Needs, wants and pretty blue pens
January 12, 2012 by Billy Coffey · Leave a Comment
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I’m guest posting over at Rachelle Gardner’s site today. You can get there from here by clicking here.
Shining your light
October 19, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 12 Comments
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I recently spent a Friday afternoon with a group of high school English students. They were stuck, their teacher said. Could you help? Since the teacher happened to be a longtime friend and I didn’t have much else to do, I said yes. Absolutely.
But it was more than simply helping out a friend and having something to do. Much more. The problem her students were having was the problem isn’t the sole property of the formative years. I didn’t have anyone around back then to tell me how to fix it. It isn’t often that life affords you the chance to right some cosmic wrong. When it does, you can’t pass it up.
Their problem was a basic one, simple yet foundational.
They had nothing to write about.
To a person, they were stereotypical teenagers. Clumsy and loud, with a strange combination of fear and arrogance. The one thing that set them apart from the rest was a common love of writing, whether it was expressed or not. But a love of writing isn’t enough. You have to do something with it. You have to have material. And they had none. Zero. Nada.
Or so they thought.
I can’t say that I managed to convince all of them otherwise in the three or so hours I was there. But I did some, I think. And I did a few most assuredly. Considering the fact that it’s darn near impossible to get a teenager to change his or her mind about anything, I’d call that a victory.
But then I started thinking about the fact that thinking there isn’t anything interesting about your life isn’t just for teenagers. Not just for writers, either. We all fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t anything that separates us from everyone else. So I thought I’d give the same little pep talk to you today that I gave them a couple weeks ago. Just in case.
It’s amazing how the rules of good writing are also the rules of good living. The two go hand in hand, I think. Good writing is cutting out all the excess, whittling down what you want to say until what you need to say is left. Same with living. Whittle it down. Find the basics. Keep it simple. Makes for not just a better story, but a better life, too.
I wasn’t visiting that class to talk about the basics of a good story, though. I was there to talk about the basics of getting ideas. Not surprisingly, that just so happened to be my own rule number one to good writing. And good living.
Rule Number One:
You are extraordinary.
Don’t let anyone fool you with that. Some will try, of course. Some will try very hard. They’ll say you’re good or nice or very polite or even special, but not extraordinary. And maybe you’ll even tell yourself that. Don’t. That’s a lie, and maybe the biggest. Believe it, and nothing will really happen. Don’t believe it, and everything will.
It’s not just you that’s extraordinary, either. Your life is, too. What you’re feeling, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. Your dreams and your fears, your hopes and worries. Extraordinary, and in a very special way. On the one hand, those things are unique to you. Your thoughts about them are your own, and how you approach each of them is determined by everything from your DNA to your experience and your beliefs.
But on the other hand, those dreams and fears and hopes and worries are for the most part shared by every other person who’s ever walked in this world. There is an invisible line that runs through the heart of every person, connecting you not only to your family and your friends, but to the stranger down the road. As different as we may appear to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the inside.
You are common, yes. But only in the way Da Vinci and Einstein and Twain were common. They were extraordinary in what they did with their commonness. You can be the same.
Think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.
When you’re born, God gives you a light and places you in one of those rooms. It might be a big room with many people. Maybe it’s a smaller room with a few people.
It doesn’t matter what kind of room you’re in. Doesn’t matter who’s there and who isn’t.
All that matters is that you shine your light.
Paper Angels
October 12, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 18 Comments
Mom saw an angel once. She was a little girl, ten or eleven, sleeping in bed one night. What woke her was the light from the hallway—a white ball that hung suspended in the air and danced into her room. You would think such a thing would be frightening, but she said there was nothing scary about it. In fact, she’ll tell you that in the fifty-some-odd years since, she never felt so peaceful. An angel, she’ll tell you. No doubt about it.
My uncle saw one, too. Same house, same time of night, different year. This time it wasn’t a white ball, it was a body and a face and a brilliance he said almost blinded him. Again, no fear. Just an awe that left him silenced and humble.
