Thomas Sullivan

One of my earlier essays was titled KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. Well, there’s kissing and there’s…kissing. I must be into deep kissing, because inevitably my essays sink below the surface into depths I try to avoid. A large volume of email seems to attest that depth isn’t all bad, but this essay really is going to try and keep it SIMPLE! And short. He said.

Subject-wise it is depth itself I want to address, however. How, in fact, does one’s writing become deeper, richer, more insightful? Like I would know, right? Hey, it’s relative. I mean I soared past the “I can write it in a box, I can write it with a fox…” stage way last week. I am practically literate. Except when I’m sick. Then I’m ill-literate. Oh, please stop me before I kill again! Must soldier on. There are a number of epiphanies and plateaus that clearly mark the growth of writers when you look at their learning curves. I propose to cover some in future columns. I’ve given you “Cannibal Essays” which ranged from KY Jelly & the Headless Squirrel to Khaki Man & the Peanut Butter Players (see: www.thomassullivanauthor.com > News & Articles for a complete list of my columns), so what do you think I should call these? Give me a name befitting inspiration and revelation. Lemme see: Illumination Essays? Quantum Leaps? Afflatus? Mystic Pizzas? How ‘bout for now we just call them Bolts from God? By any name the one I’m writing today marked my growth from 2-D writing to 3-D (no, that’s not a bra size for a well-endowed preying mantis).

Before the lightning bolt hit me, I was writing pretty much about the appearances of the world, literal happenings. After the megawatt prod from the clouds, I began to see, understand, and express the realities behind appearances. Appearances vs. Realities. That was a breakthrough for me, and, from what I see in the writings of others, for most writers who get beyond a certain point. It’s a fairly introductory point. I remember writing pale imitations of the Hardy Boys when I was in 5^th grade. These were the first of an endless declension of youthful heroes straight out of Middle America and quite enough to hold my youthful attention. They seldom achieved more than a single personality trait (headstrong, logical, compulsive, etc.), and their conflicts were with the world rather than in themselves. They were wonderful caricatures of our most secure moments. You see a lot of high school students who achieve that level of creative writing competence, but, as you might expect, even pros wrestle with the balance between full character arcs and external story. The temptation is to write about what is going on outside the character and short what is going on within. It is easier to narrate things & events than to find ways to show the sketchy emotional truths in the souls of characters.

Had I been in touch with my inner woman, I might have happened on this growth spurt a little sooner than I did, because I think female writers have a head start on getting underneath things & events. They tend to search out the emotions of their characters and use a lighter touch to express them. Both those applications (emotions and subtlety) suit recognition of the world of inner realities beneath the world of appearances.

On the other hand, if the inner angst of your characters is not sponsored by meaningful external things & events, then you are probably spooling out neurotic narratives. Fluff. Emotional pap. This is why action readers get bored. They go nuts waiting for something to happen worthy of the emotions depicted. The subtler readers, of course, believe that the action folk have to kiss a cactus or have a warm body part blown off before they feel anything. Somewhere beyond shallow characters and trotting out trivia there are enduring tales that find meaningful realities emerging from appearances gone horribly wrong. That’s the epiphany real writers (and readers) come to sooner or later.

I guess for me, the Bolt from God struck when I got immersed in a lot of 18^th and 19^th century writing. You know, that murky stuff the Russians and the Euros turned out in opposition to drawing room societies. Rebel authors attacking the pretensions and conventions of their times. Attacking the hypocritical appearances of things, really. (When has it ever been different?) Also the romanticists, hearkening onto nature and individuality, which spoke to my personal inner reality. You laugh, but you don’t know me. A friend of mine said it exquisitely just recently after a walk in the woods: that it felt good to be mixed in with all the splendor in nature, where one’s flaws no longer matter, because you become part of the perfection. I’ve wanted to share such revelations all my life, have that mythical soul-mate who becomes my inseparable everything simply drop from the sky to search out those truths with me, and it is perhaps my greatest sadness that she has not. Those 18^th and 19^th C. authors all sang the anthems of inner realities, whether for romantic love or societal duty or politics or human compassion. It got grouped under fancy names for schools of writing, literary traditions, movements, but the message was that the individual must fulfill his/her destiny based on who they really are (and often in literature, who they are not). There’s the tale! The real story. The struggle. Now that’s worth writing about. I was one morbid teenager reading that stuff, but I was on fire with my own balking over hypocritical appearances. After checking out of the womb, no one ever called me conventional.

Oh, dear, this isn’t staying SIMPLE, is it? To hell with it. Characters, characters – stand-ins for you and me. How many people in real life do you know whose appearances match their reality? I can think of only a bare few. Underline bare. Because the ones who come to mind are truly bare souls who only seem to exist in relation to something else. They hate to be alone, cannot abide quiet time or interact with their thoughts, tend to overmedicate, and “aren’t themselves” without a drink, a smoke, a coffee, or a conversation – whi
ch is to say, a mirror to tell them who they are. It’s as if they need constant sensory feedback to verify that they exist. No inner contact whatever. Now those are truly unexamined lives.

