Writing is like starting a Cross country drive with the middle of the map cut out!
In my quest to become a popular writer, it seems that I have run across a recurring theme in my life:
I feel as though I’m on cross-country drive. I have great car and lots of great audio and tasty snacks.
I have a brand new AAA map. But when I leave California and consult the map, I discover that someone has taken scissors and excised Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri.
Based on my experience driving to Kleveland from Buffalo in a white-out in the middle of a desperate Winter, I suppose that I could just plunge on and hope for the best, but I’m not 22 any longer and have less room for error- in many ways. Also I know now how lucky I was to NOT have died. It was a total white out and there was no one on the road except for one foolhardy individual: me.
I know where I started and I know where I want to end up…It’s that pesky “middle part” that I haven’t quite gotten quantified yet- and that is the disquieting part as I embark on this journey to become a popular published author. As I used to tell my students in College on the first day of classes when every hand was in the air: “You don’t know what you don’t know yet”. I feel that way often nowadays. …plus now that I’ve entered the portion of the map that has been …adulterated, I am only going on faith…faith in me and with nothing more solid upon which to base it on; nothing but a belief in me and my talent.
That should be enough.
Sometimes, it isn’t. Like, at 2AM…All I can think of is that hole in the middle of the country. Will I fall into oblivion if I go too far into the “Terra Incognita” of the Midwest?
What will it feel like if I make it all the way to Ohio and Pennsylvania.- almost across the country by land? IF I get there…Will I feel exultation? Because I passed through the unknown of Kansas? OR will the apprehension remain because I never reconciled the Missouri map with Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska?
I’m afraid of becoming (literarily!) like Francisco deCoronado, who while in search for the Seven Cities of Cibola in the American Midwest, marched into the unending waves of grass with no landmarks, no way to mark passage of any sort, and in time, went absolutely mad.
I guess I could ask for a guide, but who has the time these days? It would be a huge imposition on anyone I might ask without any guarantee of success. Or, I could, I suppose, hire someone- as a sort of “guide”-, but “they” all feel like snake-oil sales people, though my attitude might have a bit to do with living in L.A. for far too long…
At any rate I guess I’ll press on. It’s not as though there is any real second choice anyway.
Maybe I’ll run across some friendly natives who might be willing to point the way.
Ohhh, waitaminute…That’s what Coronado did -and the friendly natives? They just wanted him to go somewhere else, anywhere else, so they pointed him further into the featureless interior. Like the featureless interiors of my books if I don’t finish them.
Yay. Nothing crazy-making there. All you non-writers. You should thank God for interests in other areas.
