Babel Clash

So here’s a question for you: are writers sane?

The answer? No.

Writing is one of the most insane occupations around. I rank it right up there with acting. And since I’ve done both, I feel confident in that assertion.

So, why is it that writers’ elevators don’t got all the way to the top?

Well, for a start, our job requires us to sit by ourselves for extended periods of time, in isolation, getting up close and personal with people who don’t really exist. It requires us to have deep and meaningful conversations with them. It demands that we get so involved and so attached to these people we made up in the first place that when something awful happens to them we have to get terribly, terribly upset about it. Even though it never actually happened at all. And anyway, we did it to them.

How can any sane person think this is a sane way to live?

Writers – like actors — have a kink in the brain. It’s a kink that means we are at the same time deeply and intimately involved in the process of being human while standing outside that process watching it happen. It means that we can never truly be at one with our own lives because we can’t ever totally lose ourselves in the unconscious moment. A part of us is always conscious, always watching, analysing, pulling the moment apart so we can put it back together again as fiction.

Here’s a case in point: when I was at university, one of my horses had a terrible accident and put a stick through his side. The vet treated him and we hoped he might survive. But the next morning, as he was going down fast, he ended up falling out of the shelter he was in, sliding down a muddy slope and ending up in convulsions on the ground. In my arms. Yes, my horse was convulsing to death pretty much in my lap. I’m sure you can appreciate this wasn’t one of the better mornings of my life.

But – as my horse was dying in my arms – that kink in my brain kicked into action. Wow, it said. I swear, I can still hear it. There should be a camera here filming this because it’s so totally Disney. As in Old Yeller, or Bambi, or something like that.

You see, even in the midst of trauma the writer stands outside the moment with a pen and paper in hand, taking notes.

Another true story, just in case you doubted my claim to insanity: in my last year of university (maybe this is actually about how university is hazardous to your health) I had a car accident. It really truly wasn’t my fault. I came over a slight rise to see a station-wagon in a fast 360 degree spin coming right at me. The roads were greasy and the driver had been speeding. Anyway. I had enough time to say, Oh shit, he’s going to hit me, and pull left, when bang. He hit me. Wow, I thought. That was loud. And then I went flying off the road into the undergrowth, heading straight for a telegraph pole. The undergrowth was significant. And I thought, Wow. This is what it was like when Luke crashed on Dagobah.

Yes, indeed. In what could’ve been my last moments of life, I was thinking about Star Wars. And by the way, if that doesn’t make me a fan then I don’t know what would.

But again, my point is – writers stand outside events even while they’re happening. We are scavengers. Carrion eaters. We pick the bones of the human experience looking for interesting morsels that we can then seed through our fiction to make it more real and believable and affecting.

I helped embalm a dead body once. Up to my elbows in a deceased man’s chest cavity helping to pull out his insides so he could be packed with formaldehyde crystals. Why was I doing it? Because I’d never seen a dead body and I figured I should if I was going to write one into a story. It was very interesting. Also? People who’ve died of lung cancer have lungs that turn kind of green and go all funny looking. So maybe rethink that whole smoking thing, yes?

Writers are blessed – or cursed – with the kind of imagination that turns ‘what if’ into an automatic reflex. A lot of non-writers like to ask where we get our ideas. If you’ve got that writerly kink in the brain, the answer is, Where don’t I get them? A magazine cover, a funny cloud shape in the sky, an overheard snatch of conversation – every single thing we see and hear and feel and touch and taste is a potential catalyst for a story. Nothing is ordinary. Everything has the potential to become huge, sweeping, epic.

And to write it, we have to take ourselves out of mainstream life, out of the social sphere, into a quiet place where the people who come alive in our imaginations are as real – or sometimes more real – to us than the people we bump into in the supermarket. Or next to in bed every morning.

So yeah. It’s my contention that writers aren’t entirely sane. But then I tend to think sanity is a tad over-rated. I love my pretend people. I love watching their lives unfold and go in unexpected directions. And I really love it when a reader contacts me to say how much they love those people too.

Sanity? Pffft. Who needs it?

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