Finding the Words

I've always enjoyed writing and for the most part, like other writers I know, the purpose of writing was to share. Beautiful, tragic, terrifying, informative as the story might be, the goal was to share the wonder of it, the wonder of creation.

Meditations on Violence was different. In a single year, many, many things had happened. Too close to some ugly cases, caught between what I knew and what the media was presenting. The delivery of a baby addicted to crack and heroin. A crushed face and an empty skull and plumber's crack in death on a windy, cloudy day. Looking over sights and pulling the trigger and suddenly seeing a volcano of blood and meat erupting... and there was no one, really, to talk to about it.

I do have a good support network, people who love me and would listen, but they didn't understand. The hardest were the martial artists. Most of my friends for most of my life have been involved in martial arts. Judo and jujutsu did much to form who I am. But for the first time I was seeing them as people who played at violence as a hobby and had never heard the screams or felt the bones break.

I felt very tired and very alone.

Meditations was never meant to be shared. Like the early entries on the blog, it was just an attempt to get things out of my head, to put them down on paper so that someone else could poke at them for a while. It is an attempt to take some memories that no one should have and shape something useful out of the sewage of a soul.

THE CRAFT

Writing is like money. It's also like fighting. And like driving. It is one of those things where the people who deal with it professionally don't think of it the way that amateurs do. Raised as a poor kid, I assumed that money was a zero-sum game, that if you had more, someone else had less. Professionals see money as something that can be used, harnessed and managed and as inexhaustible as thought.

A tactical team doesn't look at confrontation or violence or fighting the way a martial artist or a martial sport competitor does. It is not a test or an adventure or an opportunity for personal growth. It is something to be avoided or ended as quickly, efficiently and safely as possible.

When my wife first introduced me to her writers group I was shocked to discover that professional writers approached it as a craft. It wasn't inspiration. It wasn't a gift from the gods. It was a skill that you spent hours of practice on. It was learning the tools to get a thought from your brain into others and having it be received with the effect that you intended.

Writing for yourself is fun. Putting the world in your head down on paper so that you can revisit it and enjoy it is good. But if you want to publish, it's not enough. You have to put it on paper so well that it creates the image in other people's heads. That's a skill, and it takes practice. It also takes a dedicated listening to your good first readers. If you have to explain your story it's not because they "didn't get it" it is because you failed to give it to them.

Mary was the one who taught me to see writing as a craft and is still one of the best mechanics of the English written language that I know. She is very active with the Long Ridge Writer's Group.

GETTING PUBLISHED

My advice will be particularly worthless here. In the field of nonfiction the way it is supposed to happen is that you research and write and polish (or at least get the idea down solid). Then you do exhaustive market research either looking for an agent or a publisher. You put together a killer cover letter; a tight, brilliant synopsis; your most fantastic example chapters and you mail them off...

I sent an early draft of Meditations out to a very small number of readers- friends who were either good martial artists and familiar with real violence or experienced at violence and familiar with martial arts. It was more of a fishing expedition than anything: "This is what I see, what am I missing? What have you seen?"

Kris Wilder called back the day he received it, "Oh, kiddo, by the way I was on the phone with my publisher when it came in. He said he'd like to see it. I sent it on to him. Hope you don't mind."

Don't mind? I can stand alone in a cell with a 300 pound inmate screaming threats without a trickle of adrenaline, but I felt a cold shot down my mind when Kris said that. It's good. Left to my own devices, Meditations probably would have been something that I just passed on to my students and martial colleagues. It would have never seen the light of day.