Writing as Immortality

P.S. Demian The Writing Life 1 Comment

InfinityI’ve often thought about what my influences are in writing. Some people watch a movie or read a book and think “Hey, I wish I had written that.” Others think “Gosh, I could have written that!” In fact, some stories are so good, or so impactful and resonate so well with what is churning in your own mind, that you think “Gosh – I need to write MORE of that!”

I can’t tell whether exposure to literature and film created my worldview, or if some primeval dystopian conspiracist reincarnationist ideas were merely activated and given form by the media I was exposed to. In either event, I’d love to detail a few of the influences that inform my writing.

Old School
When I was in 6th grade I think it was, I was too young for my parents to let me watch a violent film like Terminator. And yet my best friend turned me on to it, by sitting in the library with me and explaining the plot, beat for beat, to me. (Am I the only one whose exposure to the Terminator myth began through oral culture?) The story resonated because of the time travel. But if you look at it, time travel is a great plot device to explore consequences of actions over time. And these consequences go down for the ages.

Of course another time travel movie became wildly popular in the 80s, Back to the Future. This movie explored not only time travel but also generations, how families grow over time and pass on their values, beliefs and culture. The juxtaposition of then and now serves not only to advance the story, but as a compressed-time metaphor for exploring how EVERYTHING that happened before now is leading up to THIS INSTANT and our actions within it.

One of my teachers, a Kenneth Haker, AP US History, had us watch a film. It was The Manchurian Candidate. It’s a cold-war film about mind control and sending soldiers back to the US who have been mentally reprogrammed to assasinate. We were told I think that Sinatra (who stars) was against it’s continued release in light of Kennedy’s assassination (there was no snopes.com at the time to disprove this false fact). This experience set me searching for other material about this. Even if you view swinging watches and queen of hearts and post-hypnotic suggestions as a bunch of hooey, the success of the advertising industry should tell you that mind control *can* work…

It Never Works Out
Of course like every high school student in America (I assume), I was exposed to Animal Farm at some point. It’s a great book, and my main take-away was that they change the rules over time. Lord of the Flies taught me that even in democracy, the majority will eventually vote to eliminate human rights. But Brave New World is by far the most impactful and influential of these novels to me. From it I learned that you will be rewarded, in our culture, for giving up your power of choice.

Going Back in Time
Now, when I was in my mid teens, I had an interesting experience. After some soul searching about what I wanted to do with my life, I became fascinated with the possibility of past lives. What if you somewhat unexpectedly and suddenly remembered with clarity and specificity, who you were in a past life? What if you had memories of just the same quality as your normal memories, experiences were just as profane or mundane as now? What if you could see how the incomplete projects you had started in your last life had simply spilled into your current life? This would certainly make you into somewhat of an oddball. You’d probably have some urge to talk to people about it, yet feel like you couldn’t. It’s not like you would believe in past lives – you wouldn’t. You would simply have memories, as vivid and detailed as your current memories, such as driving such-and-such a car, and being friends with so-and-so, and wanting to live in a certain part of town, but living in another part. You might even remembered how you died. Should you believe these memories? Ah, another film, Total Recall and numerous others in the amnesia-through-drugs-or-mind-control explores these tropes and helps us understand the answer to that dilemma. Around this time as well as later, I was also exposed to the Highlander movie and series. This theatrical device – an immortal, who sort of “hides out” and keeps changing identities – is another fantastic metaphor that touches on the problems of reincarnation without getting bogged down in ‘reincarnation’ or Samsara as it is understood in Eastern culture.

But how weird was my interest in past lives? I find some solace in the fact that today, on Earth, at least a billion people, perhaps 1.5 billion believe in past lives. And a few billion more – the vast majority – at least believe in future lives. (Source: CIA World Factbook. No joke, look it up.) Even the much revered and respected Dalai Lama knows that talking about his past lives may be too much for people, and he downplays their significance in interviews.

It’s a Conspiracy
I have read countless ‘rational’ and ‘skeptical’ articles attempting to debunk conspiracy. And yet, for every one of these authors, no matter how many individual fallacies they point out, I still think they are whistling in the dark. I think their approach to explaining the chaos of the world is to say it just isn’t that complicated, resorting to Occam’s razor and all that, glosses over the fact that sometimes the world IS dark and sinister and very, very complicated.

One of the earliest introductions to this fact was actually not fiction, but the true stories of American double agents in WWII Germany. I read about double agents; in this case, working for the British but trusted by the Germans, they had to let real Allied troops die, and had to give good, actionable intelligence to the Germans to build that trust. This fact made me realize that the game of war and of life really, can get so very existential and complex, that the loyalties can get so perverted and converted that you don’t know what to do any more. And it taught me that the real truth can, after a “reveal”, be startlingly different than what you thought it was.

