Listen
Look uh, this whole thing’s a mystery really.
Writing. Art, Games, Film, it’s all a set of unanswered questions that we keep selling answers to but then ask again a few years later. Minutes. Seconds, hours, decades, centuries. There’s this, tipping point, where you push a giant boulder of writing over a ledge and at first you think “That’s it! I opened the door, I solved the puzzle, it’s all going to just, flow through me now!”
But uh, if you pay attention, (and you shouold, because of the loud echoing THUD that comes from where that boulder landeD), you realize all you’ve done is open a door to the world’s biggest library of everything that ever was and ever will be.
And the lights are off. And no one’s home.
There’s a tendency, I have, when I’m walking around in the dark. Could be an apartment, the woods, the city, I talk to myself, to try to arrange information in my head or mutter things about people and sights I see passing by and if I’m LYING to myself, I say this is all just a quirk ,a trick to do the same thing other people do but in a different way.
But when I do that, I think I’m just trying to push out the dark.
I think some of the ways I’ve written after pushing the boulder off the hill has been like that. Pushing out the dark of this giant, giant room I’ve found myself stuck in. Doomed to wander its halls for a good century or so until I become a formally registered ghost and not just a metaphorical one. All these writer’s tricks. these daily prompts scattered on this old blog, all the little attempts to find universal tools in writing. Triangle theory, worldbuilding, all of these big ideas just---pulses, lit up to push out the darkness for a tiny, tiny second.
That’s a bit hard on myself maybe. Throwing mistakes and hard-earned lessons under the bus for a moment just so I can futilely feel sorry for myself and how hard everything is. Well as a current presidential candidate’s WWE ring opponent once said, LIFE SUCKSSSSSSSSSSSSS, AND THEN YOU DIEEEEEEEEEE.
Hehehehehehe. I don’t even watch wrestling and I’m still making weird references to it. Damn you Twitter.
It’s a very big library. And there are other ghosts, like me, shoving boulders in and they’re all clunking to the ground every couple of seconds. Lots of us following maps left by different people who came before us. Crisscrossing, weaving, coming across old ruins and dusty pillars that once meant something, to someone, somewhere, and now just give us a shade of that meaning as we pass through.
I think all that muttering in the dark has to end at some point. Or at least quiet. Because it becomes background noise of a kind, this constant chatter from your own mind that SEEMS like it helps but really just does….nothing.
It’s like the secret tunnel song. The longer you try to keep a feeble light on, the more you conceal the source of light that’ll get you home.
And I think sometimes, when I stop chattering and muttering, stop pulsing, I think I found a little fire that’s lighting the way.
…
I think the way of the writer is to listen.
There’s a time and a place that idea wormed its way into my head. The 2014 Race and Racism in games panel at Indiecade in Culver City California---I forget if it was Cat or Latoya or Ashley or Shawn who said it, but one of them talked about just wanting at the very least to be listened to, to be believed, when they spoke about what it meant to be feel alone even when working in a giant company. Because of their race, because of their gender, because of both. They spoke to a whole room full of people ready to listen, ready to believe, but that room didn’t exist everywhere.
Not everyone in that room was a writer of course. Not everyone who listens is a writer.
But I find myself occupied with the notion of the writer as one who listens.
In my head I see myself in the cloth. Cloak about my shoulders, tall walking stick with notches and runes held in a gloved hand. This is the one who roams the dark tunnels, who clings to his satchel and must constantly resupply it with scraps from scarce resources. This is the form of one who lays tribute to the old altars, and waits for flames to burst with light and knowledge. This is the ghost who wanders the halls.
The ghost becomes clearer the less noise I make. The less time I spend jabbering and the more I let knowledge and information flow toward me, the louder and louder the world becomes, and the brighter the flame, and with it, the way forward.
Speaking is motion. Writing is motion but writing is speaking fueled from listening, sometimes literally, sometimes less so. I am paid right now to listen to the wisdom of others and rearrange it so that one who was not in that conversation might understand that wisdom in a shorter time. I dream of a destination in this library where I weave elaborate falsehoods for a cheering crowd, but what are falsehoods but alterations of that which is true?
If a story is a retelling of something that never happened surely something must have happened somewhere to influence it. If I see in my mind’s eye a ship passing through the stars that ship must have once been seen by one who looked at ships upon the ocean and dreamed they go somewhere else. If I dream of Champions facing demons in a mighty wasteland then somewhere a woman filled with courage stared down something monstrous in the cold north and the echo of that moment came to me, reassembled as it travelled from life to life, person to person, half of it arriving as a jewish fairy tale and the other half as a remixed spaghetti western.
When we are young we spend so much time worried about---mimicking. But maybe it is because then we understand almost too well what the nature of our task is. We know all we have done is listen, we know all we have done is reinterpret those sounds and make our own, tinted with our own fragile psychoses, but we work so hard to strip away the mimick and let the psychosis shine through. We try to strip away that which is such like the other thing, and we strain, and worry, and look to those we think of as Gods and go ‘where, where did that come from?’
I don’t think we can answer that. When I read the biographies of Dwayne MacDuffie or Ayn Rand I can’t possibly comprehend all the energy and trauma that fueled their lives and led them to pour out thousands on thousands on thousands of words, colliding both the real world with the dreams they saw in their head. One, a fantasy of what could be, the other, a fantasy what could be if the world rejected all she saw as flawed.
That...self consciousness fades somewhat. Replaced by jealousy and envy more immediate and toward one’s peers, even as one cheers and supports them. Self-conscious, all of it, more an indictment of one’s own mind and talent then the works of others.
Somewhere in the dark though, I wonder if writers on the path to their own biographies must begin to realize about the need, the power, and immediacy of that listening.
When the mind opens itself to the voice of others, to the voice of nature, to the voice of the world, the concerns and consciousness fades, and all that information becomes part of psychosis. It becomes woven into DNA, memories and chemicals and neurons firing together to take what belongs outside and make it within.
This is not research. Research is short-term and meant to bolster immediate projects. This is not memorization, memorization is the first step of an old tool from before writing meant to bolster the mind’s behavior when auxiliary knowledge, from paper to a network of human connections, is not around. This is the process of reading until your eyes are weary, hearing until your ears are deaf, and touching until your fingers turn to bone to turn that which is without into that which is within.
It is not a simple trick. It is not the answer to all the questions that come to this path. It is something that manifests itself differently in each of the ghosts I see wandering through these halls. But the ones with the most purpose, the swiftest of step, they know in some way to do this.
When I venture outside these halls, into lands held other….mindsets, I do not always see its presence.
...
This is not the answer.
This is not the statement, to guaruntee any form of destination or success in the journey one embarks on after pushing that boulder out into the abyss.
This is an acknowledgement.
To write is to listen, with most intense purpose, with utter compassion, and with some kind of eye toward the future.
It is in doing so, I think, we find the only means to create something from nothing.
