Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Passions
Writing means discovering your passions. The Kennedys have always been one of my passions, their strength in the face of tragedy. How to use this in my writing and still honor it? Pearl, the narrator of Hurricanes would look to the Kennedys as not only a source of strength but also a template to place over her own struggles to give them shape. The Kennedys rise to the level of myth in the American consciousness. Pearl would begin her story by referring to her local newspaper, saying, "Recently, another one died in his prime, John-John in an airplane. Not long before that, Bobby's boy. While playing football at high speeds on snow skis." The Kennedy story speaks to me, has always spoken to me, just as the story of Camelot has spoken to generations before. I believe in the power of myth to inform and transform us. The power to transcend pain, even death itself.
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I've met a lot of writers who feel as you do (online and off) re: the use of passion in your writing, and many who are like me, just folks with stories to tell. There is little I feel passionate about and my few attempts to write about those topics or themes have gone nowhere because I was missing what I need to write: a solid group of characters and a solid setting. Those must come first for me, then the story flows, and it will either have an obvious theme or it won't. And I write characters who are as far from me as possible. To start, they tend to be males.
Do you always use your passions so explicitly as your example about the Kennedys or do you get more subtle at times?
I think I'm opposite of you. I know my passions and have known them most of my life. The serious attempts at writing came later, when I started writing about one of my passions--The Man From UNCLE. I had no need to discover that thru writing! It was already a part of my awareness. :)
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