It is true that I am now only a month away from being 61. But this reflection is based on what happened to me while undergoing the year past. My fictional character, Valerie Clarke, took the selfie above of the two of us. She doesn’t have her own smartphone, after all, she’s a fictional character, so she used mine. It shows in the picture what she looked like at eleven and what I looked like at sixty years and eleven months, in other words, this morning.
So, what exactly does the picture reveal about us?
Well, for her, it is fairly obvious that she’s only an imaginary person. She was eleven in 1984, the year of the fictional snowstorm in Snow Babies. She’s a bright and vibrant young girl with hopes and dreams ahead of her. She’s also known tragedy, especially after her father’s suicide. But the fact that she’s fictional and based on more than one real person from my past does a lot to explain why this reflection is not about her.
For me, however, you get a look at a grumpy old man with a straw farmer’s hat, an author’s beard, and silvery Gandalf hair. More of my drawings are glimpsable on the wall behind me. I look like the kind of seedy old curmudgeon who yells at neighbor kids who walk on his lawn.
But I’m really not what I look like.
I am a writer. So I am full of experiences, ideas, and feelings. And I am also full of people. Valerie is only one of those. I create fictional people from the people I knew or knew about in my little Iowa town, Rowan, where I grew up. Kids that went to school with me. Their parents. Shopkeepers and business people and creepy old people that I sometimes encountered. Hot tempered people. Wise people. And stupid people who were often laughed at for good reason.
I can also draw on (and draw pictures of) all the people I knew as an educator. More than two thousand kids who passed through my classes in four different schools, some of whom I knew as well as I knew my own children, were available to pull details from to mix and match and make fictional characters from. Fellow teachers, some gifted with a natural way with students, some hopelessly lost in the wrong profession with the wrong sort of personality were also available to make characters from. Fools and idealists. Bullies and shrinking violets. Heroes that possible readers could look up to and love.
I am the kaleidoscope, the thing that you can look through to see the world and have it refracted and patterned to make it beautiful, even in its ugliness.
But all of this reflection is only that, the view in the mirror, the outward look of the man who is me. Mickey at sixty is many things, not all of them pretty, not all of them wise. But some of them are. And some even better than I think they are.
Why Mickey Writes
If you are wondering, “How in the Heck can Mickey write nonsense like that essay he wrote yesterday?”, then please be aware that Mickey is pondering that same question.
Seriously, why would a writer publish personal thoughts and allude to personal tragedies? Especially when they are about things that once upon a time nearly killed him? (Please note that when Mickey starts a sentence with “Seriously” it is probably about to lead to a joke, the same way as when Trump says, “Believe me” we should assume he is telling a lie and knows it.)
The answer is simply, writers write stuff. They have to. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be writers.
It is really not something to do to earn fame and fortune. Fame and fortune happen to rare individuals like J. K. Rowling and Steven King… and even Stephanie Meyer, to prove that it is totally random and not based on actual writing talent… except for sometimes.
You write to get your head right about bad things that happen in life. You find that factor in Mark Twain whose infant son died, as well as most of the rest of his family, before him, forcing him to face survivor’s guilt and the notion that life is random and death does not come for you based on any kind of merit system. Charles Dickens wrote about the foibles of his father, on whom he based the David Copperfield character Wilkins Micawber, a man who was overly optimistic and constantly landing in debtor’s prison because of it. He also wrote in his stories about the women he truly loved (who were not, it seems, his wife) one of whom died in his arms while yet a teenager. Dickens’ amused take on the innate foolishness of mankind gave him a chance to powerfully depict great tragedies both large (as in a Tale of Two Cities) and small (as in Oliver Twist). I wrote yesterday’s post based on the connection between the nudity I write about in novels and my own traumatic assault when I was only ten.
You write because you have wisdom, an inner personal truth, that you are convinced needs to be crystallized in words and written down on paper. It isn’t necessarily real truth. Lots of idiots write things and post them in newspapers, blogs, and even books. And it is often true that their inner personal truth is complete hogwash. (But, hey, at least the hogs are cleaner that way.) Still, your wisdom is your own, and it is true for you even if some idiot like Mickey reads it and thinks it is only fit for cleaning hogs.
And you truly do have to write. If I did not write my stupid, worthless novels, all the hundreds of characters in my head would get mad and start kicking the pillars that hold up the structures in my head. I do have structures in my head. My mind is organized in boxes that contain specifically sorted ideas and stories and notions. It is not a festering stew pot where everything is mixed together and either bubbling or boiling with hot places or coagulating in the cold corners. (That is how I picture Donald Trump’s mind. It is certainly not an empty desert like many people think, because deserts don’t explode all over Twitter early in the morning like the stew pot metaphor obviously would.)
And so, I have done it again. I have set down my 500+ words for today and made a complete fool of myself. And why do I do it? Because Mickey is a writer, and so, Mickey writes stuff.
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Tagged as goofy thoughts on writing