What Is It About?

The books no longer sit piled in paper Trader Joe’s bags but fill shelves in our new book room. A dark-stained old-fashioned writing table I found on Craigslist occupies the corner of the bedroom by the windows. It beckons. We’re almost settled, almost without excuses to put off a serious writing regime. We’ve been to readings and award ceremonies and seen our names in the acknowledgments section of Kermit Moyer’s recently published novel, The Chester Chronicles (fantastic to hear Kermit bring out their humor in his reading). These have made me want to read more and wider, in attempt to catch up with all the publications that beg to be explored. Perhaps it’s like the story of the man who throws the beached starfish one by one back into the sea. You do what you can, and maybe it makes a small difference in a way that is enough.

The tension between reading and writing is like the tides; one tends to dominate the other at different times in my life. I’ve been reading and thinking and trying to understand the physical process of letting go, the actual mechanism of what it means to be unaffected by what hurts. Sounds nice. I can comprehend the idea. I have no concept, though, of it’s actuality on anything bigger than someone cutting me off in traffic. I return to the book room. I ride the bus and look at the titles of the books the other passengers are reading. I can’t read on a bus or the Metro or in a car—I get motion sick if I look at my shoes let alone words strung together in printed sentences. So I glance at the novels and books others hold. One woman smiles as she turns the page. A man wrinkles his brow as he balances his book on his lap. Someone once told me that D.C. is the most-read city in the nation and as evidence pointed to the line of newspaper boxes at bus and Metro stops. Either way, it is reassuring that so many books ride the bus with me.

Something else that has been occupying my mind is the question both friends and strangers ask about my writing: What is your story about? They ask this as if it were a simple question. Maybe it is. But I do not have a straight-forward answer. For me, and, I would imagine, most writers, stories are not just about plot. When I try to explain the plot, I stumble over my speech, rush through a summary with burning cheeks—my story sounds ridiculous when I try to describe it out loud. The word “trite” comes to mind. Even worse, if I try to avoid a plot description and talk about “themes,” I find myself grappling with abstractions and wanting to excuse the story for being too dark.

I’m never sure there’s a good way to talk about something I’ve so carefully crafted to speak for itself. It’s like trying to describe a painting. It’s not just about the overall picture; it’s about the brushstrokes, the technique, the historical time period, the inspiration for the picture, the state of the artist’s mind at the time it was rendered, the events that influenced each hue. Sometimes I think I write so I don’t have to talk about the story—just tell it. Other times I have trouble answering “What is it about?” because I know the person asking thinks I’m aspiring to be the next Michael Crichton. I wouldn’t mind those kinds of royalty checks, but I don’t think I could write like that even if I set out to do so. When my writing “works,” it is because I stopped trying to force it to be something it isn’t and doesn’t want to be. I’m still discovering what it does want to be, but it tells me very quickly what it doesn’t want. Sometimes getting the story right requires reshaping and restarting; other times it requires scrapping an idea altogether. There’s that letting go again. Some ideas don’t want to be let go of and keep coming back in different forms. My latest storytelling struggle keeps emerging each time I restart; I am still deciding what to do with all the material that doesn’t seem to be working.

What is it about? It is about a process and all the jumbled thoughts that were shaped and disguised and finally emerged with much crafting and sharpening and exploration and warping of reality. It is about seeing the right colors emerge in an intricate narrative. It is about catching the rhythm. It is about creating a piece of art that stands on its own—so I don’t have to explain.

—C.