The Back Burner

I've never really had a plan. My mother wrote poems on the backs of envelopes (still does, at 91) and I've always written stories. In the fifth grade the teacher asked us to write a short story about someone in our neighborhood. That took a bit of imagination, because I lived in the woods. But I wrote about a pretty blond girl whose daddy drove her to school every day, which was unusual back then. Most daddies had already been at work for hours before eight in the morning. But her daddy drove her to school. Even as a little kid, I recognized a girl that pretty.
   
     I wrote, in that short story, that her teeth shone like the grill on a fifty-eight Buick. If you've ever seen one, there's about an acre of chrome on it, and I thought it was pretty accurate. The teacher complimented me, and put my story up on the wall beside the blackboard.
   
     I've been a writer ever since.

     But, I've never had a plan. Something small will strike me at just the right time, and I'll worry it like an oyster does a grain of sand. Like a burr in a saddle or a stone in a shoe. it may take years for this irritation to become a story I want to tell, or it may never take shape. But there's always that seed, that irritation.
  
There's always the back burner. I try, at all times, to have at least two stories going, because I get bored easily, and like to wander off in my mind. Some days, I don't feel like going to the right, so I need something to draw me to the left. That's the story on the back burner.

     My first published novel, A Thousand Bridges, started there as an odd little tale about a Mexican detective and a cadre of Knights Templar. I swear to god. When finished, it had nothing to do with that idea, but it hit me then as a good story to remove me from whatever tedium I'd encountered.
   
     (I believe that, if Necessity is the Mother of Invention, then Boredom must be the Father)

     I hate being bored, and often find that, through a lifetime of training, I can appear in one place while also being in another. Like Shrodinger's Cat. Writing is the vehicle that takes me there.

     Sometimes I get paired, at Writers' Conferences, with writers who learned to write in college and spend their summers at Writers' Retreats, teamed up with other writers to critique each other's work. I have very little in common with those writers. I get very little out of critiques from other writers, though I find critiques from readers painfully helpful. When pressed to analyze another writer's work, I always lie. Sometimes (most times) I don't even read it, I just pretend I did.

     Because I don't understand writing as a process, just as an escape from boredom. I love to write, can make entire weeks disappear and wake to find the people who love me have kept me safe while I was gone. I can't not write. I know the sentence is terrible, but it's also true.

     Utah Phillips once sang, "If I could hide the way I feel I'd never sing again."

     I feel that way about writing.