Into the Fire

Many writers claim they don’t remember when they weren’t writing something. I’m among them. I wrote letters to relatives. I wrote stories. I wrote essays. I wrote poems. I wrote. And I read. Novels and more novels. An occasional biography. Mostly horse stories when I was in grade school but expanding to the likes of Daphne duMaurier all the way to D. H. Lawrence and Flaubert with the diverse talents of Fitzgerald, Salinger, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, and Faulkner in between.

Just because I’ve “always” written doesn’t qualify me as a good writer, but it does lean toward casting me with those who understand the mechanics and the emotional significance of writing well-formed and appealing novels in a multitude of genres. I see with my eyes and hear with my mental version of ears the unique voices of authors as they lay down words on a page. I’ve experienced a wide variety of styles and discovered how much I appreciate variety, also having learned that I don’t appreciate robotic and formulaic storytelling.

It seems I am a sequential learner. In order to understand point C I must have cemented points A and B in my mind. Even in learning a foreign language I had to understand the grammar of that language before I could translate and relate to the conversational tone. My final college course was a conversational French class after I returned from my three month adventure to Great Britain and Europe and had fallen in love with France. I got a C. Not a good grade for me. Not my learning style. I had to see and understand the mechanics of the language before it worked for me.

I had some very good English/Language Arts teachers. And one wonderful college literature professor who happened to enjoy that I had an Italian last name since he did too. I learned the mechanics of the English language, and it came easy for me. Perhaps because of that knowledge I’m not afraid to take liberties with the rules—simply because I know that the English language is not bound up by those rules. It is free to communicate properly or formally, and it is free to expand into slang and sloppy rhetoric. It endures cultural slams upon its correctness and rises a bit roughed up from within the rubble still managing to survive for the most part. (Let me interject this observance here: For the most part, from what I’ve heard and seen, the public school system is failing miserably to prolong the beauty of the English language and to incorporate the value of knowing how to speak, spell, and write correctly even when taking liberties with that rightness by choice.)

I realize I’m also an “absorb-er”. After a certain point, the teaching/writing books make my skin itch and my shoulders twitch. C’mon, I argue. Get over that. Words of all kinds developed for usage cannot suddenly be shut out of their native language. I’m forced to realize some writers do not “absorb”, they organize. They respond to lists, to outlines, to catalogued order—and to rules. Too much! I shout. I’m not in school anymore nor do I plan to be. Doesn’t mean I’m done learning, but it sorta does. I’ve come to that place where I’ve grown comfortable in my own writing skin. I’ve absorbed what to do and what not to do, but I haven’t necessarily come to peace with all of it because I stubbornly disagree with some of the mantra. I will say this, at the risk of sounding critical, those who are the most demanding of following the rules tend to produce the cookie-cutter commercial novels. Not that those novels are “bad”—for heaven’s sake they sell! And they’re the backbone of [Christian] publishing for sure. Good stories, good writers. But they don’t comprise the only way to write stories, nor do they satisfy all the available audiences.

God, you are the origin of variety. The source for all the unique and beautiful differences. The distributor of creativity. The provider of every complementing part or portion. Thank you for that. You know I’m desperate for you. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.