Confessions of a Fake Writer

Pizza! Pizza! Pizza! That got your attention, didn’t it? Pizza - the most beautiful word in the English language. Pizza - not sex, booze or rocky road ice cream - is what fires the writerly imagination. I’m sure you agree.

Last night, over home-made pizza (what other kind?), my table full of writers fell to talking (well, shouting) about the Manic Compulsion to Write.

Some said their writing is an escape from the ordinary miseries of life, like stubbed toes and ungrateful children. Others shouted, No, it compensates for failure in love, business and loss of the childhood dream to build a geodesic dome in wattle-and-daub cantilevered over a stark sea cliff watching China clippers clip by. One or two moaned writing eases the pain of not having been born on a far distant planet where they could be bloodthirsty tyrants whose every word is law for groveling, twelve-eyed mutants.

I disagreed with all those theories and that’s when the fist-fighting began, but that’s a story for another blog post, after I get the cast off.

I don’t write for any of those reasons. I write for the same reason I suspect a reader reads - to step into a strange world filled with strangers confronting strange and awful problems. To learn how they wriggle out of those problems. And to ask myself, Could I have done as well?

I’m not a writer of a story. I’m it’s first reader.

Because I don’t really write a story but watch it unfold with my reader’s eyes. While I ask myself, as any reader must, How the hell would I avoid that first stumble of the hero’s that led to all his other mistakes and to the astonishing wildness of the story? Or how do I outrun that misery over there coming after her? And how will we - the he and the she and I - ever wrap up this colossal roller-coaster of a tale so I can stretch out in bed tonight without having to pull the blankets over my head?

I have a lot of weird feelings about the people I meet in my stories. Some I like, especially those struggling against terrible odds. Those I want to step into the story to help but I know I can’t, I’m only the reader. They are the folks I’d like to invite over to the house for pizza and say to them, “There, there, you’ll be alright because, win or lose, you stood up in the dragon’s fire when others cowered away and the world will remember you.”

Others I hate with a fervor that surprises me. My outrage too often causes the villains or nasty side characters to fire protests at me from the laptop screen on which I’m reading (I mean keying) their evil tricks. And we go to fist-fighting among the pixels. These are the people who could be wicked fun at wicked parties but I’d never want rapping on my front door in dark night. Not unless I’m heavily armed. Or have my blankets all pulled up.

Thing is, when the story’s done - when I’ve read/written its last word - I miss ‘em all, the good, the bad and the in-between. Not because the battered heroes prove so grand or the ghastly villains have some twisted charm. But because they all helped answer my question as a reader, If they can solve their huge problems, why can’t I?