Unhappy Endings

Sometimes, I go back and reread some of my writing, and I come away thinking that my themes might be construed as sad or even depressing. While I am fully aware of it this, and many cases, it's not actually intentional. But as most writers know, a piece of writing can start out in one tone and quickly veer off into another, with no help whatsoever from the writer other than what his or her unconsciousness contributes along the way.


Water flows downhill and always seeks those egresses that are below it. That doesn't mean that some of kind of deterioration happens along the way. In actuality, the water may even become enriched by whatever it picks up along its downward fall across rapids or as it snakes its way through woods that crest a hillside. Story plots often behave in much the same way, quickly taking a plunge at the first sign of a low spot, and then rushing on toward the sea, which, in this case, is represented by a stack of pages or a computer file that constitutes the whole body of thought gathered finally in one place.


Here's the thing: writers are constantly advised to "write what they know." And in my case, there haven't been all that many happy endings in my life to draw experience from. So how can I write about something that I'm not all that familiar with? Sadness, on the other hand, in the form of suffering, death, disruption, abandonment, rejection, tragedy, and any other manifestation of loss in between...yeah, THOSE I know a lot about, so it's not surprising to me that my stories would assume an aura of loss, sadness, or misfortune.


For a writer, the actual act of writing is an exercise in exploration. For as we type or write, we discover new things about the world, about other people, and about ourselves. Sometimes, too, we remember things that we might have thought long buried and forgotten. But the act of writing requires an expenditure of energy, and energy, as we all know, is everywhere at once, filling the large and the smaller spaces equally, and in this case, insinuating itself into the tiniest crevices between our buried thoughts and impressions, often bringing them back into the light without warning.


How often  have I sat here writing when, all of a sudden, a sentence or a phrase pops out at me in full print that I didn't consciously compose but that seemed to materialize out of nowhere, small shards of memories I'd suppressed or that were crowded out by more immediate concerns. And if they happen to be sad, then that's where the catalyst of that phrase lived for a very long time before it decided to become part once again of a greater whole.


While writers expound often upon events of the past, the actual act of writing is happening now, in real time, giving new life to old impressions and bits of tales generated from experience and perception. I envy anyone who is able to tack a happy ending on to his or her stories. But I suspect that, more often than not, loss and sadness, which seem to leave much deeper and more indelible tracks on the human soul, are much more familiar to a much larger audience.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876

A Certain Clarity

Ah, the blessed relief that is the ideal summer day, the kind that warrants no loud buzz of artificial cooling or the annoying whir of fans, and that allows nature's sounds in. Gone, for the time being anyway, is the mirror-clouding haze of humidity, the dampening of sound, the slowing of the senses. In its place, a masterpiece of a day, in which all is clearly defined and unmistakable in its purpose...each leaf delineated against the ones beneath, below and above it...each bird song a top-forties-chart-worthy melody...the pond a blue that not even the sky could aspire to. 


A wind hums in the trees as I write, providing the melody into which the distant sound of a lawnmower cannot intrude, with my wind-chimes adding their own melodious notes. Nature has arbitrarily decreed this day perfect, and who am I to argue? This is clearly a time to rejoice, if only within my own sphere of experience, in the tiny innocuous niche that I occupy.


This rejuvenation that comes out of the west via the ever-moving air masses imbues all that it touches, my own spirit included, with a new vibrancy, and reawakens my instinctive curiosity. I spy new depths among the greenery, new shapes which were hidden to me before, see new hues among the sun-drenched petunias, screen all of my sensory impressions like a 49'er to get at the jagged gleaming bits.


This is a day made for writers, for those processors of words who can take something like this and make others see without needing to utter the words "oh look!"

On the Inside Looking Out

You'll have to forgive me if I seemed to be nonexistent these last few days. I was, you see, living inside a story that I'd written, and I couldn't move out until it was finished. Based on childhood impressions that I've kept with me all these years, it was necessary to travel back to that time and take up residence once again in the world I occupied at the time, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. So this meant that I had to pack all my emotional bags and bring them with me for the duration, as I am never sure just when I'll emerge completely from inside a story.




This time around, I went back to the 1960's and to a house I'd known as a child. I didn't live in the house, at least not in a real sense. But it appropriated enough of my imagination that I was fully able to enter it and spend a considerable amount of time there absorbing its energy and storing lots of impressions away as well.




Many writers will tell you that they are introverts, as I am; and as such, that means that we spend, or have spent in our lives, a great deal of time living inside our heads where all that we've seen, done, and felt is stored away and keeps us company. It's a lot like a box of mementos, only we writers go through ours a lot more often than other people do, because, well, we don't have a choice really.


Those impressions and memories never give us a moment's peace, so that it sometimes appears to other people as if we are living in the past, when nothing could be further from the truth. We're not living IN the past, but WITH the past ever at our beck and call; and sometimes, if we're lucky, all those impressions, all that sensory information, comes together into what we like to call stories, because there really is no other word that adequately sums up what they are.




And so the last few days, that's where I've been...in that little house in Biddeford, Maine, or on the path leading to it as well as on the corner of the street I grew up on...reliving some of the experiences I had almost 50 years ago, and watching them all come together, almost like a small cyclone picking up everything in its path, and then redepositing it something that is only a shadow of what that time was like and how it affected me.




But I'm back now, for the time being anyway, until I am once again whisked off to some other initially undisclosed place that may as well be a million miles, and as many light years away, but that has been right here with me all along.


https://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Lovejoy/e/B00JJ259DS