Control

Looking over my life, I have thought people had complete control over what happened to me. They defined where my life was going and even what goals were possible except in my creative mind. I would stay there for long periods of time. I don't think as strongly as I did , but the left over echoes of those ideas are still with me. I fight constantly to overcome assumptions that are in my mind that started life with me many years ago. Many writers fight the urge that they can't write about certain subjects or write a certain and new way.

I have a writer friend who is writing about a woman whose mother was a prostitute, but the daughter has gotten scholarships and is now a doctor. When her mother visits her, my friend can't bring herself to write swear words in her novel although the mother is with others who also do. The doctor does not but she wants to compare and contrast and it is one tool of doing it in the novel. My friend was raised in a family where those words were not said. My friend is considered a mid-listed published writer and has a publisher who wants to publish the book and she really wants to write this book. My friend's father is still a Baptist preacher and the control is strong.

In writing, all of us carry the baggage of our "day lives" into our creative worlds. The stories that interest us most are those we take from the normal routines we experience. We take extracts that are the most interesting and use them. It feels that we are in control and not the other way around. My favorite vision of what life is, is of a river flowing with me on a raft and I observing what going on the banks.

In writing, I take those items of life and then play and move them around and see what happens. I have likes, dislikes, passions and so forth; but I never felt they matter all that much to others. I was convinced that no one really cared what I thought. It was a mindset that I inherited as a child when I had a family that was not interested what the children thought or felt.

Later, I was responsive to what my children were feeling and what others thought. I watched and observed; but for myself I thought no one was involved. I thought them not to care what I thought as their mother. Not good. However, as a writer, it did not matter because it was me who was putting the pieces together although the characters once created did their own thing.

I don't think I am such a nonentity anymore. However as a writer I am the center of my world, and yet I am not. I put the actors on the stage and then I record what they do. I describe the scenery so that the audience can see what is happening and give hints to the interior dialogue the actors might be experiencing if any. People often do not know what they are feeling or thinking and if that is the case, I put that in too. That is life and my inner creative world does resemble the outer world as it should.

I believe very strongly that life comes in many dimensions, the exact number is unknown. Each dimension is as true as the others. I also enjoy moving from one to the other as I believe we do in real life. Some of us rack up more frequent traveling miles than others going from one to another dimension.

I have written about control and how many people want to control others. This is unfortunate for the writers. I think writers exist and work best in environments that is free from such rules and regulations. It is best if we can work hard to get rid of the controls that have been instilled in our minds. Often, we helped put them there. Control never improves a writer but makes them a lesser one.