magnum plots

Dear K,

When I was young my teachers used to always tell me to write about what I know. They discouraged me from stretching into any topic area that was beyond my knowledge. I could not write about being a 32 year old man in a struggling marriage. Nor could I write about being a sea monster trying to find acceptance in the cruel dark cold of the bottom of the ocean. All I could write about was being an angst-filled teenage girl stuck in a small Midwestern town.

So that’s what I wrote about, because that’s what my teachers wanted. I wrote about the endless cups of bitter coffee in cafes and unrequited high school love and basketball. But I still dreamed of living a more interesting life, one that would permit me to write about war or true heartbreak or all the big-hitter topics of literature. Maybe I’d hunt a great white whale or go to the bull fights in Spain.

Eventually, I escaped the misconception that I could only write about what I know in terms of my own life. The narrators shifted to become the 32 year old man, or the soldier, or the spoiled, hopelessly bored rich girl. Even though it wasn’t exactly me, it was still me. I was still hidden within those characters. Even if I tried to eliminate myself completely from the text, I’d still find my finger tickling through the letters, my hair weaved between the paragraphs, or my eyes set dark and sad in the background. And that’s when I realized that I was still writing about what I know. Always. And in a way it became a peculiar game that I played with myself. How much could I morph, how deeply could I hide my true self within the pages?

It allows you to escape a bit, to be that different person for the days or months that you are writing as a character. But it fucks up your reality. When you set down the pen or stop typing the keys you still have to return to the standard personality, the person who comes and goes to work each day and interacts with society. Sometimes it isn’t as easy as I’d like. Sometimes I show up for a coffee date still bending like an alcoholic businessman, or show up for an appointment speaking like a disappointed weatherman. It’s not so easy to shake the lives I create on the page, and sometimes those lives are more interesting than mine and I don’t exactly want to set them aside right away. It’s almost as if maybe I can eek out a little more creativity, find a little more inspiration for the text, if I can just persist in that mindset for only a little longer.

I hope you don’t get trapped in characters like I do, but perhaps we are possibly alike in this idea.

Are the sun’s rays looking longer to you? I swear they are stretching further every day, coating another twenty minutes more or so with every passing week. The day approaches when we will be able to soak in their warmth, laying on the linoleum floor in front of the kitchen windows and smiling at the ceiling fan.

Soon,
-K