Thomas Sullivan

I think choosing a career or a genre is a little like making love. Well…a lot like making love. You have a certain skill set, and we can call that your power of attraction — your good looks. Good looks (as women always know) grant the power of choice, and so you use your skill set to attract a specific readership. It is a superficial beginning, but you build on it, so that over time you engender a certain loyalty (faithfulness). And in the happily-ever-after — if you’ve chosen the right readership — it morphs into a true butterfly. Like beauty, the initial attraction itself stays in the eyes of the beholder, because it is locked in memory and association. But the sustaining thing is not just that specific beauty or attractiveness, it is the fact that you used it to make the choice you did. You belong to those readers.

That seems to be an increasingly trendy part of our culture: the social pressure to belong to something apart from the substance or lack of it in a relationship. You see it in, for instance, music. Bands like Modest Mouse or The Shins become initially popular among a group of independent fans (“Indies”), but when they cross over into mainstream success they are almost reviled by their original followers for having “left.” So, for better or worse, genre may act more like a benevolent hostage-taker than a fair exchange of loyalty for value at one point in a writer’s life. Or to keep within the metaphor of this column, a jealous lover.

And there’s the rub. Because if you haven’t chosen the right readership — one that fits the full range of who you are — you may be stuck. This is probably the most secret (shhh!) complaint I hear from other writers. They feel like they are suffocating in a confining genre. Often they want to develop more character-driven narratives that would be considered indulgent in the action/tone of category fiction. Sometimes they balk at popular themes and new trends. Sometimes the desire to change simply reflects their own growth and outreach into the real world as they get older. In this sense, either they have outgrown their marriages — their readers — or else the genres have changed or revealed limitations in a way that leaves them stagnating.

It is no one’s fault, and there is no right or wrong. Just the unassailable fact of change or awakening. But now there are complications of time invested, marketability, image and loyalty. Assets may be involved. And yet, the choice for a writer who feels they can no longer grow in a category of fiction is often to die in the traces or to risk rejection all over again in a new direction. In order to keep my focus here, I’m just going to shorthand the philosophical side of it. To my mind, there is no real choice. Not being true to yourself is being untrue to everything else. It disrespects the marriage. The consequences of that may take a long time to become apparent, but eventually who you pretend to be and what you do will ring false and hollow all the way around. If you’re going to try and fool the world full-time, why bother to write at all?

So, if the goal is to be who you are soul deep, then life is too precious and short to procrastinate. In that situation, you put your quality time and passion where it maxes out your potential. Of course, you still want the chrome-plated, bling-encrusted, plastic banana testimonials you may have garnered along the old way, and it’s nice if they come, but if they don’t, you have to be wise enough and real enough to walk the walk wherein the true reward is in the doing…the living. Or in the words of teen rock idol Ricky Nelson in another millennium (after he tried to break out at a Madison Square Garden concert):

“When I got to the Garden party, they all knew my name
But no one recognized me, I didn’t look the same…

If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”

As I said, the number of writers I know who secretly yearn for air beyond what they breathe in their seemingly successful careers is quite arresting. It is almost a cliché (especially for writers who succeed early), like lamenting, “… it’s too bad that youth has to be wasted on the young.” Blessed are those who find a good fit early and never need to change, say I. Loyal cadres of fans should never be disdained. But for those writers who try to segue out of genre, the result is often disappointment from their fans and the perception that they have “lost it.” And the fans are correct, as far as it goes. The writers have lost the genre. I don’t think there is any mending that; any need to, really. It’s apples and oranges. The problem comes when the writer tries to have it both ways by writing hybrids. They usually end up with an “orpple.” The fans aren’t fooled, the writer isn’t satisfied.

Trying to make the genre fit the writer never works. The genre is what it is — what it’s supposed to be. So, if the writer doesn’t want a clean break, then they need a partition within their work. Sometimes that can be done openly, but more often (much, much more often than you might think), it is done with a separate identity. That’s what pseudonyms are for. It really doesn’t matter whether the world knows or not. What matters is whether the writer can handle the dual identity. Does “to thine own self be true” mean 24/7? Or does it mean that you can be true enough to yourself to be fulfilled but still maintain a presence in what you did before? I’ve seen it work out either way, though more often the writer makes an undiluted commitment in their new direction. Those existing assets I mentioned before will still be there, like children. And in the long run, they will reflect a part of the total and true writer, rather than something they tried to micromanage forever. Living your own history is a good way to miss the present and render the future stillborn. But then, if you had a really, really, really good yesterday, maybe living in its memory is the way to go. Sort of like being permanently on drugs, though. Can you make love to the past? That just seems like a colossal waste to me, because it is a fear — fear of losing, fear of never being loved again — that locks writers (and people) into unfulfilling careers. We all have to choose whether courage trumps fear and honesty trumps appearances in our lives. Either you choose life’s grand adventure, risks inclusive, or you bury the active, growing part of yourself now. As Jack London put it:

“I would rather be ashes than dust!

I would rather that my spark should burn out

In a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom

Of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

The function of man is to live, not to exist…”

Yeah. Use it or lose it. Using it fulfills your purpose and makes life worth living. Anything less is an affront to whatever created you. If you bury your assets in the earth, you are burying yourself — as the parable of the talents teaches. And whether it is God or Shakespeare that gets the last word: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man…”

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for April include updates on the white feather in last month’s column that many of you have asked about. You can follow me on Twitter now (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan ). I’ll also be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. 

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

Sorry for leaving you in the woods last month.  February’s Cannibal Essay was half a quest, and this is part 2.  The point of the two columns is to take the most mundane circumstances possible and try to make stories out of them, because you can always invent adrenaline rushes but unless you can find and express the underlying meanings in daily living you really can’t anchor make-believe dramas to believable characters.  Meaning is like DNA.  Just as the complete genetic code of an organism is present in each of its cells, so too a complete universal truth is present in each experience.  The universe in a grain of sand, as they say.  When we make up characters we are playing God, after all, usurping the power of creation, even if we only do it with words and imagination.  Fortunately we don’t have to worry about rivaling God.  Our failures will keep us humble if our ambitions do not.

 All the more reason, then, to practice exercises like last month’s http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/02/15/thomas-sullivan-do-stuck-pigs-sweat-negotiating-romance-and-the-path-of-least-resistance/ .  In a nutshell, what began as defeat (when a severely torn rotator cuff sidelined me) turned into a quest for an incredible white feather that has become a symbol of survival on both the physical and romantic planes of my life, if they are not one and the same.  Yes, I chose to do those things written about in February’s column, which considerably upped the likelihood of an adventure that day, but within that there were many more choices and recognitions that needed to occur in order to develop a story.  Here’s where I left off:

…so now I am standing there steaming in the snow, staring at a minor miracle that makes the exhaustion of the prior several hours fade away.  Because I’ve just found something that should not be there in the harsh elements of winter.  What is so eternal about a white feather?  If the symbol survives, can the thing it stands for do less?  I recall another relationship that will always survive and whose symbol hides in these woods.  This one is with a friend (Frank Wydra, author and columnist here at Storytellers) six months removed but not forgotten…

Flamingo Frank is a brother to me in every real sense of the word.  He died before his time and is buried 750 miles away, but a part of his spirit is here.  I brought it here two days after his funeral, a pink plastic flamingo that was a joke between us.  It was a joke because he would brook no mourning for him — he even had his body propped up at his wake with a glass of Jack Daniels in one hand and a silver dollar in the other.  In the heat of August I carried that pink flamingo into the most impenetrable part of a 5400 acre preserve and the joke is now a covenant.  The white feather has restored my spirit, restored my faith and hope, preserved my commitment to the people I believe in…today is a good day to visit Flamingo Frank.

Conflict and quest and character were all established in last month’s column, as were time and setting.  The main thing that needs to be added here as I segue from one quest to another is the connection between them — a catalyst, in effect — which is what the white feather instilled and renewed in me.  Additionally, if this unfocused event in the course of my day is to be turned into a story, I have to develop some back-story about Flamingo Frank.  That could be fed out through memory and association as I search for the covenant symbol.

For several hours I have struggled against deeply drifted snow and underbrush in freezing temperatures to reach this spot by the most indirect route, but now I head out from the lone tree in the Golden Meadow in another trackless direction.  The chill reality of beginning a second quest soaked to the skin in this weather soon comes home to me as I fight through waste-high dunes and lariats of reeds that snare me as tightly as Chinese finger traps.  So when I cross an actual park trail that poses no such obstacles, I opt to follow it even though it will take me a little out of my way.

This is the rising and falling action of the typical story — small hurdles and lesser challenges.  It can always be enhanced with imagination, and I’m leaving a few difficulties out that could be exploited, such as the fact that a cougar and a black bear have both been reported wintering in the area.

There are fresh tracks from three snowshoers with short strides — women or children — on the trail, and through the snow that has begun to fall I sight the veiled trio in the first mile.  By coincidence they turn out to be three nurses who work in the same hospital where my torn rotator cuff is scheduled to be surgically repaired.  They are lost and I have my own urgency, having overstayed my time in the woods.  In an odd quid pro quo of our chance meeting, I give them the right directions and they give me the lowdown on all the surgeons.

