Time
This post is in honour of Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, or Samhain. As all the kids, both young and old, scuttle about getting ready for ghoulish dress-up and trick-or-treating, I’m reminded of how my life has become rather chaotic of late. That’s saying something, as I’ve become rather good at multi-tasking my little heart out on a myriad of projects, while I seek to continue to pay the bills primarily with my writing, but endeavour at the same time to keep my own writing projects — namely my novel — from constantly being sidelined. I’m much better at time management than I used to be, but I will freely admit that it’s an ongoing struggle for me to consistently make the best use of the time allotted to me in a day. If I could forgo sleep, I would; however, I’m kinda beastly if I don’t get at least 7 hours of beauty rest.
My original goal with this site has been to post at least once a week. With that in mind I purposely saved Friday’s post for Saturday, so I could share how my orientation as a human book at the Toronto Public Library went. Well, my weekend ran away from me and now that post is being saved for this Friday. So, stay tuned for that.
But back to time and how fleeting it is. I find that all the clichés about time are horrendously true, especially these two: “time flies when you are having fun” and “the older you get the faster time goes by.” Why is that? If you read this fascinating article on it, then you know it has to do with the senses and how deeply they are invoked and thus how densely the memoires of these moments are recorded in our brains. We tend to remember our firsts: first kisses, first impressions of people, first trips to new places; and our lasts: graduations, final goodbyes, last kisses. We remember these moments vividly, almost in slow motion. They are what we write about in our stories because these are the most important times of our lives, or our characters’ lives, because they are so charged with sensory emotion. It’s these powerful place-holders in our minds that good stories are built around. Everything in between just tends to get lost in the stream of moment-to-moment. And yet, it’s so easy to get caught up in our daily routine that if feels like life just goes by us in a blur, save for these moments in time that mean something. It takes a certain skill to be able to hold onto those memorable moments as they happen, and to appreciate them and enjoy them before the daily roller-coaster of life WHOOSHES by us again.
So I suppose it’s no surprise that this holiday, as lost as it is amidst the commercialism and candy, is such an important time of year, because it’s all about time. The winding down of it, the dying off of the year from autumn into winter, and when you are faced with the end of time, you are frantic to grab hold of one last moment before it’s all gone. Moments like these are rich for reflection. One of the ancient rituals of the Celtic celebration of Samhain involves the cleansing of ritual fire. People would celebrate the year’s harvest with huge bonfires and into these conflagrations they would toss slips of paper, upon which were written things they’d been carrying with them all year. Things that they’d like to be rid of. Perhaps failed goals, or an old love that still haunted them, or worries about health, finances and family. Tossing these worries into the fire cleansed them and prepared them like the fields that now lay fallow, to be fresh and ready for new experiences to come the following spring.
So as the creatures of the night are out celebrating and gathering as many treats as they can fit into a pillowcase or plastic pumpkin, I’m going to light a candle, slow down time, and revel in the rich memories of this past year. Then I will cast off the failures of 2011 into the fire, so that I may ready myself for a winter of gestating the goals I want to realize in the spring of the coming year.
Happy Hallow’s Eve!
Characters
Every good story needs characters. Ones we can identify with, who often represent we the reader in some way. The story of our lives shape us into the characters we become. I was always a sensitive, daydreaming, pacifist kid: “I’m a writer and a dreamer, not a fighter.” Which, of course , made me the delightful target of every and any bully who ever scented my timid easy-going nature. School, for the most part was utter hell, especially high school, where I was marked out as the sole fag — a powerful word I soon came to understand the meaning of.
It breaks my heart to see the kids taking their lives these days to this same bullying that ground me down day-after-day. My parents were powerless to do anything about it, partly due to me not wanting to worsen my teen fate with a bail out from Mommy and Daddy, but mostly due to a completely broken school system running by Darwin’s Laws and not the Laws of Compassion, Understanding and Support for those who needed it most.
Take heart though, this is not a story about bullies. Although they make for great villains, that is a post for another day. I’ve been taking my power back from them for decades now. This is MY story and they are NOT my editor, so they cannot tell me how to write MY story — I do not give them that power. This is the story of characters, the tests, or quests, or obstacles set before our protagonists that build the stamina of character they need to go on to do great things.
I think one of the most powerful tools for building good characters, no matter how tragic they are destined to be, is to find the humour. A giggly girl by the name of Erica was one of a team of friends who saved my life and my sanity during the hell of small town high school. There were never tears because by god that would be letting the bullies win, but there was an abundance of laughter and that’s what got all of us through that very “educational” — in a character building way — time in our lives.
I just had a reunion with Erica and she is still her giggly self. It’s been 23 years since I last saw her, but that moment in time of her and I having one of our — to me — life saving laughs by the lockers upstairs is locked in the vault of my memory. And you know, seeing her made me realize that while it still sometimes feels like the horrible moments outnumbered the good moments, the good moments were much more powerful. If you’ve ever seen a sword forged, it gets subjected to white-hot furnace heat again and again, then pounded into shape by a hammer, but it’s the cool water bath after that tempers the forging. Water has always represented the emotions, and laughter (alongside love) is the most powerful of emotions. I have been tempered by a lot of good people over the years, responsible in the forging of my character. I’ve been very lucky in that respect.
I’ve always been fond of saying, “I need to see my hero bleed, before I can really care about him.” But I want to add to that statement: “I need to experience his sense of humour, to know he’s capable of surviving the shit being thrown at him.” I believe good characters make a story important — memorable — to me, and to many people. And the forging of them draw us in and keep us coming back for more.
Guilty!
I have a very bad habit of over-editing my work. My Inner Editor is constantly getting in the way of my creative muse and often very difficult to shut off. That is the main reason it’s taken me so long to get this website live.
I originally had the intention of keeping the site simple, but the moment I discovered the theme for my blog posts — The Power of Stories — I suddenly realized I had more to say than I thought. My whole life is influenced by stories and how they are told, the power they have over our imaginations and the way they influence every moment of our lives.
But, being the perfectionist my Inner Editor is, I’ve gone over and over and over my prior posts, originally determined to ensure there are no embarrassing typos, but instead getting distracted on updating and expanding on the ideas in my posts, re-writing them to be more clever, more meaningful, more succinct. Well, I had to put my foot down and make it stop. Over the last week I’ve told several people to expect the launch of my new website. They were at first patient, but then a few stopped tapping their foot politely and asked me, “What the fuck? Are you doing it or not?!”
Yes, I am. One more week, I promise. And this time I mean it. No more over-editing, although I think I’m going to have a hard time not going back to at least tweak a few things–all in the guise of checking for typos.
Jeff Harrison
Jeff Harrison 