Writing On The Dark Side

I attended a writing class recently in Big Sur, CA. I had reasonably high expectations. This writer, I will call Jane, is the editor of a literary press, and I assumed that she was capable of being objective about writing, and was able to evaluate the merit of a piece without being lost in judgment. I was wrong. I write (as I will encourage all of you), to go to the dark places. To dredge up the hauntings of your life, good and bad, and put them on the page. To deepen a character by going to both sides of that character. In the extremes of character definition, ask yourself, if you were writing about Hitler, what were his good qualities? We know the obvious atrocities that he committed, but what was lovable about him? These traits are harder to find in history. I’ve heard he loved his dogs. He was a vegetarian, but he appeared to hunger for human flesh. The complexities of his character make him interesting. Conversely, “What were Mother Teresa’s flaws?” She had to have had them. I haven’t a clue what they were, but I know in her humanness they were there. We all have them.

In the editorial review of my piece this weekend, Jane, the editor, addressed me and the class by saying, “If this story came across my desk I would put it down and stop reading. There is nothing about this character that makes me like him. His behavior is outrageous.” She admitted that the writing was good, but she was judging the content and could not let go of her moral judge to review and assist the writing. I listened with half an ear and scratched a note of my own as if scribbling down what she was saying. “This is why I love writing on the dark side,” I noted.

To be fair, Jane has her own view of the experience. I will be curious to read her blog and find out what she says about this. After her verbal downpour on me she asked, “Everything is okay, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “It is not. You were blatantly judging me when you could not get past the content. If you had something to say about the character in terms of definition, perhaps needing a bit more redemption (where the character’s actions and reason for behavior are explained), then I would listen. But you should have been honest and told me that you could not get past the story.”

The piece is about a tormented boy who uses sex to calm his pain. It is a rape scene that I portray. Oscar, the protagonist, is about to carry through the action on this girl and stops himself just short of orgasm. The scene is based on a comment a boy I was dating in college made to me. It was a cruel comment about fat women and making it a game to sleep with them. I took that comment and weaved it into a story and put in the dark parts of myself on both sides. The hunger, the need for love, and simultaneously, the desire to chase it away. The story jumps to life and it is hard to read because it is believable and, in some way, based in truth.

I told Jane that I supported my character, and my story, as I encourage you to write whatever you are experiencing. No matter how black, if you write from a feeling place, it will likely snap off the page and piss off editors like Jane who cannot deny the truth of the story, but are unable to accept the non-traditional writing. I suppose I should be honored in the 21st century to be able to offend someone in a simple page of writing. In a day where reality TV does everything short of live fornication, and sexting and you-name-it is available for public consumption. Because I wrote honestly and from the heart, she could not fault that. Write from that place. You can’t go wrong.

There is a parable about “good luck, bad luck,’ I don’t know’” that fits perfectly with my re-entry into “Writing on the Dark Side,” first posted in 2000.  For those returning, I give an enthusiastic, “Welcome Back.”  When I gave up the domain name in 2002 my site was at the top of the Google search engine.  Good luck, yes.  I abandoned the site to pursue my new reinvention of myself in a traditional career.  The artistic part of me was put on pause while I paid for life’s necessities of food and shelter.

A few years later I was curious if my domain name was still posted online.  I encouraged a friend of mine to see what came up for my old site, “Kleiss Ink.”  He told me it had become a porn site.  I had achieved so much attention that the name, and the recognition it brought, warranted a different kind of entry.  Bad luck. I was devastated at the time.  I couldn’t even look at what the site had become.

My friend also informed me that I could buy the domain name back.  I waited until the ownership lapsed and I did buy my old name back.  Good news, bad news, I don’t know.  The cycle continues to emerge.

If you are new to the site the rules of submission are simple.   Any writing is fair game provided it meets these criteria:  It must contain and be about feeling.  You will be encouraged to go deeply.  Nothing, I repeat, nothing is too much, provided it comes from the heart or the hunger buried in your soul.

