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.