Take those stories as you will. Some of you read those words and nodded—no doubt about it, you said. Some of you likely rolled your eyes and chalked that up to the imagination of a child. Me, I’m somewhere in the middle. I don’t know if I believe those stories per se, but I do believe in the possibility.
There are other stories. My wife says her grandmother visited her one night. It was late, something woke her, and she saw an old woman smiling at her. She’d never met her grandmother—half a continent divided them—but my wife knew who was smiling at her.
Her grandmother had died earlier that night. My wife wasn’t told until the next day.
I will admit a kind of jealousy upon hearing such stories. There are some among us who have witnessed the thin veil hanging between this world and the next come undone—lifted up, for whatever reason, to allow a glimpse into the Mystery. Aside from a few instances, that thin veil has held in my own life. I can only dream and imagine and wait.
Angels have been with us since the beginning. Despite whatever differences the religions of this world have, they seem to be a common thread. This comforts me. What comforts me, too, is that we all have our own angel. Put two people in a room, and there are really four.
The Hebrew word is malach. It means messenger. To the ancient Hebrews, anything that brings a lesson, anything that helps in some way, could be considered an angel. This comforts me, too.
Angels point the way. They guide, they help, they tell us what God wants us to know. And if we were ever blessed with the opportunity, they would show us just how special and wonderful our lives truly were.
And that, in a nutshell, is what happens to Andy Sommerville.
Paper Angels, my second novel, will be out November 9. It is the story of one ordinary man with an extraordinary ability—Andy can see his angel, calls him The Old Man. But far from seeing The Old Man as a blessing, Andy has found him a curse. He believes his angel has kept him from a better, more fulfilling life than the one he has—a life that has come to be defined by a wooden box filled with twelve trinkets The Old Man has told him to keep over the years. “You’ll need them,” The Old Man says, “when the time comes.”
That time comes one dark night when Andy is involved in a brutal attack that leaves him badly burned and the boy he’s come to see as a son murdered. Stripped of all he held dear, The Old Man abandons Andy in his hospital bed. Now all Andy has left is his wooden box and a hospital counselor named Elizabeth, who will help him discover the shocking truth of his life.
I do hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of your own. If you’re interested, you can stop by Amazon HERE or ask for it at your local bookstore. Paper Angels is a love letter of sorts, written so that others may ponder the angels in Andy’s life and then ponder the angels that fill their own. Because I may have my doubts when someone shares a story of that veil between worlds coming undone, but I do not doubt it is possible. And I do not doubt that just as there is an angel looking over my shoulder as I scribble this post, there is also one looking over yours as you read it.
This teeter totter life
August 24, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 22 Comments
- image courtesy of photobucket.com
I spent much of last Friday at the hospital with my wife, who had been feeling particularly ucky of late. The doctors had (and as I write this have) no idea what’s wrong. Tests were in order. So off we went, her to be poked and prodded for two hours, and me to pass the time in the waiting room.
As I am not a fan of feeling ucky or being poked and prodded, hospitals rank just above funeral homes on my list of Places I Wish Not To Go. It isn’t the germs that bother me, not the echoes of coughs or the abundance of wheel chairs and gurneys. It’s the despair, I think. That thick dark cloud of inevitability that seems to hang over everyone and everything. Going to the hospital makes me confront the fragility of life. That’s something I’d rather not consider.
I brought enough work to keep my mind off things. I knew the waiting area had a television, but the possibility of watching Sportscenter all morning quickly evaporated when I was told the only channel offered was HGTV (according to the nice old lady with the clipboard, anything else may be construed as “controversial.”) I had a notebook—1,000 words a day every day is what I was taught, even when you’re sitting in a hospital—and my i-Pod—the new Trace Adkins album? Gold.
I was ready, oh yes I was. The only pondering of life and death that day would come from my characters rather than myself. Yes sir, I was going to mind my own business.
The only thing I didn’t take into account was that there would be other people in need of the sort of modern medical technology that only the local hospital’s radiology department could provide. Though the waiting room was relatively empty when we arrived, by the time my wife’s name was called, it was nearly full. And five minutes later, I had company.
