Beacon of Light, 2014

Most likely you’ve near heard of the writer who I’ve selected as the Beacon of Light for 2014, but he has served as my inspiration this past year, illuminating the shoals of self-doubt and guiding me past the fears and uncertainties that often accompany the writing process.

The writer’s name is Chuck Entwistle, a friend of mine from our days as grad students in the MFA program at Vermont College, and he had to stop writing a few years ago, not because he had grown tired of writing but because he was losing his memory.

Now his memory is almost gone, and I watch with sadness on my monthly visits as he sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss of Alzheimer’s disease. No longer can he read a book or magazine. No longer can he string words into sentences. No longer can he tell the difference between a pencil and a paper straw. 

On my arrival, he usually lifts his hand in greeting and calls out my name. But on my last visit a few weeks ago, he didn’t call out my name. He lifted his hand—making the same gesture he always makes when he sees me—but my name was no longer part of his memory bank.  It was gone.

This past summer, Chuck’s dear wife, Jan, invited me over to their house to look through some of his books on writing before she donated them to the local library. She had removed them off the shelves in his office and placed them in tall piles on the living room floor and on the table near the middle of the room. 

I spent a little more than an hour thumbing through the books, searching for ones that might reveal the secret of writing or illuminate the process in a helpful way. And as I browsed through these books, I felt like I was sitting with Chuck again during one of our lunches. He could no longer talk about writing, but these books contained many of the insights into writing that he had gleaned from their pages and shared with me over the years. And it struck me that these books were Chuck’s legacy.

Year after year Chuck kept searching for the secret to writing, and he had invested in these books in order to learn more about the craft of writing so he could sustain his desire to keep writing in the face of rejection and silence. And while I felt sad, sitting in the living room, that Chuck and I could no longer talk about writing the way we used to talk about it, I felt inspired by his library of books and by the evidence that they showed of his dedication to the craft.

Of all the books on the table—there were easily more than one hundred—I found four that I thought might help me in my own writing. And Chuck’s wife was so generous. She insisted that I take the books home. 

Now they sit on my shelf, and I take them down every so often and browse through their pages in search of inspiration and insights about the writing process, kernels of truth that Chuck might have shared with me if his memory hadn’t failed him. 

I'm sharing brief excerpts with you from these books -- Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman (HarperCollins), A Year of Writing Dangerously by Barbara Abercrombie (New World Library), How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein (St. Martin’s Griffin), and Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder & Richard Todd (Random House) -- in the hope that Chuck's love of writing, and the truths that he found in these books, will inspire you in the year ahead, just as they inspire me:

When writing is going well it is not like pushing. It’s like falling. You fall the way you do in dreams. You fall and fall. There is that same disorientation and breathlessness and speed and tension. You fall past the ground floor, past the sub-basement, past the creatures that live in the center of the earth, big black lobsterlike figures working machines you glimpse as you fall toward blue sky. What joy! And yet, it’s scary. For all its vast pleasure, it’s scary because falling stops, words end, and it is always just you again at your desk in your room, judgment already beginning. –Bonnie Friedman 

Writing can be a lonely business. But gradually your characters, or the scenes and people from your past, begin to rise up around you, and you find yourself writing your way out of loneliness, writing your own company. And you’ll find yourself at dinner some evening telling your family or friends, “Well, Natalie really made a mess of things today” or “I can’t believe what John said about Kathryn’s dog.” And everyone will look at you mystified because Natalie and John and Kathryn—and the dog—reside only in your head; you’ve made them up. –Barbara Abercrombie 

If you’re determined to write, the question is when do you write? Obviously, when you can. I had a student once who did her writing standing up in the kitchen attending pots on the stove. Ideally, one ought to write in a place and at a time when the chances of being disturbed are minimal. Writing fiction is often like juggling ideas the way a juggler keeps balls in the air. An interruption can be hazardous to the health of the interrupter, or to a good sentence that escapes uncaptured.—Sol Stein 

It is a misleading truism that drama comes from conflict. Conflict in stories is generally understood as an external contest between good guys and bad guys. But to say that Hamlet depicts the conflict between a prince and usurper king is (obviously) to oversimplify that rich, mysterious drama, indeed to misunderstand it completely. The most important conflict often happens within a character, or within the narrator. The story begins with an inscrutable character and ends with a person the author and reader understand better than before, a series of events that yields, however quietly, a dramatic truth. One might call this kind of story a narrative of revelation. —Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd

  

Chuck still smiles when I visit him. I'll give him a hug, as always, as if everything is normal, and we'll spend a few minutes sitting together. I have to shout because he’s hard of hearing and sometimes his hearing aids don't work or he's forgotten to put them in. And he’ll laugh at something that only he knows is funny, or he’ll grasp for words the way someone might try catching butterflies with a net and then smile and pretend we've just shared a good joke.

