While I recognize
that our early morning conversation is hardwired into my genes – insert some scientific
jibber jabber here about melatonin cycles and genetically linked paucity of the
enzyme required to break it down, or else too much of the enzyme I can never
remember which it is. No matter, I have accepted you as part of what my Dad
used to call “your specialness” in which context “special” takes the same
meaning as the word as “funny” does to the word “peculiar”. That does not mean, however, that I welcome
you or have to be polite to you whenever you decide to show up.
Tragically
for me, a wage-slave of the most ordinary 9-5 kind, you often come tip-toeing
along with my Muse in tow. He seems to
frackin’ love you. A night person he definitely is and I’ve got no problem with
that except for when the alarm sounds at 6:45 a.m.
This
morning’s thoughts decided to take a few laps of the brain chasing down the
idea of winning the Giller Prize. For those of you not in the know of Canada’s
literary stuff, the Giller Prize is a big deal north of the 49th parallel.
It is a yearly $50,000 prize given to Canada’s best English novel or collection
of short stories and comes with lots of press and a huge bump in book sales. I’d
seen a news clip a few days ago about the award and this year’s winner (Esi
Edugyan Half-Blood Blues) and her comments were humble and heart felt. I
started thinking about what winning a big splashy prize like that would mean to
a writer, not in terms of their career so much but a few layers deeper then
that. I started wondering what it would mean to the writing.
So my Muse
sat down on the end of the bed and started playing one of his favourite games
with me – “What if that were you?”.
And so we
began. It started with me imagining what I would say if I won such a thing.
What would I talk about in an acceptance speech. Would I spend a lot of time thanking all the
people who ever helped me and then all of those who got in my way? Because
truthfully they’d have had just as big a hand in any literary success as those
who tried to help. Or would I say something real. Something about writing. Then
a transformation of some kind took place. Even though I was still writing my
Giller acceptance speech in my head, all of a sudden I was talking about why I
write. Why I have to write. It surely isn’t to win prizes I thought, for I don’t
think it is possible to actually do the work at all with that goal fixed in one’s
head.
It may seem
odd to many but it was the first time in my life I spent a big chunk of time
thinking deeply about why I write. Diving
underneath all the surface reasons like, “I’m good at it.” Or “So I can fully
express myself” or “I get to be the hero of every story” or even the big reason
that though it appears on the surface is a True Iceberg of Thought – “Because I
get to play God.” – so that surface thought is also one that goes all the way
down to the bottom.
In the
process of trying to explain why I write to my Muse I came to understand that I
write because I have to write. For
better or worse, prizes or no, twenty years of writing has created a Writer,
which is as you may or may not know is only kind of a half- human, half
mythical sort of construct. A creature that splits her time pretty equally
between the Here-and-Now(HAN) and the Land-of-What-If and –Maybe (LOWIM) and no
matter how fantastic HAN might be at any point in time, she is always pining
for the forests and valleys and oceans and planets of three moons that lie in
her truest home LOWIM.
So there it
is. I write because it is now as much a part of my genome as the weirdness on
chromosome 17 that inverts my melatonin cycle. It’s a curious sort of group of
thoughts that make me as sad as joyful. But analysis of that emotional response
will have to wait for another day’s Lost Hour. For tonight my Muse has snuggled
down in the blankets next to me and closed his eyes, so now I will too.
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