If You Had Once Chance, One Opportunity, What Would You Do?

Something more.

If that is the answer, then the status quo is unacceptable. Change is afoot. It must be. If only so that I have more fodder for reviewing here. Reports on the events of my life at this moment in time are a snapshot of dry half eaten toast sitting on a long forgotten breakfast plate deep into the afternoon. Dry, predictable, and seemingly immovable: inertia governing its continuing existence. There must be more to say? First, there needs to be more to do.

I have seen other social documentarians (read: bloggers) who address their own lives wrestling with the quandary of whether to reveal the here's and now's of their dating life and other such instances that may implicate others (of course, this requires a dating life, which my stale taost existence does not currently tolerate). Even under a veil of anonymity by way of pseudonym, the general public would be ignorant to their identity, but they would not. Neither would anyone else in your life. The barbs and wryness and withering observations may lose some of their power to amuse, and simply be tools for promoting discomfort and betrayal.

This is all valid. It is true. An unavoidable quandary.

I do not generally discuss most people in my life in this forum, for this very reason. To the extent that I do, or reserve the right to do so, it is also the reason that even after more than a year of opening this blog up to the world at large, I have yet to share it with more than a handful of residents of my social sphere.

To be a writer, whether you are actually a memoirist, columnist, or novelist, is to accept the slings and arrows of fortune that go along with your life being the fuel for your work. Wrap yourself up in the gauzy elegance of the label "fiction writer" and the problem remains. Even if you label the work "fiction" everyone in your life believes there is a grain of truth to it. And are they wrong? The seed of inspiration is sown and nurtured through an author's experience. It is impossible to say otherwise. Even if writing about something you have never done before and would never ever want to do (say, writing the character of a serial killer), in order to infuse that character with life, to make that character round, to extrude itself from the page, you must tap into something in yourself. Something dark. You must lend that reprehensible character some sliver of your humanity, however small, as imagination breeds only concept, experience begets character. It lives!

The point: A writer must accept the consequences of his or her feelings. She must own them. Because they will be shared. Feelings with be conflicted and hurt and jumbled. Some will sort themselves out. Others will not. The payment of the price pre-ordained and inexcusable.

Confrontation makes me crazy. My life is not sordid, exactly. But to expose it to light, to those who know me, whose opinions I must live with. It is a whole other question. In the end, I think there is very little that people don't actually know about me, and I am willing to be open about anything else when people ask. But unfettered honesty of opinion in a public forum with the characters of my tale sitting in the audience?

I dunno.