Thomas Sullivan

Writers are failed children.  Lemme try that on for a thesis sentence and see where it goes.  We already know that writers are failed adults by dint of the facts that they are dreamers, seldom get paid, and work sporadically; but do the roots of their malfeasance tangle with childhood?  The answer to that might be a handy object lesson for struggling parents who have burned their Dr. Spock books: “Eat your spinach and stop picking your nose, Mikey, or you’ll become a writer!”  Or maybe it could become a litmus test for predicting a career.  If Mikey stops picking his nose but starts picking his sister Sally’s nose, we could conclude: “Imaginative…rebellious…a parser of verbal cautions…no inhibitions whatever — there are possibilities for a writer here.”

Then again, a challenging childhood might be better than growing up dead.  Which is what I mostly see, gazing out across the fruited plane — sedentary parents raising sedentary children in houses whose intellectual stimulation is limited to what can be plugged into a wall.  I don’t think there are very many things my ex and I did right as parents.  We might both have been successful single parents or terrific with other partners, but together we sort of neutralized each other.  On the other hand, it kind of let our children pick what they wanted out of the vacuum.  And they did a good job.  I’m proud of them both.  Eunice and Eunuch.  Kidding.  Kidding, just kidding, Sean — a.k.a. Shane, Lad, The Boy.  (Ha, and you thought I was going to pretend Eunice was the boy!).  For the record, their names are Colleen and Sean, and they are both outstanding and unique individuals.  They could each be writers, because they not only have the verbal skills that prevailed in their household but the thinking skills as well.  They are lifelong learners and observers of people, devastatingly keen with analysis, and if I dare say, on a good day, profoundly insightful.  Above all, they have imagination.

I claim no genetic credit for any of this, but I do feel that the vibrant creative and cerebral atmosphere of our household freed those imaginations.  Call it the writer advantage.  This really didn’t come home to me until recently when my daughter visited, and we all — Colleen, Sean, their friend Sandeep and I — sat in my living room laughing at some classic examples of their creative exploits. 

I recall how Sean as a freshman in high school managed to get four lockers assigned to him using various identities.  The only name I remember was Abubucar Jones the 4^th, whose moniker I believe he borrowed in part from a Nigerian general.  I can see now that this wasn’t a misrepresentation of who he is so much as a parsing out of his larger-than-life personality.  And isn’t that what writers do with fiction?  He has an omnivorous appetite for knowledge and just doesn’t fit in any one place.  And counterintuitively (if you’re not a writer) this causes him to be very private and usually alone, though he certainly doesn’t have to be except by choice.  He knows who he is, and he is intensely loyal to the rare few he allows into his inner sanctum.

So is Colleen.  She and her brother were both elected drum majors in high school, and Colleen in college as well, and she has always headed up organizations and causes.  Whereas Sean was a professional child actor with some 1000 performances by the time he was 15, Colleen has been orchestrating productions from both sides of the footlights since the first time she drew a crowd alongside a tennis court at age 3 with her uncanny performance of a growling Linda Blair from The Exorcist.  But her true genius came through to me there in the living room with the lake twinkling merrily behind her as we recalled some of the melodramas she and her brother perpetrated on their friends.  These were the equal of inventive short stories if not, collectively, something more sustained.

The friends must necessarily be given pseudonyms here.  There was little Randy Jones who lived next door but couldn’t go home one day because my progeny convinced him there was a tornado coming.  He could have rolled out our front door and landed in his backyard without leaving Kansas, but he had to call his mother with the weather report to explain why he wouldn’t be returning any time soon.  And then there was Billy Smith, another child actor, who was constantly overwhelmed by one ruse after another.  Somehow Colleen talked him into taking off all his clothes — I believe it was so that he could weigh himself — and then the clothes, which were draped over a half-bath enclosure in the basement, disappeared.  The last frame of this farce has Billy running home some blocks away barefoot in a bright orange blanket.

Probably Colleen’s Oscar-winning spectacle, however, was The Great Neighborhood Feud.  Involuntarily, Billy Smith starred in that one too.  We lived in a kind of compound on a dead-end road on a half-acre straddling two cities.  Beyond the dead-end barrier the dirt road resumed as a fully paved street.  The half-acre was shaped as a right triangle with four neighboring houses running along the hypotenuse and another neighbor next to the upright leg of that same triangle.  Somehow Billy was persuaded that the neighbors along the hypotenuse were feuding with the neighbor along the right leg while the innocent Sullivans were caught in the crossfire between.  This was a feud on the order of the Hatfields and McCoys, and so crossfire was literal.  With Colleen setting the course, Billy had to crawl commando-style all the way out to the barbecue pit and then back to Sean’s bedroom window.  When he got to the window he was bundled over the sill and told to keep low.  Meanwhile, another neighbor child had been conscripted to play a bit part, and she pushed a button on a tape recorder which played gunfire, then explosions, then planes dropping bombs.  This was in the bathroom next to Sean’s room.  A moment later she burst into the bedroom sobbing that people were being killed.  Alas, poor Billy Smith, trapped in a war zone, forever destined to be the audience for comedy-dramas in which he himself starred.  I do not know how Colleen drew this scintillating production to a close, but it still inspires rave reviews today.  I do happen to know that Billy Smith crawled commando-style some 256 feet just to get to the barbecue pit.  If I ever see him again, I will endeavor to peek at his butt-naked elbows, if you’ll pardon the mixed anatomy, for scars.  Too bad I won’t have Colleen to devise a way to do this.

But then, she is no longer a child, and that was my point.  Writers are like rebellious children.  At least writers who never stop inquiring, demand everything from life, and constantly bound up and down the rubber steps of their imaginations are like that.  They fail to accept the restraints and the discipline and the limits put on them, and along the way they fail to acquire adult hypocrisy, double-speak, and pretensions (at least when they are being writers they fail to acquire those last three things).  Most of all they fail to grow up.  Peter Pans all.  And Penelope Pans, or maybe Wendys.  They are forever asking Why, Who, What, When, Where and Which.  Annoying and sometimes disturbing questions that can cause otherwise normal people to actually think creatively and clash with routine.  And if you are the terminally afflicted one — the writer — you know the trade-off.  Yes, you get to keep your imagination in Technicolor, you can be energized to unbelievable megawattage, and you can soar above the clouds.  But you don’t fit.  Your galaxy collides with others and almost never mixes.  A few find soulmates, but the odds are you will be the Lone Ranger, the Anthony Adverse, and the Cyrano de Bergerac of your own comedy-drama.  The price of wisdom, truth and beauty is steep in such a lifestyle, and there are no guarantees you will find even those things.  The success of that depends on how true to your ideals you can be.  But a life of enchantment is possible along the way…entirely possible.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/