The woman who sat down beside me with the crutches looked eighty but swore she wasn’t a day over fifty-seven. We exchanged hellos and I resumed my scribbling. She asked what I was doing. I said work (never say you’re a writer, I was taught that as well). She nodded and leafed through a ten-month-old magazine for exactly thirty seconds, at which time she sat it back down on the wooden table between us and asked what was wrong with me.
“I don’t think you’d have the time,” I joked.
She chuckled and touched my arm—eighty-year-old women who swear they’re not a day over fifty-seven love to touch arms—and said, “I mean what brings you here?”
“My wife’s getting a once-over,” I told her. “You?”
She tapped the crutches and then felt her leg. “Busted myself. Fell down the stairs. I blame the cat.”
“Cats are evil,” I said.
She gave me a knowing smile.
“Cats are not evil,” said the woman across from us. A sling was wrapped around her neck which made her left arm form an L. She looked as though she were leaning on an invisible fence post. “I have three, and they’re darlings.”
“Bet your cat did that to your arm,” I said.
“Nope. I fell out of a wheelbarrow.”
“Pardon?” the woman beside me said.
“Yep, wheelbarrow.” She looked down at her arm and up to us. The look on her face was a mix of embarrassment and pride. “My son said I was too chicken to let him push me down the hill in it. Guess I showed him, huh?”
“Guess so,” I said.
The man to her left had been listening this whole time under the guise of being immersed in his sports magazine. I doubt any of us thought he was actually reading it. Hard to do with a neck brace.
“I did that once,” he said. “Made it down our hill just fine. Shut that cocky son of mine’s mouth up, sure enough. I don’t take chances anymore, though.”
“What happened to you?” the old lady beside me asked.
“This?” He pointed to the brace, just in case she were asking of anything else. “I got up off the couch. Seriously. All I did. Felt something pull, just…pop goes the weasel.”
I never got any writing done. It was better to sit and talk, I think. Better to be reminded of the fragility of life, that strange thing that seems so hard but is instead so soft. I was reminded of just how clumsy we all are and how we can get hurt even when we take no chances.
Because our existence is but a thin strip of breath upon which we teeter and totter and, eventually, will tumble off.
Swinging the hammer
March 16, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
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I just typed the final period of the final draft of what will hopefully be my third book. Always an ambivalent experience. You’re glad the story is done, but at the same time it’s hard to let the story go. Even now, my thoughts are away from this sheet of paper and on my characters. I wonder what they’d do next and if they all managed to carry on. The answer to the former is that I have no idea. The answer to the second? Yes.
I figure that between drafts of books, journal entries, and blog posts, I’ve written about a million words in the last ten years. That’s a lot. And I have proof, too—the trunk beside my desk at home is full of notebooks and papers, as are the bottom two rows of my bookshelves. Not to mention files upon files on my computer. You would think that considering such bountiful evidence, I would know a thing or two about writing.
I don’t.
It’s a sickness to believe otherwise, at least in my case. Each time I feel as though I’m coming down with a case of I-could-do-a-whole-book-about-writing, I remedy myself by actually sitting down to write something. Always does the trick.
Because it’s difficult, the crafting of words. It’s painful and draining, and more than once I’ve asked myself why in the world I do it at all (answer: because it’s more painful and draining if I don’t).
This has been especially true with the book I just finished. Though aspects of it are similar to my first two, much of it isn’t. It was a leap of faith designed to prevent the one feeling I want to preserve every time I sit down to write.
Not hope or faith or love.
Fear.
Yes. While I’m writing, I want to be afraid.
On the surface, that shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, writers swim in fear. They’re terrified of rejection, anxious that their work will be perceived as infantile, troubled that there are thousands of other writers out there more talented and successful. We’re a tangled mass of neuroses and obsessions.
But those aren’t the sorts of fears I’m talking about. In fact, I’d say those fears should be battered into submission so the real fear—the necessary panic—can course through me unencumbered.
Whatever our words may be to readers, to ourselves they should resemble a sledgehammer taken to the barricade we construct to keep us a safe distance from the world. Each tap of the keys or stroke of the pen should in reality be a swing of the hammer. Each word should be a tiny chunk taken from our walls. Each paragraph a brick, each page a section, until finally we are left naked with nothing between us and our audience.
