Thinking About Writing

I guess, in the world, there are a lot of writers. And I’m guessing that a lot of them are probably unsuccessful, whether that’s their fault or not.

I was reading an essay the other day. The author was talking about what it takes to be a writer, and what you have to give up for writing. Spare time, red meat… Stuff like that. Luxuries, I guess. And I thought, what if after all that, you’re unsuccessful, you’re… gasp… bad?

So I’ve been thinking about that. The author didn’t ask you what you have to give up to be a successful writer. It was merely what you have to give up to write.

The reward of writing, maybe maybe, maybe it’s not necessarily succeeding. Maybe it’s just WRITING, just having had the privilege to write.

Does that make sense? That writing is its own reward?

The simple act of putting words down on paper changes me. As the writing scrawls its way across the page, I can visibly see something tangibly change because of me. I’m changed by seeing the change that I’m causing.

The words themselves, though, are so much greater. The ability to communicate – the ability to make others see, hear, feel, understand, THINK what we’re seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding, THINKING – is so WONDERFUL. Out words, our language… We have such a brilliantly full way to express ourselves through words.

With words, I can place my thoughts inside your head.

The ability, the privilege, of writing, speaking even, is so great and wonderful and gorgeous and worthy of awe that I feel like singing. Aren’t you glad you can READ?

I am.

Sometimes words are so wonderful that isn’t it just amazing that we share a planet with their author? When Markus Zusak speaks, his words go into the same air I’m sucking in right now. The ground that we stand on holds SHAKESPEARE and CHARLES DICKENS somewhere! ISN’T THAT AMAZING?!

It’s so exciting I’m shivering – shaking – with joy and awe and WONDER.

Quiz: Will You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse?

Yes, my darling C.S., this is for you, in more ways than one.

            Surviving the zombie apocalypse is what we’re all about. However, some people don’t even need to bother preparing. Their chances of survival are so low that it’d just be a waste of time and resources. Are you one of those people, or do you have a better chance of survival? Take this quiz and find out!

1. How would you describe yourself?

a. Healthy. I work out, eat right, and do everything the doctors ask. Melanoma? Meet sunscreen. I will live for as many years as I can squeeze out of this well-cared-for machine some call my body.

b. Prepared. The zombie apocalypse is coming, and I will be ready.

c. Pretty and popular. I wear the right clothes and do the right stuff to my hair. Everyone wants to be me, right? Right?

d. I am Chuck Norris.

2. How fast can you run?

a. I’ve been working towards a five-minute mile. Currently, my best is five twenty-two.

b. I can run a mile in three minutes if whatever’s chasing me is sufficiently frightening.

c. Run? I have no idea. I don’t really run. That would make me sweaty. Eww.

d. I’m Chuck Norris. I broke the sound barrier. Then I shattered it.

3. What are your feelings on canned and/or nonperishable food?
a. Canned food has so much sodium. That’s not good for you. But honey is nonperishable. Honey has so many different health benefits!

b. I only eat food that’s canned or nonperishable. Practice for the apocalypse. I WILL BE READY!
c. Gross. I only eat, like, coffee and sushi.

d. I’m Chuck Norris. Food doesn’t perish unless I make it perish.

4. What vaccinations have you had?

a. I carefully read up on each vaccination. I have all of the ones that my doctor and I agreed upon – the ones in which the risk doesn’t outweigh the gain.

b. All of them.
c. I don’t like needles. Anyway, the holes make my skin look bad. So, umm, well, I got that one that they spray up your nose… But that was gross. My nose, like, ran, and it smeared my makeup.

d. Are you kidding? I’m Chuck Norris. I don’t get vaccinated against diseases. Diseases get vaccinated against Chuck Norris.

5. You’re at the military surplus store. What do you buy?

a. Nothing. I’m just window-shopping. A brisk walk through the city was just what I wanted. Burn a few calories (not that I need to), admire the displays… The only problem is the car exhaust I’m allowing into my lungs. Yikes.

b. I pretty much buy them out. Night-vision goggles, body armor, several different kinds of weapons – that’s just what I came for. My impulse buys – jeez. I almost had to delve into my canned and nonperishable food budget! Not to mention those new ZA Spikes…

c. No camouflage. It makes me look awful. Maybe something beige. Beige is so hot right now. But fatigues make you look so shapeless.

d. I’m Chuck Norris. Why would I go to a military surplus store? The military goes to a Chuck Norris surplus store.