The stark verisimilitude of LeCarré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the best spy novel of all time, only confirmed my sense of how the world runs.

My history studies of the 60’s contributed to this view. We know the Warren commission said it wasn’t. And we know that Bobby Kennedy’s death was yet another lone agent. And so were all the others. And after a while, after so many events, the rationalist will try to talk you down from trying to draw conspiratorial conclusions. “It’s a human need to explain things”, they will explain. “Your mind wants to make sense of all this, fit it into a pattern”. To hell with this rationalist. There is an order to this chaos. We know now about the FBI hounding MLK, John Lennon, anyone they don’t like. We know about Nixon’s lies.

Perhaps it’s not the lizard people, perhaps it’s not the UFOs, and perhaps it’s not the dirty dozen, but to deny the fact that evil men conspire to create evil effects in our world is to be in denial.

Why I write
The novels I am writing are reincarnationist, because I simply find it fascinating and under-explored in the fiction of Western civilization, and of course I’m weird. The novels I am writing are conspiratorial, because in trying to make sense of the chaos of the world and all the broken plans of man, my mind feels compelled to weave it into a logically consistent and explanatory conspiracy.

My exposure to Huxley’s Brave New World (and the irony of his dropping acid on his deathbed and trying to achieve some sort of agnostic spiritual ascent) informs my complex anti-drug spirituality.

Possibly the real reason I am writing about it because, like Woody Allen, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

But think about your writing in this light. Immortality is a tricky thing to understand. Yet there are writers from thousands of years ago, whose ideas we still discuss every day. Greek philosophic ideas, various sacred testaments, and the Veda permeate and shape our culture, often more powerfully than the artists of today.

Who knows – perhaps that poem in school you hated having to study was something you wrote long ago!

But whatever you write, know that it can echo down the ages, affecting people, changing their minds, and imbuing them with the energy that was your life.

The Terrors of Adolescence

The Writing Life No Comments

A chill wind blows. Beneath the starry skies a lone finger pokes out from the ground, a shock of white in an otherwise blank landscape. The plains stretch out beyond the horizon, an endless ocean of green-gray grass. Footfalls sound behind you, the crunch of underbrush and new frost startles you. Slowly, you turn expecting the worst.

The scythe falls before you can cry out. A hollow laugh echoes across eternity.

It all has to start somewhere. At some point in some of your lives, someone had planted that tiny spark inside your head that blossomed into wildfire. So, it has been and so it will continue onwards, cyclically until the end of time or storytelling as we know it.

Here’s my story:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away paperback books were actually displayed inside grocery stores, not relegated to the smallest section next to the greeting cards, dog food, or laundry detergent. At the time, I had been excitedly following my family into the grocery store weekly for the newest releases in the Disney adventures. Somewhere around the summer of ’92, my parents rounded the corner in the little buggy and we made our way to the junk food aisle. And that’s where I saw it: A little picture of a house, some bumpy gooey writing, and a picture of a creepy house front and center. The title gave me goosebumps.

I begged my parents to buy it for me, and against their better judgement they caved. I took my new prize home and ran to my bedroom. Turning the pages with Cheeto-laced fingers, I dove in and didn’t come up for air until the last page.

The book was called Welcome to Dead House. It was written by a guy named R.L. Stein.

And it was the largest, scariest, most awesomest book my ten year old brain had ever digested.

I wanted more.

Now, Goofy’s Great Adventure Part 39 wasn’t good enough. R.L. Stein was my gateway drug to the world of the weird and macabre. And like all good addicts, I was out chasing the high. If Goosebumps were only coming out monthly and I was reading them in a day, I needed to fill up the other 29 days.

But Walden Books was far away. And Blockbuster was so much closer.

My parents were a terrible influence on me. They let me rent things I had no business renting. It was somewhere around the autumn of 1993, and I was no longer the cute organ grinder with the toy monkey. Now I was the cute vampire. Or the cute werewolf. I stumbled upon Nightmare on Elm Street, and it scared the crap out of me. I still hate hospitals.

So yeah. That was the end of that phase for another year or two. I still read my Goosebumps when they came out. And then I went back to watching things more age-appropriate. Things like Darkwing Duck and the Gummy Bears (bouncing here and there and everywhere…)

I had to have all of the action figures. To occupy my time between new Goosebumps releases, I would wander over to my toy box and stage epic battles of most epic proportions. The Ninja Turtles forged an alliance with Darkwing Duck to defeat the evil Shredder. Occasionally, my super powered parakeet would swoop down and claw at the faces of heroes and villains.

