Courage to Be

I try not to hold back in my writing. I like to believe that every time I, as Nash so eloquently puts it, apply my butt to the chair, I have something worthwhile to say, and I want to transfer it from formless schema, as I mentioned in my previous entry, into clear written language because as I wrote about yesterday, writing SPNs can benefit others, not just myself.

Sometimes that's easy; sometimes not. Regardless of the circumstances, it all comes back to my mindset about what I write. Do I feel it is important enough to commit to paper? Or is it better reserved for the cobwebs of my desk drawer, or an unfinished draft, or not at all?

In the tenth grade, I gained a new English Honors teacher at the start of the second semester: Brenda Stephens. I think I speak for most of my classmates when I say that a discernable tone shift occured when she took over. She piled on the literature and projects. She plowed through study guides and lecture notes. She was demanding and particular, pushing each of us to our limits. We read plenty of novels but made time for short stories, mostly in the textbook. One story I fondly recall is Washington Irving's The Devil and Tom Walker. A tense, gripping tale that eventually laid the groundwork for one writing endeavor that haunts me to this day.

For those that haven't read it, The Devil and Tom Walker is about a man who strikes a bargain with the devil, referred to as "Old Scratch," in order to make a better life: wealth, notoriety, and a way out of the miserable relationship with his wife. But everything has a price, and Tom's is the loss of his wife (which could be construed as a boon in his mind) and his free will; he must become the devil's pawn. The rest of the story follows Tom's journey to the depths of misery, then back again as he seemingly regains his freedom in God (our of fear for what will become of him when he dies), only to have it snatched from his grasp when the devil takes him away.

About a month into Mrs. Stephens' class, and only a week removed from reading this story, she assigned us a short story to write. I don't remember the exact perimeters of the assignment - only that I wanted to base mine off of The Devil and Tom Walker. I enjoyed the story, but I recall feeling a little cheated at the end. The idea that Tom got so close to redemption, turning his whole life around, only to lose it all at the end didn't sit right with me. It made me wonder. Do we as humans have free will? If so, to what extent is it ours to use? If not, what is the purpose of having minds and souls? Do our mistakes cost us in the end? Can we be redeemed by our actions? How much are we held accountable for the actions of those around us?

Nash points out in his guidelines for writing SPNs that all authentic written texts begin with constructs to focus the writer's attention and hooks to catch the reader. As you can see, I was anything but short on those. Getting my story started was pretty simple. I felt inspired by my subject. I had constructs to fasten my focus, and those constructs could also serve as hooks for my readers to latch onto. No easy answers to those questions, and if I did my job with care, they would keep pondering them.

I re-wrote Irving's story, using most of his main characters. I named Tom's wife and gave her more of a role in the story's climax. I also gave the family a son and made him a factor in Tom's pact with the devil, who was always referred to as "the black man" (he dressed in black from head to toe), the idea being that it wasn't instantly clear who he was, but the clues were present. I wanted to show, rather than tell, it in his appearance, his dialogue, and his manipulations of Tom (and later, his wife). I gave Tom a different history while keeping it true to the tone of bitterness and misery that pushes him to the devil in the original, and I made sure the reader had a clear understanding of his thoughts by narrating most of the story from his point of view. My ending on the surface was similar to Irving's; Tom still loses his wife (and his son), yet he comes out of it with more of a sense of triumph, not merely in that he "survives," but that he sees the devil's machinations for what they are and ultimately uses his free will to exorcise himself from his influence. True, things still turn out badly for his loved ones, but not as a direct result of his actions.

Mrs. Stephens enjoyed my story so much she wanted to submit it to a writing magazine and encouraged me to agree to it.

But I refused.

At the time, I was deathly worried about plagiarism issues. The fact that I used the ideas and characters of another writer to tell my story troubled me when it came to the notion of putting it on public display. My parents and teacher couldn't believe I would turn down the chance to get my story published. So what if I had Tom and Old Scratch in my story? Couldn't I just re-name them? So what if I borrowed concepts in Irving's text? Couldn't I just dub my story a what-if, or a sequel, paying respect to the source material while still allowing my version to be told?

I was too scared to do any of these things. I regret it now. I dug that story out my first year of teaching and read it to my middle school students as a model of short-story writing. I let them critique me as I would them. They were hooked. They asked me questions. It made quite a few of them think and apply some of my conventions to their own writing. A girl in my first period wrote a suspense story with a murderer and concealed her identity all the way to the last couple sentences, in which it was revealed the narrator was the murderer (with vital clues planted throughout).

Nash breaks down every writer's excuse for holding back by with this reminder: each of us has a story to tell. No single story is more or less important than another. I didn't think using another story to kickstart my own counted as telling my own tale. I couldn't have been more wrong. The constructs were mine. The focus was mine. The motivation and drive for putting the story to print in the first place was mine. I wrote The Devil and the Walkers with the best that was in me, and to this day, I feel as if I cheated myself by not allowing it to reach the public domain.

Not only that, but Nash also reminds us that we can't be purely detatched from some degree of influence in today's society. Whether we are conscious of it or not we are always drawing inspiration from someone or something else - we can't help it. So why should we let that stop us from telling the story that is genuine and flows directly from our own wonder and questions that prod us to apply our rears to the chair and write? Nash's students in chapter four didn't let it stop them from telling their stories, and they had tremendous personal issues to work through, issues that make mine pale in comparison, at least in my view.

I wonder; is it our own fear that holds us back? Fear of what? Rejection? Criticism? Embarrassment? Or do we choose to hold back because it's easier than, in the words of Phillip Lopate, "to attempt, to test, to make a run at something without knowing whether you are going to succeed?"