Where Life is Lived

For many years, while I was writing my novels and sending them out and getting them back, I would occasionally complain to my wife, “The problem with these query letters and sample chapters is I’m not there. It’s just these words on a page.” On the face of it, this complaint made no sense. I was a writer. My job was to put words on the page and sell them to people. Nonetheless, I was nagged for years by the feeling that I was leaving something out. I eventually understood that something I was leaving out was talking to people. Whether it was teaching or lecturing or coaching, I wanted to talk to people about the words I was putting on the page. I understood this because while I went for walks and runs, while I stood in the shower or did the dishes, I often found myself dreaming of speaking to imaginary groups. This happened so often that I stopped myself one day in the middle of one of my imaginary lectures and thought, “You need to actually go do this now. You know there’s a difference between doing something and imagining it and you’ve got to learn if you like the difference.”

Writing taught me this. How often on one of those very same walks had I imagined a scene and been certain it would be perfect for whatever story I was writing, only to discover, upon actually writing it, that it was not as interesting on the page as in my mind. As bright and happy and curious as my mind may be, it cannot predict the future, it cannot know in advance every word of the stories it believes I will enjoy telling, and a single, innocent word can sometime reroute the entire direction of 400-page book.

As it turns out, I do enjoy talking to people, though the experience is in fact different than the dream. That difference is where my life is lived, where dream and experience meet. Sometimes it feels like a collision, other times like a union, but the result is always the same. I get to meet myself once again, both the intention and the result, both the dreamer and the dream.