A good example is the passage in Philip Roth’s novel, The Dying Animal, which is the inspiration for the movie, The Elegy.  Roth brings into his plot the bloody tampon as an object that moves the story forward.  The protagonist drinks the woman’s blood once the tampon is removed.  On its own, the idea of writing about a bloody tampon in classic literature is, perhaps, a taboo—grotesque—over the top, piece of writing.  But Roth pulls it off.  It is not just a bloody tampon, it is Roth’s character expressing hunger of desire, looking at the human form as an animal, a carnivore of a carnivore, and represents the unfathomable—a lover so consumed by jealousy he will repeat a former lover’s action. The tampon comes up briefly in the beginning, and foreshadows more to come.  Roth tells us in a simple one-sentence statement that the tampon will return.  It does, and enriches the story in the process.

As a writer, I will encourage you to look at the hidden parts of yourself.  What you do not reveal is often more important than what you do.  If you present a character that you hate and write about that character that is real or imagined (all good writing is based on truth I believe), I encourage you to look at what you love about that character or what you are not saying about him or her.  What is the flip side?  There is where the rich writing emerges.  The arching of the character it is called.

You are not alone.  I also struggle with these concepts.  I teach what I need to learn.  Writing is quite difficult for me.  Writing from the well of truth and pain is like using the blood from your veins to fill your fountain pen.  It’s nearly impossible.  Then there is the part of rewriting.  And rewriting again.  There is the impossible task of knowing what’s good and what needs to be trimmed.  “Murder your little darlings,” it is said.

The process of rewriting is endless.  In The Ghost Writer, Roth says through the character of Lonoff, a famous writer, “. . . I turn sentences around.  That’s my life.  I write a sentence and then I turn it around.  Then I look at it and I turn it around again.  Then I have lunch.  Then I come back in and write another sentence.  Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around.  Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around.  Then I lie down on my sofa and think.  Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.  And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.”

Writing is a beginning to profoundly changing your life.  As T.S. Elliot says,

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

As I like to say, “Change your writing, change your life.”  Welcome to Writing on the Dark Side.

I went to the marketplace Saturday
To buy some badly needed answers
But when I got there I couldn’t find any
So I sat on a hard, cold, rock and cried.

Then a man came up to me saying
He was selling answers this day only
And like a fool I believed him,
Only to find he was a question in disguise.

Author’s note: I would love to know who wrote this poem. I read it in a magazine when I was 15. I don’t remember a title, but I find it to be profound. Can anyone tell me who wrote this and confirm the year written and the magazine it was in?

Jill

“…an old Chinese farmer lost his best stallion one day and his neighbor came around to express his regrets, but the farmer just said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The next day the stallion returned bringing with him 3 wild mares. The neighbor rushed back to celebrate with the farmer, but the old farmer simply said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The following day, the farmer’s son fell from one of the wild mares while trying to break her in and broke his arm and injured his leg. The neighbor came by to check on the son and give his condolences, but the old farmer just said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The next day the army came to the farm to conscript the farmer’s son for the war, but found him invalid and left him with his father. The neighbor thought to himself, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.”

Taoist Parable

“The Most Exciting Life of All: Fear & Loathing In A Public Toilet”

Brain Child Magazine, Winter 2002

I wish I could tell you that I am one of those mothers who have some sort of exciting life on the side. But after I drop my son Matthew off at his school, tucked into the hillside of Carmel Valley, I spend my three hours looking at the clock so I won’t be late for pick-up. A lot of the other mothers hurry off to real jobs in real clothes that need to be dry-cleaned, for meetings and lunches and important deadlines. I go home in my tumble dry jeans and sweatshirt to handle the ins and outs of stay-at-homehood. You know, the dishes, the laundry, all the household upkeep. It’s the sort of stuff that may be necessary and even appreciated around my house, but it’s not a life they base Superheroes on.

I am always the first mother there for pick-up. I sit on the wooden bench and wait for the kids to come out. This is one of the unheralded joys of motherhood. The march of the kindergarten children covered in sand and mud and paint and markers and whatever they had for snack that day. The children proudly carrying their works of art, usually too big to fit inside their backpacks, their eyes searching for their mother’s face. And that moment when your child sees you, when his delight and relief is so rich you can actually feel it.

