IN THE ZONE

I'm writing the climax of Godtalk. It's chapter 17 of 18 and the main character is a prophet/messiah type and so, consequently, must die. I was worried, it being a powerful and meaningful, yet delicate sequence in the story that I would not be able to pull it off with the right sense of grace.

As I had with most other chapters in the book, I used bullets to outline the major events in the chapter and then wrote the scenes that effectively dramatized the bullet entries I'd made on the outline, thereby tying them together with "riveting" prose.

Funny thing: two days ago, during my writing period, everything was flowing--dialogue, action, description, even some theme work was rolling right off the keyboard. I started off today thinking, "this is going to be a snap, I'll just pick up where I left off and let the brilliance begin."

In point of fact, I couldn't seem to write a clean, sharp sentence all morning, or think of one original descriptive detail, or write a line of dialogue that didn't come off stilted or artificial. One day in the zone, one day not. That quickly, and with no explanation or solution.

I found that dichotomy very intriguing. And some writers would disagree with this, but my theory is you keep writing anyway.

You can always fix it later.

OKAY, TWO BOOKS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Everyone who considers himself a reader most likely remembers a handful of books that changed his point-of-view, altered his life perspective, either slightly or monumentally. For each reader, there may be five, ten, twenty, or even fifty books that influenced that person as he or she matured as a person and as a lover of ideas and the written word.

I'm certain there are more than five books that changed my life. But here, in roughly the chronological order that I read them are five books that made me look at my personal, individualized, existential reality a little bit differently than I had before I closed the back cover of the book:





1. Illusions by Richard Bach. Bach's story of reluctant messiah, Donald Shimoda, and his relationship with the messiah-in-training who happens to share the name of the author was given to me by my closest friend when I was sixteen. "Here, read this," she said. The philosophy expounded in its pages--namely that all of life is an "illusion" and that there are greater planes of reality beyond our own and that we create and magnetize things in this current reality--was a mind-blower. And the last page pulled the carpet right out from under me. It was like a punch in the gut. After that, I read everything of Bach's I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, though, I had to come to terms with the fact that, staring with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Bach wrote the same book ten or fifteen times. Nevertheless, since reading Illusions as a teenager, I've never looked at the world, myself, or life the same way since. My young adult novel Godtalk owes much--maybe everything--to my reading of Bach's little religious (anti-religious?) parable.

2. 1984 by George Orwell. Assigned by my Sophomore Honors English teacher at Grossmont High School in 1978, Orwell's novel of dystopia also changed the way I looked at life and altered my view of the machines of social and political engineering and how they can manipulate you--through language, media, and mental conditioning--into doing what they want. The futuristic devices employed by Orwell--thought police, telescreens, doublespeak,etc.--were not only prophetic, but deeply disturbing to me, even as a teenager. I remember one assignment on the book I turned in that was executed more elaborately than most of my homework. The teacher said to me (I still remember this verbatim), "This book has really had an affect you, hasn't it?" Uh-huh.