When my parents would yell at me to play outside, I would go outside. And my action figures would come too. Sadly, the super-powered parakeet had to stay indoors.

And it was outside that I learned just how scary things can be. You see, I had a much older kid that lived next door. He was a junior in high school, which was old enough to be an elder god to my ten year old self. And that first time he popped out of his window wearing a halloween mask, I thought he was.

Over the rest of the year, he encouraged my friend and I to go for a ride in his “time machine” (garbage can) that he promised he could take me all the way back to prehistoric times. I was excited at the prospect. Dinosaurs were cool. And so, he put a blindfold over me and picked me up and dumped me into his garbage can…I mean time machine.

Which he then carried into the woods, leaving me there to fend for myself and find my way back to civilization. It was one hell of an adventure that led me to discovering the ancient evil that lived in the lake at the edge of my neighborhood. It’s name was Gomar, and I was terrified.

And damned if I didn’t think it was real. Over the remainder of the summer, my neighbor (Gomar) would pop up unexpectedly and terrorize my friends and I.

So, we did the only thing we could to defend ourselves from Gomar and his hordes of gremlins and demons. We teamed up Power Ranger style and punched and kicked at the air, I mean the monsters, up until Gomar finally acquiesced our superiority.

But that got me to wondering about this evil being that lived in my lake. Where did he come from? Did he want to steal our butterfingers?

School started and the little wheels spun endlessly until the hamsters in my brain gave up the ghost. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gomar. My questing led me back to my fascination with the macabre and the reality. It turned out there was a really wicked shark attack in the lake behind my house (it was actually the inspiration for “Jaws”). And there were all sorts of nasty battles during the revolutionary war within minutes of my neighborhood.

While researching the evil within my home town, I inadvertently stumbled upon HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Which only led me down the path of least resistance. It was there that I discovered a man named Dean Koontz, almost by accident really.

And it was for the second time in my life I was truly terrified.

I had watched a movie called “Fire in the Sky” the night before school. Big mistake. After all but crying myself to sleep, I found solace in the fact that Monday was library day.

Think I was 11 or 12 at the time. And as fate would have it, I found a book called “Winter Moon” by Dean Koontz. The cover had a beautiful picture of a full moon and the cover copy convinced me to open it up and take a peak.

I checked it out and came back for more. The Bad Place, Lightning, Mr. Murder, and Cold Fire followed. It seemed someone else had thought evil existed within small town America. And he aimed to keep the suspense high and the brow mopped until the very last page. I dove in headfirst and spent the next several years poolside, bus side, or taking hits between classes. I was addicted again. And it was amazing. I kept up until I couldn’t take any more. And that’s when I found The Dark Tower.

If Dean Koontz taught me that ordinary men and women could do extraordinary things in the faces of extreme challenges, Stephen King taught me the magic of simplicity. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Sold.

My mind drifted back to Gomar as my English/Creative Writing teacher gave me my first chance to write a story. Michael Wilfrey was born from two middle school kids caught up in a war older than time.  It was pure dreck, but it was an “A” and it was all mine.

As I grew up, my reading habits changed, my writing habits began to take shape. I discovered Jim Butcher, who led me to the Lester Dent method of plotting, which only led me to discover Doc Savage, who then introduced me to Solomon Kane and Conan the Barbarian.

But my addiction still lingers, I still try to chase that high. Zombies, ghosts, devils and demons… I just can’t get enough.

Maybe it’s because I’m still trying to solve my little Gomar problem.

 

Daydream Addiction

Leigh Galbreath The Writing Life No Comments

When asked to write a post on what inspired me to be a writer I went blank. Couldn’t think of a thing. Most everyone else was talking about things they’d seen, books they read, that sort of thing, but when really thinking about it, my inspiration didn’t come from any external source. In the immortal words of Neil Gaiman, “It came from my head.”

I’m an addict, and my drug of choice is daydreaming. Has been from a very early age. If I’m not actively involved in a conversation with another person, or engrossed in a work of fiction, I’m locked in my head beating up bad guys or taking over the world–or both. I spend most of my day thinking about being someone else someplace else. So, naturally, when I started writing, all I was doing was writing what I had experienced in my head.

To tell the truth, I’ve been writing far longer than I wanted to be a writer. I think I started writing when I was in junior high school (I particularly remember a story about a group of kids my age who were trapped in their school, which had been sucked into a kind of limbo universe where nothing existed but the school-yeah, I was a weird kid). I never took it seriously at all. Making up stories was just something I did, like other kids doodled cartoons on their notebooks.

