Writing, I have always said, is like breathing for me. A regular habit, you could take that to mean, and I often have; but it’s something else as well, I remembered while reading the latest work of fiction by a dear friend; it’s a vital processing—the inhalation of what life gives you, the exhalation of something you’ve done with those things, something you’ve done to make them useful.
Early in my years of writing, I crafted pure fiction—the kind that contains no semblance of real events. Still, for me producing it was an autobiographical effort, as I took deeply churning emotions from inside me and released them in new form, using their intensity, if not their exact essence, to flavor short stories and poems. The pains of growing up the child of a fragile marriage and, later, a volatile divorce was not something I could, as a teenager, write about directly; it’s not something to this day I would feel inclined to put in public terms. It is a too uniquely defining element of who I am for me to gain anything from simply stating it. But to work it like the clay my mother used to spend hours spinning and lifting into gorgeous forms; to turn it over in my hands like my father would the plastic replicas of molecular structures, considering their elemental components and using these to inspire creative thinking—to contemplate it as an essential input into a system—my system of well being—through which I could spin it into something like poetry, now that felt productive. That felt like healing.
In later years, as I began to encounter other stimuli for my emotions, I took the vital process in a new direction, creating fiction infused with real stories that I recast in characters’ lives. In this way, I not only rinsed the emotions out in a metaphorical washing cycle but also sifted through the thoughts of mine left dangling from these memorable moments or experiences and found marvelous revelations, the way once upon a time I sifted through dirt piled over hundreds of years atop a Maya kitchen and in it found objects of utility, beauty, and skill. The new process felt like discovering artistry within me. Like discovering that in addition to being able to right myself internally I could also sculpt from what I had known something of poetic worth.
That others enjoyed reading my writing was delightful, rewarding, exciting. Yet it had never been what drove me. What did so was that fundamental physical need: that productive processing of experiences, that acceptance and then ensuing output of them—that way of letting go of them enough to get myself going forward from them, to avoid loitering romantically or regretfully in the past. Writing gave me the opportunity to return to a creative work and consider its craftsmanship—rather than revisiting a memory and the feelings that may have come with it.
I have for years admired this friend who also writes fiction for her skill with words, her resonant capturing of human experience on paper as though it were three-dimensional. I am reminded now, after closing her elegant recent work, that she breathes her words as I do, infuses her own experiences, aches, and ascensions into her fiction for the dual sakes of artistry and wellness—and for that I am profoundly glad for her. To see her undertake this in the very way I myself have found to be so enlivening inspires me and also obligates me. I know I can only honor her (our) effort by returning to the act I am undertaking now: by writing, by letting out a long held-in breath and with it, I hope, at least some of what’s caused me to keep it in.
