Category: Writing

The girl in the dream

(written about 13 years ago)

She writes songs. In fact, she had the No. 1 song in the world. The words and melody struck so many people so deeply they had to own it and play it again anytime they wanted.

She lives alone on the second floor of a two-story building. Maybe it was above a storefront, I couldn’t see the details outside. All I saw was a long hallway, windows along the one side and the sun coming in. But she didn’t look out the windows. She lives alone and never comes out.

The dream was about recording an album and we started talking about her, and how she could come out of the apartment anytime she wanted if she weren’t so scared. I remember saying that song has made her a millionaire but she can’t come out. Why is she so afraid? What is she so afraid of?

I woke up haunted by the young woman. In the dream I was the musician making the album; we were between sessions, it seems, because the conversation was taking place outdoors, in a car. I was also the girl, because I remember that long hallway and the sunshine I couldn’t bear to see and feel. The song has given her all of her material needs. All she needs now is to gather the courage and step outside. But it feels so comfortable in the apartment. She’s simultaneously afraid to leave and aware there’s nothing to fear. And the world loves her song.

I heard no music in the dream, but I knew: It was a beautiful song.

the duel

There are two of us here, we,
The lump of flesh and the
whatjacallit
soul, consciousness, sentience

and we battle it out daily.
Something tells me the lump always wins
but lets the thinker rationalize
whatever it decides.

Which is our better nature?
The thinker thinks it’s him
but then he’s the one
doing the thinking.

Maybe the fallacy is
that we are two of us here.
You see anyone else
in the room?

And now, my 17th journal

So I just peeked. (Why do people start sentences and stories with “So”? When did it start? How did it happen?) I started filling my first journal — the $3.59 clearance book from Hobby Lobby — on Oct. 26, 2011, which would be almost exactly 10 years of regular journaling, except it wasn’t until April 15, 2015, that I got serious about it, coming back almost daily again and again to the point where I needed a new journal every four to six months or so. It took four years to get to the end of Journal One, six months to fill Journal Two, und so wieder.

Thursday morning I started my 17th journal, ranging from 192 to 400 pages, this one and its immediate predecessor being 240-page Moleskines. I have mined the pages to create blog posts and books over the years, but I have not plumbed all the depths, especially the random story ideas and thoughts about novels in progress. The first journal actually was a deliberate attempt to craft my novel The Imaginary Revolution, and since then I have collected blog posts into five more books, but most of the stories are still to come. In fact I just spotted an old idea for a dystopian novel in the first (or was it second?) journal that sparked something within anew.

I often re-introduce my hopes and goals at the beginning and end of these things, and comparing notes with myself can be frustrating. I keep writing things I didn’t set goals for. One book morphs into another, and others spring out of thin air. I did not wake up one morning to write a series of “writing rules,” nor did I set out to write a short story framed as 10 letters from an imaginary re-education camp established in a woodsy area by the USSA regime. They emerged in the just-completed 16th journal while I was thinking I ought to be writing something else. It’s an adult-onset attention deficit disorder kind of life. Maybe I should publish the journals as is under the banner AOADD.

Or maybe I should just R-E-L-A-X and write as I wish on these journal pages. As my most sage writing advice goes, “Write anything until you write something.” That concept literally emerged one day while I was sitting in this chair writing anything that came to mind. I should probably append that advice with, “and keep going!” Sometimes a whole passel of blog posts emerges in one sitting: I’ll be writing anything and then a nifty something will pop up out of nowhere.

At one time I’d stop there and say, OK, that’ll do, but then one day I thought hey, I still have time to keep writing anything, and out popped a second something, and then a third. So now I try to fill at least three journal pages in a session or set a specific time when I will write as much “anything” as I can, and then go back to see if I wrote “something.” Sure enough, not always right away but maybe later, I’ll go back and say, wait a minute, I have something here.

Lost in the flow

Having thoroughly enjoyed two of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, it felt like time to visit the author’s perhaps best known work, The Remains of the Day. And, of course, it is a mysterious treasure.

Ishiguro has a knack for creating endearingly flawed narrators and unfolding the story in a way that shows us the other characters in a light that the narrator doesn’t quite understand. As I write this, our friend Stevens is on his way to the climactic reunion with Miss Kenton that, I suspect, will be surprising and sweet, given my past experience with Ishiguro. (The resolution of Klara and the Sun may be my favorite reading moment of this year.)