6. THERE IS A ZOMBIE OUTSIDE YOUR HOUSE. It’s so close you can almost smell its rotting flesh. What do you do?

a. What? I don’t know! There’s nothing in Healthy Living about zombies! Grab something close at hand – I suppose I could use a tub of wheat germ as a weapon! Yes, that seems good. Bash its head in with a tub of wheat germ.

b. Well, I’d just saunter down to my weapons room. Take my pick of dozens of different kinds of guns, knives, and the like. If that fails, I can run. I’d like to see the zombie that fails to scare me into a three-minute mile.

c. I live in the penthouse. Let the people on the lower floors deal with it. Wait. IT’S ON MY FLOOR! WHAT, LIKE, HAPPENED TO THE PEOPLE ON THE LOWER LEVELS?

d. I’m Chuck Norris. Poor little guy doesn’t even know what’s coming.

RESULTS

Mostly As

            Um, yeah. Good luck. You probably don’t even need to bother preparing. Loosen up a bit – there’s really no point to being so healthy. Why try to live a long life when the zombie apocalypse is coming and you’ll just die anyway?

Mostly Bs

            You’re prepared. You’re confident. You know what’s coming. You’ll probably survive longer than most. However, as you know, your chances of survival are still hovering around zero percent.

Mostly Cs

            Oh, good grief. You’re a waste of resources now. The zombie apocalypse? You probably wouldn’t even be a good sacrifice.

All Ds

            Hey, Chuck. Carlos Ray Norris. What’s up? Your survival is a certainty. Hey, you’ll be lonely. But wait. Chuck Norris doesn’t get lonely. Lonely gets Chuck Norris.

Maybe

            Picture it. It’s summer, long ago. Or maybe not so long ago. Regardless, it’s summer. It’s hot and dry and Minnesota, so it’s hotter and drier.

            We were just kids. Children. Barely sophisticated enough to maintain acceptable personal hygiene, much less tell right from mostly right from wrong.

            At least that’s what we tell ourselves, to justify what we did to that man that summer.

            It was summer, and we were kids, and naturally we were bored. So I suggested we be Red Riding Hood and the wolf. We both wanted to be the wolf. Normally, I’d give in, because it was hot anyway and being the wolf would make it even hotter. But he always got to be the wolf. We decided to settle it in a fair and civilized manner.

            We wrestled. I won.

            We trekked though the forest. My thick pelt was hot, very. My tongue lolled and dripped drool onto the forest floor. His golden curls shone daintily where the light hit them. His vivid red cloak trailed along the ground, collecting dusty dirty and crushed leaves at its edge.

            We wandered into someone’s yard. A dog was tied up, slender and short-haired and large. I growled at it, threatening, for I was the wolf and the dog was merely a dog.

            But the dog started barking. Stupid dog. Is this normal dog behavior?

            A man came out of the house. “What the dickens is that infernal din for?”

            We stood stock still. We were stiller than we have ever been in our lives. Then, very deep in my throat, I growled. I growled at the man.

            The man stared at me for a quiet second. Then the man growled back. The man growled at me.

            I turned tail and ran. He was hot on my heels. That he didn’t trip over his too-big red cloak was a small miracle. The man watched us flee.

            We got back to where we had started. I collapsed, panting, my tail wagging as if it could somehow push more air into my lungs. He wasn’t much better, gasping for breath, his cherubic porcelain face painted rosy red.

            “Why… did we hafta… run like that?” he asked.

            I thought for a bit. “It seemed appropriate.”

            We sat there for a moment, breathlessly silent. Then I said, “I don’t want to be Red Riding Hood and the wolf anymore.”

            We were ourselves again, and as ourselves we walked inside.

To be continued. Maybe. What do you think? Too confusing? Yeah, maybe.

Summer

            Oh, summer. Summer, summer, summer. How I love thee. Shakespeare, you may think your love was lovelier than a summer’s day. Let me tell you, Mr. William Shakespeare Who Most Likely Made That Name Up And Is Dead Anyway So Whatever. There is nothing – nothing – that can top a summer’s day for me right now.

