Let Life Get In Your Way

In most jobs we are told to avoid letting life get in your way. Your boss doesn't want it to influence your performance. Your boss is afraid that you may not follow company policy. Your boss may feel that it will influence your decisions that may be counter productive to the company's position or overall goals. That is great if you have a job that opens a store front every morning at the same time and is dependent upon having a daily flow of customers use their services.

We on the other hand are creators. Sure we want a daily flow of customers to buy our books. That is why we hire book sellers to the day to day grind of selling our books. Our job is to create and to attract the customer to the store. The actual selling takes place at the store whether is be an E-Store or a bricks and mortar store. It is these places that actually processes the transaction for a percentage of the profits.

As creators, what is our job? Our job is to write a book, a poem, a short story, a movie, a play that someone wants to read. What does our customer want to read? In some cases they want to read to escape the reality of their lives. Some people like to read to see how life is on the other side of the fence. While others like to solve mysteries; and yet others like to read what happened a hundred years ago.

What is the common denominator? It is what we observe. It is what we hear. It is places we go. When we add that all together it is life or you may say life experiences. As writers, it is very important that we let life happen and that we be a part of it on a daily basis. You cannot be a hermit and write a good novel that speaks to universal truths; because it won't strike a cord with the reader. There is a line from the movie "Finding Forrester" where Sean Connery's character William Forrester says, "Writers write things to give readers something to read." Readers like to know that they are not alone in this world.

The past two days, life has gotten in my way. First, I have had the intestinal flu. Yippee, that really made me feel wonderful. Secondly, we have some friends who live about six doors to the east of us. Our boys played together up to high school and then remained friends even though their lives went in completely different directions. Neither grew up without flaws. I am the last person who will complain about others having their own flaws; because I am flush with them, myself. It is these flaws that make life interesting. Back to the story, my son's friend and the son of my wife's and my friends, died in a terrible automobile accident on Wednesday. It was Troy's fault. It was a seven car pile up at arguably the busiest intersection in the State of South Dakota. Troy died at the scene. What makes this whole interaction take on the surreal is that we learned who the victim of the crash was from our son who lives in Minnesota. The police were being very tight lipped. We still don't know and may never know why Troy was traveling on a city street at rates of 60 to 100 miles per hour. That's life in today's world. For certain, as soon as we heard who it was, we stopped by our friend's house.

You may ask how these events help us as writers? We file these events away in that file drawer we call events. We file these away in that file drawer we call character traits. We use them over and over and over, again. Our characters, our heroes in our books are not perfect and flawless human beings. One of my main characters in my Johnson-Ingram Detective novels is Frank Ingram. He has his demons and he is constantly trying to drown those demons with either Scotch or Jack Daniels. He is constantly being saved by all the quirky friends who surround him, especially his wife Missy. Missy is one of us. She is a creator, a photographer who sees life through the lens of a camera, even when the camera is nowhere around. I think we all know people like this, flawed, imperfect, colorful, quirky. We call them friends, relatives, acquaintances.

Life makes a perfect palette of colors that we can use on our canvas that we call the written page. So for we creators, I say we need to let life get in our way so we can produce something that our readers can put themselves into and become a part of the story.