Ridin’ Down the Highway

You would think that a moderately-sized town like Des Moines would not have gridlock at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. Now I’m sure that whoever might be reading this that happens to be from L.A. is going to scoff.  I mean, I’ve never been to L.A., but from all I’ve heard, it’s pretty bad.  Where else can you be in your car sipping on a latte, with your shoes kicked off and feet on the dash, all because you haven’t moved in an hour? But coming to a dead stop on the interstate in the Midwest, even briefly, this is a big deal.

I’ve noticed a trend in our Iowa drivers lately, who seem to be becoming more L.A.-ish all the time.  This morning I must have had a sign on the back of my car that said ‘please cut in front of me,’ the way someone used to slap a sign on the nerdy kid’s back that said ‘kick me’ when we were in high school.  Not funny then, and not remotely funny now.  When the gridlock finally broke and we started moving along at sixty or more, having a big old Buick miss my front bumper by scant inches was not something to laugh about.

Of course, the problem with the sign was that it must have been written in teeny-tiny letters, because all of the drivers behind me had to ride my tail in order to see it.  Then there were the ones who tried to creep through the red lights downtown.  Like what? No one is going to see them? Seriously? Or the ones who changed lanes without turn signals, or sped up to get by me and then slowed down once they were in front of me, or, or, or….

Driving used to be a lot more fun when I was a kid. Windows wide open, radio blasting. I didn’t mind so much what other people did.  I was invincible and so what they did didn’t affect me.  Maybe that’s the problem. I’ve become a grouchy grown-up.  Wonder when that happened?

Tap The Keg

There is a certain satisfaction in seeing something that you never thought would go well do so. Two days ago I finished the ending to a book that was started with one person’s idea over a year ago. I haven’t finished the middle of it yet. Don’t know if I ever will because the story is not mine alone. But I know how it ends. With sacrifice and tears, but with the knowledge that some things are worth everything. Of course, being a romance writer, she gets her happily ever after. I mean, come on…what else, right?

We as authors work toward the end goal of our books. The point where we can say, ‘I’ve told it all. There is no more.’ That point is usually a satisfying conclusion, whether a courtroom drama where the bad guy gets it the way he deserves or an urban fantasy where the good guys win the war. Along the way, though, there is a lot of story to cover, and it’s the steady climb to the top that keeps readers up late at night, turning just one more page.

Like the graphs we used to have to draw in math classes, there will be peaks and valleys along the way. The highs and lows of the hero’s or heroine’s tale, those intense moments of discovery or epiphany, get us as readers. In the hands of a wordsmith, we get carried along with the protag, finding out what makes him or her tick and maybe discovering a few things about ourselves, as well.

It’s those highs and lows that make our characters real and our stories the kind that keep fans coming back for more. It’s at the heights of the peaks or the depths of the valleys, those impact moments, when we authors connect the most with the rest of the human race. Where we can almost hear someone can say yeah, I’ve been there, too. I know how she feels.

Because most of us have experienced our own valleys, it’s easy to identify with the woman who is struggling to raise two children on her own, or the man who just lost his job in a down-sizing economy. We sympathize with the fantasy hero who stands there, sword in hand, one against formidable odds but doesn’t back away, and in the same breath applaud the woman who loves him and who draws her own weapon as she stands next to him. Even if we’ve never been in the exact situation, we get the emotion.

We humans are warehouses of emotions. They swim around through our bloodstreams and rattle our brains. They’re stored in rooms and cubbyholes of our psyches and, some of the darker ones, behind locked doors. They make our hearts sing, our pulses pound, our eyes weep. You can’t write a good story without them, but because a lot of them are painful, we keep them stopped up, so much so that our stories may not have the lows we need to play the highs off against.

We have to tap our emotional kegs in order to catch our readers’ attention, to make them say, yup, that’s how it is. To give them the satisfaction of knowing that our hero deserves the happy ending because we put him through hell to get it. To get that sigh when the final page is read and the cover closed. And maybe even to leave them wanting more.

Why We Write

I don’t remember when it was that I decided to start writing. Actually, I don’t remember that it was a conscious decision at all.  It just was.  One day I sat down to write something, and here I am years later, with several somethings under my belt, still writing. 

Sure, there were times when I didn’t.  When the kids were growing up or life interfered in other ways.  When my godmother died, I wrote a tribute to her and then didn’t write anything for the next four years. Then one day, I did again.  It wasn’t anything specific that rekindled my love affair with the written word.  I think that my emotions finally became unblocked enough to let out the words that had been milling about in my psyche for those quiet years.  The words had never gone away.  It was just that the surrounding wall had been too thick for them to breach.

Being a writer is a funny job, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha.  I mean funny odd.  You have to be somewhat of an introvert, although my family and friends would never call me that.  But I crave solitude the way people crave air or water, and some of my happiest times are when I’m among the characters I’ve created in the worlds that I’ve built. These people speak to me in ways I could never have imagined. 

It’s a hard life, too, especially when you do have a family or close circle of friends, people who love you and need you and expect a certain amount of daily contact from you. I’ve (guiltily) invented excuses more than once to bypass a function in order to write. I’ve put off dinner, forgotten to do the shopping, stayed up so late I could barely keep my eyes open at work the next day.  I even considered cancelling Christmas one year, but my children were having none of that.

This is not a life for the faint-hearted or the maybe-I’ll-write-a-book-someday crowd. You have to want it, badly, and be willing to sacrifice for it.  Because once it gets hold of you, there is no turning back.  Whether you publish or not, get recognition or not. You might never make a dime off what you write, might actually lose money doing it, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s a built-in mechanism with no off switch, this writing life. To quote a very wise being, you either do or do not. There is no try.

Tribute

A very close friend of mine lost his mother this past weekend.  I never met her in person or talked to her on the phone. Never sat in her kitchen and shared a pot of tea or looked through her picture albums and listened to her stories about her family.  I mourn her loss because I will never get to do those things. Yet in some small way, I felt like I did know her. Jack described her to me a bit and shared a photo or two. Sometimes he would let drop a few things about her and how it was to be growing up with her.

It wasn’t just those things, though, that made me feel I knew this woman who lived an ocean away. It was Jack himself who showed me through his actions just who his mother was. Who helped me see, through the words he writes and the attitudes he bears, her guiding hand through his youth and her gentle wisdom beyond his callow years.  Through him I can see her scolding her children to mind their manners, to be protective of the old and the young, to give the shirt off your back if that’s what it takes to ease someone’s plight.  I see a woman with infinite patience and a keen sense of humor, someone not afraid to have a bit of fun or to light into one of her kids if he’d done something wrong. A woman who put up with her husband’s craziness and the antics of her children with grace and style and every once in a while, a roll of her eyes.

In the man Jack has become, I get my own clear picture of the woman who raised him. I don’t know how accurate my picture of her is, and I’ll never know for sure now, but somehow I think it might be close. In the wake of her passing, what I will miss the most about this very special lady is the possibility of getting to know her better.