Stranger than Fiction

I finished my first novel about two years ago and have recently felt the urgency to return to it. I've looked at it briefly over the last few weeks, just merely glanced at it, but now I feel like since I have published my memoir, it is time to bring forth the fiction. I am not a genre writer. I do not stick with poetry or creative nonfiction or fiction. I kind of just go with the flow and entertain the muse, whatever it may be.

I have two novels - this first one, We Run From Ourselves - and a new one just in the first stages gestationally. It is called, We Have Our Reasons. Both books cycle around a persistent theme, the same theme as in the memoir I published in April: the absence of parents and what that does to us individually and as a collective whole. The absence creates a vaccuum and everything in life that we could ever deal with gets sucked into us, without the filtering that parents bring. I am not sure why this theme haunts me beyond my own persistent issues with the absence of my father. That seems so exclusively personal. But it does and I see it everywhere.

But if I am praying to be a better writer, I have to dissect those personal issues and decide how much of those areas need to be surfaced in my writing. I study the craft of writing and why some writers stay as closet writers and why others take a huge role in our literary development as humans that crave story and a witness to what we all go through as humans. One thing that seems evident is that writers that draw from their own experience as part of the human race and also from the truth of what it means to be a part of that race become voices for what none of us are always so brave to say on our own. Truthfully, I seek to be that kind of writer.

I may not understand why I feel God has called me to this theme in my writing, but I know that the truth of story and experience is multi-faceted and multi-layered. It is always so much deeper than the visceral evidence of pain. We dig deeper because we do indeed have our reasons.

So today, I am working both manuscripts - reimaging one, leaving it, going to the new one, and back again. And although it is a little like reopening wounds, I am glad to be here, fingers on the keyboard, characters speaking in my ear, words transcribed on page, breathing.