            Sure, sure. I don’t even like summer. It’s raining right now. I am absolutely covered in mosquito bites.

            So what. Right now, I now bliss. And bliss is summer.

Hmm...

Oh, it was a grand garden, thick with the most wonderful produce imaginable. There were raspberries, plump and dark red, that made your mouth water, first with their unexpected tang and then their soft sweetness. Perfect parsnips, radiant radishes, chives that could make a grown man sing. And the carrots. Oh, the carrots. Mrs. Harrow's carrots were an almost exultant experience - their shy, almost-sweet flavor, their perfect, crisp-but-won't-break-your-teeth crunch, their overall aura of strength. Mrs. Harrow's carrots sent tangible energy shivering down to your toes when you ate one.

Real

I’m not sure if people are very interesting, but that’s what I’m led to believe in the course of my reading. Fictional people are all very interesting. They all have this tough, cool outer shell but really inside they’re smart and nice. I kind of don’t believe that that’s real. In my experience, people who act tough are. Or they’re idiots. And cool people… well, there’s not a lot of actually cool people. Most people just act cool, and really they’re kind of posers.

            Gee, now that I think of it, even realistic fiction isn’t usually so realistic. I’m sure you’ve heard something along the lines of ‘Oh, if only boys in real life were like boys in books…’ from some source. And that basically goes along with my point. Book characters are not like real people. That’d be boring. Real people are all posers.

            NO! I take that back. Some real people are posers. Not all. Not only did the last sentence in the third paragraph make me sound insufferably Holden Caulfield-ish, it was kind of an oxymoron.

            Book characters kind of act more real… they’re fearless and funny and they say whatever they want, because they’re not real and the author is just having fun. You can be anyone you want when you’re writing. Reading is just as good, because it’s less effort, even if there’s less choice involved.

            If I were an author, I’d want to create something completely gorgeous and stunning. Go into it with the intention of making people laugh and cry and feel. Make their hearts stop and their jaws drop. I think that’s the intention of most artists. I will never do so. I’m not going to be a writer, I’m an awful artist, I can’t sing, the instrument I play will never draw tears.

            Everyone wants to be beautiful, to do something beautiful. To make their mark, contribute to the beauty of the world. Which I suppose makes us all realer than we think. I, for example, think of myself as being both real and fake. The things I do never reflect what’s on the inside, but what’s on the inside could be considered reasonably real.

            If I could write myself differently, I would. Knowing that you want to be different and making yourself different are on two completely different levels, however. Everyone wants to be different. There are probably some people who don’t, I guess, but they’ve got it all figured out. Lucky ducks.

            Real is a relative term, I guess. It means different things to different people, and sometimes different things to one person. But real is what we all strive for, right? Even when we're fake, we want to fake being real- we try to make our Botox and lipo look real. 

            The real people are the ones, I guess, who don't try to be anything but what they are.

The Shining

Who doesn't like shiny things? They're flashy. Eye-catching. Brilliant.

Generally, shiny things have no substance. At least shiny people. Some shiny people are wonderful beings who truly shine. But most of the time, people who shine aren't necessarily shiny. 

Shiny is such a ridiculous word. I mean, look at the spelling. You want it to be shinny, but it doesn't have enough Ns.

Shiny makes me think of aluminum foil. Aluminum foil can be attractive and it certainly draws your eye to something, but it's not really practical because it's so fragile. It tears at the slightest pressure. So it's just for storing food really, so it doesn't need to be shiny because who cares how their leftovers look? (Note: Don't put your tomatoes in aluminum foil. Just saying.) I, for one, don't care how my leftovers look. Not that I care how food looks in the first place. It's for eating. It's not art.

Also, while aluminum foil can be very eye-catching, I wouldn't try to make a sign out of it. The shine is so distracting people probably wouldn't even notice what's written on it.

I'm going to pretend this is some metaphor with depth and importance like it started out to be and all the random aluminum foil crap ties together nicely and neatly. That is how I think I'll end it. Leaving my readers to think this is meaningful and not just a weird obsession with aluminum foil.