Skip to main content

Look At Me



Why do you write?

It’s a simple question right?  I mean, why write?  Why spend the amount of time and energy and resources it takes to do this?  Why subject yourself to judgement and rejection and criticism? Why?

I don’t know why I do it.  I don’t know why I spend so much of my time inside my own head, inside my own world, why I lie in bed plotting, hearing conversations, making my characters live in my imagination, why I sometimes can’t concentrate at my pay job because I am lost in my story, why I am distracted when people are talking to me, why I sometimes can’t remember appointments or errands because I’m lost in the flood of words.  I don’t understand why at all.  I just know that I always have.  It is a part of me that I have never been able to excise, have never been able to burn out with various poisons.  Even at my worst, even when I pushed everyone away, the writing has stayed. I have always written, when I was young and fast and dumb, when I was an emotionally wasted wreck.  Even now, when time slips away so fast and my children grow up before my eyes and my hair turns grey and the days bleed into one another, even now I write, sitting at this keyboard at midnight after a long day, even now, when I need to sleep, even now I write, because that is what I do.  Because I am a writer.

The writing is partly about control.  I can make the world behave the way I want it to, in a way that makes sense, in a way that seems to follow some kind of prescribed path.  I get to offer resolution, a nice bow to wrap events in, in a way that the real world can’t.  If I allow it, my characters get to say all the right lines at the right times, they have the comeback, the witty retort.  I can define who is the bad guy, who is the good guy, assign them their respective hats, and make them dance accordingly.  The abuser is bad, the child innocent, everything falls into polite little boxes.  In our writing we get to play make-believe and display our creations, we get to pretend that there is really justice, that there is really order, that there is any real resolution.  

It’s also about fear.  I get to write about things that I am afraid of.  I get to explore things that would destroy me in my life.  What if I lost everything?  What then?  What if it was me that did it, what if I was the monster that I have feared all along?  What if I was helpless, what if I was dying? What would it be like if I was hurt or sick or irrevocably damaged?  What if my wife is lying when she tells me she loves me?  What if I lost control?  And it’s so safe here in the black and white, it’s so safe here in my cozy chair with the crickets chirping outside my window and my children and wife sleeping in the next room, it’s safe here to open the closets and lift the bed and let all the monsters out, to make them show me their teeth and claws, it’s safe here in the black and white, because I’m pulling the strings, and I can put all the monsters back under the bed when I am done playing with them.

It’s about showing off, too.  I know the lie; we all write for ourselves, right?  But if that were completely true, we wouldn’t need an audience would we?  Someone not liking our stuff wouldn’t hurt our feelings, wouldn’t damage our oh-so-fragile self worth, would it?  Really, if I am being honest, and I try my damnedest to be honest in my writing, even if it seems threatening, if I am being honest, there is a Hey Mom No Hands element there too, a touch of Look at Me and See What I Can Do.  Because I have talent and I know it; I make the words dance and flash in a way that most people can’t, and I want to show the world, I want to shout out my value, show that I’m different.  Maybe you can draw better than I can, maybe you can salsa dance, or run, maybe you can speak in front of strangers, maybe you know what to do in an emergency, but I can do this, I can make people see pictures in their heads, I can make the words dance and flash... Hey Ma, no hands, hey everyone, look at me, look at what I can do.  It is pathetic, it’s stupid and shameful, but yeah, I’m a show off.  It comes back to fear, and a deep and unrelenting belief that I am not good enough, that I never will be.  It is all a show.  Look at me, love me, tell me how valuable I am, so maybe one day I will really believe it.

Some days it is all of these things, and some days it is none of them.  The real truth is, I write because I like to.  I write because it makes me feel good.  It isn’t always great, it is hardly ever easy, and often it can be frustrating and a little awful, but at the end of the day I write because it is better for me than not writing.   

Look at me.

Still Writing,
RP
7-9-15 

If you want to contact me, comment here, or I am on Twitter @RDPullins, and I am on Facebook.  My first novel, Antiartists, will be published in the spring of 2016 on Pen Name Publishing, and has it's own little Facebook page, too.  Go and give it a like, if you wanna.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One of the Best of Us

In the stifling heat my breath comes fast and heavy. What the fuck am I even doing here? What the fuck am I trying to accomplish? I'm sitting on the mat, maybe dying, a forty something dad playacting at being a fighter. This is my mid-life crisis, this is so, so stupid. This has to be the end for me, assuming I can get my heartbeat under control, assuming I don't just peg out here on the mat.  I can't do this anymore. "It's okay man, it's okay, you just need to breathe through it. You're fine, you're okay." The voice of my training partner, gentle and kind. My partner, the maniac that drove me to such a state, that I think I might die, he sits next to me and shows me how to breathe, how to calm my body. He teaches and guides me through it, and in a few minutes I actually am okay, the panic settles down, and maybe this isn't my last class after all. "You're alright?  Okay. Now lets get back to work."  And back to work we go. There
4 comments
Read more

We Would Be a Song

I seem to define my life with soundtracks, playlists that encompass epochs or periods of change or development.  My earliest music was my mother's: Van Halen and Judas Priest, Def Leppard and AC/DC.  I remember a friend of hers explaining to second grade Ralph that the big balls that Angus was singing about were parties, but even then I didn't buy it.  My teen years were heavy on grunge, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and that was the first time that music ever felt like it was mine , that I discovered by myself or through the radio, or like minded friends, that was the first time that I took it and owned it and loved it, and even now I'll hear Black Hole Sun or Rooster or Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio and back I go. In the fifth grade, I moved to Kelso, Washington. I want to say that it was hard, but what I remember mostly from childhood is just this sense of taking every day as it arrived.  What else do we have except our own experiences to measure th
4 comments
Read more

Fighting for Clarity

There's this to be said about fighting: while you're doing it, you don't have room in your head for anything else, not your busted ass car or your worries about your family, not the leak under your bathroom sink, or how you're going to pay your bills.  There's only breathe one two, step out of range, shift off the center line, move breathe one three two slip the jab level change three to the body check the low kick counter one two...  it is a better escape than most, and I've tried most of them, believe me. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. I get humbled and beat up at every session, I don't understand why I even go. I'm feeling defeated; everything is so fucking hard for me, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I should just quit, right? Fuck you.  I'll show you motherfuckers what I am capable of. I'll show you-  And then I go and I try and my knees give and I get pummeled and twisted and what the fuck man how humble do I
5 comments
Read more