Minor characters can serve a great many purposes ranging from simple human interest to actual involvement in the unfolding of a plot.  The coincidence of the shoulder surgery could be developed through these characters as part of this story just as it happened or in a totally different way.  Think in terms of intensifying the character relationships — love, hate, gratitude, revenge — along the way.  Whatever takes place between us at Elm Creek could set the stage for even more drama or a meaningful twist if one or more of them turn out to be in the operating room for the surgery.  Coincidence is one of life’s great gifts to fiction writers…

I leave the trail and come to a creek, which I know will be no problem because it has recently been 25 below zero, and it just has to be frozen.  But there, nestled down in the woods, on a day when the temperature is twenty degrees higher, there is moving water.  With my shoulder like it is I cannot take a chance, I argue with myself.  A wet foot out here and I’ll be in real trouble this far from help and out of cell phone range.  But I look up and down the banks, because there are many logs across the creek, some in tumbled tandem where you can go from one to the other.  Plowing through the brush above the black water I find something at last that I think will work on both sides.  The fallen tree is a little slippery, and with my left arm unable to move except with my elbow leveraged against my side, I have to pretty much crawl and lean at the same time.  The main log has a few extended branches still stuck on it, but they are old and some snap off like breadsticks.  Still, I go slow enough to get to the middle, and now there is just three feet of smooth snow covering what I hope is solid ice right next to burbling water.  One lucky step is all I need, and if my momentum is fast enough and my step light enough, I should be able to hit the far bank which — though damn near vertical — is loaded with dried branches.  No “one-for-the-money,” I just do it.  (“I’m comin’, Frank…”)  And though I don’t like the disturbingly hollow sound of my foot thudding off what looks like snow over the ice, I fall forward onto the bank, clutching with my right arm at all the snapping underbrush.  I am soaked with sweat but the snow down my socks feels good somehow as I work up onto the bluff. 

Crossing the creek in winter is the riskiest part of this simple story, and again it could be made more dramatic in fiction, i.e. I fall in, I get pinned or trapped, etc. The point here being that those benign happenings of your daily life usually presents some “what ifs” which provide ample drama.  You simply have to think outside the box…

I do not know precisely where I placed the pink flamingo last August.  Heavily overgrown then, the landscape now is considerably different under winter’s pall.  But if I move in back and forth sweeps, I should be able to pick up the pink flash nestled against a tree…if it is still there.  For the next half mile I trudge futilely through the tract in ragged arcs.  No neon hint of red breaks the achromatic plane of woods and snow.  As with the white feather, I feel the drag of pending disappointment.  Someone has come upon this strange marker out here in the middle of nowhere and taken it as a souvenir.  That too was inevitable.  A symbol for a reality must become the memory of a symbol for a reality.  I make another pass close to the serpentine creek and well away from where I crossed, just to be sure, and then I see it.  I’m not sure at first, because the pink looks brighter than I imagined.  But then, Frank always was a beacon… 

This seesaw of emotions is not contrived, though perhaps predictable in these circumstances.  Until the moment of discovery, success would be in doubt.  What is important in those final moments is to bring out the poignancy of the relationship and what it means.  I think a lot of writers miss this in the denouement.  You really need to make the reader feel what the issues, conflicts and questions are right before they are resolved.  It not only hones emotional impact, it delays and teases out the climax.

Call it praying, call it a séance, call it a bridge between two planes of existence, call it what you will, standing next to that garish plastic symbol I had my commune with Flamingo Frank.  Wise-cracking, of course.  Hey, Frank, thought maybe you flew south for the winter on this here flamingo I left.  (Frank always went south in February, if he could get away).  He was as real to me in those minutes as ever, and he gave me a loan against eternity — the knowledge that there is some kind of continuance from this life, because I felt his presence so strongly that he just has to exist somewhere.  And I like to think that my being there preserves the fact that he once passed this way on planet Earth.  Wherever he is, perhaps that was a mutual assurance we both needed…

It seems almost sacrilegious to write about fictionalizing any of what actually happened that day at Elm Creek, but in keeping with this column, the content of those moments in the presence of eternal mystery could provide endless threads for storylines.  The spiritual aspect could go toward drama, mystery, thriller or any other shade of human experience.  At its most basic level, I simply took a walk in the woods that day.  But being a thinking animal (and only incidentally a writer), I have fashioned a life of symbols and meanings as I interact with my environment.  I cannot imagine living without that (the writing seems irrelevant) because I cannot sense or feel less than I do.  But if you are a person who does not optimize the world around you for its myriad connections to wit and beauty and wisdom and all truths, you must learn to do so if you expect to express it meaningfully to others, as a writer does.

“Seeing” Flamingo Frank again wasn’t closure or a simple paying of respects, it was, as always, stimulation.  We were always each other’s catalyst.  So the story continues… 

Leaving the woods I am tempted to take a shortcut and try another jumble of logs to cross the creek just for the adventure.  Don’t do it, Sully, the countering voice of prudence warns me.  Don’t do it.  But that is practically a dare to my nature.  Hey, another time…heal first, says Jiminy Cricket.  And you know what.  This time I listen.  Maybe that was Frank too.  I follow my tracks back to where I crossed the first time.  Sliding down the bank is a lot quicker than going up, and I decide to just take that step on the ice with my momentum and trust again.  I brake myself, pause, then take the leap and the one-armed reach.  But there is no luck with the thin ice this time.  The thud and the cracking are simultaneous.  I roll, sweeping the leg away from the point of contact and fall with my right arm against the log.  Sanctuary! 

Thank you, Flamingo. 

Long hike back.  I pass the stations of the cross I have walked before, and in the parking lot by the pool/pond I pick up the shuttle bus to the chalet.  The young chef at the concession stand makes my special turkey club most generously as I ply him with questions about his life and joke with the cashier.  I sit down and half a dozen high schoolers slide onto stools around me.  “Hey, Sully, when are you going to snowboard with us?”  Standard question to which I give my standard answer.  “When I retire,” I tell them.  “You guys are short-term risktakers.”  “So when are you going to retire?” one of them wants to know.  When I stop questing for white feathers and pink flamingos, I think, but what they see and get is my smile…

As with part one, this is still an internal story framed by physical events.  In my writer’s mind I cannot see it ending with the fulfillment of the quest.  Yes, there was satisfaction when that happened to me and my goal was achieved.  But Flamingo Frank and I had many adventures as varied as a week on a deserted beach in the Bahamas to big-city soirees.  It seemed fitting to me then that the return crossing of the creek should have a little kicker of adrenaline in it for me — for us — and maybe I kind of made it happen that way on that day out of the memory of those times.  Author discretion.  But it’s that kind of prerogative in writing the story — in seeing the story when it is happening to you — that makes for transcendent statement.  Whether or not what happened at Elm Creek that day became a story (or a column, as it did), or a fragment of fiction used in some later work, or just an exercise, the point is that a writer needs to become someone who finds all the living in all the life that surrounds them.

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for March include the pink flamingo from the day described in this column.  I’ll be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

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

Every author’s got one — a tale about a stolen tale.  They are so identical you might say we stole them from each other.  And — brace yourself — you may be abetting stolen intellectual property rights just by reading this, because even the subject has been used before in other columns.  But if I have to micromanage the marketplace trying to discover what someone else has thought of and expressed in their own way so that I can excise that idea from my imagination, my mind will end up being a very small island indeed.  No thank you, I’ll disavow any originality whatever on my part, call myself a mirror, a thief of nature, of life and — yes — inadvertently of other thieves who have thieved the thefts I thefted before I could think to thieve them.  Mea culpa.  There, I feel better now.  But if confession is good for the soul, it doesn’t change the fact that my writing is what it is and it comes out of me, my fulfillment and my destiny.  I don’t want to change it.  I want to be me.  Not being me makes me a hypocrite.  I want to spend as little time not being me as possible, even if that means I reinvent the wheel out of ignorance or otherwise overlap human endeavors unknown to me.  Was it Mortimer Adler who recommended not reading any books so that one’s thoughts remained original? 

That said, I’m not really worried about coming off derivative.  Fortunately the craft of writing demands so much of one’s soul top to bottom that the revisiting of themes, plots and elements can still be original.  It really depends on how totally and faithfully you can draw from everything inside yourself.  If you go about rendering ingenious premises or imaginative plot twists that someone else has used and do nothing distinctive with them, you are not only a bad thief, you are a bad writer.

I think plagiarism should be reckoned in degrees similar to rape or murder.  First-degree plagiarism would be the deliberate theft of words.  Probably no one would disagree with that, because actual expression goes to the heart of what every writer is — a wordsmythe.  Then again, there is the legal principle called the fair use doctrine.  Some years ago a court upheld the right of someone who “borrowed” something like seven whole pages verbatim from a book about teenage pregnancy.  I think one of the books was called Pregnant By Mistake, though don’t — um — quote me.  One suspects the sequel to the book that was borrowed from might be titled, Screwed Again. 

Second-degree plagiarism could then be the close paraphrasing of thoughts, concepts and words.  That kind of theft would probably most often occur in nonfiction. 

Third-degree plagiarism would be what — ideas?  Ah, here we get to the sticky wicket.

