Putting On A Voice

I can remember back in Iraq, I was there for a year on the Army plan. For nine months we were in a place called Camp Victory. They pulled me in to watch radios and work for the First Sergeant. Twelve hours on, twelve off. It went through phases, kind of: it was six to six, either am or pm; or noon to midnight. Day after day, seven days a week, for nine months.

But it was kind of fitting, because everything there was brown. Tan. Because brown can be rich. Tan is – you don’t see tan, sometimes. This was the tan you didn’t see, after a while. Tan sand, tan buildings, tan shipping containers, tan dust on all the vehicles. Gray gravel, once the parking area got too muddy in the spring rains. And there was a bombed-out building with a tan crater in the floor, but the girders still standing were red. And the sky was blue, usually. But even the palm trunks were tan. But it was perfect: a monotonous setting with a monotonous schedule.

That was where my writing suffered the most. I was still working on a novel back then, or I would have been if everything wasn’t tan. I did manage to write a poem – well, more like free verse that sounded deep and meaningful, because that’s what a lot of college-aged kids think poetry is. It was about how I couldn’t write. “Muse is Gone” I called it. I know I would’ve been gone if I could have, so I guess I can’t blame my muse for bailing on me. It took a while for it to come back, too; maybe two or three years.

I’m just thinking about this because I’m reading things from a couple different places about having the hope to write, or the courage, or whatever; and it made me think about why I write, what keeps me writing, why I don’t have the same symptoms, usually, that these other people are having. Fear. Anxiety. Desperation. Eventually I started noticing some of the motivations for writing: fame, recognition, to be published. Maybe some writers are noble enough that they just have something they want, or need to say. Sometimes there’s characters in their head that they can’t get out unless they write them out. That one always intrigued me.

But none of those really do it for me. It wasn’t even until recently that I knew what my characters looked like. I certainly have plenty to say, and sometimes I wish I could just be a speaker and go to different places and speak. But then I talk to my fiancée sometimes and everything’s coming out wrong, that I’m trying to say. Editors can fix that, if you write something confusing. But you can’t untangle words once they’re spoken. So I can’t really do the whole live speaking thing. Still, I do have lots to say.

But then, I write fantasy. See, there’s a few exceptions, but most everyone – if they want to “say” something – use realistic fiction. Except for maybe Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling – and I can’t actually speak for Harry Potter – all the “greats” of literature, the books that carry meaning through generations, are realistic fiction. So if I wrote just to say something – about culture, about times, about “reality” – if it was just because I wanted to speak? I don’t think I would use fantasy. But that’s what I write.

So, why? Why do I write, and why don’t I struggle as much with anxiety or depression as much as other people seem to? I think it has to do with goals, you know? Anxiety hits when we worry about not achieving a certain goal, or achieving it incompletely. Depression can hit when we lose something we wanted, whether we had it or were looking forward to getting it. And if you place a really juicy goal ahead of you, something you really, really want, it becomes a passion. A focused passion.

See, you can have all the energy you want and go off like an atom bomb. But if you focus all that energy you can become a rocket, and that’ll get you to the moon. Atom bombs destroy; rockets elevate. So you can be passionate; but until there’s a practical, attainable goal, all that passion is like an atom bomb. But look out for the one whose passion is focused.

You also have to have the right goal, though. And I don’t just mean focusing energy on pimping, which is always wrong. But it has to be something not only attainable, but something enduring. Something that allows for growth, but that’s always there, always worth fighting for, always just out of reach but you get tastes every now and then of it. In the Christian world we know about the Kingdom of God – the already but not yet. And I mean, who better than God knows what they’re doing?

So if someone writes to be published, well, they either get no taste of it until it happens, or it never happens. Because once you’re published, it’s like having Monster energy drink for the first time; you can keep drinking it, but that first experience is over, done with. And if the FDA finds out it’s a slow poison, Monster might go away forever. So you can be published, and maybe draw it out by being published in a small magazine first, then a larger one, then have a novel done. But you’re going to reach a point where you’re published; there’s no more but to repeat, and it might go away. Or if you’re never published, it’s like playing the lottery and never winning. You spend your entire life, by routine, day after day: write a little, send it out, get rejected – or you’re never satisfied and you never send it out. The passion is going to go away eventually, if it ever even comes.

Or maybe someone writes to be famous, to have their words and opinions heard. Well that’s incredibly difficult to guarantee, not only getting it to happen in the first place but to maintain it. I’ve read lots of examples of writers who made it big with a debut, and couldn’t follow up because of fear that they couldn’t repeat it. And maybe they couldn’t have.

Me? I write because I love the language. I chuckle inside when people complain about how difficult English is, because ancient Greek used to have hundreds of tenses for a single verb. Try learning that. If English is difficult, it’s because it’s rich, because we might have ten words that mean almost the same thing, but not quite. So you have to figure out which word to use. Writing a story is like solving an algebraic equation: you have pieces that are variable, but some constants; and whatever you put in the variables has to work out to being equal. Poetry is like a condensed version of this, which might be why it’s seen as the most “artful.” But when you care about the language, you care about using the right word. It’s not just about communicating, but conveying exactly the thought or the idea or the feeling of what’s in your mind. Conrad thinks it can’t be done, not really; I tend to agree. Because you have to take the emotion of the reader into consideration. Science may love the idea of a fully objective opinion; but fiction has to play on readers’ emotions; it has to make them feel, and getting someone to feel a certain way can’t be done objectively – or predictably.

So when I write, especially my novel, I have a certain theme I’m trying to get across; I have to figure out first on a large scale what events and what kinds of characters will get that theme across. But all of it comes down to words: a character can be made on the difference between “exhaling smoothly” and “sighing”; between “tightening” his fist and “clenching” it.

That is what excites my passion; not the hope of publication, or the fame of it: just solving the puzzle. Just mixing words around and seeing what comes up. Like a jigsaw puzzle with 5000 different shades of color, but all the pieces are cut the same: you could put together one frenetic cacophony of colors, or a spectrum, or nebulous blotches – it depends on the story you’re trying to tell. Each well-crafted sentence is a victory; each paragraph, page, chapter, novel is a taste of what you’re striving toward. Some writers fear the blank page. I never understood why. But I think their expectations are too high, and too narrow. They fear that page because to them it’s like a whitewashed paint-by-numbers: there’s an image they’re supposed to create that everyone else knows but them, and if they get it wrong they fail. But the page is blank to the reader the first time, too, even when it’s filled with text – because, ideally, the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen on that page. It’s the adventure of it. Well the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen on the page either, at the start. And that’s the adventure of it.

My pages remained blank in Iraq because there was no passion in that place, nothing to get excited about. All the color was gone, except for a few bits here and there. And if you set yourself up to make everything tan, to strip all the color from your life because of anxiety or depression, your writing – or whatever your passion is – will suffer too. If you can’t live with your goals, no matter how good and noble they may seem, you need to get new goals. Get something that gives you a taste of the realization of your passion without satiating it entirely. Stay hungry, but not starving. You’d be amazed at the story your life will tell if you do.