Silence Is All We Dread

“Silence is all we dread. There’s ransom in a voice.”

Emily Dickinson

I have completed the third draft of my new novel, Falling into Grace. I am lost without Ruby. I miss her depth, her craziness, her compassion, her fierceness, her selfishness, her creativity, her search for her soul, her relationships with her ancestral grandmother Marianne of Magdala, and her need to be whole. Where will Ruby go now? She is still alive to me and I am walking the floors feeling abandoned.

Our imaginations are the lovers, friends, stalkers that wake us in the night and show us the way into a story, character and event that we are inspired to write. We run to the page, all white and ready for our muse to take over, and pow, nothing. We sit and stare, wonder, where did it go?

A famous writer whose name eludes me once said, "writing is not so hard, just slash your wrists and let the blood flow."

Imagination evokes our inspiration, but our emotions are the passion that births the story and character to life. When imagination and passion marry in a story, we have intimacy; sensual, sexual, juicy intimacy with our characters. For me, there is no better spiritual communion than with the characters I write about.

Writing connects us to everything human and divine. We pour out our hearts and souls onto the page so we can be free and unburdened of our silence. We create events and characters that haunt our lives and keep us awake at night. Our characters help us tell the stories that in our ordinary lives we keep secret. Life as a writer is not simple…and if we make it simple then the story is boring.

As writers we can never cut ourselves off from our feelings and experiences. When we write we need to strip ourselves of all of our defenses, our fears, our should’s, have to’s, and what others think. We write in order to tell the truth, have an affair with ourselves and our characters. We are swept away by their every glance, turn of the head, bite of a fruit, stroll down a shadowy street. We eat, smell, touch, hear, feel every sense as if it were our own, and indeed they are our own, because every character is a piece of our own psyche, a sub-personality waiting to emerge, waiting to have their say and tell their story.

In Woody Allen’s movie Deconstructing Harry, he is a writer who functions better in his fiction than in his life. He uses every wife, lover, friend and family member to tell his character's quirky, neurotic, paranoid and eccentric story. He feels their lust, suffers over their wrong-doings and delights in their all their human flaws. He makes them so real that he cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. In fact, as a writer, he is a multiple-personality, enjoying the pleasures and pains of his characters, saying and doing what is judged, criticized and rejected in real life: from murder to adultery, fetishes, narcissism, paranoia, sexual deviance and all the while making us laugh at ourselves...yet he is hated by his wives and friends for making them look at themselves. He breaks every commandment in his stories. At the same time we have compassion and are drawn to these impure personalities like a moth to a flame.

So how do we come to a place where we can write freely, uncensored, with no shame or critic to shut us up? We have to uncover what we are afraid to say the most. Isn’t that what we all want to really know about? Say what no one else will say. A writer, or any kind of artist, is visionary in the way that they can break apart a person’s hypocrisy and mirror the complexities of the devils and angels we struggle to keep out of our psyches…it can reveal all of our pain, secrets, passions and outrageous beliefs.

Yes, when nothing pours from a mouth. When we stop the rain from hitting the ground. When the birds stop chirping and horns stop beeping and a voice loses its power, robbed by the world, by society who says "Stay silent, don’t speak your truth. Don’t open the valve between your heart and throat."

When we lay on our back, closed to receiving, our legs, our hearts nailed shut. When we are afraid to speak for rape, or even more subtle the 'No', for going braless, our bosoms fat, shaking, wiggling. When we silence the cracks and cries, so we can’t hear the high pitched laughter of a child, the sobs that pump our guts with sorrow. When we steal our expression, censor, repress ourselves from everything alive in us. We stop living and breathing and being human. we kill the We kill the planet. I need to be free and allow my voice to be everything my fear can’t be.