A writer no more???

At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all. I don’t say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. I like that book. I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page.

At the worst of it I no longer wanted to drink and no longer wanted to be sober, either. I felt evicted from life. At the start of the road back I just tried to believe the people who said that things would get better if I gave them time to do so. And I never stopped writing. Some of the stuff that came out was tentative and flat, but at least it was there. I buried those unhappy, lackluster pages in the bottom drawer of my desk and got on to the next project. Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again. I came back to my family with gratitude, and back to my work with relief–I came back to it the way folks come back to a summer cottage after a long winter, checking first to make sure nothing has been stolen or broken during the cold season. Nothing had been. It was still all there, still all whole. Once the pipes were thawed out and the electricity was turned back on, everything worked fine.

—Stephen King, ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT

So I actually did some writing today, and oddly…that’s something I haven’t been able to say a whole lot lately.

What’s going on? Am I slowing down? Am I losing my passion for trying to tell stories and create literary tales and whatnot?

Am I losing touch with the written word?

At times that’s what it’s felt like, and it’s been deeply disconcerting, I must admit.

Part of it is the “big elephant” in the room of my recent life over the last, oh, year-and-a-half: Photography. I suppose it’s to be expected that when you find a new passion; the other ones tend to fade a bit. I suppose it’s like that famous meme of the guy taking a second look at a pretty passing woman while his current pretty woman looks at him in consternation. And yes, photography has become a huge passion, that much I can’t deny; and it’s not just that it’s the shiny new thing. It’s that it has given me something new to learn. That’s huge.

Of course, it’s not like I have nothing to learn from writing! How silly would it be for me to claim “That’s it, I’ve learned all there is to know about writing, I now know it all and will go forth and learn no more! All that’s left is just putting down the words!” Of course that’s nonsensical…but writing isn’t new anymore, is it?

I expect that as the weather turns to the colder and more unpleasant, and as my main camera is currently a device that lacks weather-sealing, I will find myself turning back to the literary once again. But there’s something else that’s probably at the heart of my reluctance–no, not that, not reluctance, but rather a lack of enthusiasm for writing of late.

It’s that Mom is gone.

My mother wasn’t huge into enthusiastically cheerleading for my writing. That just wasn’t her style. But she always believed in my ability, and she always made that known. Mom believed in me as a writer probably more than anybody else in my life, and now that source of encouragement and belief is gone. I wonder if that’s a part, in any way, of my general feeling of “Meh” when I would otherwise have been sitting down to write. It’s hard, I think, to keep doing a thing that you’re not always sure you’re really good at when one of your constant sources of possible belief that keeps you going is gone.

But then…the stories get a vote too, don’t they? And they’re not done. Forgotten Stars V is languishing in a holding pattern between edits; I need to get it out to some readers. The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title) is unfinished, and that’s the one I’ve been starting to work on again. Others remain: the second John Lazarus book, The Jaws of Cerberus (my demonic kayak adventure novel), Orion’s Huntress (space opera set in the same world as The Song of Forgotten Stars, but with no overlap), among others. A story cycle set on a fictional Finger Lake in New York, an essay book about Star Wars, another essay book about James Bond…these things aren’t gonna write themselves.

So…let’s see what we can do about that.

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