When I write
Recently I took a different tack and got out of my comfort zone for reading. Or maybe I got back into my comfort zone. When I read fiction, I have a hard time staying awake. It will take a very long time for me to read a book of fiction since I have to keep waking myself up after a few pages to continue on. It's not necessarily that I am bored, but maybe it has something to do with a dream state that the mental imagery puts me into. Sometimes I continue the dream as though I'm reading. Only to be a little disappointed to find out that the book didn't continue where my dream state left off.
So, I do better reading non-fiction sometimes. Maybe it's because there is little imagery, or even because of a remnant of my old college days where I would devour history books for reports in an all-night frenzy of last minute term paper writing. It's the difference between drifting on a flat lake in a canoe or hitting the rapids on a whitewater river.
I read Ray Bradbury's "Zen in the Art of Writing" which I picked up at the university used book sale for a quarter. I like Bradbury's writing normally, but getting to read about his process was a treat. He attacks writing with such exuberance and optimism. He really just dives into any project, whether it's fiction or an article, with this keyed up level of inspiration. I liked seeing how he would just soak up the world around him and tell his stories based on what his subconscious could muster. The only things that bother me about Ray is how quickly these stories of his have lost their relevance. He was born in a time where kids would travel in packs and run sticks along picket fences with sticks and sneak out to play marbles instead of huffing glue. It was a more innocent time, yet uncorrupted by Hitler, a Cold War, nuclear energy, or the totalitarian world of the Nanny State that takes our freedoms for our own good. It was a world in which Civil War veterans were still roaming the earth in their long white beards and the Great War was supposed to be the last of them. Good Riddance!
His characters dance off the page in a whirlwind of naivete, and creak and groan with their antiquity in the form of youth that encapsulates a world now lost to us. I can't fault Ray's vision. It's a romanticized version of a world that still had child labor, a Great Depression, and people dying of influenza. It's a world Ray remembers, not the one he was living in. But those stories of his...he really hit the nerve of what the story was. He had a process in which love and not ink was beaten onto the page from that ribbon with every strike of the key. He wrote stories because he had them trapped inside and needed to let them out. Like wild birds fluttering and pecking for the sunlight.
Ray talks about forgetting about things like writing to impress, copying the style of others, and just writing to enjoy the experience. If someone doesn't like your story, somebody else will. Don't write with the intent of getting rich or impressing someone. The story is yours to tell. So tell it!
Michael Chabon's book, which I'm also reading, Maps and Legends is a different writer with a different take on things. Chabon talks about how writers are entertainers, which to me means that he's writing with someone else in mind. The audience. He's writing to impress. He's writing to sell. He lacks the artistry of Bradbury, but his prose, weirdly enough, is more academic. He has a style that lacks the downhome storytelling of an old Master. It's a clinical discussion amongst colleagues instead of a yarn told to friends.
Both writers drop names like crazy. They expound on how many books they have read. The influences they carry with them in their writers' hearts. Like walking into a home and having the grand tour which includes all the fine prints and signed copies of first editions nestled into the shelves with the tschochkes and framed pictures of the kids at t-ball camp. To a guy that falls asleep while reading, I just glossed over these after awhile. Great Mike. Swell, Ray. You guys read. A lot. You don't have kids swarming your ankles all day or a full time job that you have to clock into. I get that you can read and that's part of your livelihood. I can't. So forgive my rolling eyes. I stand on the shoulders of idiots since I usually catch the movie or miniseries because I don't have the kind of life that affords me the ability to carve through Proust or Melville like you guys do. I usually settle for the Spielberg or Ivory Coast production of the written work. Or hell, Alan Smithee, even. I get the filtered, distilled, and cut for commercial breaks versions. Written by writers who might have glanced at the footnotes and then forced through the machine of a director's "vision" who probably never read the book either.
It's like hearing a Beethoven symphony played on a telecaster by a guy who watched the movie Beethoven because he likes St. Bernards. What I do lack in my reading background, I make up for in life experience. This is where I liked Ray's style more than Chabon's. Ray's world seems like it grows more organically form memories and fantasy. Chabon's seem more like ideas planted in a greenhouse of academia, seeds spliced from MFA concepts and writing as lifestyle. Chabon writes with his discourse community in mind. Ray writes because his head might explode if he doesn't. We just get to see the result.
The only bummer is that, as I have discovered in my own writing, that personal experience can only carry you so far. Bradbury's concepts begin to recycle pretty quickly. The carnival. Mars. The importance of books. Nostalgia. The picket fenced small town where there are no factories on the horizon (he has omitted them) and boys run wild like packs of wolves. I have my own roots in a small town, laced with much more cynicism. Isolation. Depression. Loss. And all of that. The older I get the more I find myself referring to my childhood experiences. I haven't had the adventures lately to give me better stories. But when I write, I write because I want to tell these stories. If you enjoy them, awesome, but it's more important to write them because I love telling these stories. I love the feel of the chill of a predawn morning where the silhouettes of the mountains stretched out across the valley floor and disappeared into the western horizon. Where a snowstorm could mean living without milk, bread, or eggs for several days. A town where you were more like a dysfunctional family than you were neighbors. A town that once you leave, you are as much an outsider as any tourist passing through on his Goldwing.
That's what I carry with me. A town where the world ended just at the other side of the horizon and we lived oblivious to the rules and mores of the outside world. A town which programmed itself to fail in nearly every endeavor because success meant joining the Outside. It's a place that crawls its way into nearly everything I write. In some capacity. I wish I had more to give, but for now, I don't. Other life experiences are there, but my early life dominates. When I write, I think "I've got to tell everyone about this!" because it was awesome. I don't keep secrets when I write. It's all there. If you know me, you see my life right there. Decorated with dragons and sword play and sleeping gods and dank tunnels that thread their ways into the bones of the world.
I share Bradbury's need to shout the stories at people, to jump on that landmine and spend the rest of the day picking up the pieces, but I lack the work ethic. Unlike Chabon I'm not a professional. I make my living on fulfilling someone else's dream, which makes my writing a hobby. I don't write like a professional. My writing is the weeds that push their way into the cracks of the pavement that cover my life. They are ugly, and tenacious enough to have survived this long, but they keep growing. I don't know if they are pretty enough weeds for others to enjoy, but they are mine. And Ray is right. I can't write with the expectation of becoming rich and famous. I can't agree with Chabon that I'm here to entertain either. If people are entertained, so be it, but I'm not going to write with the intent of making people happy either. I might make some people happy, but it's not a job. I couldn't care less about Customer Satisfaction. I'm a hobby farmer and harvester of weeds!