That’s the fear of which I speak.
That’s the only way writing works.
There are countless definitions of what good writing looks like. For me, only one counts—good writing doesn’t show how we’re all different, but how we’re all the same. And that’s impossible unless writers are willing to be vulnerable.
Vulnerable enough to commit to the page those hidden parts within themselves which they wouldn’t even whisper to their closest friends.
Allison
March 7, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
The dedication page from my first novel, Snow Day
I had life figured out by the time I was seventeen. My future was planned, crystal clear and meant to be.
I was the starting second baseman on my high school team and had already received interest from several colleges and even one professional team. I was going to play baseball forever. I had to. Because the kid who roamed the halls of my high school and drove his truck around town wasn’t me. Not the real me, anyway. No, the real me was the guy on the ball field. It was the only place where I ever really felt I belonged.
School was an irritant. Most high school seniors try to stretch out that last year as far as they can, enjoying every moment. Not me. I wanted to get out. I had a life to start living.
Not that high school was hard, mind you. I had the prototypical jock schedule of classes—math, history, English, and four study halls. Brutal. On day my English teacher decided I needed to do something besides sit around all day, so she pulled some strings and got me a job writing a weekly column for the local newspaper. Write about anything, she said. Just make it good.
Oh. Joy.
I obliged, partly because I had to but mostly because she was my favorite teacher. Every Tuesday evening, I would sit down with a pad of paper and write between innings of the Braves games on television. It was busy work, nothing else. Just something to pass the time.
Then everything fell apart.
I blew out my shoulder three weeks later. Trips to doctors and specialists resulted in a shared consensus that though I could kinda/sorta play baseball again, I’d never play the way I had.
It’s tough being seventeen and knowing that every dream you’d ever had was gone. Tough knowing that your entire life lay in front of you, but it wasn’t going to be the life you wanted. Tough.
Too tough.
So one night I got into my truck, drove into the mountains, and found the highest rock I could so I could jump off.
Almost did it, too. I got to two-and-a-half on my count to three when a voice popped into my head and said, “You’re not really afraid of dying, are you?”
No. Not at all.
“Then you’re afraid of living.”
Whether that voice was God’s or my own still escapes me. But I sat for a long while on that rock, thinking. Then I got back into my truck, drove home, and wrote my column. Really wrote. About how things sometimes don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to and how sometimes life can be more night than day. About how, in the end, we all just have to keep on.
That was the night I learned to strip myself bare on the page, to risk exposing fears and worries and doubts. To quit pretending I was someone I wasn’t. It was the biggest act of courage I’d ever displayed.
Three days later, a letter was sent to the high school with my name on the front. Thank you, it said. “I’m having a really tough time right now, and a few days ago I thought I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was going to end it. Then I read your article and, well, I’m still here. So thank you. You rescued me.”
It wasn’t signed, and there was no return address on the envelope. I didn’t know who sent it, but I did know this: God didn’t want me to play baseball. He wanted me to write.
At the mall, a month later. I was picking up my girlfriend from work and decided to walk down to the bookstore. Approaching me was a teenage girl in jeans and a leather jacket. I nodded as she passed, and then she called my name.
“Allison,” she said. “My name’s Allison. I’m the one who wrote you that letter.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. So I asked if she was all right, to which she replied she was, to which I replied that it was nice to meet her. I was so shy, so backward, so unnerved, that I simply nodded again and walked away.
I have had many bad moments in my life. That one? Top three.
I never saw Allison again. I do, however, still spend many a day wishing that I would have. Just once more. Just to say I’m was sorry for not saying more. To tell her to keep hanging in there and she’s not alone.
And to tell her she rescued me, too.
***
This post is part of the One Word at a Time Blog Carnival: Future hosted by my friend Peter Pollock. To check out more posts on this topic, please visit his website, PeterPollock.com
Your story
February 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 18 Comments
I recently spent a Friday afternoon with a group of high school English students. They were stuck, their teacher said. Could you help? Since the teacher happened to be a longtime friend and I didn’t have much else to do, I said yes. Absolutely.
