Writing fiction is simply a matter of looking through windows. The writer stares out the window to observe setting, time, place, minutes, decades, centuries, seconds, streets, houses, ponds and gardens. Then peeps into windows whose owners forgot to pull the shades, so she can spy on the most private moments of their lives. A voyeur who sneaks peeks into her own mind and finds things she didn’t know were there, monsters and angels, children and octogenarians, large, sloppy dogs and small, timid ambitions, love and new life, illness and death, enthusiasm and ennui, violence and kindness sometimes delivered with one fell stroke from the same well-muscled arm. As in a dream, each character represents the writer (who suffers from multiple personality disorder and delights in it). (And who loves parentheses almost as much as she loves her hound dog with the droopy ears) She experiences the dilemmas of many genders and flies frequent miles, high miles and thousands of them, flapping someone else’s wings, except each set of sun stroked wax appendages truly belong to her. Their owners just have different names and ephemeral bodies. She loves and hates, lives and dies; all from the comfort of her tastefully cluttered home office and the rabbit holes, anthills and eagles’ aeries within her limitless brain. Welcome to her dark and twisted psyche, one of the strangest places on any planet. Enter if you dare. Venom and sticky, liquid honey spit and pour out of her inevitable pen, frigid and balmy, ecstatic and angry flood-waves of both, carrying off the lives of others, without conscience. If she doesn’t shake things up, nothing will come of it. If no one rocks the stormy seas with evil acts then how will she bathe the reader’s ship in the soothing joy of calm water without boring them to death or worse, fail to entice them into turning the page? (Coleridge used the still water to create a tsunami of suspense. Ah, genius.) There’s no intrigue and elegance in the status quo if disaster hasn’t preceded it and threatened to follow it as well. How to dive through the portholes with racing heart, leave the deck games and bingo nights behind and swim past the sharp coral reefs and abandoned treasures, wiggling someone else’s fins? Then resurface without getting the bends. Wait! No! The bends might make things even more fun. The anticipation of a sudden and painful death. The threat of agony for a character she lovingly created with her own morbid dreams!
I suppose I should start a new paragraph if I’m going to enjoy the view from my window in first person, then second, then back to first. No more third. You’re looking out a faraway window now. Past tense window or porthole, or narrow stone aperture in the thick castle wall. Gaze out and peek in. You must look both ways if you want to be a writer. We’re all merely peeping Toms, psychopaths with good grammar.
Alyson Larrabee: Enter If You Dare 