Does Everybody Daydream?
The reason I haven't been here on the blog this week is because I've been at RT Booklovers Conference, this year held in Kansas City. As many of you know, I live here, and I decided to attend because my budget to support THE OBVIOUS GAME is near nothing, and an authors' conference in my hometown is a benefit that fell in my lap. So I've taken almost a week off, and I went.
Today I met up with Jen from People I Want to Punch in the Throat, my new friend and fellow castmate of the upcoming Kansas City Listen to Your Mother Show (I'll be giving away two free tickets starting Monday, stay tuned if you're local). I had to leave the conference for a few hours to attend the funeral of a dear friend's mother, who unexpectedly died on the operating table last week. When I returned, I asked Jen where she was. She told me she was going to listen to a panel on craft by a man I'd never heard of, David Morrell, who writes a number of things, including Rambo. I have almost zero interest in thrillers or Rambo, but David Morrell changed my life.
In an extremely intense hour, he described what it is that makes writers stand out from the noise. How we find our own distinct voice. And that is, according to Morrell, to ask ourselves which stories only we can write.
As Morrell described his childhood, my heart went out to him, as it does to anyone who has a rough childhood. Childhood should be a magic time, and despite my mother's cancer when I was a child, my childhood was good. I was loved, and I knew it. Morrell didn't have quite as idyllic of an experience, but he realized as an adult that a series of events had made him the writer he was, and he said every writer is driven by the unique set of events that shaped that individual, and as such each of us can only tell the stories we individually were set on earth to tell.
Then he talked about where the stories come from: daydreams. He said he had one student who didn't understand daydreams, then he said the thing that blew me away. He said: I don't believe everyone has them.
I have been stalking other authors all my life, before I myself became one. Many authors talk about their characters deciding to do this or that, and I didn't understand until I got deep into THE OBVIOUS GAME. There were several scenes that came to me fully formed, often while I was doing something else -- showering or driving or making dinner, and they did actually come to me as daydreams. I saw them. They were usually rooted in something that happened to me at some point in life that made me question the human condition, and it was always something I was fascinated by and wanted to talk about. It has never occurred to me before that not everyone has them.
Do you have them?
He went on to talk about sitting down at the beginning of a writing project to ask yourself why you are undertaking such a thankless task. Why do you do it? What do you hope to learn from it? He said it wouldn't make us famous, but it would make us fulfilled. I understood. THE OBVIOUS GAME may never become a bestseller or win any awards, but reading the emails I've received since writing it and reading the reviews of people who wrote they did finally understand the psychology of anorexia after reading my book has been intensely fulfilling to me. I can honestly say I don't care if THE OBVIOUS GAME is a financial success, because people whom I have never met have read it and said they understood. I am fulfilled.
As I work on my new novel, THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, I'm interested in talking about power. Morrell said each of us is guided by a primary emotion. He writes thrillers: His primary emotion is fear. As I sat there listening, I realized my primary emotion is frustrated longing, and that emotion has always guided my writing. THE OBVIOUS GAME at its center is a novel about wanting to be different physically than what it is scientifically possible to be, if one is to be healthy. PARKER CLEAVES is about wanting to be more powerful than you are ready to be. What happens when you're not ready for the power that you desire? I'm extremely interested in people's motivations, in my own motivation. I undertake an extremely thankless task in writing. Why the hell do I do it?
Because I have daydreams.
And I think, somehow, that you need to know about them.
Is it narcissism? Maybe. But it's there, and it itches.
I have to tell you about it.
Morrell talked about being ostracized locally for some of his writing. He said in order to write our truths, sometimes we have to be willing to go outside of peer pressure to be "normal." I thought about my tattoo, the "now" on my left arm that is pretty prominently displayed. I can almost tell if I will be friends with someone or not by how they respond to my tattoo. It's so a part of me that I forget it is there, but this weekend at the writers conference, many authors have grabbed my arm and stared at my tattoo and understood. I say to them, it is my watch. I have anxiety disorder. I am trying to live in the now. I spend too much time worrying about the past or the future. Unless I'm being eaten by a tiger, the now is usually ... perfectly fine.
But the anxiety is still there. It doesn't go away. It's a part of who I am.
When I was a new mother living in a house built in 1920, I worried about the large holes in the antique grates. I had intrusive thoughts about snakes climbing up through the leaky stone basement to get my baby. I worried day and night about the nonexistent snakes.
Somewhere, there is a story there.
When I was 17, I developed an eating disorder, and that story became THE OBVIOUS GAME.
I have spent my entire career trying to get institutional power I've never been given. From that frustration has grown the seeds of THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES.
Morrell said something today that blew my mind. He said: "As writers we evolve and use our work to be the autobiographies of our souls."
And that is when I knew regardless of whether my work ever becomes financially successful, I must keep writing my stories. And it's why I can't write what I myself haven't experienced. If I tried, it wouldn't be the autobiography of my soul. And that novel wouldn't be a novel that only Rita Arens can write, as I feel THE OBVIOUS GAME was so personal it was a novel that only Rita Arens could write. There are plenty of writers out there who have written anorexia novels, and there were a few prominent editors who passed up on TOG because they already had an anorexia novel in their lists, but my book was my book because it was a book only I could write.
Morrell said to have a career in writing, you must want it more than life itself. This probably sounds very dramatic.
To people who don't have daydreams. To people who don't see stories when they're stopped at stoplights.
The flipside of intrusive thoughts about snakes in grates is stories that come in a flash. The flipside to religiously counting calories, for me, has been religiously recording sentences that have changed my life.
I want to write the autobiography of my soul to remain when I am gone. I want to be more than an abandoned Facebook account forty years from now. I agree with Morrell: I couldn't write another anorexia novel, because I'm a different person now than I was when I started THE OBVIOUS GAME. I don't think you can step in the same river twice.
Now I'm interested in something new -- and to stay interested is to stay interesting.
Do you daydream?