True Fiction

Several years ago on a flight from Salt Lake City to San Jose, I sat next to a young man who had his pet cat, Grommet, in a duffle bag at his feet. It was a kitty duffle, specially equipped with water and mesh air vents. He had medicated the cat, and we joked about giving the same thing to the kid in the row in front of us. As it turned out, the kid stayed quieter than Grommet did.

The young man made the mistake of unfastening a snap on the duffle to reach in and stroke the kitty to calm him. The cat immediately poked its head out the opening and kept squirming until he was in the young man’s arms. I was in the middle seat, and Grommet decided he’d like to come sit with me. He was a beautiful, gray cat with white paws and a partly white face and chest. And he was ticked.

The more his owner tried to settle the cat on his lap, the more Grommet fought to escape. He made a valiant lunge toward the seat in front of us, and it almost worked. From the safety of his aisle seat, my husband commented stoically, “That cat’s looking for a place to go to the bathroom.”

Grommet bit his master soundly enough to draw blood and that earned kitty another sedative. But still it took fifteen minutes of struggle before the guy could wad up the cat and stick him back through the small opening in the zippered bag. I found the whole incident amusing – until a horribly foul odor began to emanate from the bag.

As any frequent flyer knows, not much happens in the stuffy confines of an airplane that doesn’t waft throughout the cabin. We had half an hour left in the flight and I don’t know who was sickest. The poor kitty began to yowl and cry, softly, which made it even more pitiful. The young man told me miserably that he was moving across country and he’d thought the flight would be easier on his cat than a long car trip.

I got one last glimpse of Grommet and his owner at the baggage carousel. The young man’s eyes were wide and glazed, his hair literally standing on end as he carried his suitcase and the kitty duffle across the airport floor. Liquid dripped from the duffle. I’m going to say the kitty’s water dish had spilled.

I did what any writer would do; as soon as we hit our hotel room, I wrote the whole episode down. Later, when I was working on a scene in which the heroine was fighting not to be put through a body-sized opening into an old cistern, I thought of Grommet’s all-out desperation not to be put back in that bag. I could feel the no-holds-barred determination of both captor and captive, and I think the scene worked.

What’s that quote from Philip Roth? Nothing truly bad ever happens to a writer; it’s all material.

It starts when I least expect it, perhaps when I’m out walking, or washing dishes, or watering plants. There’s embryonic longing, a tiny squiggle in my stomach. I picture it like the determined motion of bacteria under a microscope. What is that? I think. Something I ate?  There’s a feeling of leavening, of rising and expanding. It begins in the solar plexus and blends outward like osmosis, until my whole body feels light and yet full.

I remain still and try to name the feeling, so foreign yet familiar. For a while it’s purely physical but finally it permeates my brain and breaches the chasm between subconscious and conscious. Recognition begins: Ah, I know you now. We’ve been here before. And I marvel that this miracle has come again.

There’s no way to name it except through cliche: The well is refilling. My insides will expand beyond my body’s capacity, and soon my shell must split. I don’t fear it, though it won’t be painless, this spilling out. The discomfort is somehow satisfying, and the pleasure, when it comes, is like nothing else.

The urge to write is what keeps me human. My mind begins to spin stories and the words pull me back to the keyboard. Like a metal filing to a magnet, like a swallow to the mission.  See?  It’s happening already.

There’s nothing quite like the queasy exhilaration of starting a new novel. It’s the most fun you’ll ever have, but it’s scary as hell because you know the story is too big for you; you’re unequal to the task.

You start anyway – exploring the characters, discovering who they are, what has happened to them and what makes them real. But you aren’t smart enough, aren’t good enough, to pull it off. You’ll never do justice to the subtleties of these people you already love even before you completely know them. You feel a desire to transport into their world – and not come back. To live their stories without the pain and hard work of tacking them to the page.

At this point the person you live with finds you spacey, irritable, euphoric. Unless that person has been through this with you before, he thinks you’re nuts. He’s right. You can’t wait to get to the computer, but then you want to bolt from the chair because there’s this feeling in your stomach like writhing worms. Like going over the top on the biggest roller coaster in the universe and you can’t see the bottom of the track. This is why you do it. You love it, hate it, fear it, need it.

God, I love being a writer.

Do you know how hard it is to watch your child deploy to war in the Mid-East – for the third time in six years?

Some of you do know. Many sons and daughters have served even more tours. By the third deployment, you start to wonder how many times the little buzz-haired boy you raised can walk into harm’s way and return safe and whole. I won’t say unscathed, because nobody returns without cost.

Everyone says it’s much safer in Iraq now, but every day we read of deaths from IEDs and suicide bombings. Our son wears body armor under a standard uniform that’s not cool to start with, in summer temperatures that reach 110 to 120 degrees. And I better not find out he ever goes out without that body armor, even though this is a kid who loved to goose hunt in freezing weather and used to suffer in Oklahoma heat.

I can’t know what it’s really like for our military people, how they face their fears or mark the days missing their families, how they cope. I admire them more than I can speak. But I do know what it’s like for the ones left behind.

Think of the thousands of spouses and children, the mothers and fathers, who deal with this every day. They go about their daily lives doing their best to function normally, but a big chunk of their minds and hearts is overseas, sweating out the days with someone they love more than life itself.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from W. Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

I love this quotation because it reminds me I’m in good company as I struggle along on my latest novel. It keeps me from taking myself too seriously. I like to think of old W.S.M. delivering this line with a twinkle in his eye, perhaps to some worrier like me who asked him to explain the unexplainable.

My friend, mystery writer Carolyn Hart, has forty-some novels published, yet she says the next one is always as difficult to write as the last. She can continue to do the hard work, book after book, because she knows that if she keeps showing up at the desk and putting in the time, eventually magic will happen. And that magic will let her finish the book.

Storytellers may operate under the illusion that they’re in control of their work, but sooner or later, if they immerse themselves deeply enough into the story and the characters, something else takes over. That’s the moment every fiction writer lives for. But first we have to believe in the magic and keep showing up at the desk, no matter how long it takes.

Hello, Readers and Friends. Welcome to my blog. In coming weeks, I hope to post bits of writing philosophy, random thoughts (mostly about writing), and news about my current projects. I invite you to drop by once in a while and comment on anything you happen to like.