Isolation
By Jeff Mariotte
A moment, please, to remember our comrade Charlie Grant, on the sad day of his funeral.
Writers typically spend a lot of time in no one’s company but their own. I know I do. The Flying M Word Ranch is 10 miles away from the nearest town, which only has about 17,000 inhabitants anyway. There’s one other house on our dirt road, but I see their horses more than I see the people who live there, and more of our neighbors are cows, coyotes, buzzards and crickets than human beings. I’m surrounded by 37 acres of my own property and thousands, or tens of thousands, of acres of undeveloped high desert and mountain, with a few scattered houses here and there. I see my family every day (as long as no one’s on a trip somewhere) but most days I don’t see anyone else.
And yet…
…and yet, we live in a world where anyone with a phone line (High-speed access? Out here? Don’t make me laugh.) can be in contact with tens of millions of people from all over the world. We can go online in minutes and spend hours, chatting or reading blogs (or writing them) or trading e-mails.
We can also surround ourselves with TVs and music and iPods and every other form of electronic gizmo created in the last half-century to ease our loneliness, and many of us do. These gizmos give us every opportunity for interpersonal communication, albeit of the faceless kind.
Storytellers Unplugged, for instance, has a Yahoo group for swapping messages, one of eight or nine such to which I’m subscribed. I don’t drop in on any of them nearly as often as some, and no doubt more often than others. I need to limit my online time somehow, and reading every group’s messages, plus blogs, plus other sites I like to visit, can just take too long. That dial-up thing again, partially. Point is, they’re out there if we want them. Forget about MySpace—on dial-up it’s very slow-loading, and while I understand it can be great for promotion, I just haven’t been able to force myself into that environment. I do, however, have a personal blog, an Amazon Connect blog, and my monthly contribution to this one.
We can also belong to writers’ organizations, and I do. This year I let my SFWA membership lapse, and a few years ago I gave up on the HWA. Currently I belong to the International Thriller Writers, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and the Western Writers of America. Three seems to be about my limit—when something else comes along I have to drop one. But there are plenty of others out there, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. The biggest benefit, I believe, is a sense of community. It’s good to know that there are others out there struggling with the same things we are, facing the same issues, dealing with them in our own ways. These associations can help us guide our careers and tackle personal challenges. They can also spawn friendships that go beyond the electronic and into the real world.
Mostly who I spend time with when I’m working on a project (which is pretty much always) is the characters in it. No, they’re not real. They’re fictional, imaginary. But that doesn’t mean they don’t fascinate me. If I’m doing my job right, they’re intriguing people with hopes and dreams, disappointments and heartaches, jobs and hobbies and personal interests that aren’t the same as mine.
Sometimes, through them, I learn things I never knew before. A character with an interest in Big Band music, for instance, might steer me toward websites or blogs full of information I never would have thought to look for. The interests of characters have led me into new worlds, which in some cases result in acquaintanceships or friendships with real people in the real world who share those interests.
Also through my characters, I’ve been exposed to ideas I never thought about. It sounds unlikely, to say the least, since I’m the one writing them. But how many of us haven’t worked out our ideas and feelings about some topic by writing about it? The act of writing spurs intellectual energy. Thinking about what this or that person would say or do makes us examine our own convictions. Putting thoughts down on paper (or pixel) generates new, different thoughts. Nothing spurs creativity like creativity, and if creativity isn’t defined by coming up with original ideas, then I don’t know what it is.
So writing may, at times, be the loneliest of professions. It can be one in which you can easily feel isolated from the world. But it’s also one in which you can surround yourself with whoever you want to get to know, at any given moment. It’s important to talk to real people, face to face, once in a while. But when you can’t, when you’re shackled to the desk, you still don’t have to be alone.
And there’s something to be said for choosing wisely the company you keep…
