My words--and my heart--feel frozen

My words--and my heart--feel frozen.

They froze this past month as I watched multiple videos of Americans shooting Americans on American soil. Not just shooting but murdering, execution-style, as if I was watching a scene from some Hollywood movie about the mob or the invasion of an alien army. Only it wasn’t a movie. It wasn’t an alien army.

My stomach tightened in horror at the sound of gunshots and the sight of weapons raised and fired by Americans on innocent Americans, and my stomach is still clenched, still mourning Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti, two Americans who stepped forward to observe and protect immigrants, those among us who are the least safe and the least protected.

This morning, feeling the weight of grief, I didn’t want to write anything. Not a word. What could I say that would change anything? How could I write anything about the writing process when the act of writing itself seemed so futile, such a small act, compared to people being gunned down on the street for simply raising their voices or for offering help to those beside them who might have fallen down?

I pulled up a chair, anyway. I needed some way of overcoming the weight of this sadness and grief, this despair that has come with the murders and with the failure of anyone in this administration to hold the murderers accountable.

The journal page in front of me was blank. I stared at it, not thinking I had any words to offer. Not thinking I had anything to say. But I realized this: if I didn’t keep writing, one more voice would be silenced. Not by a bullet but by my own fear. By my own cowardice. By my own inability to stand up to forces that want to silence anyone who dares take a stand against this administration’s endless stream of propaganda.

And so I lifted my pen and started writing, and with each word I began to understand how important it is to keep writing through the sadness and despair, through the doubts and the fears, to keep writing in order to keep alive the dream of America, the America that I believe in, the America that Good and Pretti gave their lives to preserve, an America that offers freedom to all.

I can still feel my stomach clench in horror at the public executions of people who had the courage and compassion to join so many others and stand up for human rights and for democracy—for an America they believed in and which so many of us believe in, even as the boots of those carrying out the orders -- sent from the desk in the White House occupied by a man who imagines himself king -- try to stamp out the American dream, as if the dream itself is nothing more than a figment of our imagination, a fantasy, a tiny candle flame, rather than an unquenchable idea that over the centuries has forged a nation of immigrants into a beacon of light for the rest of the world.

The America that I know and believe in is a country that welcomes refugees regardless of skin color, religious belief, or country of origin. It welcomes those who need a home and provides a sanctuary to build a life, gain an education, raise a family, create the space to make art, build a business, or do the research that might lead to a new scientific discovery. It’s an America where we can join hands and together fulfill our hopes and dreams, our longing for liberty, our desire for freedom from oppression, our belief in love not hate, our trust in democracy not totalitarianism.

Maybe all I’m trying to say is thank you to all the demonstrators in Minnesota and elsewhere who have stood in frigid temperatures for days to remind us of where we live and what our country stands for. Maybe all I’m trying to say is thank you to Renee Good and Alex Pretti for your willingness to take a stand, for showing us how and why we all need to take a stand.

We owe so much to everyone taking a stand, for insisting that words matter, for demanding that all lives matters, for letting us know that stories and poems and songs matter.

The sound of your voices in the streets of Minneapolis and other American cities inspires us to keep looking for the good in people, to keep believing in the future, to keep writing to unfreeze our hearts and our words.

A soft heart and a hard heart

Writing stories requires a challenging balance of a soft heart and a hard heart. 

A soft heart so that you can empathize with your characters and understand the depth of feeling that they might be experiencing in situations that are painful or uncomfortable. 

A hard heart so that you can push them beyond their limits and put them in predicaments that might cause them—most probably will cause them—to experience pain. 

Sometimes I wonder if I have the heart for writing stories, my heart too soft, or not hard enough, so that I find myself writing stories without danger, without the kind of challenges that will test my characters, because I don’t want to see them suffer, and because, if you want to know the truth, I don’t really want to suffer with them. 

Stories without these kinds of painful challenges, or tests, or obstacles, no matter what you call them, end up somehow flat, while stories that bring pain into the world of a character-- and into the world of people who you come to know and love on the page as you write about them, spending time with them day after day--are somehow more compelling.

It’s why I admire a writer like Kristin Hannah who can balance a hard heart with a soft heart, and whose sprawling novel, The Great Alone, has been on my books-to-read list ever since I finished her novel, The Nightingale, a book that I wished wouldn’t end, despite the pain its characters had to endure. 

The Great Alone is filled with the kind of pain that takes a writer a hard heart to face, but it's filled with an abundance of love, too, an overwhelming love, for which a writer must possess a soft heart to stay with characters in such pain and not abandon them. 

Hannah writes about a young girl in The Great Alone whose father has suffered enough pain for a lifetime, a POW who returns from Vietnam a broken man, changed from the man he was when he left his wife and daughter to go overseas.

He’s a little like Chekov’s gun. You read and see his anger and frustration and you can’t help wondering when his temper is going to explode… and hurt the ones he loves, the characters—his wife, his daughter—who you’ve come to love, too.

The family moves to Alaska in what turns out to be a failed attempt to help him live a normal life. The long nights of darkness that far north overwhelm him, and his anger deepens as the nights lengthen, as does his jealousy over his wife’s glances at other men and his daughter’s budding romance with the son of one of the enemies that he’s made in town.

Before long he becomes so violent that you wonder why the girl and her mother stay with him rather than leave or escape… and it all comes down to their love for him and their fear of him. They love him despite the pain he causes and despite their fear--the mother afraid that she’ll lose his love, the daughter afraid her mother will suffer more pain at his hands if they stay.

I won’t spoil the story for you if you decide to read it, but I have to say that what impressed me about the story, and what got me thinking about the balance between a writer’s need to have a hard heart and a soft heart, was the way that Hannah dealt with the material, so filled with the deep pain and emotion of each character’s life.

Hannah didn’t shy away from putting her characters in dangerous--indeed, life-threatening--situations. She kept pushing them. And they kept going, unable to stop (because Hannah kept pushing). And I wondered as I turned the pages if the characters would break or survive the challenges placed in front of them. 

Even though I was prepared to put the book down early on because I wasn’t anxious to see how the father changed into a more violent, desperate man, I kept reading —I had to keep reading!— because I needed to know in the end if the daughter—and her mother—would survive.

Hard heart. Soft heart. How do we balance our compassion for our characters with the requirements of our story, to test them to the limits of their endurance (and our own)? 

Something to think about, I guess, as we return to our works-in-progress.