Examinations

What frustrates me with writing is not the What but the How .... the How to say it, how to arrange the words just so .... to give meaning and passion .... to be fair to the charachters .... to be judicious .... to be economical in one's approach .... to find just the right words, the right sentiment. How will it come? How?

I find that I am at my best when I turn my attention away to solitary activities .... washing dishes, driving without music or NPR; when I am attuned to the musicality of words, the importance of syntax, the play of verbs. What I am examining in this novel is the time of mid-life, when one realizes that life is passing, that youth is ephemeral and I am looking through the eyes of a man. So much has been said by and about women --- how we are and are not coping through the years of adolescence, then to marriage and family, through menopause and retirement, through the years of death and loss of loved ones. We have and are still saying it. But what of the men? What are they feeling and how are they dealing with the stages of life? What are their emotions and how do those emotions impact their decisions? How do they change and what tools do they use to go through these changes? Why do they resist change and moreover, why do people in general resist change? Mid life, I realize, is a strange and, I'm sure, very tenuous time in one's life. Either the Oprah approach (yea! I'm fifty. I'm smarter, wiser, more self-assured) or the crisis. And what of the crisis? How does one get past it? What are the tasks? The lessons? At the start of this story I didn't know what I was searching for. I simply knew that a man in mid life was desperate for something, had committed adultery, and learned very deep and profound lessons in life. I knew that it was much deeper than the story of a man having an affair -- rather, it was the view of a man having been changed at some very deep, visceral level because of various choices he'd made in life and the affair only being the vehicle by which the change takes place. It is a challenge to think outside of your own sphere but this is what it is most exciting for me, what keeps my axe sharpened and perhaps what draws me write -- my passion for understanding human behavior, my love of being a casual observer of people and their actions and interactions. Perhaps this is what I disagree with most about the ridiculous axiom that one write "what they know." Why write what you know? Where is the pleasure in spilling out what you've already experienced? The challenge of life and the beauty of life is in the questions, the not knowing of the answers, the finding of tools to excavate the answers and the truth as it applies to your own life. And then the discovery, the settling into that truth, that understanding. This is what pleases me most about writing --- the discovery, the finding of the words and the emotions that are indeed universal.

Stream of consciousness.

---A.