Black-And-White

Where is your focus? Is it on the extraordinary? Or is it on the mundane?

And what do we define as extraordinary anyway? Also, how do we define mundane? Those seem to be extremes, outer limits, or close to it.

Again, there is always a range, it seems to me, a continuum. Isn't there? Things are not black and white, generally. Even total black can be represented in varying lighter shades. The purity of white can also be slightly tainted with fill over a range, too.

It seems to me, to recognize this --- that there is a range or a continuum --- is a higher degree of wisdom and insight than seeing things only as extremes.

Memory

Just how important is memory in the total scheme of things? Some might say it's very important; others say it's a blessing not to have a good memory. I believe my memory is quite poor, but perhaps I exaggerate. It seems like I just knew so many other people who had better memories in comparison to me in life's experience that it made me feel inept sometimes. In fact, quite early on in my college education I decided not to pursue a degree in chemistry because others seemed to have a better memory than me and therefore had to devote less time and effort to studying and still aced the tests.

I'm not sure abandoning chemistry as an occupation was such a bad deal. I ended up, through happenstance, doing a job I really enjoyed. I couldn't have stumbled into something more conducive to my nature than I did. And the job didn't particularly require much of a long-term memory. What I didn't know, I quickly learned I could look up and research. Part of the job involved analysis and creativity.

Memory is always helpful. When I'm writing creatively, like working on a novel for instance, it is helpful to remember what has happened many pages ago, to remember your characters, the nature of a scene, or the characteristics of your antagonist.

How Heavy Are Your Thoughts

It's not as if we could ever be static. That's not even a possibility. Even when we die, the atoms and molecules of our body are teeming with activity. Even when we're totally dissembled by maggots and the dissolution that we undergo over time after we die, there is still movement and activity. When we suggest that something is static, having no motion, we error. It's as simple as that. If you think about it, nothing is at total rest.

The monitor there before you as you work on your computer, or read this blog entry, maybe seems like it is static, but it's not in any true sense. If it's turned on, and if you're reading this it must be, there's a mass of organized electronic activity within it. Even if it were turned off, nothing of a material nature is without motion down at the subatomic level. All of being is in motion, relatively speaking.

On the other hand, what about the intangible? First of all, is there such a thing as something intangible, like thoughts and ideas? Or are they simply an assemblage of the tangible in some inconceivable way that we don't comprehend or understand?

Heavy thoughts. --- note how we even make tangible our thoughts, calling them 'heavy.' No less heavy, though, than the idea that "in today walks tomorrow," as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said.

Fiction Is Absolutely True

I recently completed reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Kudos to him.

I hope someday I can to some degree and in some small measure convey the nature of my culture and geography as well as I think he does in his book about a boy living on an Indian reservation but going off the reservation to go to school.

Sure, the story he tells of Junior is a fiction. In some measure all of life is fictitious, all caught up in our imagination and fantasy. Fiction or not, however, the truth seems to shine through the best works of literature.

Hacking Away the Underbrush

I'm glad the feeling comes in difficult endeavors that you think you can make your way through.

Paul Simon said he gets a satisfied feeling by writing songs that never comes in any other parts of his life. Susan Shaughnessy said of writing books --- or in writing long narratives, I guess, distinguishing from songwriting --- that you get the sense of a breakthrough coming.

I've only finished one novel, start to finish. I have to admit there was, or, perhaps, there were times when I felt a breakthrough was coming and had other senses of insight and ways of getting through a forest when I felt lost in the dense trees and brush. It was nice to have the feeling or the sense that you could break through. But that all didn't finish the work or make it any easier to stick to it and fight through it. Sometimes the underbrush had to be hacked away.

Library

Weird isn't it? I don't go to libraries much. It seems like about the only time I go there is to show up for my critiquing sessions with my fellow critiquers. I don't usually check out books --- at least, not at the library. Occasionally, I'll help Shelley download an audio book to listen to, but I don't even usually listen to it myself.

Shelley goes. She goes all of the time. Takes a bag; fills it up; brings it home. Chooses a few of the books to look at, reads some. Pretty soon she says it's time to go to the library again to check the old ones in and some new ones out.

As I think about that notion --- me not going to the library or checking books out there --- I feel a little ashamed. It's as if I don't wanna put such information out here for all the world to see. Here I am, professing to be a writer, and I don't go to library and I don't check out books. Weird, huh?

I remember going to the Clearfield library when I was a boy. I don't know who I was there with. It doesn't seem like my parents would have taken me there. I don't recall them ever going there, having library cards, or whatever you needed back then to check things out. It's possible I was there with a friend or with my sister. However, I doubt my sister ever checkd anything out from the library either.

I had a friend named Tom --- well, I still consider him a friend --- whose mother worked at the library for a while --- at least, I think she did. I doubt, however, him having a mother who worked there had any connection to my memory of being there, but perhaps.

But I read. I would say, relative to the general population, I read a lot. What I read, however, is usually something we've purchased over the years. Sometimes, I'll pick up a library book Shelley has brought home, and I'll read that. For example, I'm reading Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr. Come to think of it, though, I actually went to the library with Shelley that day, and I picked that book out. She read it, liked it, and I decided I better read it.

In fact, I ought to decide to make going to the library and picking out books to read more of a habit. It's not a bad idea.

Writing to Pick Subjects Apart

Does writing have to hurt somebody?

Can what is written please everybody and get received across the board without criticism or concern?

Hardly. Everybody brings to reading their agenda, their biases.

It's no different for the writer. The writer brings biases to the table in dissertation. I don't know of any way around that.

My writing has a focus, at least it seems that way to me. What got me writing more seriously to begin with was a friend telling me his wife was leaving him for an older man who had a reputation as a polygamist. My friend and his wife had children, like me, and I couldn't fathom losing both my wife and my children to an older man who ascribed to something as crass and ugly as polygamy. So, in dealing myself with the trauma the situation of my friend faced, I started writing about a scenario enough like it that I thought I could get some resolution or understanding from it. Of course, it was a fiction, a creation of my mind, only partially related to the actual situation as I understood it.

I finished the novel --- as revised, it has almost 120,000 words --- of the scenario I crafted based upon the premise of a wife leaving her husband and taking her kids to be with a polygamist.

The next writing project I undertook had me contemplating Al Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq, war, and the consequences to family when a family member is lost fighting abroad. Not only that, but the notion of religious fanaticism that causes men and women, and even children, to sacrifice themselves to create death care in others for political ends. I wrote about 100-120 pages on that project and put it on the back burner. There were some problems with the beginning of the story and its setting and the environment that I wanted to percolate with the full intention of returning to it later.

As I analyze it now, it also involved scenarios for which I felt emotionally drained: self-sacrifice to kill others and push a political/religious agenda; the death and loss of a father of a family due to military service in a war abroad that had devolved into a morass of involvement that should probably never have happened to begin with; and the prejudice in America of those who are outside of the norm.

My next project --- the one item most actively working on presently --- involves the family of immigrants from Mexico to the United States who don't have documentation. The protagonist is a boy who was born on the Mexican side of the border just before his parents crossed the border into the United States the first time. The story is set when the boy is fourteen and the family has lived in the United States all that time, and for the most part during that history they faced no dire consequences for being in the United States without legal documentation. However, as the United States economy started to tank, the heat on them as immigrants without documentation start to rise, and their lives became much more difficult and complex.

So most of what I choose to write about seems to involve questions I have about the nature of things in the world around me, usually, things I have no control over but have an emotional impact on me because they seem like they would have a grave emotional and physical impact upon people in those situations.

I suppose this is somewhat the process of all people who try to write.