The Authentic Life: writer's block

It is six thirty in the morning and I am sitting at our dining room table with a cup of coffee on one side of me and the window half open on the other. I opened the window hoping that inspiration would be carried on the back of the cool morning breeze. The half-light of the sun barely illuminates the living room, which makes the dark grouping of objects seem more like a suggestion of furniture instead of concrete reality. If I were to stretch my arm through the window I could almost touch the brick corner of our neighbor’s building. But it remains just out of reach: as does any inspiration for a story.

As a writer a great deal of my time is spent trying to bridge the world around me with the world inside of me. Often times, Paul will catch me staring blankly into space. I worry that he feels like he is living with a person who is experiencing the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; someone who is not always present in the world.

He will snap his fingers in front of my face and say “Hello? Can you repeat what I just told you?” When I flatly recount his story verbatim he’ll look at me and say “Wow, my story sounds even more boring when you tell it.” To which I respond
“Not really.”

But that is the crux of the matter. Any story can be told, but it is the way in which it is told that matters. If I write about my grandfather’s table, I can describe the way it looks. It is round with dark grained wood, curved legs and has multiple leaves to make it bigger. All of these things are true. It is an object in this world. But if I speak of its journey from the mountains of North Carolina to its spot in our dining room with our blended family sitting around it for the first time together on the evening before our marriage, it becomes something else. It becomes the bridge between this world and my world; a story in a story.

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” Rodin said.

I suppose that is what I do with a block of words. Whittling them down until the story hiding inside of the story is revealed. It runs in my family. My grandfather did this with his drawings. We would sit at his dining room table and he would begin to draw as if the picture already existed on the paper and his pencil merely highlighted it. And so must his mother, who was a musical prodigy, have done the same with him; at the very same table singing in French as she played the Mandolin. The love of art and the art of love played out over and over again upon this table.

Paul walks into the living room humming and arranges the pillows on the now clearly defined sofa. The clock above me plays its tune and strikes eight. I sit up, stretch my arms, look out through the window and catch a glimpse of my neighbor sitting at his kitchen table. I wonder if he has been there the whole time.

“Did you find any perspiration?” Paul asks playfully, knowingly misusing the word as he kisses me.

“Yep” I say, ready to join the real world again. “It was there in front of me the whole time.”

http://yeahwrite.me/81-open

When you write non-fiction it is generally accepted that what you put on paper is true. When writing a blog post, I need to pull from real life incidents and remembrances, but sometimes my life and memories are really just not that exciting. So, I am just going to start typing and wait for a story to develop. This one seems to be going nowhere. I’m sorry.

It’s not that interesting things have not occurred over the past several weeks, they certainly have. But to hold a story together, there really should be a central theme: conflict and resolution.

I attended a family wedding and a thirtieth high school reunion in the past two weeks. Entire books have been devoted to those topics, so you would think that a lousy blog post or two could develop. But, no, my mind has decided to keep these stored for a while. My friend Sam told me that there is no such thing as writer’s block. It is only that the writer is afraid of expressing his emotions. Ah, so that’s it! Good, now we have some conflict. Maybe sharing just a few observations will get the old juices flowing.

Let’s start with the wedding. If I were going to write a story about it, I would have to write about the brother of the bride’s toast. Aside from his joke referencing spousal abuse and the quote from “Slaughterhouse Five” it was a good toast. OK, maybe it sucked, there is just no sugar coating that one. Watching the bride’s face turn from a smile to a wince was painful for everyone. I don’t think I can turn that one into any more of a story.

I suppose there was one other interesting incident at the wedding. There was a photo booth, the kind you might find in a suburban mall. Paul and I slipped in and had some photos made. Long story short, we shared our hotel room with my Sister-In-Law and had no alone time Suddenly, we were alone in the dark, one thing led to another and well, you get the picture. No, you won't get the pictures and neither will we. It turns out our pictures were the only ones that did not make it to the photo booth’s website. I wanted to order re-prints, but the company said something about how our pictures became corrupted on their hard drive. I guess there really isn’t much of a story in that one either.

The reunion, there certainly should be some stories there. Here I am, thirty years later returning with my husband to a high school reunion in North Carolina. As a back story they have just passed a resolution to let the people of North Carolina vote to amend the constitution to prohibit same sex marriage. This one has comedy written all over it!

It’s really hard to know where to start. I could talk about the wife of one of my classmates who was Muslim and felt a kindred spirit with the only two gay men at the reunion. Paul kept calling her muslin. When I told him she was not a cheap fabric, he failed to see the humor. Or maybe I could write about the woman who lost the love of her life after only being with him for one year, but still harbored a deep seated hatred for a classmate she had not seen in thirty years.

Perhaps the best story could center on the classmate who entered the men’s room shouting “Are there any Homo’s in here?” shortly after Paul and I went to the men’s room. When I told my mother about that story she offered "Well remember you beat him in the individual medley at the city swim meet when your were fourteen." She said this with a satisfied look that seemed to say "You'll always have that!" No, none of that stuff is very interesting.

I wish I could make a story out of the past couple of weeks for you, but as I said, I have writer’s block. Something will come together next week. Until then, I’ll leave you with a quote, said in all seriousness, by my mother after I attended the reunion. And just to give you the background one more time: A gay man married to another man returning to the south for his thirtieth high school reunion when the state is considering a constitutional amendment outlawing same sex marriage: “Well, Bill, you didn’t have anything to prove.”