The Writer's Mania

What makes a person a writer?

It’s a seemingly esoteric question, but I think it matters. So many people these days call themselves writers. One sees them clicking away in every Starbucks on the planet. I see them, and so do you. But I only watch some of them. The ones who hunker down, and do not look up.

These are the ones gripped by Writer’s Mania.

After seven years of writing, I have come to one conclusion: Writing is an addiction, an itch that can never be scratched, a mania that cannot be quelled. Writing, or the condition of being a writer, is a never-ending obsession with conveying knowledge, feeling, and perspective. Once one begins writing on a regular basis, and begins thinking of one’s self as a “writer” as an identity, then, and only then, does this defining obsession kick in.

It came to me today, when, as so often, I was obsessed with the idea of how to communicate an image or an experience to someone who had never experienced it. For this is, essentially, what the writer does. He conveys wings to the flightless. He teaches the feeling of combat to those who lived their lives in peace. He gives the feeling of flight to the perpetually earthbound. The writer cannot watch an experience in the way others do. He cannot give himself over to it, without the obsession of recording it. Like the person gripped by the demands of her smartphone at every event, the writer cannot ever give himself over to the experience.

Fireworks, battle, a bumpy plane ride…the writer is always absorbed by the demands of absorbing and transcribing the experience. After that, the experience becomes part of the data bank, and it may emerge at some future time. Perhaps in an unexpected place.

Lately, I’ve been engaged in a radical edit of one of my older books, the intensely personal Good Time Charlie. Set in the time and place I grew up in, against the background of the Olson child murders, it is, I am sure, the most personal novel I will ever write. Beyond this, I cannot go. I hope. This radical edit, as I call it, is something of a test for me. As Sinatra said, “If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.” If I can’t bring the most visceral images of mine and my family’s experiences to 3D life in this book, how can I make readers feel they are on the far side of the Moon, or flying over Germany in 1944?

This is the real writer’s perpetual drive. Absorb, digest, refine, report. Never relax, as long as there’s a story that can be told, a moment that can be absorbed, a shading, an accent added. Because writing fiction is not make-believe. This is a common misconception. Fiction writers do not simply imagine out of thin air. They take the assembled memories of a wide-ranging life, and translate them into the fictional realm.

Perhaps you’ve talked to a writer and wondered why their head seemed to be up their ass? It wasn’t there. It was in another realm. The realm of communicating their experience to others. While we live it, we think about, “How do I tell this story?”

Sometimes, like being the designated videographer, being the writer in the room is a pain in the ass. You can’t turn it off. It’s kind of like being in law enforcement, with that continuous vigilance applied to every strange face and pensive pace.

Sometimes, I sit with my back to the door for that very reason. Because I don’t need to be on the edge anymore. I hope, that if being a writer doesn’t work out for me, that I can hit “pause,” and just lean back to enjoy life like everybody else. Until then, beware. I’m on “record” all the time.

Grant Patterson

Delta, BC

November 4, 2019