I've gone to the same auto mechanic for several years. It's a good shop, among the best; so good that they don't generally take new clients. I got in several years ago because a friend who'd been their client for decades recommended me when my last car began having serious problems. In the years that I've taken my cars there, I've gotten friendly with one of the younger mechanics who works there, who usually handles my car, gives me advice, and makes referrals for outside work when I need it. Jim. I trust him. Last week, when I took my car in for its annual check-up and a tune-up, he and I got to talking. His father had died recently, and, after sharing sympathies, questions came about my family, and I told him about my daughter's recent diagnosis with colon cancer, and described the harrowing two weeks we spent waiting to find out how bad it actually was. His father's illness and funeral, my daughter's diagnosis and experiences with surgery and treatment. Some real-life shit.
I grew up familiar with auto shops, and the shop where Jim works feels very familiar to me - like visiting my Dad's shop when I was just a girl. My father and two friends started Kalispell Motor Supply before I was born, and I grew up visiting him and "the guys" in the shop, familiar with the smell of the pits and machinery that was ever-present, and the air and sunlight that came from the ever-open front door of the shop, open even in the cold Montana winters, open to the street where their clients drove cars in for them to fix, open so that local folks could call in hellos from the street as they wandered by. Dad lost his share in the shop when, at 39, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, spread so widely through his system that they weren't even sure where it had started. Real-life shit.
I haven't written much in recent weeks. Instead of the long blocks of focused time I am used to spending at the computer or with pen and paper, I am scribbling lines here and there, often just before falling into bed. Real-life shit is at the center of my life, now.
This has happened to me before. Real-life shit overpowering everything else. But I have always kept writing to some degree, at some level. I have had people ask me how - how do I keep writing, keep going in life, when things (medical or personal or financial) fall apart. Part of it is my basic nature - my late husband used to say that I "think on paper" - that when I needed to work something out, he knew he should hand me a pad of paper and a pen, and let me go at it for a while to figure things out. Part of it is very good training. In my Creative Writing master's degree program, my adviser was always challenging me, no matter what else was going on. She pushed me, over and over, to put truth - real-life shit, if you will - on paper. Not biographical, not memoir, but knowing that what you feel, how you struggle is familiar to your readers, and putting that same sense of struggle on the page connects the writer with the reader in an essential way.
And, it doesn't hurt that pouring my emotions into a character's troubles is cathartic for me, as well. In the imaginary lives of imaginary characters, very real humanity is reflected. Real-life shit. Both the imagining of it and the perception of it when I read the works of others is a foundation - a place of growing strength both for me as the writer and for the developing sense of characters as they emerge on the page with their challenges and problems - their own real-life shit.
