Thomas Sullivan: DO STUCK PIGS SWEAT, NEGOTIATING ROMANCE, AND THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE
It was the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it on the wrong day. The direction I took couldn’t have been more wrong, and my clothes were all wrong for the woods and the snow. Whether because of wrong decisions I made, a bunch of other things went wrong along the way. Even my basic quest in pursuit of confirmations was wrong because the odds of success were as wrong as slim and none.
So, what could be more right for a story?
Quest? Check. … Conflict? Check. … Supporting cast (underlying characters)? Check. … Dynamic setting? Check. … Tension? Check. … Obstacles and minor characters along the way? Check. … Meaningful resolution? Check.
To those hundreds of people who have asked over the years, this is where stories come from. So call this column one of my Cannibal Essays. I believe the last Cannibal Essay I did was Empty Boxes I Have Worn http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/, the idea being that a meaningful life shapes meaningful stories every day and that a writer must learn not just to live them but to put frames around them and communicate them. I’ve deliberately chosen passive events here just to illustrate that it can be done without inherently dramatic material. In fact, if a writer is to reach the professional level it is critical that these underlying techniques of story creation are able to stand convincingly on their own apart from sensational plot twists i.e., a nuclear device ticking down to doom in an orphanage in which the future Dalai Lama is mastering the secret that will save the world from ebola if only his insanely jealous hermaphrodite brother/sister will find love on death row and allow a bone marrow transplant that will supply the missing gene for spiritual enlightenment. So I invite you to come along and see how an arbitrary circumstance morphed into a quest with conflicts and resolutions and, above all, greater meanings.
It began with defeat. A perfect winter of adventures ended with a fall on skinny skis one night. A rotator cuff that was already torn tore some more and surgery was deemed necessary as quickly as it could be scheduled. Out of refusal to accept my fate I got back on skis sans poles twice before the sawbones cut a week later, but of course this was merely symbolic. Just a tantrum I had to throw. Anger, frustration, bitterness…done.
Are you getting this? Negative emotions with which anyone can identify are a good beginning for a story because they map conflict.
… negative emotions, but not mourning, not denial. Those two just aren’t me and their exclusion will be part of this story. Not mourning, because its premise is an acceptance I can’t…accept. Not denial, because there is very little that I don’t believe is possible, miracles inclusive. This is because I am a romantic idealist and for me romantic idealism is the only thing worth living. If I keep faith with myself, the romance stays alive. Everything external is negotiable. In the vast resources of the mind, there is a work-around for any obstacle to ideals.
Again, important because it establishes the character of the POV, and it travels well for most readers. Okay, the romantic idealism happens to be my personal front row approach to the world. But it’s a POV that exists in virtually everyone, even if their romantic idealism is a bunch of crushed flat hopes in the back of their closet.
And it’s funny, but when you sincerely live romantic idealism, things happen. Where there’s a will there’s a way. So now, standing in the ruins of a winter in the aftermath of a ski accident, I begin to pull myself together. I won’t give up. Instead, I go into analytical mode. What is it about the skiing that is so essential to me? Flight, motion, rhythm, flow… And then the underlying reasons for those physical sensations — the fact that all of me gets used…I come alive!…I connect, I feel, I think, I sort things out, I GET IDEAS! Idea: who needs skis for all those things?
In case you missed it, that was the catalyst…
If I can’t ski for a while, I will hike. Nothing will steal my winter, my crystal ether, my fields of inspiration. Blind adventure will follow. Trust me. I’ve done this before, and you CAN try this at home. Or out in nature. When you walk the walk and talk the talk day after day it all starts to link up — the symbols, the meanings, the wild cards of chance — with the adventures. Finding a quest is easy in this my token universe of 5400 acres. A couple of quests actually. A white feather and a pink flamingo. Like I said, I’ve done this before.
The white feather is from 10 months earlier. In a place I call the Golden Meadow, next to a lone tree, I stuck it nib first into the ground, like a writer signing his name. The place and the plume have special meaning to me, and so I took note of how the feather survived spring floods, summer storms, and autumn winds. It got to be a thing in my life and for my readers. There were pictures of it in my April http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/04162008.htm , August http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm , and November http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/11162008.htm newsletters, and I wrote about it in my October column on StorytellersUnplugged Inspiration Is A Duet http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/10/15/thomas-sullivan-inspiration-is-a-duet/. The end, I thought. With winter coming that was the epilogue. But the amazing feather hung on, and so did I until I was sure it couldn’t be there any longer. Ice, snow — it couldn’t survive the cycle of seasons. I didn’t want to know. Only now I am off the ski trails, because I didn’t survive either. There is something here for me to accept. So I will make one last pilgrimage to the site, just to keep faith with myself and the symbol I placed there. Thus, knee-deep in snow, wearing only YakTrax Pros on my hiking boots, trying to protect a severely torn rotator cuff, I set off from a distant parking lot at Elm Creek’s beach to reach the Golden Meadow from the furthest approach, as if to delay by an hour or so the inevitability that this day I will confirm.
…The Quest!
