Why Do We Keep Pounding the Keys …

… when reality persistently shows us the wisdom of tamping down our dreams?

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Not long ago, I was interviewed on the topic of my writing. I was privileged to have won the “Writer of the Year” award on Fan Story for 2022, and the interviewer thought I might offer his readers some insight into the writing process.

I thought my responses to his questions were adequate at the time.

I took another look at them today.

And like a pole-vaulter, I’m happy I have a second opportunity to clear the bar. And if I’m not successful this time, I may just opt for the third attempt in a couple of years. The rules of the vault allow for three attempts, after all, as long as fate (which trumps all other rules), doesn’t yank me out of the competition before my enthusiasm is spent.

So … with my pole tip pointed to the heavens, and my eyes trained on the crossbar, I race down the runway ….

Some initial thoughts on that damned blank screen

After 67 years of almost daily writing, I still face the frightful blank screen … still find myself looking out of a dull, stupid torpor at 7:30 each morning. Something there is inside me that compels me to start my journey anew through the same gray, unwelcoming fog as the day before by tapping out the images my fingertips summon up. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t experienced yourself. You know it can be scary. I never have the assurance that this slow, plodding mind of mine will produce anything at all. That, for me, is an unalterable reality.

It’s been with me since the beginning.

It visits me daily.

The only difference is the cluster of feelings that accompanies me to my computer every day at 7:30. And it is that cluster that has morphed over time. Let’s take a look at those transformations.

When everything was fresh and new

In the beginning, it was those heady dreams of fame. You would have found me, as a young man, in the den of my parents’ home, hunkered over my Olympia typewriter, blank page taunting, while I daydreamed of a young Thomas Wolfe, banging his head against the wall, trying to slow the torrent of words flooding through his mind. Thomas Wolfe was every bit the hero to me that Mickey Mantle was to my more reasonable peers. I was certain that the flyleaf of my first novel would announce,

“Never, since Thomas Wolfe, with his towering ‘Look Homeward Angel’, has a writer written so mind-blistering a novel as the one you are holding.”

Those feelings fueled the fire in my gut for the first quarter-century of my journey.

Such was the stuff of dreams.

Then came those middling years

Mid-life presented me with four kids in braces and a loving wife I didn’t deserve, who tried desperately to balance my enthusiasm toward our indeterminate tomorrows with the reality of today’s groceries, clothing and rent.

If you drove down West Columbus Avenue those days, you’d have found me in full suit and tie behind my desk at my Allstate® Insurance office where I shoved my insubstantial dreams of fame into the background so I could nurse the flickering possibility of finding wealth and independence selling insurance.

You’d think that heady possibility would have caused me to buckle down, learn the art of selling insurance and build, brick-by-brick, the proper foundation for my family’s happiness.

And you’d be wrong, of course.

I tried that for a spell. But I was no salesman. Talk about your imposter syndrome! I had hoodwinked Allstate® into setting me up with a monthly paycheck designed to reduce to nada after two years, by the end of which time I was supposed to have such a rise in commissioned sales income that it would easily replace that salary. They gave me a rent-free furnished office, a telephone system, the advertising and signage to draw people to my office from miles around.

I sat there at first envisioning a queue of anxious prospects lined outside my office, and stretching down the street, waiting to get in and sign the application. But … alas! I was a better visualizer than a salesman. There was no line outside. The brand-new phone system that Allstate® bought me rarely lit up with a caller who would beg me to pen them into my schedule.

My success-visualizations grew less, then even less, frequent. I was no salesman. Even the powers of my imagination had taken a knockout blow!

But I did find something to help me wile away those long, empty, lonely days. The Allstate® typewriter functioned as well with a sheet of paper rolled in it as it did an auto, home, or life insurance app.

Ambitions I had forced myself to abandon suddenly reignited, smoldering for a spell, and then burst into full searing flame. I revisited stories that had started well, but drifted into impossible snares and tangles. I patiently untangled them, breathed new life in their nostrils and set them free to soar on their own. And those poems — all the poems! I found myself massaging the circulation back into the knees of poems that, a short month earlier, had limped off the dance floor and languished in a manilla folder — pinched their cheeks now like a proud mama, and watched them again prancing with the others.

Over time, new, exciting projects introduced themselves. New short stories. A novel. And I felt again vital, electric.

Predictably, though, I was nearing my second year as an Allstate® agent. There had been enough wrong numbers during that time that ended with the caller saying, “While I have you on the phone … you sell life insurance, don’t you?” And there were walk-ins who had heard the Allstate® commercials. These were what we agents called “laydown sales”. Enough of them prostrated themselves before me over those two years, that in spite of my grumpy “sign here …” and my mumbling as they walked out the door, “Thank you for choosing Allstate® …” I had acquired enough new and renewal commissions to offset my initial salary.

In short, by the end of the first two years, I was earning minimum wage.

But I was inexpressibly happy. My writing was flourishing. Nothing was published yet, but ... but ….

My wife wasn’t happy, bless her heart. And my kids, while not understanding the confusing machinations of it all, only knew that other kids had newer clothes and better toys, and their parents drove them around in cars that were shiny.

Most would find it hard to believe — I have a hard time believing it — that my marriage to Allstate® lasted thirty years! Despite my unfaithfulness to her. Could she not have known? My wife, the mother of my children, knew I had a mistress, too. How could Allstate® not? I was deliriously happy while I was at my daily writing lab. When I was home, I performed my obligatory functions, usually in high spirits. But Roseana couldn’t have helped seeing that extra sprightliness in my step each morning as I left for work.

The fact is, over those 30 years, I had failed in my polygamous marriage to Allstate® and my true wife. Was unfaithful to them both. And irony of ironies — because I realized this while it was in progress, and I was spiritually torn asunder by it — I was not being faithful to my true love, my mistress, either. I did not give her my best. And as insanely happy as I appeared with my lover … there seeped into my soul a subtle, wordless but profound, sorrow at having lost something greater — something that, at one time, had been anchored in innocence.

Jesus! This was not a good season in my life.

Finally, some thirty years later, and in retirement, I found myself (after having failed both Allstate® and my family), witnessing a slow and rather peculiar incubation going on in my creative process. If a woman’s entire nine-month pregnancy is a preparation for birthing, I was definitely struggling through the discomfort of just my first trimester. While a woman has a pretty good idea of what her baby will look like … I had (and still have) no clue of what, if anything, my incubation will produce.

It is this incubation that continues within my creative process, and it’s what keeps me getting up every morning at 7:30.

Today’s journey

Facing that screen … and with my mind dully chumming the surface with a new word combination — choosing the flamingo-like dance that a short sentence brings, or the sinewy waltz of a compound sentence — choice-making is the constant of the surface mind. But what my creative mind, below the surface, is scanning for is a wordless feeling … that I’m counting on the chum drawing to the surface.

Today, my greatest joy is chasing that elusive feeling through my daily process of creating.

Bear with me … but I can best describe this feeling as watching a beautiful young butterfly through the lens of a camera. You try to keep it at close range and in perfect focus, but as it dips and flits, as it soars and flutters, it keeps sliding in and out of focus.

That butterfly is the feeling my writing searches for each day. Once I find that feeling, once I become that fledgling butterfly, it can sustain me for hours, and those hours fly by like minutes.

Do I blend into — do I become that butterfly — often? Not as often as I’d like. For each encounter, there are days, preceding and following it, which are terribly, often painfully, unrewarding. But its next arrival is worth all the struggle that went before. It’s what makes my daily encounter with the blank screen worthwhile — and inevitable.