You can’t really protect ideas in fiction, only the expression thereof, and so there is plenty of room for grayness and paranoia and accusations and — let us not doubt — actual plagiarism of the third kind committed with intent.  I am not a lawyer (my father thought I should be, and my mother was grateful I was not), but there is some fine parsing in Hollywood and New York over what constitutes a shameless ripoff.  Shameless may be a mere decorative term.  I have no doubt whatever that a story of mine became the basis for a fairly celebrated movie some years back.  Even then I believed that it was virtually impossible to come up with anything new under the sun, so when my boy-child called upstairs, “Hey, dad, your story’s on TV!” I took only mild interest.  But a few minutes viewing of the middle of the film — already years after its theater release — had me heading for the video store to rent a copy.  The plot, the settings and even representations of aliens right down to fluttering vocal tissue were identical.  We are talking eccentric detail done at a magnification of 10.  No question.  Even the fact that the plot continued on from where my story ended and was suddenly in a different tone with a mismatched postscript all underscored what was obvious.

Whether done with full awareness by one writer or coincidently or subconsciously as part of a creative team, it happens all the time.  Hollywood really doesn’t need to scheme about this.  It’s loaded with out-of-work imaginations.  But the reality is that individuals are inspired by their own entertainment experiences, and I defy you to come up with something totally original.  If fresh work didn’t owe a debt to something, it would be as incomprehensible as amorphous shapes, raw color and cacophonous sound.  Stand-alone work, then, is always relative to something, just as individuals have parents.  Examine an idea at the genetic level and you will find the traceable DNA.  So there will never be a hard and fast definition for third-degree plagiarism.  It will rest on interpretation of extent and intent.  And sometimes the extent will be considerable while the intent will be zero.

Let me emphasize that point by telling you about my own incredible coincidence wherein I very nearly published something that would have cast me in a bad light.  The story I wrote was originally titled, Buster Beals’ Preparation H and the Intergalactic Relatives.  A spoof intended to follow up on three others I had published, the tale depended on a portal through which the main character communicated with an extraterrestrial race.  There are probably dozens of stories that could fit that parameter, but a sort of barter ensued in my tale, absurd stuff that led to a revelation and accidental cannibalism with a kicker postscript.  Additionally, I like to think that my piece was done with its own flourishes and style and perhaps attained a level of sophistication and humor that are uniquely mine.  Regardless, I read my story unpublished to a live audience and was startled when a member of one of them said he’d read it before.  I put his comment aside as a generality without much basis beyond a vague similarity to something, but a few months later I actually came across a story in a completely different tone and category of fiction that just had to be the tale to which my listener referred.  It was different in every specific element from mine, and yet there was a well (portal) through which messages were exchanged between unlike species and barter and a funny ending.  There were also major details and twists in mine not present in the other.  Still, had I read the two stories without knowing anything about the authors, I probably would have concluded that there was a link.  So I put my piece back in the file unpublished.  I may still market and publish it some day, but I will feel obliged to acknowledge similarities with the other tale, and that seems awkward.

The chill of a post-publication plagiarism accusation is something I don’t want to experience, though I got a foretaste of it once.  It happened when I was teaching ninth-grade and made a fiction assignment.  In order to launch imaginations I sometimes offered plots from my own writing, the idea being that if I gave you a premise and a resolution you still had to develop characters, narration and dialogue.  It was a steppingstone for bankrupt imaginations and virgin muses, but one particular student who was Learning Disabled either didn’t grasp that I had given her a plot or she wanted her parents to believe that she had invented her story.  In any event, the piece I wrote happened to be reprinted in The Detroit News soon thereafter, and the mother of the student called the newspaper and told them I had stolen her daughter’s assignment.  The newspaper knew me, had published me before, and after checking informed the mother that my story had originally been published years earlier.  It was blind fortune that I had chosen a published story from my inventory.  Had it been unpublished, it would have caused me major embarrassment if not a shattered career.  As it was, the woman called the school and probably mouthed her false accusation far and wide before she learned the irrefutable truth.  That same year I won a literary prize that was connected with the Detroit Auto Show, and a student in the high school division plagiarized a Roger Zelazny story that led to 25,000 programs having to be reprinted.  Sadly, I no longer feed plot cues from my inventory to writers as a learning tool.

Let’s compare the robotic derivations described in the last paragraph with some examples of inspired thinking to see how true creativity works.  In order to demonstrate that I need to bring another author into the mix, and it must be someone whose skills at invention are unassailable, an unalloyed imagination whose very reflexes are creative for the sheer joy of it.  Such a person would be able to objectively marry logic with quantum leaps and never miss a beat or blanch at old footprints in the sands of possibility.  Fortunately I have a candidate.  

The best pure idea writer I know may be David Niall Wilson.  It is impossible for the two of us to kick ideas back and forth without resonating similar permutations.  We both just seem to think through the conjugations of a theme in the same way.  Once, when he had an idea about genetic cheating in the Olympics, I mentioned that my most reprinted story — The Mickey Mouse Olympics — first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1969 on just that subject.  A lesser writer might have viewed that as a dead end, but David sees beyond pat generalizations.  For him, they are like rich topsoil that might grow any kind of vegetable underneath.  We ended up going back and forth with e-mail extensions on that satire, and while it was just fun and games for me, I was fascinated by how the process seized hold of him until his fertile mind turned a farcical premise into a wholly separate story.  This is how creativity works.  It is not a lightning stroke of unadulterated invention, it is insight into existing elements.  A chain reaction.  You throw a ping-pong ball into a room with 1000 set mousetraps and in seconds that catalyst will have triggered all of them in a crescendo of motion and sound. 

If there is nothing new under the sun, there are infinite combinations of the immutable basics.  Discovering them is a matter of stimulation, inspiration and habit.  If you can’t learn to play off the world, stand next to someone who can.  David Wilson and I are both cannibals who feast on imagination, and so communicating with each other compounds that.  I believe that that kind of conscious awareness of patterns in themes and plots is actually a doorway into creativity.  Because if you are able to grasp the connections, variations and derivations that have been done, you most certainly can exploit or develop those which have not.  This makes a David Wilson, or anyone else at that level of creativity in any field of artistry, a true original.  And remember this: while ideas may come to anyone in any particular order, the thing that distinguishes every artist is their style.

Therefore, a pastiche or homage is not considered plagiarism, rather (depending on how it is used) a parody or a tribute.  Furthermore, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then a prudent distinction made between having one’s words copied and having one’s ideas revisited might turn out to be more uplifting than threatening.  One of my earliest works, THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (Dutton hardcover, 1988), still has a cult following and brings me frequent e-mail suggesting that other works derive from it.  It is enormously flattering to me that favorite shows of mine, such as “Arrested Development,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” “My Name Is Earl,” and “Oliver Bean,” have been compared to it for their galleries of eccentric families and irreverent vignettes delivered with understatement at lightning pace.  Those programs are executed with great originality, of course, but that any reader would see one’s work as possibly inspiring others of that quality is what a writer wants to hear.  Recognition, it turns out, is the stuff of redemption and forgiveness as well as ego feed.

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

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/

Psssst. Got an inspiration problem? You say your battery is fully charged, but your starter is dead? And all those plots and plans in your head are wilting like hothouse roses at the North Pole on account of no one around you understands what you were meant to do in life? And you’re so down that you’re starting to fantasize delusions of adequacy. You say that your children’s release The Pop-up Book of Birth Control sold only two copies and that was at a truck stop in New Jersey? Is that what’s troubling you, Bunkie?

Well, don’t just lie there growing barnacles! Drag your sorry soul into the light! Rise and shine for Revelry! Get some perspective! Resize yourself!

This is entirely within your power to do. I do it every day. I do it whenever I feel myself shrinking, retreating. Four walls related to each other by berth [sic] just kill me. I need air — more than a lung full. I need a soul full. I need prima fascia evidence that the universe still exists with all its galvanizing wonders and instructive insights waiting to be discovered. Every day. Accessing that can be a problem in a modern world of routines, obligations, and networks of unmotivating and uninspiring people. So make some new friends. One friend. Your muse. Forget the phone book; your muse is probably as close as your shadow.

Now admittedly my disconnect with inspiration is made worse by the fact that I’m easily seduced by isolation. This is bad for me, and I know I should escape being alone, even though I love it in a bittersweet way. It’s a family weakness — isolation, privacy, secrecy. If my father hadn’t somehow found the single soulmate he needed (it lasted nearly 70 years), I wouldn’t be here, of course, but even in that there was a tendency toward isolation. Pater was something of a secret agent when we lived in South America, gathering intelligence and almost assassinated at least once. I didn’t put it together until I found a commendation from the Secretary of State in his papers after he died. But the privacy went deeper than that. What I learned about him when he supervised ATF for the Treasury Department later in life I learned from his agents. My parents were secretly married for over a year before they told anyone, and my sister used to swear I was two weeks old before anyone informed her she had a brother. With me the isolation started early. I was born in the lobby of the hospital, as if to avoid checking in, and I’ve kept more or less to peripheries ever since. I love deserted islands. Thus there is a pointless propensity for being a lone wolf that is in my blood as well as learned from my father. Because of my career(s) I’ve had to learn to hide by getting in people’s faces. Make a lot of noise and you can deafen people to your silence; show some color and you can slip into the shadows while your audience blinks away the flash. So, like I say, maybe that’s not the kind of shrinking or suffocation that describes everyone in search of inspiration. If you’re a writer, or for that matter anyone who tries to generate illumination in their life, you are more apt to struggle with a different cause of stagnation. Because the thing that’s even worse than isolation is having its opposite. I.e., having your life cluttered with dead ends and decay in the form of too many comatose connections.

