Best Case Scenario

May, 2020.

Like waking up in a brightly-lit apartment and seeing, feeling, nothing but darkness. You check each bulb to make sure they haven’t been replaced with something far more magical while you were “sleeping”. 60 watts have been transformed into an amount of lumens that makes everything feel topsy turvy enough that you hold back the want to choke on invisible fumes. The fact that everything, every single little thing, is just slightly off means that your new reality is through a set of goggles with a vertigo setting.

This morning I was not sure what was wrong. As most mornings go I watch as 6 a.m. becomes 7, 7 topples into 8, and only at half past 9 can I do something that resembles removing myself from my bed like a fly stuck to glue-lined tape. If I thought that I was alone in this waking dance then I would be sorely mistaken. I am living one life among many who reach out for the railing and find it missing. Stolen in the middle of the night, the object that tied us to our sanity has gone the way of the dodo.

Emotions are like a bouquet of multi-colored flowers. Each day we pick off a thorny singular rose and we don’t know which it will be today. A blue-dipped stem and we prick ourselves to the beat of anger, not knowing in which direction to aim it. Red the color of deep passion means something else entirely as we lie on our couch and even the way our cats sleep makes us want to cry. There is a bout of happiness as we brush our fingers on petals the color of a newborn chick, but it is short-lived. Every minute a reminder that the self-created smokescreen of our lives is still see-through and we can see the fabrication as well as the reality.

We creatives are in mourning. Days filled with minutes that feel stolen, hours that stretch on begging to be filled. With flung paint, pages of finely-crafted words, in front of a microphone with an emotionless weapon at hand. We told ourselves, “If I only had the time I could finally make my masterpiece.” But they never trained you how to paint in the middle of a war zone. How to write when you look at your hand around your pen and wonder if you need to wash your hands again. We go to sleep under heavy blankets of guilt, hoping we will feel better in the morning.

What does all of this even mean? Months and months of trekking through thick mud that tries to take us under instead of forward. Uncertainty like seeing a target but they’ve changed the ways to throw the darts without telling us. The only thing we can do, it seems, is to tell ourselves that getting out of bed, weighed down by our heavy thoughts, is a battle won. The war on the other hand isn’t something we can fight. We can only do our best to stay just outside the battle lines even when those lines are constantly in flux. A calmer mind once told me that we were now experiencing something that no one alive has experienced. Did this make me feel better? Worse? More unsure? I still don’t know. But I do know I have since put my fingers on this keyboard and put one word after the other. Reading this back I may even be able to comprehend it.

I wonder sometimes if it is true that they’ve given us a blessing in disguise. That fate has played its hand when it saw us overworking ourselves and losing sight on the things that matter. If that is true, then are these the side effects? The guilt that we carry in our pockets that jingle like rocks as we make our way from shallow to deeper water. 

Maybe we should make a list with two columns. We can write an effigy for the things that we miss in one column, ruminate on even the most petty things—though we know nothing now can be considered petty, not anymore. In the other we can think of the first things we will do once these restrictions are lifted. What are you most excited about? Running your hands down the bookstore shelves, sitting in tattered seats with the remnants of a prior patron’s popcorn pile. 

As lonely as we feel, we are oddly united by our longing and loss. We are holding on to things as if they have been doused in grease and are threatening to escape. It seems that all we have is an untapped amount of forgiveness we can use on ourselves daily. Hourly, if it necessitates it. There is no right way to spend your now open calendar, no matter what others try to tell you. Like a teacher who has been given a subject that has just been created a few weeks before. It’s a good time to hold on to those few things that don’t make their death dive out of our hands, grow legs, and crawl in between the cracks. Tell a friend you believe in them. Tell yourself that you believe in yourself. 

Read that book that has been burning a hole on your to-be-read shelf

Or don’t.

Begin writing the novel that has been haunting you for thirteen years.

Or don’t.

There is no right way, and maybe that is the best case scenario.

Discipline

Kids, take your seats.

Tommy, stop pulling Jasmine’s hair.

Johnathan… Is that a water gun filled with jasmine-scented cleaner?

Okay. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll try to teach amid the chaos.

It’s not like they are paying me enough either way.

Discipline.

The word makes you shiver, doesn’t it?

The fact is, if I guilt trip myself into doing something, I am more likely to do it. When it comes to writing: the more I write, the better I feel about my writing. The words that took longer to come out—be it in a story context, or any context—don’t hit as many walls as they once did. The only thing I can blame it on is consistency. Writing when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to. As well as pride in my work. Even if the pride goes only as far as saying to myself, “Hey, it isn’t good in the slightest, but there it is. Now edit it before someone sees it.”

I’ve tried to blog and have failed many times. These blogs were usually centered on an idea. There was a music blog. Another where I paired coffee with music, which lasted two posts (I ran out of steam with this silly idea pretty quickly). I held a short story and poetry blog on Tumblr for many years and had gathered a consistent following. But even so, I pulled all my work from it and kept it to myself for a while. I’ve realized that sharing your writing over blogs just doesn’t always work. And if I were to keep up a blog I would just have to write about whatever I felt like writing. Hence this post about what it takes me to write a post.