My son is always trailing behind in the parade. His Pokemon backpack drags along the ground, his sweatshirt and papers falling out, his soft brown hair shining in the sun. He is always wearing his metallic red sunglasses. We bought the sunglasses on a trip to Los Angeles when he was three, and every day since they have gone with him wherever he goes. Some kids suck their thumbs, some kids have blankies. Matthew has his red sunglasses. When he sees me, he raises them the way a movie star might and then runs to me, despite his teacher urging him not to. Safe in my arms, we pile into the car where he unloads his treasures: a cupcake half-eaten, an empty juice box, a pebble from the playground, and a picture of an umbrella that he drew with the letter U written next to it.

“How was your day?” I ask expectantly.
“Can we not talk about it?” Matthew says. He sounds exhausted.
“Okay,” I say.
“It’s just that I had a really hard day. My glasses kept falling apart.”
“What do you mean?”
I ask and look at Matthew in the rearview mirror. The lens has fallen out of one side of his glasses.
“We can fix that when we get home.”

Then halfway down Valley Road, Matthew says, “I really have to pee.” He is holding his penis and wriggling around a lot in the back seat, and I know that means we have about a two minute window to actual peeage. I know I have to pull into, God help me, a public restroom. While some people are afraid of things like spiders or heights, for me, hands down, it is the dirty public restroom that makes my skin crawl. We pull into the Valley Hills Shopping Center and make a beeline for the bathroom next to The Wagon Wheel, a great breakfast place that has been there forever. You have to grab a bathroom key that is tied to a huge iron skillet in order to open the door. I grab the skillet and open the door. Matthew knows my fear. He knows the public restroom rules: Do not touch anything.

We walk into the stall, hands by our sides. As he leans over to pull down his pants and pee, the other lens from his glasses falls into the toilet bowl. And the lens disappears into that black hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl. The horror on his face, the shock in his eyes, and the tears rolling down from under his empty frames make me start to laugh. Not like I think any of it is funny. It is the kind of shaky laughter when fears and nerves and nausea knot together in your stomach and it is the only sound that comes out.

“Don’t worry we can go to the store and buy new ones,” I choke out. “Nooooo, I want these glasses,” Matthew sobs, holding onto the empty red frames like a baby monkey clings to its mother. I knew it. It would be like telling me, if my engagement ring had accidentally fallen into the toilet, that I could go to the store and get a new one. The thought of people shitting on my treasured ring is too awful to imagine. So I start looking around for a hanger or a rubber glove or any object other than my very own hand that can fish out the lens. But there is nothing but me and that dark hole. My biggest fear is reaching in for the lens and, instead, bumping into a big morning coffee shit that never got fully flushed—not to mention encountering microscopic bacteria, a flesh-eating virus, or a freaky toilet-bowl disease. Then, even if I am brave enough to actually reach my hand in, how in God’s name am I to allow my child to place the tainted lens anywhere near his eye? All of this is racing around in my mind while Matthew is pulling on my pants leg sobbing, “Please get it for me, Mommy. Pleeeeeeease.” It’s as if I can hear my mother’s voice shouting in my ear, “You will not put your hand into that bowl, child! You flush that dirty lens down the bowl and march him right out of here!” I can see her wielding antibacterial cleanser and hear her vacuum cleaner running in my head. And my own voice is in my head, too, saying, “You have to do it, you have to get it for him.” All of it, her shouting, Matthew’s crying, my struggling, all of it beating faster and faster and louder and louder until I can’t hear anything and in that silence of complete terror, I do it. I reach in and feel for the lens.

It is over so fast. I immediately run the hot water in the sink and scrub the lens and my hand like I am a surgeon sterilizing before surgery. Matthew is so relieved and so shocked that we both start laughing. Real laughter now, relief laughter, joyous, brave, thank-God laughter. We return the skillet key and walk back to the car together. Inside the car I snap both lenses into place. And then Matthew smiles at me with this combination of enormous pride and deep gratitude like I really am a Superhero who saved his day. Right then and there I decide I am living the most exciting life of all.