I think that’s the dilemma most people with light coming out of them have. They not only have omissions that need to be filled, they have to clear the playing field before they can begin. But I’m talking about really hard-core addicts of inspiration, creative people who like to think and want to understand everything. People who don’t fit the norm. People who feel like they are searching for rainbows in a black-and-white world. Writers are at the top of the list — those who write for relief as well as those who write for a living — but not just writers. Recreational users of inspiration need not apply. They just need to be temporarily distracted. I’m talking about restless people who claw for air all the time, who stare at closed doors and hear clocks ticking loudly. Quite often their story is that by the time they discovered who they were in life they had already made choices that impeded them. In order to embark on meaningful fulfillments they have to remove obstacles, undo false starts, renegotiate wrong turns, eliminate bad choices, recognize unacknowledged endings, remove excess baggage, and cast off deadweight. Like the physician’s creed says: “First do no harm.” If you are encumbered with things that kill creativity and inspiration, you are harming the essence of your nature.

But having a renaissance of the soul can be difficult and complex. Still, I like to think that being the best you is always the only choice at any time of life, because not being yourself becomes even more difficult and complex. Life isn’t a dry run, and if you try to be anything but the real and total you, you will inevitably run up against conflicts within yourself and with the world that thinks it knows you. So it’s a no-brainer for me. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false…” Yay, verily. Sacrifices? Of course. What goal is worthy that doesn’t demand sacrifices? Sacrifice confirms, melds by fire, tempers and strengthens unique final outcomes. It creates value. So, if you’re serious about who you are, then you will get past the stage of clearing obstacles. You won’t piddle with your life. The false you will be lost — but, hey, it was false — and everything around you will ultimately be better for it. So now you are living for real, and while that’s exciting, it raises the bar and poses the problem with which I started this column: Where do you get daily inspiration?

You start by asking yourself what it is that resizes you, makes you look at new perspectives, excites you, grows you, intrigues you with questions, fills you with amazement, triggers all your emotions, makes you think and feel! Is it a place? Is it a person? You could wait for it to come to you, of course. You could wait for a million copies of The Pop-up Book of Birth Control to be sold at that truck stop in New Jersey, too, but if you want to live life while you are still above room temperature then cut through the geography and go to where your inspiration is.

You’ll know it by what it does to you. Does sensory stimulation light up your circuits and start your mind racing? Does physical activity open up your doors? Do you need serenity in order to set the table from the pantry in your own heart and mind? Do you need a catalyst person whose prism on the world gives you a gateway to things you want to see and feel? All of the above? Whatever combination turns you on starts the domino effect you need to launch the HMS You — H(eart), M(ind), S(oul). So put yourself into it, next to it, around it. Let it into your veins and merge with its aura. Follow it to its lair and once you have its address visit it every day, move in with it, put it on a leash if you can.

It’s actually better if it is slightly inaccessible — that is, if it makes you work a little to get there. We all like our comfort zone, but that’s quicksand for the soul and the mind. Make yourself take a step beyond comfort and convenience and you are halfway to inspiration just because you have gotten off the dime.

I promise you it is not far away. In fact, if you think it’s on the other side of the planet, or shimmering in the next exotic vacation, or that you have to spend a lot of money to buy it or dumb down your senses to fill the void or cram it all into desperate weekends here and there and now and then, you have gotten lost. It is closer than that. Let your eyes adjust to the dimness of hidden things, niches, borders, crevices and seams, for there you can see how life is cobbled together. And when you delve the secrets there, your eyes will have to adjust to the brilliance of insight and inspiration. Blink once, like the shutter of a camera. Click! There. You have committed it to memory and knowledge. Now you can carry it into your mood, tone, day, relationships, work. By analogy, metaphor and association you can travel poetically and musically through the rhythms of expression, and perhaps yourself become an inspiration. Or maybe you just want to live it in private and mark its passing silently, like a shadow or footprints. Either way, you’ll now have that inspiration at your beck and call.

And here’s a secret: inspiration is a duet.

It is never a solo act that performs on demand while you sit passively like a spectator. You have to partner with it. You. You’re not in the audience, you’re on the stage — or should be. It may be a private stage, but it’s your show to star in. This Is Your Life. So open your eyes to the shooting script, go on location, ask “what’s my motivation?” and then do improv with what you find at hand. More than anything, your role is to be open-minded, open to possibilities, because more than anything, inspiration is a way of looking at the world. It requires your imagination and lowering the barriers, expanding the narrowness, and removing the borders. When you stop resisting truth, it will appear all around you.

As those of you who read my newsletters and columns know, my particular stage is nature in the raw. Somewhere, somehow, I find a way to get off the beaten path every day. I can be alone in a crowd, if I have to be, but I usually go for the woods or water or snow or even the chiaroscuro world of a drive at night. Give me moving air in all those interacting dramas of the seasons and my inspirations become limitless. What nature doesn’t teach me firsthand, if confirms from what I learn elsewhere. The universe really is in a grain of sand or in the flower in the crannied wall, as some poet once penned. And it’s always new and exciting. I had to discover that. I had to quit resisting change and learn to flow with it. For me, the most inspiring thing of all is the newness every day as nature frees my imagination.

An example in kind to make the point: last spring, in a place I call the Golden Meadow, I stuck a white feather in the ground next to a tree. I did so for no other reason than to mark an anniversary. But as the months passed and it survived hailstorms and huge weather that brought down branches and flooded the area, it became an object of fascination to me, as if it had a strategy to remain upright. The strategy was to not resist. The weather passed through it, combing out its barbs, but failed to bring it down like it did the inflexible and rigid branches. The seemingly vulnerable white feather remained upright if transformed. And that’s precisely how you use the world in your work (and how, parenthetically, you survive rejection as a writer and a person). You don’t fight it, you assimilate it. You merge with it and use it. Winter will come soon, and my white feather will doubtless itself merge with the elements, but I have its inspiration forever now. Only I’m thinking as I’m writing this, what the hell, go check one last time. And practice what you preach, Sullivan. Do it now. Excuse me, please…

… hello, again. Back. And, of course, I found infinitely more than I went looking for. But then, if inspiration was predictable, it wouldn’t be inspiration. The Golden Meadow was taller than I’ve ever seen it. I made a prow of my hands and knifed through the reeds like a schooner, golden tassels bobbing in benediction, the chaff touching my face like spray. I lost sight of the tree until a skein of birds wound through the reeds and swooped up above the tassels. It is a lone tree, and I knew the birds would be heading toward it. The reeds suddenly thinned to a spot where I have sat many times on a blanket and felt a peace that can only exist at the center of the universe. And there it was. The tree and the white feather. Like a pair of prayers vying for eternity. Ah, yes, inspiration is a duet. Amazing…simply amazing.

I’ll put a photo or two of the Golden Meadow in my newsletter this month. 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/

Flamingo Frank would hate it if I wrote his obituary, especially with black crepe hung all over it. Much too dreary. But early on the dawn of August 2, 2008 — by his own decision, you can be quite certain — Frank T. Wydra decided he’d had enough of wrestling with pancreatic cancer and told the subversive processes that were racking his body, “Okay, you want it, you got it.” He could do that because his physical presence was the least of his impact on the world around him, whereas his thoughts and his spirit will trump the grave, and so on that Saturday morning my friend and yours Flamingo Frank awoke to eternity.

Not to be outdone by John Barrymore and Errol Flynn (if you know that legendary wake story), Frank did not take his funeral home viewing lying down — strictly speaking. He was propped up a bit, the old familiar smile on his lips, with a glass of Jack in his right hand next to a bottle of same in the coffin and a silver dollar in the fingers of his left. We sang his favorite songs and hymns, as per his wishes, and spoke extemporaneously. It was the most warm and sincere wake I’ve ever seen. The assembled celebrants were eclectic, as you might imagine, ranging from enormously successful business magnates to creative types like Frank’s brother Jim, a well-known bluesman who has backed Led Zeppelin and is one of the few white men to play with Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix. But there were formal moments of great poignancy as well, such as when Frank was buried with full military honors and the flag was folded with ritual precision and delivered to his wife by a kneeling soldier “…from a grateful nation.” Flamingo Frank, be it known, was to organize the taking out of the missiles in the Cuban missile crisis, had the invasion not been aborted. His full military honors burial came about through presidential executive order and included a 21-gun salute and Taps. Incidentally, our colleague Bobby Jones of Storytellers was also part of the second wave in the Cuban missile crisis, though he and Frank did not know that about each other until recently.

Flamingo Frank never wasted a moment of his life. He spent his time making impossible things happen and was far too honest to give a single moment being anyone but his real and true self. He was also one of the happiest and most successful people I’ve ever known.

