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| Sunlight through stained glass, Pasadena's Gamble House by architects Greene and Greene. |
We are each, for how could we not be, filters of experience and information. What happens to us is sifted, strained, clarified, and transmuted. Whether or not this is more true for anyone who creates I don't know. All is process.
Taking exception to something I find on the internet is one of my least favorite, as it is so unproductive, things even to contemplate. When I found BuzzFeed's "25 quotes that will inspire you to be a fearless writer" I knew I'd been challenged to a duel. Generally (my interpretation) the quotes suggest than unless the story we tell is autobiographical, we are cowards. I disagree.
I have told my story to friends, in 12-step meetings, in recovery groups, in therapy and I no longer find any benefit, for me or anyone, in telling it. However, being a highly porous collection of particles and/or energy, by filtering it over time it has become something else, I hope something possibly more useful and more entertaining. I assume, being optimistic that way, it will be more than one story. Its current shape is the episodic fiction that found me, I was not seeking it, that follows the summer activities of residents in the coastal town, Billington's Cove, particularly Gloria who owns the tea room and Robert Apotienne, aka The Reading Man, who is vacationing in the Cove.
How everything I've ever experienced, heard, read, seen or imagined was refined into now nearly 70 episodes of this quiet tale is one of my personal Great Mysteries. Yet this is the truth of it. Plants take in sunlight and convert it to chlorophyll. Or something like that. If we are very lucky, we turn lead into gold.
If you create, fashion by whatever means something that has not existed before, I find it impossible to believe there is one right way to do it. There are writers who bleed on the page, whose clear calling is to tell us exactly how it was, how it is. There are others who send us tumbling down rabbit holes or leave us in strange company on desert planets. Paint what calls to you, what demands your hand and no other. Write the world that has taken up residence within. I will survive being thought a coward, should I ever arrive at a place where critics get their hands on my work. I am done being scolded.
2 comments:
I've often been told I have no filter, but your words encourage me to believe that my unique experiences provide the sieve that causes expressive eruptions.
Kass - That's it exactly, a sieve. What shakes through is the gold. Expressive eruptions welcome. I am quite sure you have a filter. What we both may be missing is the rhino hide that in some is a first line of defense. We don't know until we know what those unique experiences may be woven into. xo
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