Need to start writing about real life. Mine. I’d sell more books.
People are asking if DEVOTION is real. It’s not. That disappoints them. The ache, pain, and loss—that engages. Pulls. Gets people digging into their own layers. But when I tell them the stories are only stories, they deflate. They’re hoping the narrators and characters are walking around earth, making their way through mess.
In his Notebook, Mark Twain wrote: “Write what you know. It will always be original because no one else knows exactly what you know.”
He’s not the only one that’s said it. But that’s the one I remember. And memory beats reality.
The stories in DEVOTION are memories. They have to be. Just like the rest of this. All this waking and working, relating and fighting, figuring and fucking, dreaming and losing, guessing and winning, just to make ends meet. The makings to make everything work are otherworldly. Physics and religion be damned.
I woke without my wife beside me this morning. A punctuation mark on a dream I’d returned from. She had a baby on her hip. Was with another man. They were in a driveway of a home in a neighborhood from another time. I was in the house. Mug in my hand, coffee nearly gone. Watching her. She was taking all she is somewhere else. So, when I got up–here in reality–I got up and out of bed as quickly as I could. I stumbled downstairs. She was outside with the dogs, but had just come inside. I was waiting. “Miss me already?” she asked. I laughed. We hugged.
There are no more babies for us. We’re in that weird spot. Kids aging out of our care. Out of our water, our food, our gas, our electricity. Forming their own plans. Narrating their own stories. Picking flashbacks and flashforwards. Using coded language. Choosing complex characters and complex situations and complex worlds, when all they really need are simple sentences about their daily life mixed in with a little weather.
Another hot one today. Don’t care though. I’m going to hit the hammock at the lake. Read. Then wade in the water. Pick rocks from the bottom of the lake and stack them against the break wall. Feel the hot sun on my neck, my back, my face. Watch minnows peck at my legs. Consider how to write a story about a man moving closer to the end of his life. Getting quieter, braver, stronger, so he can be more supportive of the characters he’s surrounded himself with—and loves so much.
~ KJ
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