It's all about control

It's time to get control

Control. It's all about who has it and who doesn't that determines which path the story takes. And maybe that's a lure to writing. Gaining control through written words can take hold early.

Letters and journals allow us to say the things that we can't (or won't) say out loud, for fear of what the consequences might be. Sharing thoughts on paper is easier than owning them in real life. Sometimes it lets us move on, other times, not so much. In high school and college, I often turned to writing to get the clutter out of my head (ok, not all that different from now.) Feelings of fear, insecurity, self-worth, frustration, or love spill over the pages, like blood through an open cut. Eventually the bleeding stops. Then the healing begins.

But you're an adult now, so you're supposed to suck it up and deal with it, or fix it, take control. That makes for great stories, where art imitates life. Better yet, it allows you create your own Hollywood ending. That's fine, unless you're trying to teach a lesson.

Writers Read

I finally got around to picking up Zenna Henderson's The Anything Box. It wasn't an easy book to find many years ago. I think it's even more difficult now.

I dove into a story titled, Turn the Page, which takes a life imitating art approach. If giving a brief overview here keeps you from reading it, then that's on you because it's pure magic and you're missing out. The story is about a teacher and the special connection she makes with her students through fairy tales. The students feel what it's like to live the lives of the characters in the stories. Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Chicken Little, and the children live as those characters, feeling delight, sorrow, joy, pain, fear, all of the emotions experienced in the stories. The children are to learn how it feels to be them, the hunter and the hunted, the have and have-nots, but to ultimately, turn the page, where everyone lives happily ever after. (Spoiler alert, there is no happy ending.) Like any magical story there is an eerie quality, a caveat emptor of buying in too deeply to one character's plight and forgetting to live happily ever after. (I lost some of you back there didn't I? Again, not Merriam-webster, look it up kids) You've seen them in real life too. The evil stepsisters (male and female, vanity plays no favorites), the wolf, the chicken littles of the world who always think the sky is falling. Some of her students let the stories take control of them as just one character, and they live as the hunter or the hunted, or whatever character took hold of them, into their adult lives. It really is a delightfully wonderful, creepy and sad story.

Who is in control?

Control is essential in murder mysteries, it's all about someone with the desire to take it back, or at least they've been controlled long enough. I have always wanted to write one of those, but I think I'd feel bad about killing someone.

Jimmy was fortunate. he got to live to see another day. He had control until shortly after the second drink. (If you're unclear on who Jimmy is, then you're late again. What is wrong with you, anyway? Go for a "warm up," and come back when you're ready, ok?)

Jimmy had given up control, but he didn't realize it until the mysterious leather jacket took over. Only, I liked Jimmy, and I really didn't want to see him eat gravel and bleed all over the place, so I had Mike take control and give at least a portion back to him. Jimmy wasn't a bad guy and he was clearly over matched. Leather Jacket wasn't a bad guy either, just a little overprotective of his little sister (oh, sorry, I didn't get to that part. That'll teach you to make judgements before you get the whole story.) But he did have other issues, obviously fashion was one of them.


Ultimately, the writer is in control. Dangling carrots, enticing readers, teasing them with suggestion and innuendo, then pulling out the rug from under them. And what reader doesn't like to be mislead, teased, at least a little. It makes life interesting. (Never tease an editor though. They don't like it. And now I'm just taunting mine, so I'd better move on.)

Anyway, time to exhibit some self-control and keep this short tonight. When I started this post I was really going in a different direction, but I got side-tracked and then completely derailed.

It's not uncommon to lose control, when you're the Incomplete Writer.