Writing

Last edited Mon Dec 8, 2025, 10:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Your every paragraph sets off a slew of thoughts and responses. Most of this i hope will relate to what you wrote, but some will be me wandering inevitably through my own patch of the woods.

Where i'm at right now in my writing is less compulsion and more pleasure and sanity. Writing is one of several pursuits that keep me sane. The pleasure i find in it is like the pleasure i find in gardening, growing vegetables mainly, but in both (writing and gardening) there's a solitude and a freedom that bring clarity and a kind of understanding of myself and life that maybe i don't need to put into words so much anymore. In fact as soon as i try to verbalize that understanding it turns to sand in the hand of my mind, which is fine with me.

I'm 80 and my two books, novels, were published (at small independent houses) when i was 77 and 79. They were the two books out of the four i've written which i most wanted to be published. They are very different from one another. Because i got what i prayed for, despite neither one doing much in the world or the marketplace, i feel satisfied. I don't feel compelled to write, though i write every day. Or maybe what was once compulsion has simply calmed down through time and aging. But i know i write for the pleasure of the nuts & bolts of it, and for the sanity it gives me, a sanity separate from the world but which helps me live in my mortal body among other human beings in that world.

I've never been ambitious. i'm lazy, willful, rebellious. The things/events that most affected & shaped me were my father dying suddenly when i was 13, discovering alcohol at 17, getting sober at 40, and marrying at 50. Most of who i am is inside. My life in the world is unremarkable.

I dont think i ever wrote to find answers to questions, or to ask questions. I just loved words, i was drunk on words. I had to express my different selves when i was away from home in college and in Germany in the Army (in the late 1960s), writing home to family, friends, girl friend. For each person i wrote i had a separate persona. I wasnt faking it, it was just that communicating with each different person brought out of me a different side of me, a different slice of my personality. I'm still sort of like that. I'm not the same with different people. Writing those letters was how i found myself, or my selves, which later would come out in characters in my fiction. I wrote plays for a while because i think i love dialogue, conversation, more than any other part of writing. I think we find ourselves as human beings in real-life conflicts with ourself & others, just as we find ourselves as writers through our characters and their internal and external conflicts. I'm more confident, at peace, and stable as a writer writing characters and their stories, than i am as a human being in the world. I know who i am as a writer more than i know who i am as a human being.

I'm just gonna stop there for now and see if anything in there is useful to you. I hope you sense that what i wrote is at least partly in response to what you wrote. Like i say, you opened a lot of deep, important, mysterious boxes in your post.

P.S. Your film sounds very intriguing. I'm glad you were able to adjust to feedback, as long as you don't lose what inspired you to write it in the first place. I had a couple critical comments about the marriage in one book (the husband's treatment of the wife) but i had made it sufficiently clear in the text that it was not being excused or celebrated. Write on.