At some point in my teenage years (probably around eighteen or nineteen) I wondered what it would be like to get sucked into an alternate world with magic. Not original, I know, but bear with me. I started going through scenarios in my head as to how I would react in that situation. In true Walter Mitty fashion, I wasn’t really myself, but a better, braver, prettier, cleverer version of myself. At some point in the daydream, I got the weird notion that I would get imprisoned in a mountain. This brought up a question.

What would a magically inclined person be like if they were locked in a dark, underground prison, alone, for hundreds of years? How would they cope? What would they do to get out, and what would they be like when they did?

From that kernel was born my first trunk novel.

It was while writing that book, that I realized how much I really love writing. I’d been doing it forever, already. And I decided that, since it didn’t look like I was going to be rockstar, I’d be a writer.

Just about all my stories have started out just like that first trunk novel. What would it be like to experience this thing that I’ve never experienced, to be this person I’ve never been? Using myself as a starting point makes it easier to get into the idea. A dozen or so scenario’s later, and the idea has a life of its own. Those are the stories I end up writing down.

To be honest, what was in my head was influenced by real events in my life, books I read, music I listened to, and movies and television I had seen, all mashed up in my subconscious and bubbling out in my own unique way. Now that I think about it, the things in my head always had a tendency to work as stories because, after growing up sequestered in my room, reading fiction, I have a very twisted view of the world. I get frustrated when life doesn’t function like a piece of fiction (I’ve come to realize that I walk around listening to music constantly because I feel the need for my life to have a soundtrack-yeah, I’m still a weird kid).

This odd way of looking at the world sort of perpetuates my need to daydream. Life isn’t structured in three acts. We don’t get to skip the boring parts to keep the momentum going. People aren’t characters with understandable motivations.

Real life is complicated.

But dang it, it shouldn’t be! And so, I escape this nonsensical reality to my crazy made up worlds.

I am the first to admit that this is not a healthy way of looking at the world. But I ask you: How else am I going to experience life as a ridiculously rich and famous, deliriously beautiful, impossibly crafty, immortal vampire mage who travels through time to other planets in parallel universes?

Finding Courage in a Harsh World

Ace Jordyn Living Deliberately Motivation Self-Awareness Self-Motivation The Writing Life Work-Life Balance No Comments

Many stories, from mystery to science fiction and fantasy have inspired and awed me. But my road to writing has been a tough and painful one. It wasn’t so much inspiration I needed as the courage to overcome an environment that discouraged reading, let alone writing for a living. One author gave me that courage.

Imagine growing up in a family where reading was never encouraged and was viewed as being lazy. Where farm chores and homework were the priorities. My father occasionally read westerns and Archie comics and then only after we were in bed. My mother just read recipes. Now, imagine the frustrations of a child whose imagination is so taken by the Dick_and_Janerich worlds in books that she wants to write but must suppress that desire and limit it only to school assignments.

What did I love to read? I still remember Dick and Jane’s antics in the grade one picture books –  “See Dick run. Run Dick run!’ – those first words excited my tiny heart and showed me the power of words on paper. Then came rhyming and Dr. Seuss filled my world – “One fish two fish, red fish blue fish’. nancy drewBy grades five and six, I was sneak reading the mysteries of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys on the bus ride home – a book a day. Somewhere in junior high school, I discovered science fiction, fell in love with it and then got into trouble with teachers because my imagination and verbosity were greater than assignments demanded. When I took a degree in English and drama, I had relatives who shunned me for years.

Perhaps I should have quit then and for a few years life took over and I almost did. But I always dabbled and always loved reading. So, what changed? What gave me the courage to write and to overcome all the discouraging influences? Where did I find the confidence to achieve my goal of mastering and communicating in my second language? Oh yes, English isn’t my first language and throughout my life, I’ve had a desire to master it and rarely feel I have. Yet, one book, one writer gave me the courage to pursue my dream wholly – to throw myself into it with a modicum of hope to succeed. I owe my courage to J.K. Rowling.

Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher's_StoneWhen I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, I thought that if she could do it, so could I!”. Her life story, her courage to write and  her perseverance to find a publisher were the inspiration I needed. Since then, I’ve written many wild tales. I can write! My childhood desire to engage in worlds so far removed from reality, to master their voices and breathe life into them in words not my own has blossomed!

Which authors inspire me today? They all do as do the readers who buy their books. Everyone who has the courage to pen their imaginations, to give life to new worlds and voices, and to all our readers who encourage us, I give you my heartfelt thanks.

Cheers and happy writing (and reading too)!