Feral Beasts

"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off. "
~Ray Bradbury

In searching for some inspirational quotations for my students I came across this one and it, well, it sort of bit me in the leg and I haven't been able to shake it all day.  I have  read many, many pithy, funny, touching, moving, and revelatory quotations about the writing process, but this is the first time I'd ever read this one.

And at first I dismissed it.  Pffft.  Silly.  Grr.  Not what I was looking for.

Then I revisited it and examined it as a possibility because it seemed like something that might appeal to my middle schoolers.  Personifying untold stories as little beasties that latch on with lock-jawed tenacity.  It wasn't what I needed today, but perhaps I ought to keep it in mind for future inspirational quotage.

But it kept coming back to me at random intervals throughout the day.  And I realized why the thing stuck with me more than all the Twain quotes, the Stephen King quotes, the Plaths, the Woolfes, the Hemingways and Keruacs, the Angelous or the Wildes.  Even though I've never been particularly interested in Mr. Bradbury, nor felt a particular connection to his works, the gentleman scholar has hit my proverbial nail in the head.

My stories, my epics, my ideas--they come like feral beasts out of a wild yonder; they appear unbidden and they are determined to upset the natural ecosystem, the natural balance of my metaphorical natural order of things.  And, rabid, crazed and unrestrained, they sink their teeth into me.  And the only course of action, the only way to fight them is to give them what they want.  

And that's how it feels when I'm compelled, impelled, coerced into my 'creative writing ventures'.

And perhaps why, in absence of one of these clawing, scrambling monsters I find it so damned difficult to create, to produce, to output.  

But the little ghouls, the little animals are so inconvenient!  So unreliable! 

And so I am not a writer, but one who now and then writes.

It isn't 'fancy', for that word is too polite!  Too whimsical and smiling.  

It is more a fight-or-flight response to a mortal imperative; I'm attacked and I respond as I must in order to survive.  I write to feed the gnashing maws; I write to exorcise those wild jaws that have me in a veritable deathroll.

And when it is done, when they are temporarily sated and they slink back into the unknown and unknowable ether from whence they came, when that happens I am spent, I shiver and weep and usually hate.

That's writing...

 

 

 

Or!  Or perhaps this quotation struck a particular cord with me today because my beastly insane-o-cat attacked me quite randomly yesterday-- as I'm correcting papers all of a sudden I let out a blood curdling screech in response to the very real and very 'not-just-playing' claws sunk into my exposed lower back.

Still no idea why the neurotic little shit wigged out like that.  We think he might have been after a string or a moth or even a shadow.  Whatever it was, boy was he ever intent on murder.   It looks like I've been bitten by the demon monster from paranormal activity!