But it was more than simply helping out a friend and having something to do. Much more. The problem her students were having was the problem isn’t the sole property of the formative years. I didn’t have anyone around back then to tell me how to fix it. It isn’t often that life affords you the chance to right some cosmic wrong. When it does, you can’t pass it up.
Their problem was a basic one, simple yet foundational.
They had nothing to write about.
To a person, they were stereotypical teenagers. Clumsy and loud, with a strange combination of fear and arrogance. The one thing that set them apart from the rest was a common love of writing, whether it was expressed or not. But a love of writing isn’t enough. You have to do something with it. You have to have material. And they had none. Zero. Nada.
Or so they thought.
I can’t say that I managed to convince all of them otherwise in the three or so hours I was there. But I did some, I think. And I did a few most assuredly. Considering the fact that it’s darn near impossible to get a teenager to change his or her mind about anything, I’d call that a victory.
But then I started thinking about the fact that thinking there isn’t anything interesting about your life isn’t just for teenagers. Not just for writers, either. We all fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t anything that separates us from everyone else. So I thought I’d give the same little pep talk to you today that I gave them a couple weeks ago. Just in case.
It’s amazing how the rules of good writing are also the rules of good living. The two go hand in hand, I think. Good writing is cutting out all the excess, whittling down what you want to say until what you need to say is left. Same with living. Whittle it down. Find the basics. Keep it simple. Makes for not just a better story, but a better life, too.
I wasn’t visiting that class to talk about the basics of a good story, though. I was there to talk about the basics of getting ideas. Not surprisingly, that just so happened to be my own rule number one to good writing. And good living.
Rule Number One: You are extraordinary.
Don’t let anyone fool you with that. Some will try, of course. Some will try very hard. They’ll say you’re good or nice or very polite or even special, but not extraordinary. And maybe you’ll even tell yourself that. Don’t. That’s a lie, and maybe the biggest. Believe it, and nothing will really happen. Don’t believe it, and everything will.
It’s not just you that’s extraordinary, either. Your life is, too. What you’re feeling, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. Your dreams and your fears, your hopes and worries. Extraordinary, and in a very special way. On the one hand, those things are unique to you. Your thoughts about them are your own, and how you approach each of them is determined by everything from your DNA to your experience and your beliefs.
But on the other hand, those dreams and fears and hopes and worries are for the most part shared by every other person who’s ever walked in this world. There is an invisible line that runs through the heart of every person, connecting you not only to your family and your friends, but to the stranger down the road. As different as we may appear to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the inside.
You are common, yes. But only in the way Da Vinci and Einstein and Twain were common. They were extraordinary in what they did with their commonness. You can be the same.
Think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.
When you’re born, God gives you a light and places you in one of those rooms. It might be a big room with many people. Maybe it’s a smaller room with a few people.
It doesn’t matter what kind of room you’re in. Doesn’t matter who’s there and who isn’t.
All that matters is that you shine your light.
The Tucson shootings, Huckleberry Finn, and the power of words
January 12, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 26 Comments
Mark Twain image courtesy of photobucket.com
The news lately has been all about the power of words, both written and spoken. A guy like me would normally think that’s a good thing. But then again, these aren’t what you’d call normal times.
It began last week, when news came that Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University, is ready to publish a new edition of Huckleberrry Finn that has been scrubbed clean of all 219 mentions of what is now culturally known as “the N-word.” A powerful word. In its place is now 219 mentions of the word “slave.” The reason, at least in Professor Gribben’s mind, was very clear: he wanted to spare “the reader from a racial slur that never seems to lose its vitriol.”
Nice of him.
That was big news for a few days, and not just in literary circles. But it paled to what happened next.
On Saturday, a gunman named Jared Loughner opened fire at a “Congress on Your Corner” event by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. Six were killed. Fourteen, including Ms. Giffords, were injured.