A number of mourners/celebrants have asked if there is a recording or transcript of the funeral oration I gave, and there is not so far as I know. It was given spontaneously at the wake a night early when we heard that the priests would limit my eulogy at the funeral to a couple of minutes. Ah, Rome’s rituals! But I knew pretty much what I wanted to say and the memory is vivid, reinforced by many discussions afterward, so I’ll attempt here to write down a shortened facsimile with maybe a few gaps and compressions. It should also be added about this column that it will delay by one month the second column about Glenn Frey and the Crosslake concert at Manhattan Beach. The first one in the series last month brought in more mail than ever before, and there is a paragraph about the concert in this month’s newsletter, which you can get free by request at: mn333mn@earthLink.net

Frank’s Funeral Oration

[I won’t attempt to render the opener which began with some stuff about young Jack, Frank’s grandson who had just spoken, and then talking to Flamingo, who was behind me with that bottle of Jack Daniels, the glass, and a silver dollar in the coffin. You had to be there.]

“…The good news is that Frank is entirely possible in eternity. That’s because he is consistent with the spirit of the Universe, which is to think beyond yourself, to outgrow yourself, to give yourself unstintingly to whatever you do and wherever you are. Don’t give until it hurts — that implies keeping score — give until it stops hurting. That’s who Frank was. You can’t fake what you feel and who you are over the long haul. You have to be genuine and totally honest about that. Frank was the real deal. Frank IS the real deal. He lived the kind of life that won’t go away as long as we survive him. And he’s still giving to us. He may have just stepped into the next room, but the example of attitude and problem-solving he left behind shines through the doorway like a beacon.

“‘Chin up, no regrets!’ That was his mantra. And that’s what we’re all trying to ride on, right now. We don’t want to give him up in our presence; but we can have him in our memories and in our life’s lessons. Frank was and is a sustainer. You need only look around at this assembly to see the quality of his work and his life. A wife, children, grandchildren, brothers, friends — radiant and successful human beings all, on productive journeys through this world. In some ways he was a kind of king, a hub, but a benevolent king and a resource hub. Kings collect tribute, Frank gave it. He took little for himself.

“In fact, it was hard to give to Frank. He wouldn’t suffer the spotlight to remain on himself. And he was a terrific audience for anyone with an out-of-control ego who did like the spotlight. He and I were made for each other! I’d dance, cartwheel, do push-ups, and he’d smile politely and watch. But if I said something nice about him — and I tried very hard not to do that often — he would wiggle out of it or find a way to turn it around. The only way you could give to him was if it was a joke. The miserable gifts I did give him were always jokes, and that’s what he loved about them. No one took a joke better than Flamingo Frank.

“Flamingo…that name came about because of one of those miserable gifts — a pair of cheap pink plastic lawn flamingos I brought to the housewarming in Clarkston. Wrapped in newspaper. I think Karen got as big a kick out of it as I did watching Frank grin like a Cheshire cat, oohing and aahing as he tried delicately to remove the newsprint like he was going to find a Fabergé egg. Before that there was the Sully Picasso painting I had the temerity to bring into the house of one of America’s foremost painters [Karen Wydra]. It was a stick figure on an enormous canvas. He couldn’t find a place to hang it, so he put it out at the curb for the whole world to see. Unfortunately some crazy guys in a city truck mistook it for trash and hauled it away. And after the flamingos there was the varsity jacket hanging on the clearance rack of a sport shop. Just one little flaw that made it hard to sell. The word BUFFALO was emblazoned across the back. Perfect! Flamingo…Buffalo — I could see that. And only five bucks. Twice what I wanted to spend, but what the heck… Flamingo Frank: ever the gentleman, ever the host, the benefactor. And still… all those things. That’s his legacy.

“When FRANK gave, on the other hand, it was like a stealth bomber run. He did it so under the radar that you didn’t know it was happening. [Here I told the lengthy wine story that I’ve told elsewhere.]

“I don’t know what comes next, but it must be all right. Because it happens to everyone. The last time I saw Frank, he spoke about ‘change.’ Said that that was all there was – ‘change.’ To be honest, he said it with a little dismay. But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that all his success and happiness in life had come about because of his openness to change. I know of no one less enslaved by mindless rules or social pressure to conform one’s thinking. He examined every habit, every value, every restriction, and always found the most honest and simple solutions. I remember a particular vacation in the Bahamas where he had a list of rules and the first one was that there were no rules. I forget how he got around the fact that the list went on, but the point he was making was that this was a vacation for everyone and that we had to work cooperatively on the mundane parts of daily living so that no one was burdened with anyone else’s life. We get it, Frank. Change. No rules. Do not get so bogged down in the way things are that you can’t see the way things can be.

“I had a sister, and after I met Frank, I had a brother. I lost my sister. Yes, she died too young, but I mean I lost her. We were close in some ways, but I never went to see her. And I remember driving back from speaking at Western Writers of America’s national conference in Arkansas and coming within 200 miles of her house. I could’ve turned east… I could’ve taken that first star to the right and been parked in her drive by morning. But it was late at night, and I was in the middle of an 18 hour haul, so I kept heading home. Two weeks later my sister was dead. [Let me skip over the pathetic story of trying to record a tape she wanted of me playing the T-sax and then digging a shallow grave with a garden spade in the middle of winter to bury it in a remote place I call the White Isle.] In my mind the White Isle is where my sister is, and that’s how I keep her in my life. I’d like to make an appeal here. If Frank Wydra has had an impact on your life, consider finding a tangible way to keep him there. It could be a physical symbol or something you do or a place you go. I’m going to buy the cheapest pink plastic flamingo I can find and put it in an inaccessible place I know about at Elm Creek. It’s bounded by streams with no bridges, an isolated island I’ll call The Gonquin — after Frank’s reference to the Algonquin table of literary note, whose fame he added to with his columns on StorytellersUnplugged.com. He was always the only living character in the Algonquin Room, and in his last column he intended to cross over and join the others. So The Gonquin will be sort of his seat at the table. Maybe someday in some way we will re-visit surf from new places crashing on old shores, and stars as big as spotlights spangling the night, and pink flamingos, but until then I’ll put a plastic pink flamingo in that picturesque spot at Elm Creek where no one else goes, and in my mind and my heart that will be where I will visit my brother. And, of course, I’ll try to live his open-mindedness every day.

“Frank was a consummate collector, and now he’s collected all the days of his life. He’s analyzed them and crunched the numbers and gotten his ducks in a row. You and me — his family and friends — we’re his ducks, because he collected people too. We are one of Frank’s collections. He knows we won’t stay in line. But that’s okay. Frank likes a challenge. I’m waiting for the clouds to open up and some spot advice to come down in Frank’s elegant voice and manner. Count on me to give him a rough time. – ‘What’s that, Frank?’ He’s laughing at me. Telling me it’s time to shut up and get off the stage. ‘Okay, Frank, but feel free to re-visit anytime. In your own unique way, of course. Because as we all know after your time in our lives and our time in yours…there are no rules.’”

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

I think it was the DragonBar that made me remember an early lesson in my writing career.  And that happened because the carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome that beset my wrists after too many 18-hour marathons at the keyboard eventually led me to try voice activation software.  Dragon NaturallySpeaking with its DragonBar is arguably the leader in that field.  I had tried using it in the late 90s to write a book for a celebrity, but the error rate just killed me when it came time to transcribe our interviews.  The celeb’s voice was crystal clear, while mine sounded like a cat coughing up hairballs underwater.  And guess what?  Dragon just wrote “their balls” for “hairballs,” so my enunciation is still perilous at best.  I think I learned speaking from Demosthenes, and no one ever told me to take the pebbles out of my mouth.  At any rate, the new version of Dragon is more mumble-friendly and so intuitive that you can talk in your sleep and come up with coherent confessions by morning.  The mumble-friendly is a gas, but I can do without the intuitive aspect, which is actually a bit of a pain because of the way I think and speak.  That’s because the intuition is based on normal patterns of sane people, and I’m not…um – well, let’s just say that if you think unorthodox thoughts or constantly use language in inventive ways, Dragon won’t be able to zero in on you. 

So, there is this DragonBar on my screen.  I mean doesn’t the name alone set off pinwheels and sparklers in your imagination?  DragonBar! – can’t you just picture a lizard lounge with fire-breathing serpents warming their rum toddies by blowing on ‘em?  And there’s this little yellow dialog box that plays Simon Says with your every breath and grunt (clear your throat and it’s liable to “spit out” the Gettysburg address).  The thing spangles with color cues in response to your voice — a kind of synesthesia — that make you feel that your words are refracting light like bits of broken glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope.  And the mystical crossing between sound and visual representation is unpredictable.  You never know what zaniness will pop up next, because what’s inside the box is sometimes outside the box, if you get my meaning.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’m looking in a mirror.

But it’s also inspiring, intriguing, rich in possibilities, thought-provoking, and a catalyst for newness and change.  It unblocks me, unlocks me — lets me develop and distill those truths I need to find and express in order to be me.  I can’t do that by following rutted footprints and being the same as everyone else.  Every day (and every experience) is fresh and new if you can find the words and wisdom with which to capture it.  To put it conversely, DragonBar does not go with the herd.  It goes beyond what you would expect from passive people, places and things.  It travels to terra incognita (land of my birth!).  There be DragonBars!  It does so by unleashing little imperfections in what you feed it; and that’s what reminded me of the early lesson in my writing career.

