Here in the woods I have discovered more than a little of that inspiration I wrote on yesterday. It is easy to be inspired in a place of such beauty and calm and in this sacred space I discovered a truth about myself and my writing. What I write is often about the idea of truth—more specifically it is about the subjective nature of truth and how people react to their truth being questioned and how far they are willing to go in order to defend it.
Generally speaking, I have written about this throughout my career/life. However, I’ve done so without recognizing the core of what I was attempting to argue. My latest independent work challenges two fundamental truths: one about racial perception and one about the power/uniqueness of the human construct. Both are questions I carried with me since I was a boy growing up In Harlem and going to a wealthy midtown public school where the few other black kids were all dynamically special in some sort of way, while I was just an out of place kid. I should have recognized it then in my earliest works; in Horace Treefellow and Liefer Shadowseek, elves who were apart from their people largely because of perception and position. I didn’t.
In higher level literature classes the focus is often on what is the author trying to say with this work vs. what does the work itself say as a reflection of time and place (often regardless of intentionality). As a writer, knowing what you are saying helps to quietly carve the borders around the action of what will be in a story. Inside those lines your characters will paint your story for you. Inside those lines the individual motivations and interconnections can grow into relationships that shape and direct a tale. I am now aware of what it is I say overall. I am also aware of how dramatically large and wide that umbrella of meaning truly is.
As a takeaway, try to consider what it is you are saying and thinking about when you are shaping your stories. Try to envision in your palette of characters and scenarios just what it is you feel about the world you are creating and or writing about. That theme should form the canvas upon which those stories find their form.