Acts of Surrender 17: All That Matters Is That I'm Writing III

An excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress.

It's a Thursday afternoon. I'm sitting at Albuquerque's west-side Borders, writing on my screenplay of The StarQuest, sequel to The MoonQuest. Rather, I'm not writing. I'm wondering why the writing is so difficult.

Unlike my MoonQuest screenplay, which was adapted from a novel that was one draft shy of its final version and fairly easy to write, I'm working the StarQuest screenplay from a still-chaotic initial draft of the novel. That the movie version is bearing little resemblance to the book is stressful enough. But as I sit here staring at my computer screen, I begin to see my anxiety in an uncomfortably familiar light.

In March 1994, while facilitating a Toronto writing workshop, the initial threads of an as-yet unknown fantasy story began to find its way out of me and onto the page. It was exhilarating to watch this story unfold, word by word. It was gratifying to realize that the Muse Stream writing techniques I'd been teaching could produce a book-length story. And it was exciting to experience myself writing my first novel.

At the same time, the stress was nearly debilitating.

During those first weeks, I wrote only in bed, figuring that if I got up and launched my day, I'd never get to my still-untitled manuscript. I was on Marilyn and Harvey Diamond's "Fit for Life" diet back then, eating only fresh fruit before noon. As I sat up in bed writing longhand, I would scarf down bowl after overflowing bowl of fruit, negating all the diet's healthful benefits with my obsessive attempts to deaden my fear with food.

Within two months, I knew I would be leaving Toronto for rural Nova Scotia. By October, I had sold most everything I owned and trekked thirteen hundred miles to the Atlantic coast, with my few remaining possessions stuffed into the back of a '94 Dodge Caravan. I thought this was to be the start of a new life in a new part of the country. I thought Yarmouth County, across the Bay of Fundy from Maine at the province's southwest tip, would be my longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future home.

I thought many things in those early, naive days of my conscious spiritual journey. What I didn't think was that my radical upheaval and relocation had anything at all to do with The MoonQuest. Why would I, when I'd barely thought about my hundred manuscript pages since flying out to Nova Scotia in June for an exploratory visit.

Yet whatever else Nova Scotia was for me, it was clearly about a novel that was determined to have its way with me, free of all distractions. During my fourteen months in the province, I spent only two days in the big city (Halifax). The rest of the time, I was squirreled away in one rural outpost or another, writing. When my second MoonQuest draft was done, so was my time in Nova Scotia. I packed up the Caravan, said my goodbyes and headed back to Toronto.

Why the anxiety? And why did I need to shed my full urban life for one emptied largely of anything but writerly pursuits?

That first draft of The MoonQuest was an exercise in stripping away large measures of the control that had long ruled my life. Much about how I'd lived my first thirty-something years had been ordered, planned, controlled — designed, if unconsciously, to help me feel safe. The only major exceptions had been three extended and largely unplanned European rail-pass vacations taken in my late twenties.

By surrendering to a fictional story that would reveal itself ony in the moment (I had no outline for The MoonQuest and no sense where the story was taking me), I began to learn to surrender in much the same way to my story, the one that I was living. It was a powerful teaching and, control freak that I still was, a powerfully stressful one. Every day's writing challenged my status quo. Every day's writing was an assault on how I'd always moved through life. Every day's writing forced me to experience life moment-to-moment.

Every day's writing scared the shit out of me.

Beyond the control issues were deep-seated doubts about my creative abilities. A dozen years as a full-time freelance writer had proved I had some talent. But I wasn't sure that an aptitude for newspaper/magazine writing and copywriting could translate into a gift for storytelling. Hell, I wasn't even a very good joke-teller!

Somehow, though, I pushed through and past my terror. Somehow, I completed The MoonQuest, saw it through to publication and managed to win a bunch of awards for it. Somehow, I even managed to teach myself screenwriting and craft a film adaptation considered adept enough to attract producer interest and kudos from the director of a New Mexico film festival.

Clearly, I was launched and the next phase of my writing journey would be a cakewalk.

Not.

Not, because here I am, terrified by this StarQuest script for many of the same reasons The MoonQuest book so paralyzed me. Not, too, because I find myself, likely for similar reasons, in a variation of my Nova Scotia MoonQuest experience.

The parallels, I'm discovering in writing this, are eerily exact...

Once again, I seem poised for a genre change. In 1994, I was moving into creative writing from more commercial/journalistic pursuits. Today, I'm feeling as though my future is linked more to screenwriting than it is to prose. My experience with the Q'ntana Trilogy (MoonQuest/StarQuest/SunQuest) seems to back that up. If I crafted The MoonQuest script from a fully formed story and am creating its sequel from one in its nascent stages, I'm feeling called to write The SunQuest as an original screenplay. The SunQuest book would, strangely for me, come after the film version.

