Writing: A Metaphor or Maybe a Memoir

The Setting

 

You may recall a little essay I wrote in November entitled "Reading, a Love Story."

I have often thought of doing its sequel: "Writing, a..."
To what do I compare Writing if Reading is already a Love Story?
Writing takes Reading to the next level.
Writing hits my brain and leaks out my fingertips like Fornication Itself.
I need to write like I need to breathe, only more desperately.
Writing sears across my mind like some intensely sultry image that I can't forget until I act on it. Repeatedly.
Copiously.
Writing is an urge, a compulsion, a driving force.
Writing starts as maybe a little spark, a little itch, an idea.
Maybe it's because of that bird I saw wandering beside the highway the other day.
Maybe I saw something happen on a playground that reminded me of when I was younger.
Perhaps there is some great injustice that I feel could be righted if only I were to find a good analogy to use when writing about it.

Sometimes it's not just an itch; it's a burning question on my mind that I just have to get out.

The idea becomes a description or a character, maybe several different places and a variety of people. Either it's a quickie that fits into a short story or an essay, or it's one of those check into a hotel for the weekend and never see daylight torrid relationships that require lots of chapters and endless bottles of wine.
Personally, I'm more of a slow burn kind of writer. I court the story, study the story, soak in the story, and ultimately become engrossed in the story. I think about the story all the time. Little things I see and hear remind me of my story. I dash off little love letters on sticky notes and in notepads while out in the working world, and can't wait to come home to the story every night. I'm up at all hours of the night and sometimes into the early morning alternately coaxing out the details and banging out my ardor in throes of passion. I can't eat, I can't sleep, and I can't focus on or think about anything else. Yesterday I was at a bar and all I could think about was how several of its occupants would make great minor character descriptions for my novel.
I suppose it's like an addiction as much as like sex at this point, but it all began innocuously enough.

The Characters

Having read a great deal of books by the time I was in the third grade, I was now writing full-length stories of my own that imitated the stories our teacher was reading to us. They were horrible but they were ambitious.
By fourth grade writing had overtaken nearly every other activity in my life. Use our spelling words in complete sentences that indicate we understand the meaning of the words? Child's play! I linked all my sentences into paragraphs until I had short stories. In the first of these, a mallard duck showed up on the doorstep of my Sam Spade Detective Agency one morning, croaked out the word, "Detergents!" and then died. The story was about how the detective figured out his death. Not to mention why the hell the duck could speak, a mystery which I believe was never solved. Shoot - not only do I still remember how to spell all the words; I even remember what all the words were. This is because Mr. Deacon was a fantastic teacher who encouraged his students' strengths. He laughed out loud at my story and had me stand in front of the class to read it. He challenged me to top that story with our spelling words the next week, and had me read my work before the class again to wild applause.
My parents, encouraged by the suggestion of my teacher, enrolled me in a children's writing workshop that ran at the U of M extension in Flint that summer. I think that's what it was, anyway. I wrote a poem about The North Wind based on a book I had read, and then screen printed my own cover to hold that and the other stories I had written.

I continued along this vein from fourth through sixth grade, developing a strong sense of writing to a specific audience. The stories included my classmates, lampooned our teachers, and involved zany plots with aliens, spies, or any other situational comedy I could come up with. When these stories were not enough writing to suit me, I started keeping lengthy diaries, that I later called journals, and maintained a steady report on what was going on in my life from roughly fifth grade to the present date. It would take two strong men to cart out the boxes of journals that I now have stored away in my closet like a stack of Playboys.
Our family moved when I was going into the sixth grade, so I had a new school and new classmates to impress. I won Best Illustrations in the Young Authors and Illustrators contest for a story about how my bedroom came to life and tried to eat me while I was cleaning it. I put the family's World Book Encyclopedias to good use when I had to write a report on Norse Mythology. I didn't know what to write. I asked my mother how to write a report. She said that the important thing was to ask and answer some significant question, but refused to give me any specific ideas. (Kind of like when I asked her about sex.) I ended up writing an essay about the violent times the people lived in and how that was reflected in the stories they told. My social studies teacher laughed when she read it, and then shared it with the class. She had a big grin on her face as she read the opening lines: "In Norse Mythology, it is said that the earth is made up of the body of a fallen giant. His hair forms the grass, his blood the seas, and the sun is one of his eyeballs. Based on this story, you may be wondering, as I am, the following question: Why did their stories have to be so gross?"

Free of spelling tests, I composed a story that was a compilation of all my best work that included my new classmates and teachers. We were moving again at the end of the year, so my English teacher allowed me to read it in class. I shall never forget the sight of her, literally doubled over with laughter, when Jeffery Miller ran to the alien spaceship and was taken home to live with his real family.
My goodbye poem was printed in the little school newsletter.
Last year I reconnected with an old friend from that school district and found out that she'd saved the poem, and that they'd had it read at her father's funeral.
I'm constantly reminded of the continuing impact of words on a page, far beyond the imagined reach of the author. Sixth grade was the last time in my school career that I knew I had the adoration of my classmates for being clever.

