THE Return

 The words have returned to me, in a very big way.

Oh, they never left entirely. I could scribble out a poem, describe an evening on my porch, share a summer shower, and most especially I could write a lengthy rant and make others laugh at my horrible life, because I was making a joke of it, even while complaining and whining and feeling sorry for myself. 

Always, always, a thin trickle of words remained. 

But I was used to a river! A wide, full, flowing river, hopefully with a waterfall or an underground component that popped back out of a rock wall.

Not just a babbling brook, although those could be fun. 

Not a nearly dried up creek bed full of rocks that crack and turn to powder in the heat of everyday. 

And not just things. Not just weather, and birds, and description of static objects.

My words were persons, and lives, and with voices and thoughts of their own. With in-jokes and griefs and crying-until-laughing, and laughing-until-crying. 

These persons wanted needed me to tell their stories so that they did not dissolve unnoticed into the midsts of mists. 

But I could only share moments of them, if even that much.

Somewhere I lost them.

My words had gone, and with them gone, so was I. I was no longer the Voice, or the Participating Narrator, or however my role could be defined. 

I was not them and they were not me, and so I was no longer I, and their very existence was at risk. 

Sometime in the autumn of this past year, they came back. A whole gang of them started shouting at me, even waking me every three or four hours in the night. 

Mostly they were saying, "Look at Me! Here is My Story!" That was okay. I could watch and listen and wander off into dreamland, often a mixture of their presence and my lack of presence. I need do nothing but be aware, and I needed only to be aware of their existence. 

Soon, they compelled me to creating them for others, and I did. Not always easily, not often quickly, but the more I did it, the more I felt myself again becoming.

I am me! I am Here! I am me!

I finished that story and did a second draft, and sent it out to a few chosen readers that I thought would offer good commentary. So far the reviews have brought up good points, but I've not heard from one section of my chosen readers. I don't know yet what does or doesn't work for that class (for lack of a more precise word.)

As I waited to hear from my readers -- I am seriously considering this as a venture into self-publishing, or print-on-demand, or whatever it's called these days -- I began another story with my fingers and there was a third story stirring into existence in my mind. 

These last two were abruptly and rudely shoved out of place by a compulsive need to write a fan fiction piece about a young child trying to make sense of the death of a parent. 

It wrote itself in ten days, wringing me out from the inside out. That's why it took so long to write it. It left me too exhausted to communicate. 

I slept. 

I slept, I wrote, I ate, with occasional trips to the doctors (5 or 6 of them) because I am old. But mostly I stayed home, with two sets of people pushed to the back of my mind, squabbling for my attention, while this child was trying to make his world make sense again. 

That exact type of compulsion to write is a rare event. It was really almost like what psychic scribes (I forgot the correct term) describe. As if someone else was melding with me, using my mind and body to do what theirs could not.

And I am concerned, my friends, for surely a compulsion of that strength and with that urgency was MEANT to be heard/seen by someone, perhaps to make sense of their topsy-turvy world. 

I just hope that somehow I am getting the word out to the right person. 

Fan fiction seems a strange platform for delivering such a message. 

I don't do fan fiction. The people in my own head tell me this or that is wrong with the other peoples characters and turn them into who they are. I have a sincere respect for any writer who can make someone else's character breathe, and can do it right, but that is a skill I have never ~quite ~ had.

I can only hope that the same energy that produced it reaches across or through the void and finds its target.

Whoever you are, I hear you. I feel you. I even love you. 

Because I, too, have been there.

You are not alone. 

Writer's Dilemma: Diagnosis

Fellow writers, what would you do? What do you think?


I have written two things that include oddities -- one an illness; the other a behavior. Some of the feedback I have received is that I should be telling (not good storycrafting) what the diagnosis is or explaining the behavior.

The illness is the story of a child who died and her father.  the story is set somewhat ambiguously in the 1940s, USA. The disease that the child died of was not even named until 1938, and that was in Canada.
Therefore, at the time of the story, there was no diagnosis.
None.
Treatment was of the symptoms as they arose.

The fact is, I didn't know myself what the disease was until I had finished writing the vignettes, and looked up the symptoms myself. Not quite a textbook case -- are they ever, really? -- but variations were within the norms for the condition.

In the story, the illness went undiagnosed, even after the death of the child.
Because there was, in that time period, no (or rare) formal diagnosis for it.

It was what it was, and so was the outcome. Those involved had to deal with the situation as it occurred, with no answers.

That was the story.

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The other situation was part of a novel, a character trait that was not consistent with the character's general development. An irregularity in verbalizing, even though the character had an enormous (for his age and the times) vocabulary with a good understanding of most words and the ability to guess accurately the meaning of unfamiliar words.

In the novel, the child's caretakers do notice and try to have this idiosyncrasy checked out. They mention at different times that this that or the other was done. A thorough physical, and the boy's hearing was tested, even though that seemed an unlikely cause since he could understand.
In the end, the adults decided it was just a quirk in the child's development and let it be, just keeping an eye on it as he ages.

It isn't really a BIG IMPORTANT detail, just, as I said, something of a character quirk.

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In both cases, or in either case, inserting today's knowledge in a yesterday's story doesn't seem right to me.
I also have not been able to figure out how I would do it, if I wanted to. (Which I don't.)


It speaks loudly and is a sad commentary that readers want everything put in a box, sorted, and labelled, don't you think? I wonder why it is this way. Does this approach really make anyone happier? Are children no longer allowed to be themselves, unique?

There are still undiagnosable conditions, especially in children.
There are still unexplainable idiosyncracies in childhood development.
There are still unique characters whose entire existence is outside the box.

What's most alarming is that these demands were made, not by everyday readers, but by other writers.
Make no mistake, these were demands. One critiquer was infuriated that I did not tell her and every other reader what was wrong with that boy. In her opinion, if I didn't explain it, I shouldn't write it that way.
And she had only read an excerpt. Even when I explained that the 'issue' was addressed in other parts of the book, she was still insistent that nothing undiagnosed, unexplained, or unlabelled could be in the story.

If out creative peoples are thinking and writing this way, what hope is there for the individualists in our world and the world to come?