I’m borrowing a little on this title from a coal mining protest song that asked a hard and bloody question. Today’s subject matter can be hard and bloody for some. 

Last week I touched on support: who supports the writer and who doesn’t. It is a difficult thing, marring a writer, or giving birth to a writer, or having a writer for a parent or a sibling. Loving a writer often requires sacrifice of some kind. To be a writer’s helpmate, one must give up something—a piece of the writer. Let’s look at it from the nonwriter’s side of the equation. 

For one thing, those writers are always steeling your material, using your life for their stories. Or someone might think they are writing about you, even when they aren’t. Can I get an amen? For another thing, they are always going places you can’t go, places in their heads where people live and say and do things you can’t see them say and do, at least not until the book is finished, or until your particular writer trusts you enough to show you some pages. And you’d better be careful what you say after you read them! This aspect of being the nonwriter is especially hard because it threatens you, the person left behind, the person who must wait, the person who must entertain themselves while the writer goes and works, which looks an awful lot like play from your side of the closed door. No one likes to be left alone—except for maybe a writer.  And lets don’t even get into living with a published writer who goes on the road and sees room after room of strangers (let’s hope full rooms) who want to know the author, your author, express how your author created characters so real, the reader was moved to tears. Can any puny family member compete with such adulation?

Well, yes! But under these circumstances, it seems apparent to the writer’s loved one that said writer should take a practical–and maybe romantically wise–step and choose a relationship with a living person over a nonliving—neverliving—person or persons. But when it comes to giving up the characters who populate our imaginations and hopefully our pages, for most of us writers, you might as well ask us for a kidney or a liver or a lung. “Here, let me just cut out this lung and lay it at your feet. Sorry about all that blood. Now, do you know I love you?”

I once had a student whose husband didn’t mind her signing up for a writing class, but he didn’t like it when she started taking her writing seriously, because he didn’t want her to get her hopes up about publishing a novel and then just get let down. The odds were so against her, after all. When she did publish her first book, however, he didn’t go to many readings. At first this makes the husband sound like the bad guy, but the truth is, as long as the student writes anyway, and goes to her readings anyway, there really is no bad guy.  There’s just someone threatened in the equation by what is outside his experience, what disrupts his status quo. Fear can hold back a writer, but fear can also hold back the person who loves the writer.

As Mary Annie Brown said in the documentary film The Rough South of Larry Brown, “I didn’t marry Larry the writer.” But she did stay married to him. She did come to terms with the fact he was easier to live with, in the long run, when he got the writing done. She loved him even after this addiction took such violent hold of him. In fact, she made it possible for him to write amid all the other demands on his time from family and work and just plain living. And she was proud of him for being so damn good.

Eleven years ago yesterday, my husband and I met online. After we were married, I moved to Tennessee and began work on a novel. Generously, he supported my decision to write full-time and work very little in other ways—as in for money. But even in the flow of all that generosity, he still had an initiation to undergo. (See, I’m writing about him without his knowledge.)

One day I was driving to a nearby town and he asked me from the shotgun seat of my Miata if I was mad at him. “Why would you think that?” I asked. “Because,” he answered, “we’ve been driving for 30 minutes and you haven’t said a word. That’s not like you.” I explained I was listening to my characters. On another occasion, he said something to me in the kitchen, and I didn’t respond in time, and when I did, I said “What?”. Again, he asked, “Are you mad at me?” This time I heard him; and I heard the edge in his voice. He was irritated because I wouldn’t answer. As usual, I was listening to my novel, watching a piece of the story take shape in my mind. I had to pull out of what was going on in my head to belatedly hear his question, and by then I’d already responded—a beat late and with that awful blind come back: “What?” Or worse: “Huh?”

Writers, fiction writers in particular, work so hard to get their characters talking and moving and revealing what’s important to the story. Once you get them to stand up and share, they resist hiding in the corner when the writer needs to cook dinner, or wants to watch a little TV, or take a romantic drive with his honey. Characters horn in, wedge themselves between the writer and the real world. And that makes matters worse—most of all for the person who can’t hear or see characters. Who wouldn’t be a little jealous? A lot jealous? After all, it ‘s a kind of love triangle.