On the other hand, there are some pretty stark and sorry souls living in the camp of sheer reality. Prison, comes to mind. Prison can make you very honest, in a way, because there’s no more need to keep up appearances. Lots of different types of prisons, though, including jobs, relationships, and states of mind. Like depression. Often depression is a vacation from the pressure of appearances. And yet we talk about coming out of depression back into coping with reality. But that’s the thing. Coping, for most of us, means keeping up appearances. A vicious cycle unless you find the magic perspective, the trigger that gives you total sanctuary for the total you. And the deeper you are, the harder to find that match. I think characters that capture some aspect of this universal conflict should be present in almost any fully developed work. It’s that fundamental in the human condition and thus in creating believable characters with credible lives.

Writers, being particularly screwed up, have primary research at their fingertips when it comes to the care and feeding of our true selves in a world that demands conformity to appearances. We may do the rat race and jump into the nuclear family thing, but sooner or later “me, myself and I” corner us alone and demand equal time. Without a refuge in which to be our real selves, we might as well hang out a sign: life cancelled on account of appearances. Hmmm. In which case, we probably read books as an escape, thereby keeping writers gainfully employed. Ahem. Forget everything I just said.

I guess what makes it tough to find ourselves is that we are bred to the appearance of things. Our sense of self-worth and self-honesty are buried deep in facades when we are too young to know that appearances may not ultimately coincide with our personal reality. We end up stuck with emotional reflexes like guilt and fear that have little connection with who we really are. I recommend failure early and often in life in order to shake free of the phony constraints. As a writer, and a maverick, but also an idealist, I’ve had to make my peace with it. I’m very much an individual, but I also bow to the appearance of things until the two collide. Then it’s no contest. You only get one shot at life. I gotta be me.

Well, damn, if I haven’t provoked a lot of quibbling with those statements, I’m off my game. Nevertheless, whatever you throw back at me my answer will be the same: “semantics.” And in any case, this essay is about a writer’s evolution into the realities beneath appearances. When we are young and simple and unable to sort things out, we tend to take appearances at face value. We deal with tangible things & events that we can easily grasp with our senses and don’t look very deeply into people and their motives because abstract thinking is effortful whereas senses are automatic. And even as adults growing up in a media-driven society, individuals with independent analytical skills seem to be an endangered species. Beginning writers too usually focus on apparent palpable realities to the detriment of characters. They go for the appearances – orchestrations of character that look real but are simply reflections of the character’s outward image. The characters have on their chosen clothes: name, rank and serial number. They wear their airs, and their actions, and their interactions, and their direct words (or the narrator’s) inform us of what we should think about them. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” And we don’t. A lot of superficial writing is like that. It tends to be the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew for grownups, guised in different genres. A genre is a bias, a kind of overkill of emphasis of one thing or another. I don’t want to read about hearts and flowers exclusively, so I pick a different bias. But I think the best of any genre – best meaning most broadly satisfying – moves toward mainstream. I mean, it’s still about something – as John Skipp might say – but it fleshes out the characters in a more rounded way, complete with their struggles to become themselves against the appearances of life. Do you call that kind of appeal mature? Maybe. Let’s just say that the reader with an examined life probably wants to see a little of the same in the characters he/she reads about before they suspend disbelief. There is resistance to this on Publishers Row and elsewhere. Ask Dean Koontz.

Okay. In sum, one of the Bolts from God that opens up literary horizons is when a writer begins to see past the appearances into the realities of people and to focus their writing on that difference. That’s important because the conflict between appearances and inner realities is a universal experience. Nearly everyone discovers and measures the gaps between who they appear to be and who they really are. And we all yearn to be free, to be ourselves, to fulfill our natural potential and capacities. Nothing more stressful or ultimately damning than hypocritical appearances (aka rusting realities). An affront to Creation. To one degree or another we will break the mold. Fortunately for writers, it’s a messy process with zillions of outcomes and a high failure rate. Ergo, we get fodder for stories, most of which don’t end “they lived happily ever after.” Also, fortunately for writers, we are exempt from society’s suffocating expectations by dint of the fact that we are eccentrics. While others run the obstacle course, finding diversions wherever they can beyond duty or image, we are genuine pariahs. Low expectations do us a favor. Things can only get more respectable for us. If we succeed a little, we are actually celebrated and envied for our individuality. Even our families are exempt, like my son who became a minister overnight in order to perform a wedding ceremony on a cliff, which his sister wrote for herself from an old Celtic ritual. It’s terrific to be allowed to be real – like the insane, the young, the famous, and the senile. The insane do it wonderfully. Mad scientists with mussed hair and pencil caddies cackle with joy at who they are.
Funny how society lets you be who you are if you are adamant enough. It’s a kind of self-declared success. This is who I am. Over time the mundane world gives up trying to recruit you as confirmation of itself. If you’re lucky, it actually listens to your voice and your dreams. That’s our mission, isn’t it? To give the mundane world its dreams. To launch readers into time and space through someone else’s life. To help them escape the baffles and barriers of their own appearances. Suits me. I help people find lives every day, whether I’m writing or not. Of all the tests I’ve failed, that’s the one I passed. Didn’t even have to study. You can’t study for reality. You just have to show up for life.

If you’d like to get my free monthly newsletter, drop me your email address at mn333mn@earthlink.net. And if you would like to read a sample chapter of my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF, check it out at the web site link below. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com