How Great Things Happen When You Give Up Hope

Hate and anger and jealousy--these are things that come so quickly. Probably because they’re so easy to feel. They demand nothing of you but your time and a constant fear of the unknown. Forgiveness, understanding, love--these are significantly harder to feel. They require you to trust, to respect, to stick your neck out and let it be cut if necessary. And once you’re cut, they require you to go on and stick your neck out again.
They require bravery; whereas I am convinced cowardice is the natural human state.

We make decisions every day. Every minute. We do them, sometimes, without a thought: chocolate or vanilla? paper or plastic? soup or salad? vaginal or anal? Daily we suffer this onslaught of meaningless options and we move forward.
We rarely, if ever, make big decisions. When confronted with a real choice we generally stare at it until the choice is gone and then pretend we made up our minds. It’s easier that way, because deep down we can tell ourselves we didn’t have a hand in our own failure. We can say, “I had no choice.”
Again, cowardice.

There are people reading this, I know, who will say that they are the brave sort. That they make their decisions in a timely manner; that they trust and love and understand. That they never let fear get the better of them. That they are not cowards.
These people are liars. Which is also a mark of cowardice. We’re all cowards sometimes. We’re all flawed beyond repair. We’re all damaged, we’re all fuck ups. So it’s okay. I suppose what I’m hoping here is that we can be brave enough to forgive one another of this all too human flaw.

I made a decision recently. Actually, to be accurate, another person and I made a decision together. We weighed the options, considered the consequences, examined the relevant issues from every angle.
It took days.
We sat facing each other on the couch. Outside in the sun. On the phone. Over the internet. In bed. We talked endlessly about what to do, how to do it. We talked about why we were doing it and whether anyone would or could understand.
What became clear pretty quickly was that no matter what we did, someone would get hurt. We also came to realise that even the best-case scenario would be a fucking nightmare.
I wish, in making other difficult decisions in the past, I could have had a partner who made it as easy.

So what’s happened?
I’ve damaged at least one friendship beyond any hope of repair. There‘s a chance, I suppose, that one day we’ll be able to look at one another again without feeling mistrust or guilt or anger. But I know it can never be like it was. I also know that it was never quite what I thought it was.
I’m not sure which of those realisations hurts more.
I am sure that if I regret anything about this decision; it will be how I failed that friend, how his accusations felt and how our friendship simply wasn’t strong enough.
What else?
I destroyed something fantastic. I salted the earth where I’d only just sown the seeds of a relationship that could have been amazing. Probably because I mistook that relationship for something like salvation and destiny. Which was stupid, because I don’t believe in either of those things.
There’s some semblance of a friendship there now. But we can never be as close as we might have been.
Then there’s what it’s done to us--to her and I. Me and my fellow decision-maker.
It’s brought us closer than I would have thought possible. It’s renewed our confidence in something we’d both recently lost all faith in. It’s landed us in the middle of something we never asked for…
…something we never asked for because we never would have thought to ask for it.

So was it worth it?
Yes.

In So Many Words

Have you ever read a story and thought to yourself, I need to know the person who wrote this?
This is how I felt after reading New blues song by Lauryn Mutter (link to her blog at right). It was a pretty new feeling. It’s not that I’d never felt like I wanted to sit and have a conversation with an author whose work touched me in some way. But there was an urgency to the desire this time around--one that I wasn’t prepared for and couldn’t have prepared for if I’d known it was coming.

When other writers ask me how to get better I usually do everything I can to help. I have thirteen rules composed of the little bits of writing knowledge I’ve garnered over the years and which I frequently hand over, piecemeal, to other aspiring writers.
For example, one is to practice writing Haikus. Because if you can pack all the heart-rending, the most bleak, the most exciting and the most emotional moments of your day-to-day life into seventeen little syllables without losing any of the ooey-gooey-goodness that made those moments worth writing about; then you'll never need to write another unnecessary word again.
Here’s another good one I lifted from Kurt Vonnegut: "Every character should want something, even if it's only a glass of water."
Another one I put a lot of stock into is that a storyteller should learn the basics of journalism. Yes, an MFA in Creative Writing will teach you all sorts of tools you can use to write a fantastic story--but you don’t necessarily need those tools. What you need is to be able to deliver the facts of the story to your reader--everything else is just pomp and circumstance.
Another thing I tell writers to do is read. A lot. To take apart the stories they love, figure out how they work and use what they learn in their own writing.

Lauryn Mutter majored in journalism in college--not English, not Creative Writing. She’s never taken a course in CW or been in a workshop. What she has done is read every short story in the New Yorker, the Atlantic’s Fiction issues and Harper’s for the past few years.
This is a fantastic start--and the beginning of a pedigree that I have to admit, gets me just a little hard. Especially given the skill with which she delivers her stories--stories that shake me to the core.
In short declaratives, Lauryn unpacks the details of her stories. Each little fact, each sad truth, soaked in so much feeling that your heart can’t help but chip and crack as each individual word hurtles into it, assailing it in a way that you really don’t want to end. She takes peculiar incidents in the lives of her characters and distils the events down to an emotional truth so compact and so complete that you can’t help but relate to completely.
Amy Hempel is one of Lauryn‘s favourite writers and, like Amy, Lauryn Mutter manages to take the mundane and elevate it. She makes masturbation into an atheistic prayer and converts the image of two people on a street corner into a vignette about youth lost. Like Amy, she holds your hand while she breaks your heart.
And like Amy, you will notice a few themes, a few personae, a few events, that come up repeatedly in Lauryn’s work. And just like Amy, you’ll know that these are things she’s lived through. And this is where Lauryn really shines. Because when she tells you about her life; even when she just uses some small, personal truth as a mere aspect of an otherwise fictional character’s life; the effect is severe. She does it bravely, with complete honesty and a heartfelt earnestness that sends me to my knees with tears in my eyes. And, where Lauryn and her work are concerned, it happens more often than this Black Bejeaned Prophet of Doom cares to admit.

I have gotten to know Lauryn. The desire was too strong to ignore. I know her by two names, we talk on the phone, we plan to meet one day (soon, I hope). We’ve shared stories with one another, discussed the craft. What amazes me is how much she loves my stories--given that I think of her raw talent as miles ahead of my carefully cultivated and learned style.
She loves my voice as a writer--she calls it “distinctive.”
I love her voice as a writer--because it disappears in the story, cuts to the quick and makes you forget that it’s a story you’re reading.
Here’s something else she said about my writing:
“You have an aesthetic that allows you to feel sympathy--actually, empathy is a better word--for things and people that are downtrodden, neglected, flawed, sad.”
Which is, I suppose, a really good thing to be able to do. It’s something I’ve tried to do. But to me, what Lauryn does is so much fucking better.
What Lauryn does is, she takes the personal and makes it universal--and really, is there anything bigger or more fantastic that an artist could ever hope to do?
Somehow, I doubt it.

Recently, in an IM, Lauryn said to me, “Sometimes the most important, profound stuff is so hard to get across right…”
Truer words were never spoken. And yet, I have nothing but faith in her ability to do it. And I hope to remain close enough to her to watch her do it; again and again and again. I’ll put my heart into her hand and let her break it--in so many words.