RSSStrange Beast (An Exercise in Self-Reflection)
Dec 08
Relationships author, Love, Writing Comments Off
Try writing about your sex life. Not the torrid details,1 but just try describing the romantic entanglements of…say the last two years. Start the beginning of the time period and describe the person you were with then. Talk about how you two spent time together, about the frustrations of your relationship (if you even called it a relationship) and the joys of spending time together. Describe the parts of his personality that turned you on, or the parts of his body (er, ahem, proceed gently). How long did it last? Is it still going on? How did you meet? In a bar, through friends, online? Who came next? How long were you alone? And when you move on to the next person, start again.
For whatever reason,2 I went through this process with my friend and the final output was a book we wrote together, to be published at the end of January. Partly the reason relationships dominated the book is because we already talked about them all the time. The first tenet of any good author is to write about what you know. And in looking back over that two year period of our lives, we discovered we had some interesting insights on the matter to share.
The history of my dating life3 has been largely a laundry list of unsuccessful relationships, and for better or worse, that theme is evident in the retelling. The whys of it I won’t even hazard an explanation, assuming you could identify common themes running across each one. Perhaps just a combination of circumstances or a natural gift for making things complicated or (I suspect) trying to fit every relationship into a standard mold. They come that way for some people, just not me.
But writing about it, and focusing on it particularly in the last six months has made me somewhat of an expert, albeit after the fact, on my own love life. It’s a weird perspective to gain, and notwithstanding the final steps of editing and proofing, probably horribly unhealthy to focus on it for such an extended time. It’s made acutely aware of my own mismanagement, past and present, and perhaps the inevitability of the outcome. I think it’s easier to blame yourself, though, because otherwise, you presume to understand the motivations of the other half.
So why did I suggest you do it too?
What struck me most in the process of fleshing out a story was that there was a story to tell. Self-expression is a strange beast, people find ways to get it out (paint, words, sculpture, humor, etc.) For me, of course, it’s putting words on the paper and hoping that in the doing so, I am conveying the context that I’m aiming for. But the act of self-reflection, explicitly expressed or not, is a useful enterprise. There’s a story there, maybe you have to make a flip book to tell it, or maybe tell it out loud, or act it out. And if your story isn’t for public consumption, don’t deny yourself the telling anyway. Find your story, for whatever it’s worth, because the trick of it is, you’ll find it’s quite valuable.
My story, well the part I’m publishing anyway, is called What Do You Say to the DJ? It will be on sale in late January. For more details, visit saytothedj.com.
1 Unless you’re into that kind of stuff it’s not a porn novel we’re aiming for here.
2 Actually for some very good reasons.
3 Since it won’t be much of a secret in about a month, I feel confident revealing some insider information here -- and if you have in any way been following this site for the last few years, you already know more about my love life than you ever need to.
