How if someone insults or threatens you, your response may be passive, avoiding conflict. But if someone insults or threatens one you love, your response is more passionate and involved?
How you can go for years without eating something you did as a kid, but one smell or one taste will roll back the years?
How you forget others’ suffering if not exposed to it regularly, and can forget there are others less fortunate, even among friends and family?
How we remain acutely aware there are others more fortunate? How we all feel poor at some point, and blame others for it, but when we see another as poor we tend to think it’s their own doing?
How physical pain may be forgotten, but emotional wounds are not? How we don’t notice when we wound others, but they do? How easy it is to wound with words or even a look without realizing it, without even meaning it? How long it takes resentment to fade, once we feel it?
How touchy we all are about different things? How you never really know what another’s soft spot is until you accidentally brush against it? How sometimes you wish that information had been tattooed on their forehead?
How florists’ flowers just don’t smell the same?
How the drone of bees can be musical, until they come too near?
How gardens smell like honey on warm days?
How limitless the sky’s blue is? How we look for that limitlessness in others’ eyes?
How many words of yours your dog or cat knows, and how few you know of his?
How no matter how annoyed we may be to hear a person use “he” or “she” instead of the other, we’re all incensed if someone calls a person or pet “it” and we correct them at once?
How goddess-like or god-like the being next to you is? The glow of spirit in another’s face?
Writing is risky. Especially writing fiction. As Forrest Landry points out in his latest post at For The Trees, alarm and ire have arisen over the number of writers who give up these days and self-publish. He pointed to a blog post by E. Ann Bardawill at Something Fell, on The Killing of Mockingbirds. She used Richard Adams’ Watership Down as an example, and that drew me in because it’s one of my favorite books.
I know a little about this tendency of writers to give up and give in, because I was one of them.
In a sense I gave up on what is probably still my best work to date, by self-publishing rather than continuing to go through rejection and revision. Now I wish I’d kept looking for an agent or publisher, kept rewriting when all the rejections (where anyone bothered to read past the cover letter) pointed out problems. Now what do I do with a book that’s been published first by a POD subsidy outfit and again by me? I’d still like to see it published by a “real” publisher, but I fear that I gave it a premature funeral.
Some good has come of all this. My mother and a few other older relatives got to see my name in print and read the story in book form, before they passed away. I’ll never regret that, but I never intended to give my book such a limited audience. I never will again.
If you don’t want to go the distance, find something else worthwhile to spend all your free hours on. If you want to be a writer, if you know in your heart you’re a writer, go for the gold. Stop reading articles about POD and self-publishing. Stop subscribing to writer’s magazines that print them. The publishing industry may very well be ripe with middle men and favoritism, with big money interests and maybe even corruption. But you the lowly unknown writer aren’t going to change that by self-publishing. Read more articles on good writing, the market, getting an agent. Learn how to structure a story or novel. Give each sentence its due attention. Read more Richard Adams. Read Annie Dillard. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep submitting. Keep rewriting. Keep rewriting. (That bears repeating.) Rework it until you can see your face in it, and submit it until either it’s published or the post office runs out of stamps.
I don’t like memes or favorites lists, because my favorites are constantly in flux and too numerous to list anyway. Some of my favorites I can’t think of on demand. Others have replaced them in the forefront of my thoughts. The present distracts me from the past, overriding memories.
If you ask what my five favorite birds are, I may list the last five species that visited my yard and forget I’ve ever seen an osprey, a roadrunner, a California quail. I might forget the red-tailed hawk that dropped the pigeon it had just caught when it saw my van driving toward it, or the two times I came across a great blue heron standing beside my path while I walked.
But sometimes I come across a name, an image, a sound, and I think, “Oh, how I love that.”
Do you have favorites or memories you don’t recall when someone asks, that come in odd moments like patches sewn to older thoughts?
Just the other day, while thinking about peace, I remembered a favorite song. “From A Distance” is most famous because Bette Midler’s 1990 recording of it won a Grammy. It’s written by Julie Gold. Here’s the snippet of the lyrics that came to mind a few days ago:
“From a distance
You look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance
I just cannot comprehend
What all this fighting’s for”