The words started soon thereafter. Powerful ones. In a matter of hours, pundits of every stripe were decrying the vitriolic (there’s that word again) rhetoric now common in politics. Accusations flew. Blame was assigned. Both facts and evidence were nonexistent, which meant what the commentators on television and the Internet were saying told me little about what actually happened and much about their own view of things. That seems to be pretty usual now. More and more, what happened and why are things better left unanswered. That way anyone and everyone can be a scapegoat.
It was a sad thing to witness, all that talk. It seemed to me the rhetoric used to bemoan the sad state of political discourse was even more vitriolic than the political discourse itself.
Now comes the aftermath.
Most people—and myself included—believe all the nasty talk should be toned down. Not just in politics, either. There’s little doubt our society has gotten filthy-mouthed over the years. All you need for evidence of that can be found at your child’s school. It’s getting difficult to not believe ours is becoming an uncivil civilization.
But mixed in with these pleas for politeness are calls for the political equivalent of Professor Gribben’s punishment of Mark Twain and his so-called poor choice of words. One lawmaker is planning to introduce a bill that would ban symbols or language that threaten “a congressman, senator or federal judge.”
To say it another way—No more powerful words.
It’ll make things better. Safer. For us.
But I don’t think so. To me, it sounds more like this: you, Naïve Citizen, and you, Fragile Reader, need us to look after you so you won’t be offended or cause any trouble.
Maybe the writer in me is simply overreacting. My view of things is such that language, whether written or spoken, should be protected at all cost. Freedom cannot exist without them.
There is power in words, great power. But they aren’t so powerful that they can sprout from us bounties of good or evil. Those are seeds we sow ourselves, watered by our own choices and, at least in Mr. Loughner’s case, the negligence of others.
To me, the solution isn’t to abolish powerful words, but to use them more wisely. Which is why I think everyone from the simple folk to the politicians should do with their words what writers do with theirs—tremble as they craft them.
Mall Walkers
January 11, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Every writer gets stuck from time to time. Part of the process. Either the ideas won’t come or the words around those ideas. Instead of sitting down and letting your better self take over, you end up staring at a blank cursor knowing that it’s over. You can’t fool anyone anymore.
Every writer has his or her own method to reverse this process, which can be as creative as a fieldtrip to somewhere silly or as mundane as taking a shower. I suppose mine lies somewhere between the two—half silly and half mundane.
I go to the mall.
I’m a big fan of the mall, though not because of the stores or the coffee shop (okay, maybe the coffee shop). I could do without another pair of jeans or another T-shirt, especially when together they cost a little less than half a week’s pay. No, I go to the mall for another reason that’s just as valuable. To spy.
My usual spot is smack in the middle of everything, where the powers that be have arranged a set of leather couches and chairs for the shopping weary. Or for people like me, who are just curious.
Though I’m generally not someone very comfortable in the midst of a crowd, I do pretty well when I can watch them from a distance. And that’s my method of unclogging the writer’s brain. I go look. I watch people going about their daily lives and imagine what they’re thinking and feeling. And it works. Every time.
Today my attention seems focused on that ever present but often overlooked cult known as the Mall Walkers. Every mall seems to have its own dedicated troupe, and they all seem to be the same sort of people—very kind, very focused, and very old.
There are nuances of course, as there is in anything. People can perform the same activity but in different ways, depending upon their goal and their personality. And as I sit and watch them make their laps in the comfortable weather of the indoors, I see a lot of personalities. And what I see resembles much more than someone’s walk around a mall.
There are the die-hards, of course. Men and women who prance about in actual workout clothes and shoes much more expensive than my own. They’re not here to shop or socialize. They’re here to work. And they take that work seriously. Head down, arms pumping. And they refuse to wander from the gray tiles that line the edge of the mall lest they cheat themselves.
Others see this morning ritual as more of a social gathering. They’re here to walk, yes. To exercise, even. But they seem to exercise their mouths as much as their legs. They talk as they go, and talk about anything. Family, friends, church, who’s doing what and to whom and why. These people have no problem with breaking their stride to say hello to someone or do a little window shopping. They’re here for better health, but they also understand that exercising alone won’t guarantee that. Community and a sense of fun plays into the equation in equal parts.