I talk about routine a lot (see my January 13th post, aptly called “Routine). It’s not that I have to follow a set of guidelines for my day. But it helps. Especially when it comes to something like writing. Especially when you aren’t getting paid, keeping to some kind of schedule can be the thing that you need. I tell myself to write by Saturday, edit by Sunday, and post by Monday. Alas, this never seems to go as planned. But it is a loose window that I can work with and, so far, it has been fairly productive.

As a fiction writer, I will get into my head a lot, trying to shake through the cobwebs to get from one point to another without confusing myself or my future reader. This type of work can become exhausting. Take many of my posts: walking, believing, learning new things. These are necessities when it comes to getting out of my own head and remembering the world around me. If I forget that there are people, animals, buildings, stars, and mountains out there, then my prose will fall flat. That much is obvious. But that aside, sometimes I want to just write about real life, without all of the fluff.

An open dream of mine is to be a journalist. I think a lot about following a subject around the world and documenting what I see, smell, hear, taste, and touch. There is so much discipline in that field. I long for it sometimes, especially when I am building palaces in my mind, trying to make them sound interesting on paper. There is discipline in that too, of course. Roping in your creativity enough until it makes sense to someone who doesn’t share your mind. To you journalists out there, I envy you. I know that is a tough, and often dangerous, job. It is also very important work.

“So what are you really trying to say?” Johnny is asking me, smelling completely like cleaner. Listen, I am not entirely sure, you little shit. Maybe I am just reiterating things to myself so I stay disciplined in this crazy, non-linear type of work they call Writing. It may all seem obvious, especially to those who are published writers already, but sometimes discipline itself is hearing the same things over and over again. It’s like your ABCs. Or something.

Face Value

“I believe everything has a soul.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

“… is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“One time, springing to my feet, I said, ‘This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!’” — John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

There can be an intense want to make the world around seem bigger than itself. It isn’t that the birds aren’t beautiful in the way they gather and fly in formation, up and over the mountain’s crest. The way that the tree stands firm no matter how hard the winds blow, no matter how much the squirrel plays on its rough skin. What one is wont to do is to make the tree explode and the birds talk. It is for that reason that sometimes I have to venture back into the real world and try my best to write it as I see it. Because the world is as beautiful as a fantasy novel. As breathless as a sci-fi thriller. Yet it is hard to distill that into anything worth reading, sometimes. Unless you have that intrinsic eye like that of the nature writers.

Nature writers like John Muir, Anne Dillard, and Mary Oliver are the ones I truly look up to. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was a book that blew things wide open for me. The way that Dillard could sit by the waterside and watch nature as if it was the most spectacular play that she had ever seen. Of course the “Father of National Parks”, John Muir, has the same effect. His wonder was like a child’s when traversing Yosemite and the Sierras, when taking a thousand mile walk of the gulf. I think of Muir looking at every squirrel and talking to them, and them talking back in such a quiet chitter that he has to ask “what?” a dozen times. I think of Dillard dipping her feet into the water and it turning the color of burgundy wine. None of this happens, so I stop myself from pretending.

Pretend. A state of being that seems to flitter away at some point in one’s life. Those that harness it become artists, writers, creative types. To some pretend is a state that is just slightly removed from reality but enough to feel isolated. Calm. Safe. Solitary. There is a way to have both, it seems. To live in some thin veil of fantasy that drapes over the tangible. It is there that one can truly take their brush and their pen. I am sure this is what Oliver saw, too, when she gleaned her poetry from the natural world. These nature writers who took the world at face value but also saw the beauty bubbling underneath in shades unseen by the lazy eye. 

It is true that in your craft you must open up your mind and let your surroundings inspire you. The cat lying sleepily at your feet may not be doing much—like my own Olive, as I watch her pet the same square of carpet over and over. The music more like a metronome as you type word after word. You want to make the picture frames detach from the wall and revolve around your head. You want Olive to grow human size, wink, and then shrink to normal. But Muir didn’t need to make El Capitan shine like a diamond to make it beautiful. Especially when the sunset already turned it into a golden spectacular. 

Dipping back and forth between writing fiction and non-fiction can be challenging. You feel the want to write purple prose until it rots your teeth from its sweetness. You hold a red pen and refuse to cross out that sentence that you would vote is the sentence to end all sentences. But sometimes the best sentence is one with five of the best words that you could come up with. 

These are the things I tell myself. I am thick into revising my novel and writing these essay-type blogs. I am doing my best to extend the boundaries of my writing and seeing what works. And, most importantly, what doesn’t. My suggestion? Look to the nature writers to see how they view the world with a microscope and a fine-toothed comb. If anything, they are most worthy inspirations for your fiction.