On top of that, the new project ideas that have come to me in recent weeks have all been for screenplays. Not one interests me as novel.

Sixteen years ago, with no experience or training to support what I was attempting, I doubted my abilities as a novelist. Today, with no experience or training to support what I'm now attempting, my doubts revolve around my screenwriting ability. Part of me can't believe I've got what it takes, can't believe that all I need to know — of story, craft and technique — I carry within and can access at will.

Ironically, everything I've ever succeeded at has been self-taught, and all my credentials have been expressed from within. And although grateful client testimonials, glowing book reviews and multiple awards for both my published books should prove to me both the brilliance of my higher wisdom and the effectiveness of my inner reliance, fearful aspects still try to take over when I sit down to work on The StarQuest. They scream, shout and cry from those deep-seated places of insecurity and low self-esteem that still lurk deep in my psyche.

Let me be clear about one thing: I'm not saying that today's fears and insecurities are identical to those of the past. That would suggest that I've experienced no growth since my MoonQuest days. Of course, I have. In countless ways, that was a different lifetime and I'm a different person. But as I've written here before, life's journey is a spiral — moving us into deeper and deeper levels of our emotional issues from higher and higher levels of consciousness and awareness.

My 1994 leap from one form of prose to another was nowhere near as dramatic as today's leap from prose to screenwriting. Also, what took me years to recognize around my MoonQuest experience has taken me only days to see and begin to process with The StarQuest screenplay.

Clearly, I've made progress. Clearly, I'm moving closer to the core of those issues today than I was able to do sixteen years ago. Clearly, I'm not done with them.

What about the Nova Scotia parallel?

Sixteen years ago, in order for me to access the emotional space that would free The MoonQuest onto the page, I needed to be moved into a focused, distraction-free environment where writing was my top priority. I needed to live the notion, however unconsciously, that The MoonQuest was the only thing that could matter. Rural Nova Scotia met those criteria.

Today, having surrendered to a soul imperative that places writing above all else (All That Matters Is That I'm Writing II), I find myself once again stripped of most of my belongings and many of the ways I've moved through the world. Once again, I've been placed in a setting where writing is my sole priority.

The western fringes of Albuquerque, where I'm now staying, may not be as remote as Yarmouth County. But my current situation carries certain unmistakable likenesses to that one, even if the specifics are different.

For one, having let go so much else, there's not much left for me to do but write. I'm also staying in a place fully supportive of my screenwriting pursuits, given that my current host during this house-less period in my life, is with K, the independent producer who wants to film the Q'ntana Trilogy. Suddenly, in ways it never has been before, the energy of a MoonQuest movie is front and center for me 24/7. That K also happens to be an accomplished photographer is an added bonus, given that photography is another of my passions.

Many of the few distractions I still have may vanish next month when I will likely lose my car and, with it, a chunk of my mobility. (The nearest bus stop is a fifty-minute walk away, so public transit is not a viable option.) When that inevitability became clear a few days ago, I was distraught — less over the loss of the car itself and more because I feared I would be stranded.

Then I thought about Nova Scotia, about how I'd been sent to a place where the only thing to do was write. And I wrote. In spite of my fears and insecurities, I wrote. And what I produced was pretty damn good!

Yes, I had a car. But there weren't that many places to go with it and I didn't use it for much beyond basic errands.

Now, for a time, I may have no car — not as some sort of punishment but to keep me focused and distraction-free, to keep me writing what I need to write, whatever I may think in the moment about the quality of what I'm producing. And like Nova Scotia turned out to be, this is not a longterm, for-the-foreseeable-future situation. It's a brief stop that I will move through and ultimately thrive from.

When I first noticed the parallels between 1994 and today, I spent a few days fearing that I'd made no progress in my creative, spiritual and emotional life over the past decade and a half. Then I remembered the spiral. And then I saw the similarity as the gift that it was, a gift that will fortify my when I return to work on the screenplay in the next days, a gift that will remind me that, truly, all that matters is that I'm writing.

A postscript: Within hours of surrendering to the higher purpose in the likely loss of my car, K let me know that I would be able to use her car. Suddenly, my openness had created an opening. Suddenly, the constriction had eased. And once again, my needs were being met as I focused on what was most important: my writing.

Photos (c) 2010 Mark David Gerson.
All photos are of Albuquerque, NM.
Click here for more of Mark David's photos.
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Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Recent excerpts:
• October 1
• October 5
• October 6
• October 20
• October 23
• October 29