John asked us to write about grief yesterday. Most everyone shared what they had written and for all but one, it reprented a real life experience, basically fact; there was one who wrote fiction based on factual emotion experience, which is basically what we all try to do to make it real. John has experienced much grief in his life and writing was therapeutic to that end and I appreciated him sharing that with us. I didn’t have a personal experience to share, but I did write about 900 words of my climactic death scene this morning of insomnia, and finished it minutes before I had to leave, so it was fairly raw.
When I started the class, I was dealing with the anxiety of reading something I have written. It was quite acute last month in my first novel writing class and so I was afraid of it and not sure why it was, but it has gotten easier for me so I think I am ove that. There were a few prompts today to write about our fears relative to writing and how fear has changed the course of our lives.
When I started writing about how a fear of something had changed my life, this is what I came up with:
I wonder now, after 35 years of doing what I do if I missed something by not taking a more active role in writing as it was the one thing I always wanted to do but never had the time for over a fear of failure and need for success. Even had I pursued it more aggressively, being a teacher, writing in the evenings and so on, would it have turned out different? Would I have hurt the same people in the same way, or was my choice to become something so exacting in time, effort and dedication, which had a cost on my family, along for the ride, specific to my choice I made? Would I have been a better person had I chosen the other of the roads that diverged in a yellow wood.
It’s unedited, but, mainly, I went into medicine not only for the obvious reason that I have the compassion for that and the desire to help others, but also for the surety of financial security. You can help people in lots of ways. I could have helped others in the educational field, but I knew it would likely not have been renumerative and I already had four mouths to feed, or so that is how I viewed it. How different would I have been had I chosen the other course. Would I have been better, or worse; richer or poorer; happier, or more sad. Stupid thoughts really because what does it matter now.
The last prompt was to identify what type of personality you are and how that has influenced your writing:
I’m an introvert, more comfortable with silence and aloneness than with people. I guess that makes me more shy, and I like writing because I can be those things that I otherwise would not be. I like the freedom of that, to be evil and good and mean and nice and say thing things in my soul, for better or for worse.
I’m not a huge fan of introspection, unless I’m introspecting about something specific, like The Dying Man; otherwise, it seems self-indulgent to me. I’m pretty sure that’s wrong-think, but it’s where I’m at presently.
Speaking of wrong-think, one of the participants shared a quote from George Orwell relating to freedom of thought and everybody nodded their heads, a few more emphatically than others. The strange thing is that I know that at least a few were imaging orangeman whereas I was imagining Biden althoug really the collective cabal behind him which is difficult to form a picture of in one’s head because it is so multidimensional. That’s the funny thing, the same words mean the same thing, represent the same fear, but the image that forms in the minds of half of the people is the political opposite of the image that forms in the other.