Down the rabbit hole
Dear Phil,
I am writing in regards to my ten year old daughter, Susan. Lately she has been displaying what I can only describe as evidence of a ‘sociopathic personality’. It might be hard to believe that at such a young age such a gorgeous little girl might harbor a deep rooted evilness inside her, but I am afraid this is the case.
Only yesterday she presented me with a crayon drawing of a woman with her head severed and a bloody knife resting beside the corpse. ‘I did a drawing of you, mummy,’ she said as she handed it to me. My blood ran cold as I looked at it. The drawing was unusually descriptive (Susan’s teacher tells me that she displays a rare ‘artistic talent’ and that I should be very proud of her. We do not agree on this).
‘Don’t you like it, mummy?’ She asked me in her innocent voice when I proceeded to tear that horrible image into pieces right there in the kitchen.
‘Is this what you want?’ I screamed at her, ‘Is that what’s your going to do to me?’
At the time I was, understandably, beside myself, and without realizing it I had taken the girl by the shoulders and begun to shake her. I stopped when I realized that she was crying and I quickly embraced her and apologized. She did not accept my apology, unfairly I believe, and tore herself from my arms and ran to her room. As she ran away she screamed, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,’ over and over again in a voice I can only describe as that of a severely disturbed creature.
Dr Phil, I am not a bad mother. I do not abuse my daughter or shake her on a regular basis but things have been getting stressful around here. At night I sleep with my bedroom door locked and a baseball bat in the bed beside me. I average two or three hours sleep a night, because I hear her out there walking around, whispering to herself. On a number of occasions I am certain I have heard the knife drawer in the kitchen open and closing, followed by a devilish giggle and the sound of running feet.
The kitten I bought Susan for her tenth birthday did not last a week. One morning I found it drowned in the toilet bowl. ‘He must have wanted to go swimming,’ she said, pretending to cry. Trust me, Dr Phil, I didn’t buy this story for a minute.
A year ago my husband, Danny, died when he fell off a ladder while cleaning the gutters on our home. At first I blamed Susan’s bizarre behaviour on the traumatic loss of her dear father, but of late I have come to suspect foul play on her behalf. Danny was an experienced climber of ladders, I know that much.
I hope this letter reaches you soon, Dr Phil, and that you have the time to help me out with this predicament. I fear my time is running out. I can only stay locked in this room for so long. I hear her running, running, all night. She knocks on the door and pleads for me to come out. ‘I’m hungry,’ she says. But I won’t be fooled by her games.
Yours urgently,
I Was Born A Writer.
Staff Note: He speaks of his own theory of passion within this piece, and one thing is for sure, you can definitely feel the passion he has for writing within the words of this piece.
Some people are born artists. Some people are born as athletes. Some people are born as scientists.
I definitely believe that we can practice…practice, practice, practice…until we’ve perfected whatever we’ve been practicing. But it won’t be good if we don’t have a passion for it. And passion is something we are born with.
Some people spend their whole lives studying and perfecting their stroke techniques, become god-like painters that can capture human emotion with oil on canvas. Others spend their days in the gym, in the training room, and on the field or court, jumping, hurdling, kicking, and tossing at whatever type of ball their favored sport requires. And there are those who are book-worms and spend all their days studying biology and ant life, and the different kind of trees. Studying electricity, chemistry, physics. Some study math.
But before all of this, at the moment of conception (Or maybe even before?) something in the universe lines up just so, and a passion for a certain thing is burned into our DNA. Without this passion, we could never achieve our true potential.
If we were born with a passion for painting, but spent all of our lives studying to be a doctor, our life would be wasted. We could, most definitely, be a great doctor. But we could never be as good a doctor as we could have been a painter. This is our inner voice, this is our soul speaking. This is our passion. And nothing drives our determination with such vigor and agility as out passion. This is truly the fire of our soul, the light of our existence. Why, then, would we spend all of our short eternity away from the warmth and the light?