I enjoy getting lost in stories. As a writer I should pay closer attention to the storyteller’s methods, I suppose, to see what they do to make me lost, but the enjoyment is in the story, not the dissection. And I wonder if I were to try applying lessons and formulas rather than just getting lost in the story as I tell it, the resulting work would feel a bit mechanical. I can sense when a formulaic story has reached its halfway point because the hero has come to her lowest ebb before starting to piece together her eventual triumph.

No, I’m ready to drift along with the story like the proverbial leaf carried on the stream. I would wager the authors of the best stories get caught up the same way. I’m pleased to be able to say I’ve had a few “scenes that wrote themselves” along the way, though I’ve never yet written a tale as fine as Ishiguro’s.

I’d love to see the film now that I’ve read the book, especially as I see Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are the leads.

I am an impostor

Groucho Glasses © Oleg Dudko | Dreamstime.com

Oh, man, I’m not into this today. My brain is resisting the various promises I’ve made to write this or do that or make this call or research that. It feels so comfy just to sit and do nothing.

“You have been there and done that your whole life, fulfilling those promises, and see where it got you: A house full of stuff and no time to enjoy it.”

Oh, woe is me, right? The tortured comfy person, overweight and stuffed with self-pity.

“Ain’t that America, land of the free? Go back to sleep, you know you want to.”

Oh! Aha!

“What?”

I see you, you nasty little syndrome lurking behind the garbage can.

“You’re an impostor!”

Yes, yes I am. As are we all. We hope to impart what we’ve learned, but someone will think we’re foolish and not qualified for the task, and we glimpse that someone in the mirror. No need to pile on.

“No one will find your work any good at all.”

Thank you, thank you, I know. I don’t even know why I try.

“That’s true — you’re a quitter, too.”

What will it take to make you go away?

“Go away? Whatever for? I’m your realistic side. You need to realize you will always be inadequate, you will never have anything useful to impart, and you may as well accept that and disappear into your normal everyday life.”

Methinks you doth protest too much.

“Now you think you’re Shakespeare.”

I’m making you nervous, aren’t I, little syndrome?

“Nervous? Not at all. Move along, move along, no one is paying attention.”

And yet here I am, stumbling along and writing away, making my little scratches on paper for a handful of readers.

“You think you have even a handful of readers? What part of ‘no one is reading’ or ‘no one is listening’ do you misunderstand?”

I’m reading. I’m listening. I’m saying something here. I need to say something.

“What do you have to say that hasn’t been said a million times before? What do you have to offer except platitudes and attitudes that everyone already knows, you unoriginal cheeky little nobody?”

You’re overplaying your hand now, little syndrome. I am making you nervous, aren’t I? The longer I plow ahead, the weaker you become. You depend on my giving up, don’t you? You depend on my agreeing with you and confessing to the world — as if the world is listening — and admitting to myself that I’m an impostor. Then I can stop encouraging myself to keep going, to keep believing I have something to say, and fade into my numb little quiet life of desperation and sleep.

“Yes — yes! You are getting sleepy …”

In your dreams, impostor syndrome. I’m just waking up now; that’s what happens when I see you for what you are. Yes, I am one in 7 billion, and I was one in 4 billion when I was born, but I am one, and no matter how many billion there are, I will still be this one, and each one is a life and each one has value, Q.E.D., I have value and what I have to say has value, and if I keep going, I will eventually find others among the 7 billion who will read my words and hear what I’m saying and think, “Hey, thanks, I needed to know that.” And it’s for those others that I keep scrawling words across the page and retyping them for people to find out there in the place where words are scattered by the quadrillion, because if I leave them here on the page on my bookshelf, no one can ever find them. And so fly, little words! Go and proclaim my humanity to the world and in so doing inspire readers to realize, “Hey, I could be doing that, too — here I come, world, here I come.”

And I will warn them about you, impostor syndrome, I will warn them that you come to everyone who dares to share their thoughts, and the only way to shout you down is to keep writing and keep sharing, and even then you will crop up when we least expect it and when we are most vulnerable. I respect your persistence, and maybe I should follow your example, because even the greatest writers have to go a few rounds with you, and they have learned to be as persistent as you and keep writing when you whisper your discouraging whispers, to laugh and say tell you what, I can keep writing just as long as you can keep whispering and we’ll see who loses their voice first.

“Keep writing, big man, you are still an impostor.”

Yes, I am. But I’m still writing.