It's about life!

In the midst of a kind of murky Pacific Northwest winter, cow problems (which have been resolved satisfactorily by selling the cow/calf to someone who had  time to deal with the problem; plus the cow might be a better mother away from her herd), lambing (14 lambs and counting), a cold/allergy/something that seems to know no end and has evidently evolved into something with a life all its own for both Farm Boss and me, political stories that are depressing, world events that are even more so, I am feeling so lucky that I write.

Instead of dwelling on all the things going wrong, I can immerse myself into a hero who satisfies all the vitality and excitement that frankly I wouldn't have energy for if he showed up anywhere but on the page. I don't have to do a thing to get all that flowing into me. Just write about him and his heroine, about the joys they are discovering and for a few hours, I am into their life, not my own.

With writing I can go someplace warm if I want and bask in a climate change created by my imagination and laid out by words. I can revisit places I have loved but where I may never return. I can own a home that I'd never be able to find in my reality but enjoy my time there while I write about it. A lot of times I can almost visualize what that house was like as though it had been real even though I know it never was.

When I do dwell on some problem in my characters' lives, it's just plain different than when it's my own. For one thing I know it's going to work out for them. I am going to make it work out.

When I read the newspaper, I get all my need for misery like a story that happened last week. A young man drove up to a boat ramp and saw the car of the woman he loved had been accidentally driven into the river and was slowly sinking. Heroically he dove in to try and save her. He drowned. Not only that but she had already been saved and was down the river a ways. Now that's a real life story which still disturbs me days later because it's how life often works out but we wish it would not.

Then there is this photo taken in Yemen by Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda. Arab Spring deservedly won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year award. The beautiful, almost spiritual photo tells us of the cost of war and love with one photograph. But it doesn't tell us how the story ended or even what it was. The photo gives us that one moment with all its beauty and angst. The writer can take that moment and create a story that does end happily or sadly. It is a choice. Life does what it will. Fiction gives us an option.


In any book I write, my characters might struggle and nearly lose their lives, but I have the power and will make sure hero and heroine survive. That's the wonder of fiction, and why writing is so rewarding when days are tough. For a few hours every day you can get away and be someone else as you create dialogue and actions that are equally believable to how life works, but where it ends the 'right' way instead of the tragic.

Dreams kind of fit in here also as what we dream sometimes works out to be fuel for a good story. I've had more than one book come from a bit I got in a dream and expanded.  We don't really have control over our dreams-- or do we? Sometimes I wonder from where they have come.

The dream the other night is pretty obvious from where it came. I had been shopping in a store with several clerks, a family who had two children. I was looking for Christmas presents for our grandchildren but the prices were a little steep; so ended up buying nothing. I went across the way to a hill that overlooked a river, a kind of small bay off the river and the store. I was there with my grandchildren and another adult who was most likely Farm Boss.

As I looked back down suddenly a flood had expanded into a tsunami. The huge wave wiped out that little store before the water disappeared. I was concerned to protect my grandchildren first but then we went back down  to find the parents were in the store and had managed to survive the disaster but their children had been swept away.

Sounds like a tragedy, right, but there were people looking for the two kids. It seemed it'd be about retrieving bodies, but suddenly they shouted they'd found them and they were alive. One had gotten hold of a tree, the other grabbed onto a cable like the one that stretches across our stream.

Even in my dreams, if I can work it out, I create happy endings. Sometimes it's through lucid dreaming where you know you are dreaming and you rewrite an ending that appears to be going the wrong way. Other times, like this one, I guess my subconscious just did it for me.

Currently I am dreaming a lot, very vivid dreams that I often remember. Maybe it's happening because I am also writing a lot. I am immersed in these plots and characters and some of it might carry over into the night in a kind of reverse process from the times when I get a story idea from a dream.

For me, to 'grow' characters, to give them tough experiences, find ways for them to get through them, and see them develop more totally into who they were born to be, that is satisfying. You know humans don't always act that way. We've all known those who wallow in the same mistakes year after year after year. That might be 'reality', but what fun is it to read about it or spend months writing about an important character who is like that.

To me, writing should be fun. Save the angst for memoirs. They are where you can't keep control because you are telling a true life story. In fiction why wallow in tragedy? I can't think of a reason; so when I do have my characters go through tough times, which, of course, has to happen to have a story be interesting and because I had set up a problem they'd be going through, I know it'll be worthwhile.

In real life those old saws about it all is for the best, god doesn't give us more than we can handle, or there is a reason for it, etc. etc. Forget it. I don't buy into any of that. Sometimes things just are tragedies. Yes, we can make the best of them but I don't buy they are all the best that could have happened. It's just how life is.

Finally, the best part of writing is you know there are all those ideas for the next book floating around in your head. This one was good but that one, that one will be even better. Writing is a way of both being in the world and out of it. Sometimes that is a very good way to be.

Marketing the books...  Now that's not so much fun!

(I wrote some of this blog for 'Rain Trueax' but when Farm Boss read it (he's my editor and publisher for everything I write), he said the topic should be here too. It is about life and that's the title he said it should have.)