Writing About Love: Notes Toward 'Why We Should Suffer For This'
This has been a demanding week. Between the oppressive heat (my office feels like an oven right now) and demands at work (we're going live with a new layout/content management program. Which I rather like in theory and kind of hate in practice, at least until my learning curve catches up), I've not had much time to write, or even to get out and read. The latter's a shame, because I'm rather committed to debuting sections of my longer work in progress, Why We Should Suffer for This, at the Outlaw Stage. One of the goals of the Outlaw Stage is for it to be a place to try out new work, and while going in and reading long passages of fiction/poetic prose might sound out of place amid the music and performance art, I found it to be a good fit. Will endeavor to get back as often as I can.
Back when I was in college, one of the college librarians read a small stack of my poems and said, "You write rather well about, love, don't you? You seem to really understand it." I was flattered, as the compliment sounded even better in an English accent (they always do, don't they?) but the fact is, I didn't. What I was writing about in college was loneliness. It was the sort of love a young person writes about ... which is to say, the conception of love expressed by a person who doesn't know shit about love. When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I wrote prettily about love, but I wrote about it like it was a distant object, a Grecian urn in a museum.
To tell the truth, I think love (and its usual corollary, sex) is among the most difficult topics for me to write about. Most of the time, it falls into that place most writers have, the area of their selves they shield from outside view, the small piece they keep for themselves. Writing about love (and sex) makes me feel extremely vulnerable, almost embarrassed. And yet, as I've paraphrased my good friend Amélie Frank saying numerous time, a writer needs to aim for the things that scare them.
Suffer is all about love, and marriage, and how a person becomes someone who can love. And how sometimes being that person's not enough. I opted to approach it as fiction, to give myself that breathing room I needed to overcome my own weaknesses. Will it work? Beats me. So far, the reaction's been good, but I'm only maybe a third of the way through. It's been slow, hard writing. The first chunk is all about teen romance, and how for most, whatever the mythology, it's mostly an exercise in terror and guilt, punctuated by moments of bliss. The next part is largely about the wreckage of young adulthood. I'm still feeling that part out, trying to sort out that chaos. (And that time was definitely chaos for me.)
Writing this has been an interesting experience. It's re-enforced in my mind that I've only ever truly been in love with one person, and that's my wife. And it's forced me to re-evaluate the road I took getting to that place, and to admit there have been other women I could have loved along the way, had the circumstances been different, or had I allowed myself. The book is not my story, but the emotional content is real, and that's a level of vulnerability that I'm unaccustomed to, even though I've been fairly fearless for years writing about other sorts of wounds, many considerably more painful.
I think writing this thing is proving good for me, and I think the commitment to reading it at the Outlaw Stage has been a real prod to keep me moving forward. Even if it all falls apart in the end, it's been instructive.
Now if only we could do something about the goddamned heat ....
Back when I was in college, one of the college librarians read a small stack of my poems and said, "You write rather well about, love, don't you? You seem to really understand it." I was flattered, as the compliment sounded even better in an English accent (they always do, don't they?) but the fact is, I didn't. What I was writing about in college was loneliness. It was the sort of love a young person writes about ... which is to say, the conception of love expressed by a person who doesn't know shit about love. When I was in my late teens/early 20s, I wrote prettily about love, but I wrote about it like it was a distant object, a Grecian urn in a museum.
To tell the truth, I think love (and its usual corollary, sex) is among the most difficult topics for me to write about. Most of the time, it falls into that place most writers have, the area of their selves they shield from outside view, the small piece they keep for themselves. Writing about love (and sex) makes me feel extremely vulnerable, almost embarrassed. And yet, as I've paraphrased my good friend Amélie Frank saying numerous time, a writer needs to aim for the things that scare them.
Suffer is all about love, and marriage, and how a person becomes someone who can love. And how sometimes being that person's not enough. I opted to approach it as fiction, to give myself that breathing room I needed to overcome my own weaknesses. Will it work? Beats me. So far, the reaction's been good, but I'm only maybe a third of the way through. It's been slow, hard writing. The first chunk is all about teen romance, and how for most, whatever the mythology, it's mostly an exercise in terror and guilt, punctuated by moments of bliss. The next part is largely about the wreckage of young adulthood. I'm still feeling that part out, trying to sort out that chaos. (And that time was definitely chaos for me.)
Writing this has been an interesting experience. It's re-enforced in my mind that I've only ever truly been in love with one person, and that's my wife. And it's forced me to re-evaluate the road I took getting to that place, and to admit there have been other women I could have loved along the way, had the circumstances been different, or had I allowed myself. The book is not my story, but the emotional content is real, and that's a level of vulnerability that I'm unaccustomed to, even though I've been fairly fearless for years writing about other sorts of wounds, many considerably more painful.
I think writing this thing is proving good for me, and I think the commitment to reading it at the Outlaw Stage has been a real prod to keep me moving forward. Even if it all falls apart in the end, it's been instructive.
Now if only we could do something about the goddamned heat ....
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