Mistakes of a Beginning Writer

It’s the complexity I love, the strange space on the borderlands where good men pick up weapons, where bad men leave their black hearts behind and walk into the river to wash away their sins. The labels are the problem. The good guy, the bad guy, the hero, the villain. It’s a strange line we all walk, and at any time we can walk on down that line. I know there are outliers, people two standard deviations from the mean, but the majority of us move every day somewhere along a line that moves from the best person we can be to the worst.

For me as a writer, this complexity is what appeals. What happens when a person who knows they are essentially good does something that any fool can see is wrong? How does it change them? What do they do now? Try to make it right? Try to forget? Try to bring balance back to the Force? Have nightmares for the rest of their lives, or engage is miserably self-destructive behavior?

I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks of these flawed characters. The rest of the world can go gather up a bunch of rocks for the stoning. What matters to me as a writer is potential, human potential, run hard against the times, culture, history, hearts, blood.

If I start a story with the intention of pushing my worldview, that is propaganda. If I intend to write a story to show people that guns are bad, for instance, I will probably write a piece of propaganda crap. Don’t try to make a point. Just write what happens next.

I’m a new writer, and I don’t always hit the mark I intend. I remember taking lessons in Navajo weaving from a woman when I lived out in Navajo country, and she told me she was just a beginner. She had been weaving since she was a child, so, sixty or seventy years? She was a beginner because she was still just weaving her way into the heart of what she wanted to explore. I’m a beginner in that same way, and I will still be a beginner when the arthritis makes it painful to hit the keyboard. But I intend to write my way into the complex hearts of men, and when I do that, I am holding up a mirror to my own heart.

Good writers should be changed by what they learn, writing their own stories. There have been a couple of stories that have changed me, and I think of them as the ones that mean something, that I’m proud of. I love the new one, The General and the Horse-Lord. These men and women are like me, and not like me, and I am enjoying their company. They are exploring some issues I am also exploring—the loss of meaning in life when you change your career, the way that aging changes us, what it’s like to lose family, when you make a choice your heart directs. I have finished a second book with these characters and am nearly ready to start a third, strangely enough. Part of the fascination for me is the novelistic approach to the characters and the story, rather than the approach of writing a short story, very different. But also I am enjoying their company. They are thinking about the same things I’m thinking about, and through the writing, and the story, we can talk things over.

The other story I really love is Murder at Black Dog Springs. When it was first published, I had rushed the writing, and this was a complicated story that needed time. I was very unhappy with the quality of my own story, because I could see its potential. I just wasn’t there yet. I still think about pulling it out of the Kindle store and working on it. Because the characters are complex and difficult and deeply flawed and I am a beginning writer, and did not show them in all their beautiful colors. My favorite character ever written, Curtis Benally. What an interesting man. So easily condemned for what he does. But if all the men in the world were lined up in a row, waiting for judgment, I would go stand by his side, just so we could talk for awhile. And because I want to stand in his beautiful light.

Clearly I’m not writing for money! I’m publishing for money, and without a great deal of enthusiasm or success. Some days, reading over an editor’s comments, wondering if I have to have one more discussion about commas, I feel like every word is sandpaper across my skin. When the Kindle Store sends me a check for twenty-five dollars for the month, I wonder if that money meant anything to the people who bought my stories. Did they click on the button and download the book, without thinking about the exchange at all? Did that money mean something to them, did they work hard to earn it, and did they offer it in exchange for my story, knowing I also worked hard to write it? In other words, did the transaction have meaning for both of us? It does for me.

It means something to me, when people read my stories. But it’s not about money. It’s about meaning, and the wild and deep and hidden places in the human heart. And if people read my stories and then go gather up a bunch of rocks for the stoning, then I’ve failed as a writer to touch their hearts and minds. I’m a beginner! I’ll work harder next time.