I had created a new character - one borne out of my own experiences and ideas, true, but new nonetheless. I considered how I had conceived of her, what I had imagined her doing. And I realized that she existed, in my make-believe world, and that furthermore, she was far from as blandly temporal as they all had supposed her to be. I became rather defensive of her, really, though she was, by most estimations, a relatively minor character in that play (this even as she, seemingly aloof, orchestrated certain eventualities that eventually made it possible for it to all come so neatly together). And yet she had a higher cause. I realized this, and went from being defensive, to shocked, to grateful. I had it back, and I hadn’t even realized. I was to be confined to blandly satisfying satire no more. And so I set out to write with a vengeance.
Well, not really. It was awhile longer before I really began to feel characters jump off the page at me, and awhile after that that I found myself actually worried about (and delighting in) some of the circumstances of their world. It took a long time before I got so deep in a story that I felt its tenor and design permeate every action of my everyday life. And frankly, it’s going to be awhile longer yet before I feel that satisfying sense of closure as I craft an ending for their world - even if only a temporary one - and awhile after that before I feel ready to release it to the deluge of questions and even accusations I imagine it might provoke from this prurient and very incisive world. But that’s OK. For now at least, the characters are mine, and they remind me of this even as they tumble in opposite directions across my page.
Like children, they only let me think I have temporary control. And I’m OK with this. I want them to be happy, and all I ever wanted was for them to grow up to whatever it is they’re meant to be. But I hope they’ll let me stay with them for a little while longer, match the words to them as I know they’re meant to go.
It’s a process, but I hope they’ll stay with me. I know my real world family and lovers and friends would expect no less. Not because they want to control me or tell me what any of it means, but because they know that this is what is a part of me and what makes me able to feel a full range of emotions in this world, and that ultimately, I’m not an aborted exhibit of a full person who hangs on writing like a crutch. Ultimately, I’m both my instincts and my passion for making those instincts make sense in ways that works for me - an amalgamation which, eventually, I might want to share. And if I do, I can only hope that it reaches a part of you that’s never been processed, or even acknowledged as such, so that you're that much better able to get through your day.
Or sleep, nay dream, through your night.
But over the past few years, I have begun to see how nice it is to not only have it, but to be aware of having it - the propensity for writing, that is. To realize that it's what I do and that's OK, but other people might not necessarily and so I should figure out ways to explain it to them. That writing is both a part of and removed from the rest of my life. The translation between the two isn't exact, but then neither is translating between actual languages. And getting better at real, face-to-face communication is rewarding in a different way than writing, because it means there really is some common ground. It’s a skill and something that can be improved, to which writing is a complement but not the final solution. Writing, for all of its intrinsic power, doesn’t necessarily lead to these types of skills one needs (or at least I need) to work with actual people in a range of situations in everyday life. It can help me process them, but it can’t reassure me or give me the skills I need to actually deal with things as they happen. Only practice can do that.
Like face-to-face communication, part of why it's nice to actually be aware of processing things by writing has to do with having temporarily lost it, and then when I rediscovered it, having gone through the process of learning how to claim it as something that's really my own, rather than just something that - through pure instinct, desire, and luck - was always just, well, there. "I am Sarah, and I choose to write," rather than, "I am Sarah, and - what's that you say? - well, yes [sheepish/scornful grin], I do write.” Actively owning it has also to do with reclaiming some of the uninhibited joy that I tapped when I was younger - almost like becoming aware of it in a more adult sort of way really freed me to embrace it as I did as a child. I look back and see that not infrequently, pieces from that time had little bits of blistering naiveté (particularly when I was trying out a genre or a style for which I hadn't yet figured out what was or wasn't cliché or overdone), but more often, there was this kind of rawness and joy and real observation of, and commentary on, various situations surrounding me. I mean, I wasn't all-knowing; there were definite things I missed. But I also know that there were certain social, emotional, and philosophical themes and ideas that I discerned in writing years and years before I consciously confronted them in my real life. I can go back to certain pieces and reread them and conjure up that previous state of mind, and then reflect on it with what I know now. It's a rewarding process, if one frequently posing more questions than answers. But it's not projecting; it's real.
Furthermore, I don't think the fact that processing-things-by-writing feels so very natural to me blinds me to the fact that other people may not experience things this way, and in fact, might have very different sorts of strategies... but I do know that part of what makes it so innate to who I am is the way the advantages and the disadvantages just so neatly parallel other aspects of who I am. With writing, obviously, you get out of it exactly what you put in it, and I really do believe that if you seek out an audience, you will get one (of some sort), and if you don't, you won't. Accordingly, I don't have one, as I have never really been inclined to see it as the sort of thing I particularly feel like showing to large numbers of people (or indeed, much of the time, to anyone). I worry that if I do, it would become mechanical, like some sort of commodity, and that would just be the worst. But I've begun to think about it in somewhat different terms of late. I think of pieces of writing I really like, writings by authors I really respect, and I wonder what would happen if their authors had always insisted on keeping them to themselves. I try to think about releasing a piece of writing like releasing a child. It's going to grow up and eventually have a life of its own, but hopefully you'll get to raise it a bit first. During that time, you can choose what answers to give, just as you can choose some of the influences on your child, even if you can't ultimately control how it will turn out. So maybe it's worth some thought.
