Character development

One of the things I like about getting out once in a while - out of the house, out of the cubicle, out of the everyday rut - is the opportunity to run into characters like Ali. I talked to a guy named Ali - he pronounced it like Ollie - the other day while drinking green tea downtown. He quoted Milan Kundera as saying that the three most important things in life are eating, reproducing, and eliminating. You have to eat to live, so obviously it's worth paying attention to. Most people, for widely different reasons, would agree that maintaining the human species is a high priority; some are more actively engaged in that endeavor than others, while many are deeply involved in either increasing or decreasing the probability that they personally cause the birth rate to rise. What is easily ignored, forgotten, or denied is the excretory imperative, but it causes havoc when it ceases to function, shall we say, smoothly.

I don't recall what prompted this exchange or the ensuing conversation about politics and publishing and what not to believe, but it was an unexpected pleasure. Ali had seen me around, and I had seen him around, but we had never met or had occasion to talk. Now I know a little bit about his literary tastes, his politics, his sense of humor, and even his journalistic standards. He's about my age but has probably been many more places, and he strikes me as nobody's fool. My personal narrative has been increased and enriched by one additional flesh-and-blood character. Besides that, it gives me something to write about.

This in turn provides me with a means to practice what I think of as the Natalie Goldberg-David Martin School of Creative Writing, which can succinctly be summarized as follows: Write something every day. That's it. You don't have to show it to anyone, publish it, polish it, edit, hone, dress it up, or endlessly redraft your precious piece of art. You don't even have to read it yourself (lucky you) or ask your friends to read it (lucky them). It doesn't have to meet your own or anyone else's high critical standards, stylistic preconceptions, or baseless expectations of what constitutes "important" content. Consequently you don't need to have anything to say. You just have to know how to operate a pen, pencil, or keyboard.

What happens in the process - and I'm assuming that something happens - is that writing something - writing anything - changes the writer, regardless of what else happens to the ink stains on the page or pixels on the screen. Let's not even think about changing anyone else's mind, reaching out to our fellow Amerikans, or, pardon the expression, making a difference in the world. Writing as a practice, as opposed to writing strictly to produce a certain outcome, works on the mind of the writer. That's all it is, and that's enough, and that's what makes it a practice rather than a project. It's probably better if you don't know ahead of time what will come of it. Mostly likely nothing much.