11.11.08
Behind the Curtain, a Window
Yesterday, after a long time away from my own creative writing, I found I had caught up with pressing obligations and still possessed several daylight hours.
Suddenly free, I cleared my desk and started a project I was to have begun some time ago: Profiles of some of my novel characters.
I started with the narrator, Delia. The novel is in first person, but I wrote the study in third person. What a change. Immediately I knew things about this character I hadn’t before, such as how she appeared to other people, what they noticed about her. I discovered more about her sister, Antonia, and their relationship to each other.
Taking this character into a study allowed me to open a curtain on her, to describe her in a way I couldn’t within the context of the novel.
What also surprised me was the joy of writing again. Since high school, writing has been something of an obsession, though I never thought I was particularly “good” at it. In college, all of those papers drove me insane, especially the French ones which I had to write every week. I remember how I wouldn’t start on them until midnight or later, and each paper was a guaranteed all-nighter.
Strangely, at 21 years old, on an airplane coming home from a year’s study in France, a sense of identity crystallized within me. I looked over the New York skyline and knew I was a writer. I had no idea what that meant, of course, only that I was going to write about things. I imagined at the time I’d write poetry about them. (How romantic. You’re breaking my heart.)
Followed were several years of figuring out what being a writer actually meant: At times I confused writing with drinking, a not uncommon pitfall. By the time I figured it out, I also realized no one would ever really understand what I did, why, or all the outside elements of my life that would never make sense to the world. That’s still true to some extent.
I never imagined how much I’d have to give up to be a writer — so much of life I miss, hunched over this desk, the jobs I’d like to have had, such as to be a botanist, or a lawyer, or a veterinarian.
In the end, it’s like the proverbial moth to the flame, or the homing pigeon coming back to the rooftop. Writing is simply where I live, and when I’m away from it, I’m miserable.
Omar Khayyam courtesy of Okon Life