And to be fair, writing - to me, for awhile - was purely mechanical. Not in the same sort of way, though - not in that "cranking out a term paper for school" sense - but rather, as a purely coping and hardly aspirational strategy for dealing with the wider world. This was a period that went on for several years, and one to which I frankly don't ever want to go back. It was a painful adolescence between the freedom of my childhood and the timorous maturity of being a young adult. I wrote reflexively during this period: frequently very biting, scathing, satirical type things. Often brutal, frequently humorous, and at times transparent bids for some measure of attention and control, these things molded me into the person I am, in terms of a lot of social (and especially political) pursuits - but they weren't really part of a higher cause. They were funny, dry, sarcastic, biting, and droll, but they weren't ultimately what I'm meant to do. And I knew this while I was writing them. They were a temporary (and very colorful) bridge to a larger and more complete whole. I still like them; occasionally, I will indulge myself and write one. But they aren’t enough any more than cookies for dinner or coffee and cigarettes will ever be enough. They’re perhaps a useful way to work with the actual world we live in, maybe even get some attention and legislation passed. But I’ll be damned if they’re actually what I want to do.
I finally got back into the sort of writing I was born to do when I realized that, quite literally, I was creating people. Creating characters, who were in fact little people who could be born and leap out of the very recesses of my mind. Yes, doesn’t that sound poetic, but it’s true. As it happened, this came about (as do many things) because of my contrarian urges. I based some characters in one (reflexive, very accidental) writing thing on real people from my real life, and told some other real people in my real life that this was what I was doing, and then when I was done with the thing, I showed it to those same people, and much to my surprise, they insisted on connecting all of the characters on the page with the real people I had told them about from my real life. And I thought it was really astonishing, the extent to which they were doing this. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but it made me wonder if they would, if they could, perhaps have objected to some of the compressions, the tweaks, the changes, and the different shadings I had given to a range of different characters and circumstances and ideas. How much they would have lamented the fact that it wasn’t “real” in terms of the actual things that had happened to me in my actual life had been, had they been able to somehow access the actual scenes stored somewhere between my own memory and the universe’s own imprint of what it was that happened. I thought about this, and it made me feel unwell. I had been open about the fact that many of the characters and situations and things were based on my real life, but I also thought it was more than obvious that they weren’t my real life, and never could be. That there would be things that would also be just the products of my own mind.
But the people didn’t see it like this. They drew their lines between the real and the fake, and then they asked where one line went because it seemed to wither off in the distance, with no sign of an eventual connection to its (real-life) mate. At least three separate people asked me this, from a wide range of places in my real life, and I looked at each of them in turn and said, I don’t know. I said things like, She’s a composite character. I said, Not all of the things are 100% real, you know. And at least once I shook my head and said, Wouldn’t you like to know. And they smiled and nodded their heads and tried to come up with ideas for where she could have been born. That character, that is. And that made me sit and think.
I hadn’t, you know, given myself much credit for that thing. Sure, it had helped me process some things I hadn’t been able to process in any other way, and yes, I had been pleasantly surprised and deeply satisfied at the refined and eminently pleasing way it all came together at the end. But I didn’t credit myself with any really deep powers of perception. I had only taken the things given to me in a jumbled and incomplete whole and put them together in a way that made sense to me. Filling in the gaps, filing down the corners, but not really switching any of the pieces or realizing that they could shrink or grow exactly as I imagined them to fit into the larger rules of the game. That’s what I thought I had done. But as people began to insist on examining the pieces, often in startling detail (even those who hadn’t known me during that particular period of my life on which the piece was based) - well, I kind of flared up, a bit (in my real-life, not writerly way), and said, now look, I created her [the character without a real-life mate], because she had to be in certain places and do certain things to make everything else work. I said, she doesn’t have a real-life mate because she’s not real. She came from in me. And because she could interact with all the other characters “with” real-life mates, well, maybe they aren’t so real either. Maybe none of it is as real or as clear-cut as you seem to expect.
And so I explained this to a few people, and blithely ignored a few others, as I went home and sat down and pondered what it meant that I had created a new character - one borne out of my own experiences and ideas, true, but new nonetheless. I considered how I had conceived of her, what I had imagined her doing. And I realized that she existed, in my make-believe world, and that furthermore, she was far from as blandly temporal as they all had supposed her to be. I became rather defensive of her, really, though she was, by most estimations, a relatively minor character in that play (this even as she, seemingly aloof, orchestrated certain eventualities that eventually made it possible for it to all come so neatly together). And yet she had a higher cause. I realized this, and went from being defensive, to shocked, to grateful. I had it back, and I hadn’t even realized. I was to be confined to blandly satisfying satire no more. And so I set out to write with a vengeance.
Well, not really. It was awhile longer before I really began to feel characters jump off the page at me, and awhile after that that I found myself actually worried about (and delighting in) some of the circumstances of their world. It took a long time before I got so deep in a story that I felt its tenor and design permeate every action of my everyday life. And frankly, it’s going to be awhile longer yet before I feel that satisfying sense of closure as I craft an ending for their world - even if only a temporary one - and awhile after that before I feel ready to release it to the deluge of questions and even accusations I imagine it might provoke from this prurient and very incisive world. But that’s OK. For now at least, the characters are mine, and they remind me of this even as they tumble in opposite directions across my page.
Like children, they only let me think I have temporary control. And I’m OK with this. I want them to be happy, and all I ever wanted was for them to grow up to whatever it is they’re meant to be. But I hope they’ll let me stay with them for a little while longer, match the words to them as I know they’re meant to go.
It’s a process, but I hope they’ll stay with me. I know my real world family and lovers and friends would expect no less. Not because they want to control me or tell me what any of it means, but because they know that this is what is a part of me and what makes me able to feel a full range of emotions in this world, and that ultimately, I’m not an aborted exhibit of a full person who hangs on writing like a crutch. Ultimately, I’m both my instincts and my passion for making those instincts make sense in ways that works for me - an amalgamation which, eventually, I might want to share. And if I do, I can only hope that it reaches a part of you that’s never been processed, or even acknowledged as such, so that you're that much better able to get through your day.
Or sleep, nay dream, through your night.