The Causality of Inspiration
Traditionally, the artist must suffer. Inspiration is derived, then, from the general malaise that attends the suffering, or from the negativity that suffuses a long interval of suffering. The artist must suffer. So they say.
I can't say as how this has held true for me. It wouldn't be the first time that conventional/historical wisdom has had little to offer to a gay man, I'd reckon.
It's not that I haven't suffered, and rather pointedly at that. Everyone has and I'm not special in that regard. It's that I haven't ever written anything signficant that I have been proud of while I'd been in the midst of the suffering. I was too busy suffering, I guess.
It's been in the emergence part of the grief curve that I found voice, found words that further illuminated an already-brightening space. Maybe it's just a limitation of mine, a literary variation on the computer-science-y "bootstrapping" problem: I cannot strike the match that lights the candle that illuminates the darkness, but I can grandiloquently (at times) cover the dimly-lit walls with vivid Story. And Story is another form of Light.
So I wrote a lot in my journal when Allen died, but none of it was ever good enough for public consumption. About a year and a half after he was gone, I started writing real fiction, which turned into a short story, which continued, ad hoc, into a novella-length piece, which blew right through that form. In the first 8 or 9 months I had written (and seriously edited and re-edited) about 90 pages. And then something happened. I remember that it was March 1, 1998. I had hit a stride. Or the characters in the story had reached a critical mass of well-roundedness. Or the moon just stopped being in the House of Ca-ca. Whatever. But for the rest of that March, I wrote 120 pages. April had me writing another 150. May, another 100, at least.
It slowed down some, with having met the man who would become the POX, but still, I completed a "final" first draft in August of that year, a manuscript weighing in at about 550, all told.
You must understand that I am almost completely without discipline for writing. It comes when it comes and I enjoy the fuck out of it when it comes. I wrote because the words were there. I continued writing the story because of the story's pressing need to tell itself to completion and my enjoyment of listening to it.
Until this blog came along, I was one of the only ones who'd read the manuscript. I have had no interest—or at least no discpline—in going through the hell of getting it published for real, even though I know I would benefit in so many ways from following through. As it stands, it appears here, chapter by chapter, weighing in at a much-edited 525 manuscript pages.
The story is there simply because it wasn't there before I wrote it. The story is here because it was unplanned.
Ad hoc ergo propter hoc; post hoc ergo ad hoc.