The Paragraph That Ended It All

One of my favorite writers is Margaret Atwood.  The Canadian author is most famous for the dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, depicting a world where people very much like the Christian Dominionists have taken control. She has written a great variety of excellent stuff, including science fiction, slice of life books, short stories and poetry.

I have just read her book Cat's Eye, a tale of growing up in mid-century Canada.  The main focus is on the central character and her relationships with the other girls that have befriended her.  She is sometimes bullied and abused, and at other times those roles are reversed.

Early on, there was a paragraph so overpowering that it changed my opinion about something fundamentally important to me.

And what was that life changing paragraph?  The central character was introducing her family, bringing them to life by describing their ears.  In great, loving detail she brought them to focus, using colorful and imaginative language.  Each are distinct and hints cleverly at who they are.  I don't want to get in trouble so I won't quote much, but here is just one sentence of it -

"My father's, which stick out from under the brim of the old felt hat he wears to keep twigs and tree sap and caterpillars out of his hair, are large and soft-looking, with long lobes: they're like the ears of gnomes, or those of the flesh-colored, doglike minor characters in Mickey Mouse comic books."

And what life changing lesson did I derive from this?

I am not a writer.  I'm just pretending.  No matter how much I study or plan or research, I don't think I could ever write a paragraph like that.  I just don't have it in me.

My writing is quick and joggy, usually barely one step ahead of the Grammar Police.  You're lucky if I tell you my characters have ears much less what they look like.  Some writers spend pages describing a lunch a character is at, whereas my plotting hurls along at the pace of a toddler building a sand castle.  It's built sloppily and in a hurry, and is washed away at the first high tide.

My hopes and dreams of writing providing the financial means of escape from accounting are ridiculous and immature.  I am no Margaret Atwood.  I'm not even a Stephen King or George R. R. Martin.

The rational thing to do is to move on and do something more realistic, something that may better help me make the transition out.

But I won't.

I love writing too much, even if I'm not very good at it.  It brings me too much joy.  The weeks I had off last year, where I was able to write for six or more hours a day, was one of the happiest weeks of my life.  It helped me finish up Crowley Stories, something no one else has read as a book, from beginning to end.  But I enjoyed creating it, and maybe someday a few others will.

So it was a harsh realty check, reading that paragraph, and has made me face up to the impossibility of what I had hoped to achieve.

Nevertheless, I will soldier on, even with my vastly lowered expectations.

I can't help it.

I love tilting at windmills.