For a long time now I have not written anything remotely resembling fiction – no, not even this blog, which is all the actual truth, occasionally very slightly embroidered for effect. But there was once a time when everything inspired a story and all that I wrote was madder than real life. My real life, that is. Aiding and abetting me in this were a few very interesting people, who gave me the push I needed at the time and still continue to be willing cohorts in my creative crimes. They read everything I wrote and encouraged me to be madder with each piece, forcing all sorts of crazy plot lines and linguistic convolutions out of my over-excited brain cells and revelling in the results. None of what I produced was Pulitzer worthy, but it made me happy and said what I wanted to say and feel at that moment in time.
My favourite story was written as a travelogue, but with a little bit of fiction thrown in for fun. We had just come back from a trip to China and Thailand and I was raring to write. So I did, on every aspect of our wanderings, talking about food, sightseeing, people and everything else, from environmental issues to textiles, for every newspaper that was part of the group I worked with at the time. But there was still one story that needed to come out of me and I say down and wrote it - on the ancient city of Ayutthaya and a monk I didn't meet...or did I? It stayed in the editorial cans for a long time, far longer than I was used to and wanted to tolerate. So, one day, getting my act together as only I could, I sent a copy to my fiction writing teacher in college on Long Island. She was not too acerbic in her comments or critique, but pointed out where my perspective was slipping, what I should have phrased how without losing my own identity in the change and why she preferred a certain word to one I had used.
The story was finally used and given a full broadsheet page spread, almost, interrupted by money-making ads but carried over to the next sheet. It had the photos I had taken blurred into the background, the most evocative image blown up enormously, setting the mood and tone of the story without my having to push the point. The central character was an ancient monk, inspired by a wonderfully calm and soothing stone figure that sat solemnly in the precincts of the ruined temple complex, a yellow scarf around its neck, staring sightlessly and timelessly into the distance. Those eyes saw truths no man could know, and had lived through a history that should never recur. But the monk was a wise man, one who told his tale and let his listeners make of it what they would.
In this telling, I found a certain peace, too. A sense of calm and of a wonderful confidence in my own abilities that could not have been discovered in other stories I wrote, from the romance novel with holes where the steamy parts should have been (I was 13, how did I know anything about steam then!), to the fantasy-horror tale of the aspidistra that ate a girl’s prom dress to the uncompleted serial-saga of Claudette the purple elephant who wore false eyelashes and blue mascara and had to deal with a plane crash in the Thar desert. Those were fun, but they did nothing to make me feel like I was a writer. My monk did.
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