Oh yeah, I forgot

Yesterday afternoon I got my mind back. I feel so much better.

I snuggled into the corner of the couch with a strong cup of irish breakfast tea and picked up a book of short stories I was given for my birthday. I flipped randomly to a story by Rick Bass called, "The Hermit's Story." It starts out simply enough: four people are sharing Thanksgiving together. They are eating pie and drinking wine. Then one of them tells a story that gets more and more fantastic as it goes on. Birds and dogs and stars and ice, and sleeping under a the icy skin of a lake where all the water has drained away. It was beautiful. There's no time in the story. The narrator tells us it was 12 years ago and then later tells us it was 20 years ago. And it made no sense. And I loved it.

After I read it I thought, "Oh yeah. I can write stories that don't make complete sense. I can write anything I want." I can write anything I want.

I've been stuck trying to tell this stupid story about this boring woman. I was trying to write it, because the boring character made the whole thing make sense. Some sales woman who has tried her whole life to get ahead but then one day realizes her whole life is meaningless. But it was boring, and I wasn't having any fun writing it, and I would keep freezing up and then trying just to push through, but then get frustrated and bored. I would think, "No one wants to read a story about a woman like this. And I don't really want to write it either." But I had two really strong images on either side of the story, and I needed the woman to connect them--to make the story logical.

Maybe I let this happen because a few weeks back, I gave a copy of Lost to an acquaintence. I didn't expect anything except for her to read it but she gave it back to me with written comments and everything. She didn't like the part toward the end where the girl dives down under the water and sees a whole town down at the bottom of the river. She wrote, " I could belive in the bat boy, but not the town at the bottom of the river." And when I read it, I thought, "Oh well...that's just her opinion" but I think it influenced me more than I realized. Because lately I've been trying to write stuff that's more "believable."

I don't want the girl to just swim back across the river. I want it to feel like she's getting dragged down by the river, the town is like the Sirens in the Odessey, tempting and dangerous, and she has to drag herself out of it.I'm not so interested in the logic as the feeling.

I hate logic in writing. I want to write the stuff that makes my heart hurt. The stuff that makes a wolf's howl form at the base of my throat. That's delightful. That's why I write. Oh yeah, I forgot. Thanks, Rick Bass, for reminding me.