So, let’s see where we are in this framing of simple events. We have begun with a frustrated protagonist who, in desperation, sets off walking in an effort to reclaim a season of life and of nature denied him. The symbol of his futile defiance is a white feather, now surely gone with the elements, but that he must quest for one last time as a kind of closure. Q.E.D. The meanings are multiple, but there are levels which will remain beyond the story –
…this is how you anchor and preserve romantic idealism, but the quest could serve any passion or tangible goal in a larger story.
The route I have chosen is very long and destined to become longer this day because I do not want to mess up the groomed trails with my boots. I switch to snowmobile trails, but the first close call roaring up from behind gives me pause, and soon I am playing a dangerous game of Dodg’em. It culminates when a bouncing ballistic behemoth of gleaming green metal careens off a curve head-on, driving me to my knees and nearly onto the injured shoulder. I am in the wrong place. My bad. Traversing a strip of woods ends the danger and brings me to a snowshoe trail.
First challenges met. Please note that I am not adding anything to this from my imagination. It would be easy to intensify it with elements of almost any genre from supernatural to thriller, but the point here is that real-life has real stories every day no matter how innocuous. The thing of it is that they never happen for you if you don’t invite them or recognize them or communicate them.
The adrenaline rush is followed by an encounter with two novice snowshoers on their maiden journey. The exchange of stories is interesting, informative. One of them has a brother who makes snowshoes. Note to self: maybe I should get into snowshoeing while I’m rehabbing the shoulder.
This is a Canterbury Tales element — a character sidebar paced after an event. Again, it could be invested with dramatic material — confrontation, rescue, emotional connection, tragedy, comedy — suitable to any category.
When the snowshoe trail veers away from my destination, I abandon it. But cutting through fields and forests soon envelops me in waste high drifts, while marshes wrap themselves around me like wheat paste and black pools block me. Ominous cracks appear in thin ice I must cross. I have been skiing all winter mostly without poles in order to allow healing, but now I have an injury that must be protected against falls. [Photos are in this month’s newsletter] I use an old trick I learned the hard way in Michigan’s state parks, i.e., that deer tracks will lead you out of dense areas. Deer follow the path of least resistance.
Another wave of challenges met.
I discover that deer don’t have to duck under low branches, and — just to get one more animal into this sentence — I am sweating like a stuck pig (do stuck pigs sweat or just bleed). The next couple of hours are pure struggle against the elements. Exhaustion and below zero cold are taking their toll. A bass drum is beating in my chest as I surge and plunge through the snow, and I am soaked through all layers. I cannot stop to rest, because the dampness will freeze if I stop putting out heat. But at last I come upon the meadow, still gold though thinned and clumped by drifts, and am briefly heartened. This is going to end my quest, I remember. The meadow rises above me and there is the lone tree halfway up where I planted the white feather 10 months ago. Its slender snowbound trunk informs me of what I must accept, and there is even a pulse of self-disdain in me for having come here to be defeated. I feel foolish. But what’s the alternative? I climb the final hundred yards.
Do you see the possibilities for an ending? It can be whatever you want it to be. But this is what it was…
Cold tomb, pale shroud. No white plume à la Cyrano de Bergerac. The white feather could not survive an endless winter, of course, though this one nearly made it through the full cycle of seasons. But that’s okay, I tell myself. There is nothing safer than a memory. The memory will always be there waiting for yet another spring. Still, I stare grimly at the undefiled sweep of snow. And then, like a latent flame leaping down a column of smoke to re-light a candle, I am taken by a faint hope. I pull off my glove, and as carefully as an archaeologist at an ancient altar I caress away the white dust of winter. At first I think it is a scraggly leaf — the skeleton of one — somehow upright, but then I see what to me is still miraculous. [Photos in my newsletter this month -- mn333mn@earthlink.net ]
And that’s the point. It doesn’t matter whether the reader feels they foresaw this particular outcome, because it’s not a story about things & events. It’s an internal story about feelings, insights and revelations. What matters is the journey, whether the reader empathizes with the POV of the story. If it works, it works because the reader went somewhere. And that’s the job of the writer. To take the reader on a journey.
Most stories that happen to most people on most days are like this one. They do not hit you between the eyes with tangible events. For impact they depend on your world view and the poetry in your soul or the passion with which you regard things. But when you do this every day, potent adrenaline adventures will also happen. You are never bored. In any case, the fully interpreted happenings of your life are the underlayment, the launch point for the writer’s imagination. And the writer’s imagination is the visa to cross all borders and explore all possibilities.
Did I mention that there were two quests that day? The second arose because something in me was confirmed by the results of the first. I’ll use the final quest for next month’s column.
Also thanks for all the inquiries about the shoulder. Rotator cuff had to be Fed-exed from the scene of the ski accident, but the sawbones said I had excellent tissue and in two hours of surgery with twice the usual number of pins and sutures he got me on the road to full recovery. Also had a ruptured bicep, same arm, which wasn’t fixed. Other bicep has been ruptured for a long time, though, and I never fixed that one. In the words of the inimitable orthopod, “…you probably won’t notice any difference.” Yeah, that’s what I want to hear and why I pay my med bills promptly.
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
www.thomassullivanauthor.com
