Reading, Writing

If you spend much time in any writing community, a lot of themes repeat themselves.  Tips and truisms about process, inspiration, taking care of yourself - taking care of your writing.  One of those things any writer learns to say as early as "dada" is "read, read, read."  The best inspiration to write is to read.  (Experiencing life, of course, and thinking about that, is not bad either; but reading is way up there.)  The TRICK about reading, though, is that not all reading is created equal.  Looking at the work of an author I know, or admire, or finding a subject which enflames my interest - that inspires me to write.  But not all fiction does; not all history does.

Reading Parke Godwin can leave me almost beside myself - both because I become so absorbed in his characters, his headlong and acutely engaging plots, and because these things make my amygdala just ITCH.  As reading a sexy story will get most people a bit randy - reading a GREAT story will get a writer terribly creative.  And my great will not be Leila's great, or Kristi's great, or Godwin's perhaps, or anyone else's.  What crawls around that secret, dangerous part of my brain in which a story exerts its pull on me is entirely mine, entirely unique.  Even if the same story inspired someone else - someone even a lot like me - what would come of the inspiration will always be singular.

I'm often struck, in the context of being an author, by the way similarities play out SO differently amongst us.  It's a human game.  X and I, for instance, started off with a very similar set of perspectives and expectations - a certain kind of youth, a certain level of sensitivity, melancholy, and values - and ended up coming to rather apparently different conclusions.  On paper, in a way, it makes no sense a woman like me should gravitate to someone super into video games, or votes republican ...  Then again, on paper, the last boyfriend before him should have been "perfect" and I didn't manage to provide that guy excesses of respect nor patience.  So people go.

So I'm always fascinated when I find one of those "kindred spirits" (particularly writers) who loved Godwin, or had a similarly formative experience of Mary Stewart's Merlin growing up.  Because it takes only minutes to find the nuances which separate our experiences.  The way I gravitated to one character, and they fell in thrall to another.  The way I wanted to read about the particulars of the women most of all, but they wanted to read the nitty gritties of magic.  The way I learned from - but hated - battle scenes, but someone else was noticing anachronisms, or the interesting routes the author explains in the Notes.

Clovis' story, for one, could have been told in so many different ways - but I could only tell it in mine.

Sometimes, I can read another work, whether fiction or non-, on a subject I feel I know very well (my ancient Frank is hardly the only one of those) and be completely surprised at the focus - or the conclusions.

This kind of conflict, and this kind of dynamic, of course makes for incredibly amusing arguments among historians (or archaeologists, or paleontologists, or people at work, or kids on a schoolyard) - and yet, if we lose sight of how fascinating the turns are which give rise to our differences, we won't be able to tell a story well anymore.  I always find myself entertained - but fascinated - when I see conflicting theories at work.  This team working on a system of skids, moving giant pallets of weights, to research how Stonehenge might have been raised - and that team, working from the standpoint that some manner of roller of *course* was the way it was done - energize me.  I may be convinced one way or another, but I *must* hear both their plans, their reasons.  This woman saying "there were clam gardens in use for centuries" in the face of archaeological scholarship saying that is a Salish myth.  This child, asking why things don't work better than they do - why life must be hard, in some particular way - and saying how it could be easier.

I wish, instead of ONE person 

being REALLY sick 

that we ALL 

could just be a LITTLE bit sick 

and it would all be better ...

If we didn't disagree, we would be dead.  And if nobody ever looked at the other side:  we could not be writers.  Nor *storytellers*.  Then we'd be nothing but a pack of dogmatists, propagandists.

And, even saying that:  I believe even dogma has its place.

Gives the rest of us something to subvert.  And to study, in intrigued - and perhaps even detached - interest.