Before I became stupid, I knew a great many things.  I had a phenomenal memory for facts and could explain any process.  Never mind that most of those explanations were wrong; when I looked at a wall it dissolved into molecules and quantum paradigms.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about converting my mind’s warehouse space for facts to storage space for patterns [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/03/16/thomas-sullivan-%e2%80%9cmamas-don%e2%80%99t-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-writers%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/].  I did this because patterns are more valuable.  I can always look up facts, but patterns have to be recognized and understood.  At least, I think I did this conversion of my mind’s limited storage space.  But since that’s a fact, I may have forgotten it (I forget).  Before that, remembering facts was a kind of perfection.  And it showed in my writing. 

I wrote with an airless clarity that was logical and absolute.  I think a certain kind of beginner writer does this to a fault.  Usually they are male.  Usually they write about “things and events” or “ideas,” as opposed to incorporating “emotions.”  I’ve covered all three of those elements in a five-part series here on StorytellersUnplugged, which is central to my writing philosophy.  What the hell, here are the links: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/     

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/05/16/thomas-sullivan-horned-owls-other-horny-beasts/    

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/06/16/thomas-sullivan-name-the-baby/    

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/07/16/thomas-sullivan-marmaduke-er%e2%80%a6-goes-to-college-or-wet-naked-screaming/     

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/08/16/thomas-sullivan-time-to-jump-the-shark/ 

The change in my writing did not come from a sudden epiphany anymore than the change in what I stored in my brain was instantaneous.  It was (and still is) a gradual trade-out of inventory.  I learn much more about life and people by focusing on patterns than I ever learned from facts.  And patterns are seldom pure and exact.  They tend to be a kind of consensus of observation, and they cut to the heart of an issue, and they reveal private truth like…uh, nobody’s business.  They separate the façades we all wear from the underlying and meaningful realities that govern who we really are.

Anyway, writing with perfect knowledge of facts can get in the way of showing the patterns of life.  To know everything is to be unreal.  You can even intimidate readers, or make them uncomfortable, by bombarding them with too much in-depth certainty.  Most of all, you are very likely to be rejected by mature readers as phony if all your prose is cocksure factual and exact.  On the other hand, the messy contradictions that show the humanity of characters (and even of the third person POV of the author) are more consistent with inexactness.  It wasn’t until I learned to use qualifier words and relative modifiers that I felt my characters coming to life.  Beware of characters you think you know inside and out.  You may have dressed them in caricature.  Let them go where you cannot.  Let them lead you from page to page.  Are you never going to change, be wrong or contradictory?  If the answer is no, then why create fully formed manikins whose thoughts and utterances are exact?  Sure your characters can have their unchanging bedrock, but all the more reason to show the reader their vagueness and uncertainty in the little things they think and do on the surface.  Let your characters grow and surprise you.

And here’s the key: apply some of that same inexactness to the narrator, even if it’s third person omniscient.  Because even that unobtrusive narrator is a kind of implied character POV, capable of stepping away from every other character and observing, describing, philosophizing, analyzing and so on.  You have the reader by the hand, and they must trust you.  So think of yourself as needing to come across as the real and imperfect person you are and not God.  Of course, if you are God, that’s different.  But then, shouldn’t you be writing a Bible? You are trying to be omniscient, not omnipotent.  So give the blend of your fallible humanness and omniscience a name or an anagram that will stick with you.  Think 3CPO — if I may borrow from “Stars War.”  Third Character-Person Omniscient. 

What I’m suggesting is that giving reality some elbow room is a stage of development in good fiction writing.  Pin it down too tightly and it may lose color, reverting to black and white.  The more human you are as a writer, while still observing and analyzing but never judging, the more your readers will fit under your umbrella.  Sometimes it is better to be merely omnipresent rather than omniscient as a third-person narrator.  And if you are writing first-person narratives you can really be imperfect.  First-person POVs enjoy the suspense of not knowing.  Sort of gives a whole new meaning to imperfect tense.

I do recall sitting in a writer’s group one night where I had a sort of epiphany about this.  And I have a déjà vu feeling that this anecdote is also in the SU archives of my columns (if you find it, please let me know).  Three of the people present that night stand out like an equilateral tri — no, too perfect, make it an isosceles triangle… aargh! worse… okay, you know, one of those Leaning Tower of Pisa triangles. 

So, there they were, three people coming from different angles from acutely bent to obtuse.  The first angle was a former ballet dancer who emoted with everything.  Her movements were dramatic and choreographed, even when she helped herself to the honey roasted cashews.  She would rise up on one bent leg, the other extended toward the coffee table, and with a graceful bob dip one hand swan-like into the silver dish, then curtsy back down to the divan.  Her writing was infused with emotional color but no form, rather like a finger pressed to mute lips seen in a dream for which there is no explanation.  The second angle was all sly mind games — ideas — which he perpetrated on the hostess mostly, and on those among us he felt were easily shocked (definitely not moi).  His writing was about transvestites, and in reality he was outing himself, enjoying the delicious dawning horror in the faces of the inhibited ones in the group.  But the third angle is the one I am writing about today — facts (things & events).  He was a wonderfully researched, technically informed, fact-crammed writer who should have been in charge of all shop manuals from Taiwan.  He also had a squeeze bottle of Neosynephrin (spelling — where is my pharmacist?) that he kept squirting up his nostrils.  One of the hosts had a hearing aid whose ultrasonic mosquito note came clearly into range each time he turned it up.  So it remains a very vivid memory for me, filled with eccentric mannerisms like the madcap Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera.”  Of course, I was the straight arrow member of the group.

If there was a single moment when the fallacy of a perfect omniscient narrator sank in for me as a writer, that was it.  But I’d like to make a distinction here between the kind of stylistic imperfection I’ve described and perfection as motivation.  I worship perfection.  It has always been my Grail.  Without it as an ideal to pursue full speed my life would be dull and empty.  The difference is in learning that communication has no rules.  DragonBar reminds me of that.

“What?” you say.  “No rules!  Absurd.  Of course it has rules!”  Well… not really.  Just the one.  Communication must communicate.  That’s the definition.  Yes, I’m using a ton of rules (or trying to) to write this essay.  But that’s my choice.  Sometimes you have to strip away all the rules in order to appreciate how much freedom you have within the rules.  You won’t find your voice on DragonBar, but you might find the breath of freedom and imagination you need to go looking for it.

Finally, last month I gave some misinformation in my newsletter which, for many people, is linked to this column.  I mentioned that the gift of a nomination at The1000BestSpecialPeople.com  expires after a year, and so I thanked a number of individuals for tributes and for boosts as the year drew to a close.  Now Australian Grant Soosalu informs me that the site has gone free and thus the nomination will stay up there.  Thank you one and all, in particular for the tributes and boosts posted since last month. 

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 send it to 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/

When it comes to writing, every day is April Fools’ Day.  The Muses — hobgoblins of the mind that they are — play their usual tricks 24/7/365.  Clear your desk, your computer screen and your brain for them and they will clear out of town.  Cut yourself off from pen and paper and they will immediately begin dictating the great American novel to you.  They have a sense of humor, a sense of irony, and no sense of obligation whatsoever.  Swim a mile from shore, sky dive, slide under your car and remove the oil drain plug, grab a handful of buttered popcorn, or swab down deck cleaner that must be rinsed off in 20 minutes, and inspiration that needs to be written down IMMEDIATELY will hit you like a Mack truck driven by a muse.  They do this to a-Muse themselves because they don’t have TVs or iPods and there is nothing funnier than a writer with an idea and no place to put it.  Sort of like diarrhea in the middle of a speech, or a frying pan that bursts into flames as you lift it off the stove.  It must be boring as hell to be a muse — being more than human but still a lesser god and always in charge of your own entertainment.  I’m betting more than a few of them go off the reservation.  Muses, leprechauns, and poltergeists are probably all related.  Theologically speaking, it’s tempting to speculate that the Big Kahuna created us just to keep the demigods and minor spirits in good…uh, spirits.  I mean, think about it.  Name a magical being below Prime Mover that you can depend on.  They’re all mischief-makers and unpredictable.  Holy Hijinks , I’m using voice recognition to type this, and when I dictated “Prime Mover,” Dragon NaturallySpeaking typed “Prime Blooper.”  And if that wasn’t enough fun for the muse, when I tried to use “Prime Blooper” in the title of this essay, it became “Prime Pooper.”  I rest my case.  Lady Luck smiles on a whim and Cupid can’t shoot straight.  If love is fickle, writing must be the greatest romance of all time. 

Anyway, to move along here and get to the point (can you see how I’m getting to the point?), people who live off their creativity evolve all kinds of strategies to max out the good timing and beat the bad.  Some of us have “systems.”  But systems usually trigger counter-systems, and the gods of irony love to be challenged.  So it’s a constant battle.  Still, seeing someone else’s pathetic struggle can sometimes unlock one’s own shackles, whether through the shock of recognition or just out of plain old pity (there might even be an untried stratagem for you in the following).  Therefore, for all you disenfranchised souls — or for anyone who has ever gone to the cupboard for inspiration and found it bare — I humbly offer:

ONE NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF AN AUTHOR

6:18 p.m. Wake up, you sleepyhead, rise and shine!  Hey, where’s the sun?