After I leave and return to my car, I open my journal and make some quick notes. They are meaningless notes, really. But I need to make them all the same, just to see my hand moving across the paper, just to feel words flowing, just to convince myself that my memory is still intact and that I can still write.

That's what my friend, Chuck, still does: he inspires me to write.

  

As the year ends and a new year begins, I hope that you may find your own inspiring Beacon of Light in the days ahead. 

My friend, Chuck

Last weekend I went to visit my friend, Chuck, a writer of books for adults and children, whose nonfiction stories have appeared in Cricket magazine and elsewhere.

We began meeting every month or so after I moved to Florida a decade ago. Both of us attended the same graduate writing program in Vermont and had met while sharing the dorm floor that had been reserved for the men in the program. He was a bit older than me by a good ten or fifteen years, but we shared a love of stories, and our difference in ages didn't matter much. He was slightly deaf and wore hearing aids, and it wasn't always easy to talk to him--sometimes I had to shout and he didn't always understand what I was saying--but I enjoyed hanging out with him.

When I moved with my family to Florida's west coast, just south of Tampa, I learned that Chuck lived only a few minutes away. He was the one friend who I had in the area and the only other writer who I knew here. To welcome me to town, he offered to meet me at the old Melody restaurant on the Tamiami Trail. That was the beginning of what Chuck called our "literary" lunches.

After that meal, we arranged to meet for monthly lunches at local coffee shops, and we talked about our works-in-progress and how we had submitted our manuscripts to certain editors or agents, and we shared news about ongoing research and our hopes for future projects. Chuck was always full of enthusiasm. If either of us had experienced rejection since the last time we met, he'd simply laugh it off, and we'd move on to the next plan or project. That was Chuck's way. He was a retired military officer. He'd learned how to view obstacles like rejection as a temporary impediment. He taught me to keep writing.

For the past few years I've watched from the sidelines as Chuck struggled with the early onset of Alzheimer's, a disease that robbed his mother of her memory and now is robbing him of his. He often joked about it during our lunches, refusing to let the disease keep him from what he loved--writing stories for children--and he continued doing his research for stories as long as he could remember what he was working on. A few weeks ago, though, his family decided it was time to move him from his home to a "memory care" facility. So last weekend I met him for one of our "literary" lunches at his new home.

He was easy to spot. As soon as I walked into the main lobby, I saw him. He was the tall man with the erect military bearing and bright smile, and, thank goodness, he was still alert enough to spot me and lift a hand over his head to wave.

We sat together in the empty dining room for a little while. As in our literary lunches over the past ten years, I shared news of what I was working on and what I planned for future projects. Of course, Chuck wasn't able to share plans for his own work in progress. I knew he had stopped writing months, if not years, ago. But I shared my work with him anyway, and he nodded and smiled, continuing to show the same enthusiasm that he always displayed.

He still flashed the broad smile that I remembered whenever I told him a joke or shared a piece of news that he found humorous. His eyes still sparkled with the same joy in life, and they held, if you looked deeper, the same fierce determination that he'd always shown toward writing. Except now it wasn't determination to keep writing despite rejection that I saw in his eyes. It was a fierce hope that he could keep what remained of his memory as long as possible.

When it came time to say goodbye, he said that he hoped he'd only have to spend another few weeks at the facility before he returned home. A moment later he expressed worry that he'd lost his room key, which I pointed out to him was attached to his wrist by a spring-like bracelet. 

I turned to wave one more time as I walked out the door and saw him surrounded by others who had fallen further down the hole of memory loss. He lifted his hand over his head to wave. He was still smiling.

I'll see him again for another one of our "literary" lunches in a month or so. I'll share with him news of what I'm working on, just as I've always done, and I'll let him know some of my plans for the future.

And I know Chuck will share with me what he's always shared--his enthusiasm for life, his passion for stories (even if he can no longer remember them), and his determination to keep going, despite the obstacles awaiting him, even when the future is unclear.