A marketable obsession

I do far too much reading and thinking and talking about writing, and not nearly enough writing.

I do write every day, which seems to qualify me as "a writer." I write carefully worded and edited emails to friends and family and colleagues. I write in this blog, my open-armed lover, when my mind won't let me settle. It's like releasing the struggling bodies of small birds that have flown unwittingly into my mental flypaper. I write random notes and reminders and ideas in Evernote. I write thoughtful, considered (though not always considerate) passages on a small variety of online bulletin boards. I even keep a hand-written, if very sporadic, journal for those thoughts that seem too audacious, self-centred, petty or dangerous to post online.

When I'm not writing in those places, I'm thinking about writing. I watch, a fascinated bystander, as story ideas take form in my mind. They are the results of a strange alchemy I have no part in but to allow it to bubble and spit until something forms in the depths of the cauldron. I dip a ladle down deep and try to pull out whatever squirming, embryonic thing has formed in there. The result of a recipe made of equal parts conversation, observation and inspiration, seasoned with whatever bizarre spices the unique crannies of my mind and memory secrete. I'm like James Thurber, whose wife, seeing him all glassy-eyed and distant at parties, was known to scold him by saying "dammit, Thurber, stop writing!"

If I think about something enough, I will end up writing about it. In that small way, perhaps, I can compare myself with the likes of Stephen King, whose writing is, for me, the greatest inspiration and aspiration there is. I'm reading his book "Secret Windows" now. I got up halfway through the night, after finishing, all in a rush, the second half of Ira Levine's "Rosemary's Baby." My mind was in a delicious uproar after reading such simple, effective writing. I couldn't just put the book down and turn out the light for sleep like I usually do. My brain was wide awake at half past one in the morning.

So I got up and went to my bookshelf. Even as I approached it, I was berating myself. I have a tower of unfinished books on my nightstand. I shouldn't have been going looking for yet another book to add to the teetering pile. But I did. And my eyes fell on "Secret Windows," an odd collection of Stephen King's short stories, interspersed with his essays on writing and being a writer. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe this was the book in which he used an expression I've been trying to find again ever since I first read it several years ago, but never made note of. It was a word he'd made up to describe that uncomfortable gurgly feeling you get in your innards sometimes when the digestive process isn't working quite as it ought to. Maybe, I thought, I can scan lightly through this and find that expression and actually write it down somewhere, capture it for good this time.

So, I removed the dust jacket and set it safely aside on the bookshelf, and took the book back to bed with me and started reading. I brought it back out to the living room with me this morning, something I rarely do with my nighttime reading. I wanted to keep going. King says that all art is the result of some obsession or other, though not all obsessions become art. Luckily for him, he says, his obsession is a marketable one.

I thought about that. If I ever start getting published, I will also consider myself lucky to have a marketable obsession. I am not a writer who writes exclusively for the craft or for myself or for some high-falutin' ideal of "art." I always have an audience in mind. I always hope that someday someone will read my writing and perhaps be moved by it, even if it's just to move the book aside for a few moments to take a bracing swig of scotch.

And I thought about why it is that I keep being drawn to story ideas that are dark and frightening. I am not a dark and frightening kind of person. I don't suffer from nightmares or depression. I don't seek out dangerous places, I don't associate with frightening people. Yet, all my life there has been this interest in the macabre. As a very young child, I watched scary movies with my father. I curled myself safely between his strong arm and his solid, protective side, and believed him when he said "it's okay honey, it's just make-believe, it's not real." Later on, I had a new father who had a store with a long rack of magazines and pocketbooks. I'd stand there while he prepared to close the store, looking for anything with a lurid cover or promises of terror inside. Vampirella magazines were my favourite. I discovered Stephen King on those racks, and read Carrie when it was first released, and then Salem's Lot (which I'm re-reading now, almost 35 years later) and, tucked deep into the covers of my college dorm room, The Shining, which was the scariest book I ever read and it wasn't even about monsters or vampires. Not the kind we can really close the book on, anyway.

Perhaps my dark turn of mind is the reason why I'm so well adjusted otherwise. I allow my mind to explore morbid and dangerous inspirations where, maybe, most people would shut them out at the first hint of the macabre. The thoughts that go through my mind would never be acted upon.

But they sure make for good story inspiration.