6:19 p.m. point at self in bathroom mirror.  “Don’t even try to hide.  Call yourself an author?  You are going straight to Geekspeak9 — that bells and whistles desktop for which you paid much wampum — and you are going to work relentlessly through the night until the Great American Novel sends the smoke signal for mercy through whatever orifices a computer has.  And put some pants over your posse, for booty’s sake, you look like an Ethiopian snowman.”

6:21 p.m. pull on sweatpants and Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards for carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome, adjust 6-way ergonomic chair all six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust cheap Costco reading glasses for computer screen over headset, don wool cap, mute phone, turn off Big Bang e-mail alert. 

6:26 p.m. open working novel file.  Read last page written.  Read again.  Read last paragraph.  Read six more times.  …stare out window at lone duck squatting on ice on lake.  Wonder if duck’s feet frozen in ice.  Too dark to tell.  Start to take off headset to go check.  Reach for binoculars instead.  Still can’t tell.  Crank open window.  Bark like dog.  Feathered squatter unmoved.  Shake head rapidly while making noise like Donald Duck pissed off.  Duck waddles slowly away in zigzag line.  Notice small child next door staring up at me wide-eyed.  No problem.  Someone will explain to her that it was God’s plan to make writers this way. … Duck emergency over.  Must quit stalling the Great American Novel.

6:32 p.m. notice status bar update alert.  Jump on it like it was the secret of life and happiness.  Trace tech info links explaining the option that Windows wants to install for new fonts in Farsi and Pig Latin.  Install.  Reboot computer.

6:43 p.m. read last page written, read again, read last paragraph, read six more times.  Stare.  Read last sentence.  Read 23 more times (might have been 24).  Need a starter word.  Write “The.”  Stare.  Delete “The.”  Stay with it, stay with it…

6:44 p.m. check e-mail.  All subject lines begin: “Fwd:Fwd:Re:Re:…”

6:44:06 p.m. ignore e-mail.  Return to novel.  Reread last sentence five more times.  Write “Sometimes.”  Delete “Sometimes” — too many syllables.  Do not give up.  Do not give –

6:45 p.m. check Drudge Report, follow all links in order to be fully informed in case any news tidbit turns out to be relevant to new novel.

6:59 p.m. return to novel.  Stare.  Consider new plot in which neighborhood awakens to find lake missing.  Small child with wide eyes is only witness to what happened and no one believes her.  100,000 ducks with their 200,000 webbed feet frozen in the ice lifted off at dawn with the entire lake still locked around their skinny orange ankles (shallow lake completely frozen down to lakebed).  Child is vindicated when jet airliner crashes into flying lake, or maybe it melts and drowns East Sweet Pea, Arizona, or maybe the ducks get testy when all the ones flying wing on the V cannot rotate into new leadership formations, or maybe my muse is making me quack up!

7:11 p.m. check e-mail again, reading everything this time, including contact lens re-order reminder and pathetic letter from 106-year-old Nigerian widow suffering from Dutch Elm disease looking for someone trustworthy to help her launder $45 million left by late husband, General Abubacar Jones XXXVII, who was tortured to death by a cabal of witch doctors in the employ of Shell oil.  Return to novel.  No witch doctors, no tortured general, no Dutch Elm disease, no $45 million.  Novel sucks. 

7:22 p.m. burn title page.  Smoke alarm goes off.  Beat out flames.  Sulk.

7:27 p.m. try to get things rolling by calling self from cell phone and leaving voicemail SOS for muse on home phone.

7:28 p.m. switch to home phone to hear voicemail SOS just phoned in.  Stare expectantly at novel on computer screen.  Muse must not have pager.  Print out new title page. 

7:29 p.m. check blogs, including StorytellersUnplugged and dozen others.  Reply, manage, delete, adjust privacy settings…

8:02 p.m. call muse on cell again.  Busy signal.  Busy signal?  Am sitting next to phone that is purportedly busy.  This proves that muses are magical and conspiratorial.

8:03 p.m. check more blogs, recalling a certain Thomas Sullivan fan site a few months back that had nothing on it.  Find again.  Nothing on it.  Laugh hysterically until wracked with sobs. 

8:05 p.m. decide I must immediately upload pictures that have sat in camera for two weeks.  But which import app to select in dialog box?  Major dilemma. 

8:12 p.m. pick Windows Media.  Upload pictures from camera.

8:15 p.m. decide to upload lone cell phone photo that has sat in phone for two weeks.  Major dilemma redux. 

8:19 p.m. choose Roxio.  Upload photo.

8:21 p.m. stare at novel on monitor some more.  Type in single word “industrious” on first page.  Discover house phone is not fully seated in cradle, explaining busy signal.

8:22 p.m. exhausted from writing.  Time for break.  Google: The Cranberries Dreams.  Google opens.  Hit link for Cranberries music video “Dreams” on YouTube.  Iridescent green frogs rain into green pool, followed by raining green pearls, followed by blue Ophelia-like face floating to surface.  Am incapable of hearing urgent beat of “Dreams” without magic and inspiration breathing into brain.  Song flows through veins like a drug, but nothing to do with novel.  Poignant stabs.  Screw novel.  Crank up volume.  Loop video.  Turn off lights. 

9:33 p.m. 71 minute magic carpet ride ends when computer announces new updates available.  Click off YouTube “Dreams.”  Go for nightly drive.

9:36 p.m. think about new novel while driving Interstate.  Look for remorseful muse hitchhiking on soft shoulder, but dead doe’s eyes flash directly into mine.  Protruding tongue definitely aimed at me.  

9:37 p.m. turn on FM.  First song is A Fine Frenzy’s “Almost Lover.”  Insert CD of Cranberries “Dreams” in car stereo.  Crank up.  Loop.  Romantic ideal comes ghosting in from outer reach of headlights.  Here it comes, here it comes on the soft shoulder, the face I will love forever.  …another dead doe with tongue hanging out.  Does species matter?   

9:37 p.m. to 1:51 a.m. 4 hour and 14 minute magic carpet ride.  Alien abduction?

2:01 a.m. drive to Elm Creek and enter back trail on skis kept in car.  Soar to different part of Universe.  Phantom blue, deep beyond measure, roaring with silence.  No pen, no paper…abandon computers all ye who enter here.  Out of crystal silence, crackling like million shooting stars bursting through black velvet ether, comes tardy and unapologetic muse, spouting soul-searing poetry like auctioneer put to music.  Great voluble stanzas of wisdom bound to beauty.  I channel thoughts and words as seeds of sleeping rainbows awaken.  Indelible stuff, wasted on mere mortal me, because what am I to do — write in snow with ski poles and take cell phone picture?  Cell phone!  ET phone home.  I call voicemail and repeat dictation from muse. 

3:46 a.m. arrive home smug and intoxicated.  Peel off soaked layers of polypropylene.  Drink Cytomax, O. J., cherry cider and ice water. 

3:57 a.m. don sweatpants, go to computer.  Pull on Wal-Mart deluxe wrist guards, adjust 6-waychair six ways, plug-in USB sound card adapter, plug-in microphone, adjust Sennheiser ME3 headset, open Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-recognition app, adjust Costco cheap reading glasses over headset, skinny on wool cap. 

4:04 a.m. transcribe voicemail poetry.  Open novel.  Stare.  Except for priming pump, no connection between Elm Creek rapture and ms.  Wherefore art thou, muse? 

4:11 a.m. delete word “industrious” added before nightly drive.  Wool cap rubbing stubble of shaved head is picked up by Sennheiser microphone, which keeps writing “fish” – “fish fish fish…”  Must shave stubble.

4:12 a.m., while running hot bath, drink quart of microwaved Coffee Blast ice cream because haven’t eaten since 4 p.m. yesterday. 

4:19 a.m. esophagus numb from drinking Coffee Blast.  Get into hot bath.  Scald privates.  Shout “Baby!” like wrestler in FM heavy-metal commercial. 

4:24 a.m. pain from third-degree burns subsides.  Once again cut off from computer, pen, paper.  Hello, muse.  Writing ideas flood brain.  Call voicemail from cordless phone next to tub, leave deathless but incoherent prose.

5:31 a.m. water now room temp.   Lather up with Irish Spring on bod, leg shaving gel on head.  Shave head.  Bloody foam floats around tub like little volcanic glaciers.  Shower caddy mirror reveals cross between stigmata and piranha attack above neck.

5:39 a.m. write entire novel in six minutes with styptic pencil on skull.

And there you have it.  At this point I throw myself on the mercy of my readers.  I am open to suggestions (and I mightily fear I will get some).  No, I will not flay my scalp and submit it in formaldehyde to an editor, nor will I collaborate with a taxidermist.  Yes, I have considered collaborating on a novel with a 106-year-old widow in Nigeria.  Am currently checking to see if there is a vaccination against Dutch Elm disease.  In the meantime, may my life serve as a warning to others.

