The Pen is Mightier than the Sword, though less profitable

Deep within my soul, unbeknownst to me, was gestating a latent figure of mysterious origin.  For a generation, I had spent all of my waking moments raking in all of the currency printed by the mint, that which was allowed as my share according to my efforts and those who control such things.  I accomplished those things with a stressful, mindless efficiency that left me hollow.  Peddling stocks and bonds and building homes for a real estate bubble now burst, may very well have provided the wherewithal to purchase cars and DVD's, but it left me, sans bubble, yearning for something that I would be passionate about.  Down in back pain and a laptop, appropriately, in my lap, I began penning words in a certain order that seemed to convey a story.  Whether a rebirth or a delusion of catastrophic proportions economically, that became my joie de vivre.

My lovely wife Stephanie has been an avid supporter of this venture, though I'm sure, lost in the demonic wash of wondering where the next dollar will come from in the revolving door of bills and utilities.  Having whittled away at the debt so easily amassed during the days of wine and roses, the pressure cooker of making the monthly nut has been reduced in volume, but still steams with constant urgency.  In this, I digress and miss the entire point of this missive.  In fact, no one really understands nor cares about the financial struggle within these four walls, unless of course, it involves them.

What has been the most compelling result of my new adventure has less to do with the trainloads of rejections from agents than it does about the effect of becoming a "writer" on those around us.  After finishing the first novel, family and friends had an awakening.  Manuscripts long parked in desk drawers were pulled out to be revived and revisited.  My wife even began penning a fictionalized autobiography that if I must be honest, was in its rawest form, far better prose than anything I had written.  My sister-in-law began sending me chapters of a book of paranormal romance that is extraordinarily well-written.  My brother is now starting a book he has been threatening to write for years.

With the aforementioned characters excepted, and those playing the role of an ad hoc editor for my work, there is another crew of spectators that I find amusing, and frustrating.  There is the pervasive view that writing is simply the art of conversation converted to printed word.  Any fool can do it and of course, many fools do, the crowd I include myself in after reading the work of true wordsmiths, like Conroy, Siddon or Clarke.  What is most frustrating is that writing as a way of life isolates one and robs the spirit of oxygen.  Rummaging around in bookstores and libraries lends itself to further removal from the general population and results, occasionally, in weird manifestations of this seclusion, to wit, striking up conversations with complete strangers and telling them of your craft, only to have them frown and wonder whether a mild stroke or a psychotic break may have been the genesis of your downfall.  Knowing nods of spousal friends only serve to reinforce the disappointment generated in the soul of the writer.

This is, I suspect, not unusual for anyone who steps out of the mechanized cultural conception of normalcy.  The banker who buys a welding kit, scouring the junkyard for just the correct metallic object, then firing up the night with his sculpture much to the chagrin of his neighbors and his family, who silently contemplate the dire necessity of admitting the now mad former wage-earner into the psychiatric facility nearby.  Or, consider the now-laid-off human resources administrator who rushes to Michael's and purchases the canvas, brush and paints to begin replicating the human experience in oil.  In each of these cases, the madness is justified with the mention of some person in history who abandoned all logic and set about to create something heretofore unknown.  Without platform or experience, the sum total of one's life work becomes a sad commentary for those who had the creative friend pigeonholed into a comfortable niche, which made it easy to converse over cocktails.

Outside of the company of those who share such dementia, the creative sort is at sea, unable to effectively enter into human discourse with those now safely set in their understandable posture.  All things American are weighed by the amount of funds set aside for future perpetuation of the lifestyle one has assumed to be fitting, casual and comfortable.  To see another within the circle abort this process, to flail away in some ill-conceived exploration of all things esoteric raises the alarm bells within those who, after all, only have the flailing madman's best interests at heart.

To them, I would suggest that to live a life without passion, free of the exploration of the creative spirit that yearns for expression, is a life wasted.  This is not an indictment against the practice of law or medicine or administration, though the respect for another has nothing to do with cliches.