The Habit

I couldn’t get it together to work on the fantasy novel today, elections and drafty windows aside, there is the NaNoWriMo book, Eversky. Working on it I’m remembering the things on my mind.
These characters: the Laujinesse family, Jayson, his friends, I know them. I knew them. I went to school with them. When I’m writing about them I’m certainly not writing about my world. I’m writing about a world I was right beside. That world is ten years gone. Not just from me, from all of the people involved. When I take up that story again I look at it as a storyteller. There is this peculiar dance where I look at it as someone twenty-seven staring into the teenage world of these boys, where I look at it as someone who is seventeen looking into a world that isn’t really mine, that is a little better than my world, running parallel to it. But the moment of transubstantiation comes when, in writing, I become the other. Ultimately Jayson and Ryan and Scooter… all of these are me. And I remember things they said long ago, and those words echo in my brain. No, not my brain… some place else, then.

Last night, Dr. Bender said, “Many writers becomes professors to support their habit.” That’s what I am doing. That’s why I am in graduate school. Support our habit… Like we’re addicts, like what we are doing is some decadent, not quite respectable, addiction. Subversive, addictive, not exactly work.

Yes, Dr. Bender, that’s the PERFECT phrase!