“ . . . those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him.”
—Michel de Montaigne
When I started this column, my apartment was quiet, and I felt like I had a good handle on what I was about to write. Until the washing machine started its spin cycle. Now the contraption sounds like a fighter jet in severe turbulence.
I am partially to blame for this distraction, to be honest. I never got around to properly adjusting the feet on the washer, and it sometimes gets out of balance, especially when it's full of towels. One day soon, it may leave the laundry room and chase me out of the apartment.
If that happens, you’ll hear about it first in the Lake Oconee News under one of these possible headlines: Hostile Hotpoint hounds hack. Sexy sexagenarian comes clean. Washed-up writer rinsed and spun.
OK, that was a serious digression, but the spin cycle appears to be over, so maybe I can remain on topic.
But what was the topic? Oh, never mind. I’ve entirely forgotten.
Not that such a thing has mattered much in the past.
If you want my advice, don’t even try to secure an ideal environment in which to write. Just sit down and do it. Do your best and try to be honest. How people deal with what you write is up to them.
And it’s alright to begin with reluctance. I feel that way most of the time.
“Why do I keep doing this?” I say to myself. “I’m just writing myself into a corner. The more I say, the more I risk being misunderstood and disliked. It’s only a matter of time before villagers carrying torches gather below my balcony and set fire to my apartment building as they set fire to the windmill where the Frankenstein monster sought sanctuary in the 1931 Boris Karloff film.”
Each time I approach the keyboard, I feel like I am giving life to something unpredictable, something that may come back to haunt me. I have no real way of knowing what impact these piled-up paragraphs will have on the reader, which, in this case, is you.
For instance: Three weeks ago, I wrote what I intended as a humorous look at the daily lives of angels and the wages of sin, but one reader emailed me to say the column made her sad. Turns out damnation isn’t very funny.
She included James 5:16-20 in her assessment.
So, I looked it up. Verses 19 and 20 really spoke to me: “If one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring that person back, remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of their way will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”
I lose sight of the truth from time to time, and I am certainly in no position to cast the first stone, but truth is the only absolute in the writing game, even for someone who uses fiction as much as I do. Sometimes I need to be reminded of that fact.
My critic’s response is what I call constructive and caring criticism. (I hope she doesn’t dislike excessive alliteration, because I can’t seem to avoid it today.)
The piled-up paragraphs I produce (sigh) — let’s call them pups — are like living creatures I send out into the world to entertain people. At the end of the day, I’d like to think these pups increase the overall happiness of people in Lake Country in some measurable, if infinitesimal way, much like donating aluminum cans at the shed behind Publix.
But I don’t always succeed the way I’d like. The other day, one of my friends told me she heard someone talking about my columns at the Waffle House. My heart swelled with pride until she told me the person described them as incomprehensible nonsense.
Incomprehensible? Good thing I wasn’t at Waffle House. Or else ...
“Say incomprehensible one more time, buddy! Say it to my face. I’ll show you incomprehensible! You’re about to be scattered, smothered, and covered.”
Selah.