THE QUILL & THE INKPOT

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

Ray Bradbury

I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot lately, and I’ve got to admit that lately it feels like reality has been winning.

Let’s back up a bit. Like a lot.

I don’t have too many crystal-clear memories from my childhood. If I sat down and focused, I could conjure up some fuzzy recollections of a few occasions. But the one thing I do remember very clearly is a sense of accomplishment after finishing a short story about the purple people-eater who ate my older sister. I think I was in first grade… or second. It’s the first story I remember writing, and I remember thinking, This is something I can do. Putting words on a page is easy.

I was an awkward kid. I had to get huge glasses in first grade so I didn’t have to squint at the board and hover an inch above the page I was reading. I was the smart kid everyone really only talked to so they could get answers to the latest homework assignment. I was quiet, unless I was answering questions in class, showing off, really. I read books while I ate lunch rather than talking to anyone else. I devoured any books I could get my hands on, but particularly loved fantasy stories. Terry Brooks was one of my absolute favorites. 

I started writing my first novel around age twelve. It was, of course, a fantasy story about a young girl who never really fit in but one day discovers that she alone is uniquely positioned to save the world. Although I look back now and see very clearly how cliché the whole thing was—an unlikely hero, prophecies, cities in trees, a secret spring in the woods, I’m still proud of it. I remember how I would write and write in my spiral notebook until my hand cramped. The words just poured out.

I look back at that girl and think, she had it good. I’m envious of the easy inspiration, the lack of self-judgment. Where did that girl go? Maybe she got drowned out after years of critiques, both internal and external.

Reality is insidious. It creeps into the cracks, pries them apart, and puts down roots. It’s hard to ignore. As I type these words, it’s there, pulling at me, distracting me. Everything from the mundane What should I make for dinner tonight? to the fearful What if someone is trying to hack into my computer right now as I sit at the coffee shop and write this? to the judgmental Why am I even doing this? No one is even going to read it.

So how do I keep reality from destroying my writing? How do I get back to that girl, to that delirious, drunk-on-words writer of my childhood? I think, I need to appreciate reality. I need to use it.

I bemoan the fact that I feel like I have no inspiration left, that the past few years have just about drained me dry. Then inspiration smacks me across the face. I remember, years ago, I was joking with my friend about the whole hullabaloo about the fast-approaching end of the Seattle viaduct. I had just moved to Seattle and didn’t understand the love that long-established Seattleites felt for the massive, in my opinion ugly, structure. Then my friend told me about how her roommate viewed the viaduct as a strange portal to a magical place.

She had just moved to Seattle with her mother and was driving around the city for the first time. She took a wrong turn and ended up in one of the tunnels that eventually emerges onto the viaduct. When she emerged, lost and confused, from the tunnel and took in the view of the waterfront as she drove along the viaduct, she felt in awe of her new city. She was sad to see this viaduct go, so laden as it is with happy memories of her early days in a new city.

My brain began churning, and a story formed: A young woman feeling nostalgia, for an (ugly) inanimate object. A world in a different galaxy where a portal network allows travel between planets. And the tearing-down of one of the planet’s earliest portals.

Reality needs to be my fuel, the wine that gets me drunk on writing. So, I guess that means I’m going to stop writing for now and go take a long drink. Then I’ll come back and spit out that reality all over the blank page. It won’t always be pretty, but it’ll be there. And that’s what matters.