Surfing Life, Page, Mind

I woke up the other morning realizing that if I had entered myself in the race to become a great, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, I am certainly losing. Next thought (thanks to years of therapy and generic Cymbalta) was that I have never finished reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (except 100 Years of Solitude). I appreciate their brilliance, the way they are stories about an entire culture as much as a single person, but they are always so slow and boggy. That’s not the kind of novel I want to write. I want my novel to move fast on the surface but provide undercurrents that people can ride should they choose to.

Besides, I’m not in the race. I’m just trying to live a full, rich, loving life. I’m a teacher who writes and a writer who teaches. The two enhance each other, and I don’t believe that old adage, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Rather, those who can truly teach are a rare breed and do a great service to the world. I aspire to be one of those kinds of teachers.

Writing a novel is hard and requires balance, yet movement. The surfing metaphor comes to mind. You have to overcome ego issues, you have to tune into the rest of the world, but you have to tune into yourself at the same time so that you can become an accurate conduit… and you have to maintain the balance between the abstract and the concrete, between words and sounds, between conscious and unconscious. You have to go into the past, but not get swallowed by it, know when to make things up, know when to borrow from reality. You ride the wave, exerting years of practice to maintain balance, but following where the wave leads.

It’s better than watching TV (I do too much of that, because it’s so much easier). Novel writing is a worthy puzzle to master. It enriches life and strengthens them mind no matter the outcome.

By the way, my essay, “How Not to Become a Writer” was a finalist in the writing advice contest of  Talking Writing and will be published in their Spring 2015 issue, and my story “Life in the Margins” is forthcoming in Big Lucks. I had a great time working with their brilliant fiction editor, An Tran. I’ll post the links when they are in.