You Have Some Explaining To Do

DAILY PROMPT

Verbal Confirmation

To be, to have, to think, to move — which of these verbs is the one you feel most connected to? Or is there another verb that characterizes you better?

 

 

Oh boy!

A prompt where I get to explain myself.

Oh boy!

I don’t think so.

Oh well. Stephen King says you shouldn’t shy away from writing because the topic is to hard so I’ll give it a whack.

I think I’ll try to explain why I write.

It’s what I do, so how hard can it be?

I write fiction because it makes sense. Life not so much.

You know what Mark Twain said right?  He said,

“Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

Boy was he right.

I’ve written whoppers about Killer Grandmothers and what happens when the Devil has a bad hair day and I did one about a woman who gets inspired to bake a new kind of pie for Halloween.

Weird as those stories are, I can’t cheat the reader – they have to make sense, they have to follow rules, they must have a sense of order.

Life.

Ha.

In real life my nephew died from a disease called Friedreich’s ataxia and that made no sense. None. I couldn’t write a story where that happens because in a million years I couldn’t come up with a reason for that to happen to anyone.

If I tried people wouldn’t buy it, they’d say ” Oh come on, stuff like that doesn’t drop out of the sky and hit someone on the head.”

But that’s what happened.

My dog was diagnosed with a serious heart condition when she was about 11. The vet thought she had a few months to live, he gave her some meds to control her cough and we decided to let her run her clock down on her own because she was eating, sleeping and active and alert.

 On  her last day at age 14, and at that time she was still active, alert though she was frail looking,  I came home from work, we went for a walk and then we ate our dinner together. When we were done she went to her bed  and she  died.

I could never explain that one either. Saying ‘just because’ wouldn’t cut it. She had a will to live and die on her own terms. And I don’t know where that came from.

It made no sense.

Me being able to write makes no sense either, my love for it, the ease that it came to me made no sense.

 I remember I was little- I was like six and I remember being desperate to learn to read because I wanted to write so much.

By the end of my first year in school I was reading at a first grade level,  in fact I read ‘up’ a year or two until I was 12 and by then I was reading at college level.

I was driven to read so I could write. Makes no sense at all. It just happened that way.

Life is weird and full of twists and it offers no explanation for itself.

I hate that.

So I write fiction to bring some kind of order into my head and my life.

And that my friends is as close as I will ever come to explaining myself  again.

amm