internal dialogues of an aspiring writer

I want to be a writer.  I watch this desire unfold in my imagination, personified in characters who offer me advice or just do their own thing.  Like this one time I was sitting in the front seat of my car in my parents’ driveway, enjoying the warmth unique to Volvos of an earlier era.  A conquering warlord comes on the scene of my mind, wearing animal skins and wielding a large club he’s just hewn out of a nearby tree.  He then morphs ever-so-slightly into a politician on the road to victory – think Howard Dean – complete with throaty bellows of anticipated triumph: “I will be a writer!  And the world will love me!!  RAAAARR!!”  (The forest/audience is silently aghast, wondering if that really just happened.  In an instant all woodland creatures and pollsters scatter, along with all of my potential readers.)

And then the inner southern California surfer stirs from his noon time slumber, somewhat indifferent but nevertheless wakened by such a fuss.  ”Duuude,” he slurs through his drool-drenched pillow, “chill out.  You just gotta relax, man.”  Never fully opening his eyes, he drifts right back down the face of a killer wave of saliva.

And he’s right, I think.  Don’t get too carried away, Peter, I tell myself.  You can’t force these things.  Don’t try to conquer the world with a few strokes of your pen, especially not yet.

Then flutters in a new image of the writer I might aspire to be, my internal dialogue taking on an airy-fairy, just-let-the-magic-happen kind of tone.  This fairy drifting around my mental headspace is probably a vegan with blood-relation to whoever invented granola, has a couple of mis-inspired nose piercings and definitely doesn’t shave anything.  Her minimalist clothing looks as though she pieced it together from leaves that had already fallen to the ground.  She magics into existence whole fields of flowers in which she frolics, one with the grasses and the deer and the soil and the Great Mother herself.  ”Write from your heart,” she squeaks gaily.  ”Free yourself and let your inner muse speak.”  I float away in this dreamscape, seduced by a mystical, unbridled, totally natural image of what it means to be a writer – until the anal academic within, who for some odd reason has just taken the form of a drill sergeant with a graying crewcut, starts shouting at me.

“Neuenschwander!  What the hell are you doing?!  Quit jerking off in Neverland and get back to work!  You think you want to be a writer?  Then WRITE!”  Glasses on, I find myself huddled into a cramped desk engraved with juvenile declarations of teenage love and uninspired and hackneyed four-letter words, writing equally uninspired and hackneyed descriptions of objects in the room or mundane events in my life – all exercises threatened to make me a better writer by the overwrought, finger-jabbing commando-turned-English teacher.  I quickly lose interest, the drive I had as Howard Dean the viking and the inspiration of hippie fairies, and just sink into my orange plastic chair, staring.

As I hunch dejected and overwhelmed, ready to give up on this mentally exhausting aspiration, in walks Warner Sallman’s Jesus.  His robes are immaculate, his hair conditioned, and his nose decidedly Anglo.  In one hand is a staff, and in the other a sleeping lamb which I’m sure he’s just rescued from Satan masquerading as a wolf masquerading as a sheep.  ”Peter,” he breathes, sending shivers of transcendent peace and hair-raising incredulity down my barely perceivable backbone, “you already know that you can write.  You already know that you can see.  So write what you see and allow yourself the process of learning.”  Suddenly the lights brighten, angelic sopranos start singing, and Jesus starts levitating a few inches off the floor.  ”And I will be with you always, even to the end of the . . . .”

At this point I start chuckling, shake my head a couple of times, and pick up my pen.

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