Rising Tension/ Conflict

The switch to middle school was tough. I didn't know anyone well and there seemed to be no public outlet for my writing. Additionally, some teen gawkiness had settled into my personality. That couldn't stop me. My compulsive need to write became my self-defense. Not knowing what to do or who to talk to, I carried around my notebook and wrote everywhere, in every free moment I had. I sat in the hallway between classes and wrote. Whenever I was done with my schoolwork I would pull out my notebook and write. I wrote in my free time at home. I wrote secretly into the night. Sometimes I woke in the late hours or early morning in a frenzy over a dream I had and continued writing as an idea struck me. Teachers appreciated my writing. Classmates didn't know what to make of it. Being middle schoolers, this suggested the need to make something of it. I remember being teased a lot. Bullied would be the word they use these days.
I couldn't stop writing. Having had such positive early experiences with writing, I had decided that I was a writer, that I would be a published writer, and that I had to keep on writing if I was ever going to get out of that school or out of that small town. I wrote poems and short stories. I started several bad novels that I never finished (I might still have one of them lying around somewhere, squirreled away in a folder). I wrote fall, winter, spring and summer. I wrote in my journals as practice for when I would write "for real," compiling the most vivid and accurate descriptions I could of classmates, life events, movies or books that I admired, my naive opinions on politics, relationships, and injustices of all sorts. I wrote about what I had done and what I hoped to do. I wrote about who I admired and who I hoped to be. I won the America and Me essay contest describing how I would like to write kid-friendly history books that made historical figures as interesting to young children as I found them to be.

At the end of the year, the eighth grade class at that school always went on a weekend field trip to a sort of juvenile detention camp as a motivational experience. For this I brought a new journal so that I could describe the trip in detail. Originally, I had planned to write it as a satirical account, as I was none too thrilled to be trapped in a cabin with my peers. I was working on getting the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of the experience on paper. Unable to fully describe the climbing tower they forced me up the first day, I sat at a table in the cafeteria and drew it, trying to get a bead on what distinguishing features of the tower could be put in writing to enable a reader to fully visualize it. Always interested in what I was working on, my science teacher spotted the drawing and asked if he could see it. He showed the drawing to another teacher, and they both said that they wanted to read the journal when it was finished. Having redetermined that I was going to make this dreaded experience as positive as humanly possible, I created a three day tour of what one might learn while being forced to do cooperative activities with one's peers. Looking back, I may have had my audience in mind as I talked about building self-esteem and forming bonds with classmates. I was impressed that I made it up that tower, but I was never very comfortable around my peers. They didn't understand the volume of reading and writing I needed to do on a daily basis, and I didn't understand their preoccupation with clothes, boys, and what everyone else did on the weekend.

 

The teachers were so impressed by the journal that they asked if I would type it so that they could
make copies. I explained that I had no typing skills. I was fighting technology tooth and nail because it seemed easier to write longhand in my notebooks, which were easily transported from place to place. Not sure if I'd even heard of laptop computers at the time, which dates me a bit. Not to be dissuaded, the teachers had another student type the story. In the end, there were a lot of typos because this girl wasn't especially thrilled to be given such a huge job. I have no memory of how they talked her into it and what recompense she had for her efforts, but it mustn't have justified the avoidance of several errors. I felt sorry for her and also kind of embarrassed to be causing her all that trouble. All the same, the journal was shared with other students, and copies of it were put in the school library.
Last week I called the school to ask about helping out the local PFLAG group, and the secretary knew my name because she'd just read the journal last summer!

Now that I was an "established" writer, I was tormented less and kind of ignored instead. I learned not to mind. No one wanted to discuss character or plot development with me, and I still had no clue why it was so important that everyone know if I had a crush on someone and why. I was going to go to college and become a writer. What did I care about dating? (The answer is, a lot, but I didn't think there was anyone in the entire building who had anything in common with me, saving perhaps that weird kid who read Webster's Dictionary every lunch hour instead of eating. Don't get me wrong, he was a nice kid and all - I was just a coward. Back then, I hid behind those words like they were fences instead of bridges.)

I aced all my English classes without much effort. Sometimes the teachers would still be trying to clarify the difference between adverbs and adjectives, a lesson I had learned by third grade and never needed to be reminded of. Every marking period at least one of my teachers read one of my stories to the class, or asked if they could photocopy it and keep it as a writing sample. Read huge novels and write book reports? Please. I was on page 335 of my own book, thank you very much. Write an argumentative essay on censorship? Glad to. I had plenty of things I wanted to present and defend concerning that topic. Huge essay test? Bring it on - I would love to compare and contrast Holden Caufield with Huckleberry Finn. They were my favorite type of characters because they weren't as straightforward as a Hero. They were unreliable narrators whose opinions colored how they described the events of their stories.
There was nothing I loved better than discussing the mechanics or politics behind a novel in class, or
championing my cause concerning a particular topic if it was important enough to me. I scored points in debates about the value of a given novel as a matter of course. At that time, all the novels we read were good and their authors had to be defended at all costs. After all, I was going to be one of them someday. God, I must have been annoying to the people who just wanted to pass the class so that they never had to read "another book like that again."

