Secret journey

It’s not surprising to find me reflecting on writing the day after the Nebula news. So many stories of writing! Nicola has told the story of the first Nebula (when we were both nominated the same year) when we stopped in the middle of working on our new house and went out to a restaurant with paint in our hair. And last night we drank a bottle of pinot gris in front of the fire and then ate leftover spaghetti, partly because we can’t really afford to go out right now and partly because, well, there are lots of ways to celebrate. After more than 20 years together, we’re good at making just about anything feel special if we want to.

That skill to turn a moment to our own purpose — to alter the emotional dynamic (or to cement it), to step into a new perspective, to feel fully and then move on, to find the next thing to say that will turn us down a different road — that’s a writing skill as well as a life skill. I can’t imagine either life or work without it.

I wrote my first serious story — the first that I conceived and started and finished though I knew it wasn’t very good, because it was the finishing that mattered — at age 20 or so. I had returned to Florida after four wonderful years at boarding school and one disastrous year at Northwestern University. I was living with my mother; she worked two jobs (one full-time), I worked two or three part-time jobs and carried a full course load at the University of South Florida to keep the grants I’d earned. I was in the theatre program, so I spent many nights rehearsing for classes or shows, performing, building sets, tearing them down…

We were always tired. And sometimes, in the middle of washing the dishes that had piled up over days because I just couldn’t face the kitchen (it was an old house, it was Florida, there were bugs, it was just no fun), I would find myself feeling the particular hopelessness of youth, the angst of I want things to be better but I don’t know how, I don’t have the money, and it all takes so long… That’s where my first real story came from, and it was appropriately, y’know, angsty, about a lonely dying woman who smuggles herself onto a rocket so that when it re-enters the atmosphere and burns, she will be the streak of light that people see overhead.

Sometimes I still get angsty about writing, about life. But I have better strategies now. I know how to change those moments, how to feel and move on, how to turn down a different road. I no longer must eradicate the tiny biting voices that sometimes speak from under my breastbone. They’re like the bugs in Florida, resilient and good at hiding in the cracks, and you just can’t win at their game. The trick with bugs and voices is to just smile and say, Oh, you again, yeah, yeah, hello, go away now.

When I was washing those millions of dishes all those years ago, I often listened to music on my headphones. Standing over the dirty water, I would play a movie in my head: the sink was a set, behind me were the cameras and the director, and we were all telling a story about a woman on a secret journey of struggle; but she was determined, and she would triumph, and everyone in the audience would be glad.

It was only later that I came to see that what I really wanted was my own secret journey, whose wanderings (occasionally off the map) would be fully mine, not just a “story” to please other people. And that’s what led me to Clarion, and Nicola, and Solitaire, and screenwriting, and “Dangerous Space,” and this lovely third-time “movie moment” of a Nebula nomination that I can celebrate any damn way I please. Because it’s not some character who’s feeling good. It’s me.

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