Fortunately for me, my husband is a quick study. He supports my writing even more than I do at times. Now that he’s been married to me a while, he would gladly lock me in my office if I would just write the damn novel, instead of mope around the house feeling as if the next novel is just beyond my non-key-stroking nail-bitten fingertips. He did once, as a joke, tape me to my desk chair so I’d finish a final revision of my first novel. Of course, I had scissors within reach. I could have gotten up at any time. But since my bum was taped to the chair, I stopped procrastinating and finished my revision while my husband took a nap, made dinner, and finally, ceremoniously, cut the tape so I could go pee and wash up for the meal he’d made.

As for how to get folks inside the circle who are outside it (see last week’s exercise), I don’t know the answer to that question. You might start by asking them if they’d be satisfied if you cut out your liver and laid it at their feet. Ask them if that would make them happy, would let them know you loved them enough. If a piece of you died, would that be enough? Or a more charitable tack might be to think back to the days when you had a toddler and it dawned on you how nice it would be if they could, for at least part of the day, entertain themselves–and feel good about it, maybe even take joy in it. How much training are you willing to do for those you love? You might sign up for a couple of classes at John C. Campbell Folk School and hope the nonwriter finds a passion for craft that requires hours of solitude. But, be careful what you wish for. You may find the shoe on the other foot. You, the writer, might become a forge widow.

My husband (a metal artist and aspiring blacksmith) most ardently takes me seriously as a writer when I take myself seriously as a writer. He’s less patient when he knows my computer is in my lap to check Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, or to write a blog entry. He’s suspicious, interprets these non-novel, non-short-story, non-poem, non-essay activities as methods of procrastination. Smart guy, my husband. Before you can ask someone to be supportive of your need to write, you must first be supportive of it yourself. There’s nothing worse than a whiny writer who isn’t writing because she’s are afraid she won’t write the story well enough, afraid those pushy characters won’t come horn in on her life.

Now that I’ve said this, I think I’ll go put my bum in the desk chair and finish my novel. Then I’ll give it to my husband as a Christmas present, because I know he can’t wait to read it, and then read it again and again as I revise it over and over. I don’t want to deny him that pleasure, that spousal gratification.

Where’s the tape? Anybody seen the box tape? I need box tape!

Oh, before I tape myself into the cockpit, let me add that sometimes the writer does need to pull out of the story, lock the characters in the office, and pay full, unadulterated attention to someone who’s got a pulse, a real pulse, a pulse issuing from a heart devoted to said writer. Writer’s shouldn’t forget to live. That’s where all the good material for stories comes from. 

Suggestion: Get a copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Read the chapters and do the exercises. Better yet, do the exercises with your partner or someone else you love. Share your answers. Come to terms with your creative gifts together, and all the heavy stuff and painful associations that may come with those gifts. You might be surprised what you learn about yourself and someone else. You might be surprised how much you have to talk about when you AREN’T trying to write.

Non sequitur exercise for December: Make a list of ten holiday memories. As each memory surfaces, freeze the image like a photograph and describe in detail what you see, foreground and background, objects and gestures, light and shadow. Let the image move. What do you SEE now? Write a paragraph or two of description for each memory. Now, as Roberta Allen might suggest, circle the memory with the highest energy and the memory with the lowest energy. Set a timer for 10 to 20 minutes and begin writing about one memory, then reset the timer and write about the other.

You now have ten writing prompts. Why circle the highest and lowest energy memory and write about them first? Sometimes the highest energy memory has he most action, the most obvious detail; and sometimes the most revealing writing comes from the lowest energy memory because there is something there to avoid. And then sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

If you are a fiction writer, write ten holiday memories for one of your characters. Have the character select a high and a low energy memory. See what they hold onto and what they push into the shadows.

Read: The Christmas Letters by Lee Smith.

Works cited directly or indirectly:

Allen, Roberta. The Playful Way to Serious Writing. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. New York: Tarcher/Petigree Books, 1992.

Hawkins, Gary. Dir. The Rough South of Larry Brown. Downhome Entertainment and Blue Moon Film Productions, 2008. DVD.

Smith, Lee. The Christmas Letters. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1996.

Wright, Jack. Producer. Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coal Fields. Lonesome Records & BMI Publishing, 2007. CD.