Photo Friday, No. 721

Current Photo Friday theme: Slow

In the early 1970s as bored youngsters needing to use our imaginations, Lynne and I began creating characters. We used people who inspired us, but the stories we concocted around them were all our own inventions.

In the late 1970s, I began to put them on paper as best I could remember them, but I did it from the perspective of someone older, and I did it with a semi-sense of the kind of fiction that I could write using them. It was probably best described at that time as glitz.

In 1980, I destroyed that manuscript. When I did, all fiction writing stopped for me. I embarked on a series of jobs and relationships and mistakes that were my training ground for how not to be an adult. I knew a lot of writers. I could talk about writing. I could certainly talk about novels, short stories, and poems and teach them. But I believed my bad writing breakup was forever.

I thought a lot of breaking up was forever, and my bad choices certainly ensured it.

Then I met Tom, and somewhere on the journey to trusting myself again, I told him about my by then many-years writing block. He said maybe I should consider revisiting those old characters and their stories. Maybe if I resurrected them, my writing would come back to life. Over the next few years, I wrote three novels, with Tom as my reader and advisor and Lynne once again providing creative input of plot and character development as she read them, too.

I wrote those novels while I changed cities and then states. While I embarked on more jobs. While I became HIV-AIDS aware and a LGBT ally. While I finally began to figure out who I was in this world. Some people read the manuscripts and liked them, some people didn’t. It was all okay. The manuscripts were my teachers.

As I lost friends to AIDS one after another, one of them said, “One day, you must tell our stories.” I tried, but nothing I put on paper ever came close. Then I met my writing partners online, and with them, I found a voice and together we wrote our five Manhattan novels (or four Manhattan novels, one mall novel) and were published. Then Timothy and I wrote our two novels and they were published. I wrote two contemporary romances, and they were published. Together, Timothy and I edited three short story anthologies that were published.

By then, I was tired. I started new creative and professional endeavors with sporadic successes. Over the years, I lost my mother and a nephew and beloved dogs. I lost a lifelong friend who had been instrumental in encouraging my creative writing. He was a poet and musician and songwriter, and I had been his muse. I never knew he had been my muse, as well. Life was full of changes and transitions. I was a little lost. I was not writing fiction.

In 2013, I found an organization to work with and then for, and it consumed me. I certainly didn’t have the energy or time to write. In early 2019, I knew I had to make a change. I desperately needed balance, and for me, that means there must be a creative outlet. I had no idea what to do.

They came back to me. All of the characters from my earliest years of their creation. I wondered, How would I write them now? So many years, so many experiences, so many joys and losses behind me, how would they change based on how I’ve changed? No more glitz. No more soap opera. Stories. Their stories.

One day I colored the sketch in the photo, “I Would Find You in Any Lifetime,” and I thought about the love stories in my three novels and about one character in particular. I had missed him so much. I had missed them all. They came back because I needed them. I realized the phrase in the sketch wasn’t only about them. It was about me.

Two months later, I’d written my first 20-plus pages with a plan: same characters, same general plot lines, what I hoped was a better me. I finally accepted that I would have to break all rules to write them and not give a damn about that. The first novel would be two novels. Then three. Now I know it’s going to be four. I’ve written them without the anxiety of publishers and editors, because I honestly don’t care. These are for me. Not for my vanity. For my health and happiness.

They are being read (and not read) as I go along. That isn’t without its frustrations, because the characters and storylines are different from all previous incarnations. I’m writing them organically, and I know where I want to go, but my characters have grown up, too, and I’m learning they don’t always agree with me. That may mean a lot of adjustments later, and it also means I might not express everything the way I mean to for my readers’ preferences and expectations.

I finished the first novel around December 2019 and began the second around February 2020, I think. I’m one chapter away from finishing the second, and then I’m going to do a massive edit to better break up my chapters and fix some bad writing habits. Hopefully lessons learned during the edits will make the third and fourth novels a little less painful to write.

I’m more grateful than anyone could imagine that my wonderful, flawed, sometimes foolish, sometimes wise characters came back to me. Who knew I would need them to focus on during a pandemic? Who knew I would be laid off from my job and social distancing would deny me so much of the comfort and creative energy I share with friends? Who knew all the big plans we made for 2020 would not happen?

The Photo Friday theme is “Slow?” I think I understand the concept. Some relationships take our entire lives of surviving a crazy, unpredictable journey. Some relationships are real–and some are real in another way.

I want them all.