Thoughts on Writing

Stream of Consciousness

Or rather, rapids.

Borrowing

I don't assume every writer does it, but I do. Not from anyone else, but from my own life. Moments. Thoughts. Memories. I take it, mold it, knead it, turn it into something just a little different--maybe even the same. I think about it for a while. Stir in some emotion if it's not already there, and I run with it. Sometimes it's falling in love. Sometimes it's killing something that hurts. The viscera is its existence somewhere in my world.

Sometimes I wonder what people read in to what I've written. If they see the skeleton memory over which I've stitched emotions, and the flash of a story. Context is everything. So I suppose that assumptions can be made if the reader has a shared experience. He or she sees the house in which we both lived, and the love we may have both felt...but I've turned him in to something new. Because that character is not that person with whom I shared that space. It's a character who needed a place to live, and air to breathe.

Is This Autobiographical?

I can see the question in the eyes of a reader, when it's someone I know. And that one that follows "Is that (him/her/me/it/that)?" Sometimes yes a little, but mostly no; because I don't have characters in my life, I have people. I know a character's motivations, histories, thoughts. People, not so much. Characters make more sense to me, and sometimes even help make sense of people. But never does one equal the other.

Sense and Nonsense

Most times it's just me, trying to make sense of nonsense and broken puzzles. Understand departures. Find to my own little piece of real estate in Oh-I-Get-It-istan. I may never really know why you (for simplicity's sake) left, but that you did in the most hurtful way you could, but here I stand with some mismatched pieces of pottery and a pile of sand that looked like gold only moments ago. Explanations fall short, and I only dig my hole deeper as I struggle to understand, explain, comprehend, defend.I may never know why you started talking in the first place. Or why I responded the way I did. That is all nonsense.

And so I write. It's not unlike a scientist with a bug; slicing, dissecting, examining. Figuring out why it can fly, or how it poops. But the "you" in my story isn't necessarily "you" at all, rather a patchwork of all the other bugs that made me.

Or maybe it always was just nonsense, and you read context where there was none at all. Because I live passionately. I love passionately. And I love passion more than anything.

Waterfall

And the little kayak plunged off that stream and into nighttime.