At the other end of the spectrum is the upper crust of the mall-walking society. The ones whose choice of clothing is the sundress or the suit and tie. They’re presence here stumps me. They don’t seem interested in exercising. Only an idiot would wear a sport jacket or high heels for a workout. But neither do they seem to be here for the socializing, since they tend to turn up their noses to the other walkers (and especially to those of their own ilk).
After watching them pass for the fourth time, not walking but more ambling, I decide they’re here just to be here. They’re content to just be seen.
Then, like some rare celestial event, members of all three groups intersect around me—the diehards and the social butterflies to my left, and the country-clubbers to my right. Around and around on their journey from beginning to end.
And I decide that we’re all mall walkers in our own right, left to spend our days journeying from beginning to end. Like them, there are those who see that journey as a nose-to-the-grindstone marathon of endless work and self-improvement. And there are those who prefer to walk through their days making friends and having fun. And there are still others whose sole purpose seems to be all the attention they can get.
And then there are people like me, who make their own journey while watching others make theirs.
A writer’s learning curve
June 25, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 39 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Across the road from my house sits about 30,000 acres of national forest, which is home to all manner of creepy crawlies. The boundary between civilized and not is clearly marked by a nearly straight line of neatly-kept backyards and a foreboding tree line of towering oaks.
Of course, neither man nor beast keeps to his own side. We all mingle with each other from time to time. Miles of trails leading into the mountains provide all a guy like me needs for feed his inner redneck. And as if to even things out a bit, everything from bear to deer to snakes to coyotes have been seen wandering our streets.
Most of us pay little mind to such intrusions, believing that the animals have just as much right to snoop around our homes as we have theirs. But there is one person in particular who is uneasy about the whole thing.
I speak of the kid down the road. Sixteenish and free for the summer. I remember the summer I turned sixteen, three glorious months of getting into more trouble than I’d ever gotten into in my life. Ask his father, and he’ll say he almost wishes his son would get into that same sort of trouble. Not a lot, mind you. But at least a little. After all, he’s sixteen. Trouble’s supposed to find you at that age.
But it hasn’t found him, mostly because he refuses to go outside. His days are spent staring out his bedroom window and writing about what he sees. He wants to write a book, he told his father. He’s serious about it. And while his father is supportive, he also knows it’s an excuse. His son doesn’t like his new home. Doesn’t like the small town or the big woods. He wants to go home to the city.
The family moved here from the city last year as the result of a job transfer. All this wildness suits mom and dad just fine, but not the boy. He woke up one morning in April to find a bear in the backyard. Found a snake on the deck a few weeks later. Though he refuses to admit it, they think it was all just a little too Wild Kingdom for him. So when school let out and he was free to do what he wanted, he retreated to the safety of the indoors.
He says he’s spending his time wisely. He’s writing. Working. There isn’t any time for much of anything else.
I heard about all of this the other night while out for an evening walk. His father was putting up a new mailbox, I stopped to say hello, and things just sort of went from there.
“He really is a good storyteller,” he told me. “Just wish he wouldn’t stay inside all the time. That can’t be healthy, can it?”
No.
Not for a kid. And especially not for a writer.
There are a lot of would-be authors out there who think it’s fine to stare out of their window and write about the world. They take their journey within themselves because they’re unwilling or afraid to go out.
I can’t blame them for that. I was once the kid down the road, too.
Not afraid of bears and snakes, but afraid to go out the door. To face life in all its glory and pain. Give me a nice desk and some paper instead. Let life leave me alone so I could write about it.
Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? But that’s what I thought. And that’s what a lot of authors think.
There is a learning curve to writing, of course. First come the simple words and simpler thoughts, which through countless hours of practice becomes better words and greater thoughts. No one denies this.
But there is another learning curve to writing that often goes overlooked, and that is the experience of living. Of plunging headlong into life and daring to swim in both the clear and the murky waters, and then using pen and paper as a towel to dry yourself off.
You have to hurt. And suffer. You have to love and hate and believe and doubt. You have to fail and succeed.
And the only way to do that is to go out and live before you come in to write.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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