I, myself, have many skills. The jack of all trades. I am a computer wiz. I can fix just about anything on a computer. I can take laptops apart, put them together, re-arrange shit, etc. I can make websites. I can even write some code for computer programs. Also, I’m a naturally talented mathematician. To a lot of people, math is their least favorite subject. And their hardest one. To me, it has always been my easiest. I’ve always understood math. It’s always been simple. 1+1=2. And to some degree, every form of math is just that: a problem, and an answer. And it didn’t matter how you got to the answer, as long as you followed the rules, and got to it. And there was always only one right answer. I really liked that about math. There was one answer only. No “there is no right or wrong answer” bullshit.
English, on the other hand, was very confusing. Because every question I was asked was an opinion, and it’s very hard for me to give an opinion because I like to be as un-biased as humanly possible, which meant I’d be giving at least two answers, because there are two sides to every story. But I loved English class. I love reading. And, I discovered, I love writing.
Not essays. Oh, hell fucking no, not essays. I hated that bullshit that asked me to give my opinion on shit. Fuck my opinion. That’s what I thought, and that’s what I always will think. But I loved writing. Fiction mostly. And poetry. I could express myself that way.
I’m one of those people who are very social, but rarely ever talk about themselves. I find it very hard to just openly talk about my past, my issues, my whatevers. I could do great in a public speech, but I would never be able to open myself up and tell everybody, in my own audible voice, about myself. I don’t know why, but that’s pretty much impossible for me. I can’t express myself audibly.
But, I could write it. I had no trouble writing it. Matter of fact, I loved it. And I could express everything on such a greater level than ever before by writing it. I have no idea why. It’s not because I’m able to go back and edit anything if I wanted to, because I rarely do. But keeping my mouth shut, and typing whatever is on my mind comes so damn easy to me. It’s just natural. It flows like a damn river. Words gushing out and spilling into whatever mouth awaits.
And even more than that, it is a release. Just as drugs. Yes, I can totally compare writing to doing drugs, at least for myself. I get that same “feel-good, happy-motha-fucka” feeling that I get from drugs by writing. It’s the strangest thing.
Another thing I’d like to mention: I really believe it’s the ONLY thing I can really do. I mean, I could get a job as an I.T. professional. Or some other shit. But I could never keep it. I’d get bored. I’d get tired. But not from writing. I could never get tired of this. I could never hate this. I really believe this is the only thing I could do for a living. This is what I was meant to do from the beginning. And this is what I really, really, fucking really want to do.
And so I fucking swear to you, I will make a living off of this. I will be a writer. Because just as some people are born athletes and painters, I was born a writer.
I think I need to remember some things about writing.
- Write everything for a reason. Know what you want to say. Set about saying it.
- There are different types of writing. Fiction, prose poetry, poetry. Personal. Impersonal. They’re all different. They’re not completely interchangable.
- Write poetry because that is the only way you can express something. Write poetry so that the poem becomes an expression of itself.
- Use verbs and punctuation sparingly. Let the images carry themselves.
- Make the images work hard. Use strong, vivid words; not many words.
- Don’t use images just because they are pretty. Have a reason for using them. Keep other images locked away for when they are matured.
- Evolve the image throughout the poem. Don’t use a metaphor once and then discard it, unless that creates meaning.
- Bring the image to life. But then put the image into action. There needs to be a point.
- Write & edit & rewrite & ask for feedback & work.
- Writing is hard.
Waiting for the bus.
He wrestled her to the ground as her screams turned into giggles and their lips pressed firmly together. They paused and his waiting mouth hovered above hers as their lashes brushed against each other. She smiled as she ran her determined fingers down her blouse, popping open buttons until she revealed her entire chest. The smirk on his face grew and he pulled himself out of his jeans.
His mouth remained open over hers as he pushed her panties aside and forced himself in. Her gasping breath filled his lungs with compassion as her teeth soon embedded in his bottom lip. Each thrust he felt her let out more of herself as he put more of him in, and she tensed around him every time she felt she was going to finish too early.
The grass on her back tainted her skin, as he tainted her and she tainted him. The dawn sky was dim enough to hide their spontaneous act, but as a light shone brightly meters infront of them, they realized their bus was here. In tangled clothes they hopped onto the city bus.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
“
| — | Neil Gaiman, American Gods (via pavorst) |
