The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod
The #LetsBlogOff question today is "What is Creativity?" I usually post these forays into tandem-land with my fellow Let's-Blog-Off pals on Roaming By Design but today I'm giving a nod to the memoir I'm rolling out here bit by bit because this is one of the most creative things I am doing right now and it just so happens that today's post is about exploring creative writing. I love it when synchronicity happens!
Follow the Leader
One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: "Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won't answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work." I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!
I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera's book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: "All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?" I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.
With Kudera's questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who'd taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first "game" involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line.
Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. "I'll betcha $60 that I can!" The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, "I'll betcha $50 million that you can't jump that." They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.
He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to "make it." He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, "That was no good!" The little guy countered, "What? It is so; it's exactly the way you did it across the street!"
"That was over there," the mean kid responded. "This is over here and over here it doesn't count if you touch the stick!" The little girl yelled, "You owe him $50 million!" The dejection on the smallest boy's face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was "Follow the Leader" and you've likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard.
The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn't stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup.
What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was "Follow the Leader," each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called "crash position" and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy's name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid's name. They must have raided both their father's garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash.
I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer's notebook and thought about how Michael's psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn't have even thought about had I not read "Dialogue on the Art of Composition," one of the chapters in Kundera's book. "Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation," he said. "Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length." This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative live.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
A list of posts by my #LetsBlogOff cohorts in crime can be found here.
