Thomas Sullivan

                                                                                              8 COMMENTS follow

Where do you write? I mean really write. Where do the answers come to the questions you agonize over in front of the computer screen? In your dreams, driving the car, watching people at a mall?

I skied at a place called Elm Creek on Christmas Eve, listening to the owls – three of them in the miles I covered – echoing their question, “Who?” as if to pass along advance warning of my approach. Who, indeed. To be a writer is to have a perpetual identity crisis. Normally you’d have a few hundred people out there at Elm Creek, dwindling down to the last diehards by ten o’clock. But it was empty. Lamps punctuated part of the trail, throwing a succession of golden spotlights for me to pass through, searching for one that fit. None of them fit. I left the last one behind me and skate-skied on under starlight, enthralled by the phantom blue snow and crystal magic. As always. This is ritual for me in winter, at least once a day. It is where I write.

CC skiing is my religion. I think it is the blankness of snow that makes it so. The world out there is simplified, made whole, its flaws covered up, with the potential for perfection renewed. Like a blank page on a computer screen.

Both the snow and the blank page invite invention, and I get a rush out of inventing from the ground up. That tabula rasa of a blank page is as exciting to me as it can be daunting. I stare at its perfection before I begin to mess it up with my humble prose, and for just that few seconds I know that I have a shot at writing the most timeless words ever written. Doesn’t matter that it’s an illusion, the potential perfection is there, the same starting point as the one for the words that actually are the greatest ever written. Dunno who wrote ‘em, or what they say – that doesn’t matter either. Potential matters. Potential is motivation.

The characters begin their transits across the blank page, and I become the inquisitor owl, asking “who, who…” And in that process, the question is always, “Who am I?” Because you cannot write things you do not know. You don’t have to know them first-hand, of course, but it requires, insight, empathy, vicarious living. So, the “Who,” it seems to me, is always a search within yourself.

Thus, as I said above, to sell one’s soul to the muse is to have a perpetual identity crisis. There are times when I think I know who I am, but then some maverick inspiration will take a potshot inside my imagination and my muses will all scatter in new directions. I don’t like limits, and I don’t like borders. Both are invitations to trespass. As soon as you define one or the other, you imply that there is something beyond, and by nature I want to see over the horizon. I want to go beyond the trail lights into the phantom blue snow.

I think most writers are like that. There are some who regard borders as security zones, and others who see limits as convenient aids to define their interests, and still others who think of limits and borders as backgrounds that in no way stunt the possibilities for setting characters against each other in a full range of human dramas. For me, the human drama interacts with the limits and the borders, and so I need to orchestrate both.

Once I actually begin to write, dissatisfaction begins. Now I have to like what I’ve dared introduce on the page. I’m damn dangerous to myself at this point and painfully aware of “sully-ing” the perfect whiteness. If it’s a novel, I’d better fall in love with it quickly. Else a pyromaniac deep within me will burn the sucker (or hit delete) in short order. The most difficult thing for me to maintain in the throes of creativity is perspective. I have lots of tricks for this, and there are a few people I trust to weigh into the process – true muses, if you will – who will read my stuff and help me regain perspective. But even so, familiarity breeds contempt, and it is just tough to read and re-read your words as you work a novel day after day and not lose a sense of what you have. “Who, who…” nags.

Sometimes the blank page stays blank. Same at Elm Creek. I become snow-blind to what’s there or it all just grays into an absence of perspective. When that happens, I will kick off the skis and trudge off-trail into the woods at night. Then I will study the darkness until I start to see what’s there. Amazing what you can see when you stare into the darkness long enough. It might be a pained tree, so gnarled and tightly balled that it looks like it dipped its fingers in acid or recoiled from a flame. Or the roseate glow of a city to the west and an ominous deep purple cloud wall across a stark valley to the south. The sky repairs itself at night and is covered with welts and abrasions of every hue. Or I might read some tracks in the snow of a drama that happened hours before, life and death stuff, played out by hungry nocturnal denizens. And the snow is always luminous at night. Did you know, there are spiders in the snow? Yeah. Microcosms and macrocosms everywhere, starting with spiders and ending with stars. The stars are just pinpricks in the unrelenting darkness of the cosmos, I told another writer recently. You just have to connect the dots.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

 http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

8 Comments:

John Skipp said…

Wow. That was beautiful, and achingly apt.

Thanks for taking me out to the unbroken snow, where everything is possible.

(Even here, in the desert that is southern California.)

11:37 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

“…it is the blankess of snow that makes it so…”

“I want to go beyond the trail lights into the phantom blue snow.”

“Amazing what you can see when you stare into the darkness long enough”

I could go back through the last twenty or so essays and not find that many lines worth remembering…there are titles in them, whole vistas of …STUFF… just waiting. Like the blank snow, I suppose…I needed this. It’s been a “life” filled weekend and I have been less-than-creative in this new year….good reminder.

We don’t have any snow, but I could always go sit on the bridge and watch the river, or stand on the bank of The Great Dismal Swamp – or drive through the 200 year old graveyard…

Thanks for “Sullying” my day (heh).

Dave

2:07 PM  

Sully said…

Thanks, guys. Snowscapes, sandscapes — same blank slate, John. Is this why we both shave our heads? … And, Davey, I’ll trade you an Elm Creek odyssey for some sagas out of the Great Dismal Swamp, which was an early soul-shaker for me.

Sully

5:18 PM  

Teresa said…

The sky repairs itself at night and is covered with welts and abrasions of every hue.

Wow… talk about an indelible image.

Welcome, Thomas.

5:28 PM  

Janet Berliner said…

Thank you, Sully-man, for yet another intelligent, beautiful, soulful essay. For me, though I will not, cannot, compete with your extraordinary prose, my muse is the sea.

For Paul Gallico, who wrote “THE SNOW GOOSE,” it must have been both.

Answer this, if you please. What do we do, you and I, if the snow and the sea are beyond our grasp? What–do we do?

–Janet

5:37 PM  

Sully said…

Ah, well, Janet, there is always more space within than without. If there is no snow and no sea, we turn to the cosmos of the soul, our imaginations. Real estate there is always available and rent free. … You know, when I was responding to Skipp’s dunes out there near L.A., I was thinking just that — the sea. And maybe that’s the eternal fascination of it, not just that water is so elemental, but that it is a vast vista, forever in flux, like an Etch-A-Sketch always washed clean by the yawing. No wonder Jack London nailed down the universe in The Sea Wolf. And “pshaw” about competing with me. That’s always a 2-way street. Hopefully none of us can do what any of the rest of us do. I sure as hell can’t balance a vast epic like you can. Don’t have the center for it. Guess that’s called insight…

TERESA — Appreciate your response. Hang in there with those short stories. Whatever they look like to you now, they are like children who grow up to support your future.

All best, Sully

7:06 PM  

Mark Rainey said…

An excellent essay, Sully — the imagery alone is enticing, the metaphors more than a little apt. I haven’t been skiing in many, many years, and never CC, but I’ve been out there enough to relate to the exhilaration you describe. Thanks for sharing all that feeling.

–Mark

9:02 PM  

Sully said…

We just skied together, Mark. Funny how often when I’m out there I wish I could share it; and it never occurred to me that by writing about it, others would connect. Thank you for the affirmation.

Sully

9:46 PM