The Climax

It all culminated in my creative writing class my senior year of high school. Impressed by my work, the teacher arranged for me and another student to attend a writer's conference at the local community college.

During the last week of school that year, he made the exam so easy - turn in your best work. So I did, and I was so self-conscious about it that I tried to focus on what I was writing in class, but I kept stealing glances over at the podium where he was standing, reading my story - and then to my utter chagrin, I saw that he had tears in his eyes. It was a sad story, so you'd think that was the reaction I wanted, but such a strong reaction was completely unexpected.

My heart started pounding like a jackhammer. I barely made it through class without falling apart myself. Had I really reached a point where my reading could effect another human being so viscerally that it brought them to tears in a public place? Later, I convinced myself that I'd imagined it.

Last year, a woman friended me on facebook whom I remembered fairly well from school, but I wasn't sure how she remembered me until she messaged me a story about how envious she had been of my writing; that I could bring a teacher to tears like that with something I had written.
She reminded me of another story I'd written in that class that was about how the paper was plotting to take over my room - little sticky notes and notepaper and construction paper and the like, all balling up and creeping out over everything with some insidious invasional intent. I forgot I ever wrote it until she wrote me about it. I recalled that I was just writing whatever popped into my head first as a way to fill class time when I was feeling particularly blocked, not concerned about the quality because I felt it would still be pretty good when compared to some of the other entries. Honestly, how did I have any friends? I suppose it was because I never bragged about my talents. Out loud. I didn't go out of my way to share anything I wrote with anyone but the teachers, but I felt so confident of my writing that false modesty seemed trite at best; hypocritical at worst. Outside of English classes, I tried to keep a low profile, but I simply could not keep my mouth shut when the subject was my favorite.

Not even trying to be modest with the long-lost facebook friend, I had to admit that I hadn't even thought the sad little story I had given to the teacher that day was even a particularly well-written one. Only now that I'd gone and made someone cry over it, there was no way to take it back and change it much. I had always known and understood that the written word was powerful, and after that day I began to give serious thought to what kinds of stories I wanted to tell.
 A quote of Toni Morrison's that I really love is that if there is a book you really want to read, and you can't find that book, then you must write it. Because of this quote, when my sisters complained that there were no King Arthur stories published that told the story so well as I had rendered it into bedtime stories for them long ago, I let them talk me into writing it for them.
Another quote to the subject, however, would be Alain de Botton's contention that most books are created by writers who "couldn't find anyone to talk to."
 

That's probably more true of me than anything more complimentary could ever be.
 

I finally reached my stride when I went to college and majored in English. What a relief to be surrounded by other people who loved words and wanted to talk about them! It felt like going out of the closet after moving to Elton John's Philadelphia. Concerned at making a living as I write, I have since strayed into the teaching field. I had always admired my English teachers, who had encouraged me like no one else in my life.

I've yet to publish anything, but I'm still writing. I'm writing a novel about something that I once was unable to talk about. At it's best, my writing was always a way of communicating to myself and others.
I joined a Writer's Group for encouragement and to have someone to talk to about my work, and have found that it is also rewarding to help others with their writing, or simply to sit back and soak in what everyone else has to say. Writing is an act of giving more than anything, if you plan on being published. You give something away of yourself  with every phrase.
 

I can't stop writing. There are so many stories that I want to tell, so many causes I still have to champion, still so many people who might laugh or cry at that shared experience that is born when an author finishes a novel and it comes into their possession, a gift of themselves from the authors in which the readers interprets themselves. That's a fun one to work out.
I feel this heavy responsibility to shepherd my words, to craft them and plot them and arrange them in such a way that they impact people in some way that is significant for them. I think the elements of surprise and familiarity both have to combine to bring that about. It makes for a good sex life, too.
I don't really care if readers bring away from what I've written what I put into it. It would be juvenile to expect the exchange to work that way. Relationships don't work that way. I've created a certain environment that the reader shares with me for a time, and I want to riffle through their lymbic system while they're there. It's interesting to see what they take away, but I don't own that anymore after I've given it away.

Denouement (because French is Sexy)

 

Unlike when I stood before audiences who laughed and cheered, I now write solely for myself. I would like to publish something, but more than that I would like to birth something that will live a life of its own after I let it go. In my opinion, all truly good writing does exactly that.
 

And that, my dears, is how writing is like sex. You do the deed, you have the children, and you raise them in such a way that one day you can let them go. It's less romantic than reading. It's more like how life just happens to you every day, whether you have planned it that way or not.
 

Yes, I am addicted to writing.

Any metaphor that suggests of my personal life you will have to interpret for yourself.