Walls

I talk about the fourth wall a lot. I was educated predominantly by formalists, and I’m a bit of a formalist myself. I believe in the fourth wall, and unless I’m in a post-modern piece, I don’t even want any chinks in the mortar of the fourth wall. I want every single brick in place, and I’d prefer a tongue and groove cedar wall if I could get my druthers. I don’t even want the author peeking in the window at me. This is my experience with the text, and everyone except the text needs to be quiet. That’s how I feel about the fourth wall as a reader.

I don’t get to be a reader all of the time, which means I have to deal with the fourth wall from another place. I have to respect it and never cross that line in craft pieces. I fuck around a lot, too—I pay my money and voice whatever I want to make vocal. There’s no limit on how much of my emotional vomit on the page I can plaster to my wall. But that’s not the wall I want to talk about. I want to talk about the other wall. The scary one.

We all have different processes, and we all write differently, but we work with many of the same tools or similar tools—we all use dictionaries, but we’re not all using the same ones. I cannot begin to explain how excited I am that when I begin teaching at a traditional liberal arts university in the fall (in addition to the career college where I currently teach), I will once again have access to 🎼the OED online🎶 (Did you hear the violins?). It’s one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments, its creation and curation—the canon lives and breathes in it in the most beautiful, catalogued way. Its very existence makes my soul sing Ode to Joy.

When I write, I pass through a wall into another space. Not with everything, but some pieces require that only my body remains in this weird space we call the world. The air is different here, the water flows differently, and the edges are too sharp. I like my story space better. I could live in some of them forever, except then my body would starve, the bills wouldn’t get paid, and all of that other nasty fallout for not doing what you have to in this world-thing.

The transition from being in one space to the other has always been difficult for me; it’s why I didn’t write for so many years—I was just so goddamn needed here that I didn’t have permission to check out. It was awful, horrible, terrible, and miserable living like that. I have no idea how some people do it for their whole lives and even seem to love it. Are they insane? Robots? Muggles, for fuck’s sake? I do as much of it as I have to and wish I could limit it to rocks, trees, rivers, music, good company and honest food and drink. Too much to ask, I know.

Recently, I’ve found a space that lets me coexist. I never even knew it was there before, maybe it wasn’t. My time machine’s in the shop, so it will most likely remain a mystery. But this space allows me to write and remain aware of my surroundings, real people, and all of that. But now I have a story that requires me to go in my writing space and close the door completely on the present. Wish me luck. I’m fine when I’m in there, but Michael, Elizabeth, and my dad are dead again every time I come out, and it hurts like hell.