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 send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!  And David Niall Wilson, whose questions are like laser brain surgery, has done a new interview of me at this link: Interview-Sully   Does anyone ask better questions than DNW?  Squirm, squirm.  One last.  As many of you know from my column subbing in a few days ago (April 13^th), Frank Wydra is fighting the toughest battle of his life and doing it in the style for which he is so much loved.  The outpouring of response for Flamingo Frank and that column are appreciated more than you know.  Thanks for reading.

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

My first word was “Boo!” and I’ve loved surprises ever since.  I want to discover things.  Refine that, I want to discover hidden things, things that have meaning.  I want there to be more than five senses can take in.  Five senses are standard issue.  Most critters with fin, skin, fur or feathers have them, often with a superior specialty.  Jack rabbits out-hear me.  Eagles out-see me.  I’m tied with the koala bear.  But word has it that heart, mind and soul are strong suits for the human clay, and these have a type of sensory perception that respond to a whole different set of stimuli.  They feed off meanings, connections, patterns and intangible things that are bigger than life.  And mine also flourish on surprises.   So I look for that which is behind the scenes, under the surface, or “manifestly” invisible.  My physical senses pick up the obvious stuff, the bows, ribbons and colorful exteriors that gift-wrap life, but my heart, mind and soul go for what’s inside the package.  If it’s people I’m looking at, the package contains their wants and their fears, and if I can see inside the package I’ll know everything important about them – their motives, their responses, their lines in the sand.  And if it’s nature I’m looking at, the package contains the voice of the universe, whispered by stars and whatever force is behind creation.  The voice carries grandeur, excitement, meaning and truth.  I want to hear the voice of God and think about it.

Does that make me a writer?  Maybe a species of writer.  A poet.  Check that.  I still have to transmit the poetry in order to be a writer, don’t I?  And I have to find the poetry in every reader in order to be read with appreciation.  So I’m writing this to every writer who has an ounce of poetry in them (you all do) and to every reader capable of recognizing that five senses are not enough equipment to take along for a potentially incredible ride through life.

Trouble is, the world seems bent on ignoring its poetry.  Cut me some slack, please.  I’m going to bundle the words poetry, romance, ideals, heroes and perfection together for no other reason than they all seem to be in short supply in this disbelieving age.  They all sound bigger than life to me, and bigger than life is what I want to distill.  I’m talking magic, things that sing with a rhythm that transcends routine.  Natural poetry, if you will.  Trust me, it’s out there.  Or rather it’s in there.  Inside your head, your feelings, your soul.  Eye of the beholder, eye of the believer, and all that.  But shhh…please don’t let that get around.  Especially you readers.  The poets union is going to be on my case, as it is, for revealing trade secrets.  Can’t have everyone creating their own poetry willy-nilly.  Writers rule!  So if you’re not a writer, plant yourself indoors and sink your roots into the Scothguard brocade of the sofa, while you wait for bigger-than-life to magically appear on Cable and mesmerize you.  But do not – I repeat DO NOT – take things into your own hands by pulling the plug on the TV and sticking your fingers into the world’s sockets, because then you won’t need us.  Can’t have you finding out you are the finest generator of interesting content ever made.  That’s how a writer gets a leg up.  They do primary research and report to you.  And if you’re a writer, or a writer in process, bathe your senses in whatever you experience, but then take it inside your mind and dwell on it like a guru on acid.  Do not multi-task.  Transcendental yourself.  That way you may learn how to think, how to see the world, which is impossible to do in dumbed down circumstances.  So tear up the script.  Write your own.  You are unique.  Then give yourself an Emmy (Emmy, Emmy…an enema is what you get when you visit the marketplace – whole other essay).

Writer or reader, most people suffer from a contagious disease called “passivity,” characterized by a lack of imagination.  It’s generally harmless, except for lost living time – sort of like sleeping on the job.  But if you’re a writer, it’s downright lethal.  Some people are born with an immunity, or a hyper-gene for imagination, but everyone has some natural resistance to passivity.  If you’ve lost yours, the best way to reacquire it is to concentrate without distraction until you can make walls collapse and to stay away from voluntarily boring people.  You can tell if people are voluntarily boring because they will say they are themselves bored or otherwise surrender initiative.  The second best way to get in touch with your imagination is to connect yourself with reservoirs of inspiration.  That can be a place, an activity, or a person.  In my case, my mentor was a tree.

I first met Evergreen as I was skiing around a turn.  It wasn’t just the front-row seat he had taken to hang out on the corner that drew my attention, but rather his infirmity.  He was missing his lowest overhanging boughs.  Moreover, they had obviously been lopped off.  I stopped.  “Ouch, I bet that hurt,” I said.  He said nothing, conveying the impression of wisdom; and the fact that the rest of him was throbbingly green and thriving suggested strength of character.  We talked.  Or rather he listened, which confirmed the impression of stately wisdom.  “Aren’t you bored just standing here?” I blathered.  But he answered naught.  Could be autistic, crossed my mind.  I decided to give him a test.  “When you see a cloud, do you just see…a cloud?”  Naught squared.  A genius!  Of course he saw more than a cloud.  How could he not?  Standing there, seeing every cloud of every sky of every day in his corner of the universe?  He was too wise to answer, that’s all.  How could you stare at the cosmos 24/7, non-stop naked infinity, as the moon and the sun trade numberless shifts, and life and death play out before you, leaving telltale tracks in the snow or trails in the grass as the seasons come and go, observing mating, hunting, the answering of territorial imperatives through droughts and times of plenty, storms and Halcyon days, witnessing miracles in the light of day and dark magic in the night, and not learn all there is to learn?  And you know, there has never been a time since, when I have passed that tree, that I have not felt an amazing thought or emotion.  So Evergreen has become my reservoir of inspiration.   I do not know if he is religious, but then he surely knows more of God than any religion trapped behind four walls within the petty politics and shifting moralities of civilization.  So I usually murmur a nondenominational, “May our prayers be granted, tree,” as I pass by.  And Evergreen rewards me by saying naught.

But I digress.  I was lamenting that the world seems bent on ignoring its poetry.  I can propound a dozen reasons for this, though at bottom I think it’s a throwback to a 19^th century conflict.  The Virgin and the Dynamo met head on during the Industrial Revolution, and the Virgin lost everything but her virginity.  It was an age when spiritual values collided with the razzmatazz of mechanized ways of doing things.  Up reared the factories, pulling an agrarian world into the future.  No, I’m not ranting about pollution or globalization.  But in an increasingly pre- packaged world where needs were met and delivered by third parties, people were beginning to lose their connections with the natural world, with self-reliance and their own inner resources.  Hard to be philosophical in a large and meaningful way when you are shrinking into a complex mega-society where everyone and everything is specialized.  The John Stuart Mill classical education went by the boards, and broadly learned generalists became an endangered species.  And that was just the beginning.  We saw a resurgence of humanism here and there in the 20^th century, but technology (and I love it) advanced as Toffler said it would in FUTURE SHOCK.  Too much information spread over too many fields to be assimilated and put into perspective.  So the push was toward becoming a cog in the great machine of humanity and knowing little of how the other cogs work.  Jay Leno’s JayWalks and Glenn Beck’s Moron Trivia reveal a frightening vacuum between the ears of those poised to inherit the Earth.  But you really only needed to listen to the media’s talking heads over the past 30 years since they anointed themselves in trios and quartets on raised daises to find the same appalling ignorance and lack of context.  And that increasingly activist media is the surrogate parent, educator and peer representative for us all.  So it’s very hard to be independent these days, very hard to rely on your own imagination and develop an informed and encompassing view of life.  Much easier to just have it fed you according to your time and place and circumstances.  And if you can’t get beneath the conditioning and indoctrination of our times, you are to a greater degree derivative.  BUT…if you are or want to become one of those rare people who still know where the primary sources are, and you can fight your way out of the sheltering cocoon that comes pretty much automatically with modern living, you just might become an original.  Seems to me a writer must do this, if they want something to say.  And finding the poetry in life is a good place to start, because it is almost synonymous with those words I cited earlier: romance, ideals, heroes and perfection – all casualties of a jaded, more cynical world that came with the savvy of a fast-transit, mass communication, pc-connected, hi-tech, dynamo-wins-over-virgin age.  But can you understand a jaded world without having a vision for a perfect one?  Don’t negative things imply the existence of positives?  There is no night without day, no pain without pleasure, no death without life.  I want to go where the light and warmth are.  I want to live and write where beauty and wisdom remind me of that, even if I show it by reversing it in a dark mirror.  Five senses are good for digesting fast food and taking in life’s re-runs.  Heart, mind and soul can make truth dance and awaken sleeping dreams.  Let me discover and relay the surprises.  And if the world won’t give me that, I’ll find the poetry within myself and plant it wherever I go.  Johnny Appleseed would understand.   

Thanks for reading. 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 send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Older newsletters are now being added to the website (www.thomassullivanauthor.com) but unfortunately we can only include new photos with the e-mailed version.  You can also get to my past columns right there with the newsletter on my web page under News & Articles, or if you want to go month by month to the 16^th in the SU archives, they are available that way as well.

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

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