Of Character Shifts, Balloon Boy and Well-Meaning Friends…

Entering the meat of a novel offers revelation after revelation.

Personalities come forth, shift and recede into the murky lands from which they emerged.

Characters shift positions in an effort to hold honor to, if not find their authentic identity. Perceptions change. The child of truth and wisdom forged by time and circumstance relays the story within the narrative.

Writers learn the salt of our worth when setting foot into the central plains of our novel.

How much our desire to write comes from the desire for attention, or dwells within an earnest love of telling stories?

Everybody wants to be a rock star.

It’s not always easy to uncover this need for recognition.

The American landscape is one of the blind searching for sight in amid the need to see.

And yet that for which we hunt lies as close our breath.

Writers and those who seek fame as authors are no less subject to what sweeps up Americans each week, those who tune into the reality television shows and the individuals like the parents of the famed Balloon Boy, who crafted the hoax of a lone child caught up in a hot air balloon in their efforts to five rise to a reality television show at which they would occupy the center.

Quite interestingly it was the son of the two parents who carried out the hoax who spoke truth, or rather it slipped through his lips, as often happens with children.

Too many writers and would-be writers behave like the parents of Balloon Boy.

Writing is about wearing two hats. The helmet of the adult who symbolizes the importance of discipline and hard work along with a commitment to learning the craft of writing of which the writer seeks to refine and improve each time we set out to write a new story of novel.

The second one we don is a skullcap that not unlike mothers place upon newborns to protect, not only the soft spot at the crown of our heads, but also keep us warm.

Much of writing bears loneliness.

Writers experience the cold, both from well-meaning friends who in their ignorance of all demanded of, and that goes into making an author famous, ask the wrong questions, and then ourselves in delivering ourselves goals impossible to achieve if we are to maintain a miniscule of sanity.

The best writing, that which benefits both the story and the storyteller flow from joy, exuberance at the center of our lives in knowing that we belong to more than our story, something larger.

Our stories are but a small part of the web of life in which we live.

What part have you been asked to tell?

How will you go about preparing yourself for the journey of crafting the story?