The Life of a Writer
During our last day at the beach, the ocean turned steely as the sun moved behind a plum-colored cloudbank flooded with mauve layers of escaping light. Closest to the proximity of the sunset, the water still glimmered—the way a hunter's gun would catch the light in the early morning as the lid of the blind is thrown back and he emerges, his barrel lifted upward. The sand was littered with tiny parcels of light as the sun's last showing of the day illuminated bits of broken shells their former inhabitants had abandoned for better protection or in succumbing to death.
One of them called to a wasp, which had landed on the large mutilated shell at my feet as I combed the sand for unscathed offerings. I crouched and watched as it lingered a bit too long and was swept up in the surf, now littering the sand like its damaged fascination, its wings wet and useless. What an echo of life! I thought. The ocean had beckoned to the hungry creature, offering it a buffet of possibilities within the crevice it explored in the shell's heart only to sweep it away with her choking liquid. As the wasp helplessly tumbled in her rolling embrace, I wondered why the ocean felt the need to take the breath of others. Didn't she feel confident, as strong as she was, I questioned; didn't she trust that she'd have enough of a life force to sustain her throughout eternity?
That night I watched a television interview during which Faye Dunaway remarked, "What do you do when you're vulnerable? You cover it up and pretend you're in control." I thought of that wasp, so insignificant against an ocean that certainly wasn't giving up its forcefulness. It struck me that my own sense of power had grown such a tiny bit as I continued to develop a small writer's voice, and the thought soothed me as I turned out the lights to be sung to sleep by the waxing and waning waves.
The solace was short-lived as I faced the flight home the next morning. We slipped away from Panama City before dawn, the wings of our small plane vibrating in reaction to the unfriendly air mass we were battling as we clawed our way past Montgomery's cloud-choked sky. The radar fanned on the control panel, seeking rain's presence and painting itself spotty green in victory. It yellowed when finding heavy patches of Mother Nature's wrath, the brilliance of the sunny hue the antithesis of what it represented.
Jim puttered around the cockpit doing what pilots do and I wanted to tell him to keep his eye on the road, though there was no need for him to peer through the embattled windshield, which was taking it on the chin as the rain pelted it in a staccato rhythm. Had the ride not been so bumpy, it would have been a pleasant experience sliding through the blueness of the sky as the day dawned bright above the blanket of clouds. I was determined to finish Weber's article, which I'd started the day after I'd studied the boys on their bikes, but the plane shuddered to the point that the words were vibrating. As I held the magazine still enough that I could follow the text, I found Ford's take on the life of a writer to be fascinating, as he saw it as a combination of self-sacrifice and self-championing. Could I champion myself if I ever found the courage to make the sacrifice to write? I wondered as I read that fiction writing was to Ford as useful a thing for a culture as there is. He went on to say, "Not that I've been so useful, but it is as high a calling as you can have…serious devotion to it purchases some rights: the right to presume, to make things up, to create."
I knew I was doing certain things the "right way," namely keeping my writer's notebooks. Ford kept them; would spend months accumulating the "raw stuff" that would come together to make his novels or short stories whole. He maintained that anything that appeared to him to be singular would end up in his notebooks. "Here's a sentence I wrote [that's] not meant to be interesting to anybody else: 'Christmas, comma, Jesus Christ.' That'll turn out to be a dialogue line."
He went on to tell Weber, "A sentence in my notebook will come at a place where I never imagined it. And that's what writing is for me, taking the raw stuff and recasting it into a logic that is its own. Taking lines which maybe occurred in life in one context, and then creating another context for them." Ford says of the characters in Rock Springs that though readers may think of them as less articulate, the stories assert they have just as much to tell. When Weber mentions that the critics contend he gives his uneducated, unambitious characters too much credit, he responds, "It's a philosophical point very near the heart of everything I write…If I were limited to just predictable responses, if we believe 'Here is a guy who can only think this or that,' that people live within their givens, then life's pretty well set for us. But human beings continue to surprise us. It is just a fact of life that people pick up Volkswagens at moments of stress. People just say things that make you stare off, sometimes."
As I clutched the magazine, stretching the page to a tautness that would keep the words from jumping around, I prayed I'd get to the point of being able to say what Ford declares next: "I've just given everything I've ever written my very best—my absolute, greatest best shot. And that's all."
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To see the trajectory of my writing life to present day, visit Roaming by Design and see what I'm up to these days as a writer. You can also see my #LetsBlogOff pals doing their thing here!
