View From a Speeding Car (Thoughts on Meaning)

Years ago, when I was in grad school, I wrote a novel... in 10 weeks. My professor who was amazing and inspiring, based the class on National Writers Month (in Nov.), where you write an entire novel in a month's time. At the time I took the class (fall semester of my last year of grad school, about six six ago) one of the things that scared me most in the world was  writing a novel. The sheer enormity of such a thing made me tremble. So when Mary Kay (my amazing professor) decided to offer this course with the idea that all of us (herself included) would write a novel by Thanksgiving, I figured that there would never be a better time to face this fear.

I did, of course, write that novel in 10 weeks. We all did, amazingly enough. We'd bring in our flash drive every week and Mary Kay would check our word count. Sheer panic, I think helped us. No one wanted to be the one person who didn't make their word count. And what a word count it was. We had to write 5,000 words a week. 5,000. And let me tell you, there were weeks that I left all those words until the very last minute. I'd wait until two to three days before class and begin to realize that I had a mountain of words to still create. But instead of panicking, I'd focus. And something incredible happened. I had 2,000 and 3,000 word days. I had days where I wrote without stopping for hours straight. Looking back now, I realize that was the only time I have ever been able to do that, to give myself to something completely and totally, with faith and abandon. Faith that I could turn out 3,000 words in an afternoon and the commitment to sit down, shut the world out and do it. It was one of the most freeing experiences of my life. And I've never had it again.

Its only when I'm writing (or reading for that matter) that my solitude seems full. It's full of the lives of my characters. Its full of all the dreams I capture for them, as well as all their pain and heartache. One of my professors once said that the difference with life and stories, is that in  life, it is only after what we are passed what we are going through that we see the meaning in it, if we are lucky. Novels and stories, have the ability to give life meaning in the moment, in a way that life never will. That's part of their appeal.

I've been think about that a lot lately. About not being able to see meaning in the moment and if my life has meaning at all. In the moments I come up blank,  I wonder if my life doesn't have meaning, what it might take to have meaning? I've been thinking about this now more than ever, and maybe that's because I've reached a certain age. Maybe its because I'm this age, and am still single and don't know if or when I might have a family of my own. Maybe its also partly because my folks are far away from me, in more than just distance sometimes, and I have no siblings. Don't get me wrong, I have people, lots of them, who care about me. But there is a distance that can only can be filled by flesh and blood, or by years and years of moments, woven into the fabric of your life. And those things, lately, seem few and far between.

If my life is a story, as so many Christian writers suggest, and it is part of God's great story, then why do we, as people, constantly struggle for meaning? If we are blessed in that we are aware of God's hand in our lives, guiding us, then why do we reach these moments so often that we are screaming "why?" to the heavens? If only there were Clift Notes for life. If only we could flip ahead and read the last page of the story or novel; read the last line, and breath a sigh of relief: "Ok, at the end of this, everything is ok." But we can't do that. As much as we want to or pray for it, those "whys" are often not answered for years, if ever.

Lately, I've been in a season of change and that makes me long for meaning. It makes me long for a solitude that feels full even when I'm not writing. In the meantime, I'm also waiting for the other "characters" in my life to stay or go, change or stay the same, just as I am trying to make these same decisions for myself.  

When I was writing that novel, all those years ago, one of the most terrifying things I remember Mary Kay telling my class was that we had to have a beginning, middle and end to our novel, by the time we were finished the 40,000 word project. We weren't supposed to re-write or edit what we'd already written, but just push forward. Always forward. We followed suit, even though it freaked a lot of us out. And you know what? Something amazing happened. When we were done,  and swapped documents, we saw something. When we read each other's (and our own) novels, we saw something we never expected, or even planned. There were patterns that repeated, subtle things we hadn't even been aware that we were writing in. And they didn't appear once on twice, but a dozens of times. And it happened to All of us. No matter the subject matter of the novel, or the time period, there we meaningful, beautiful, subtle recurrences over and over in stories. Metaphors and  treasured objects; situations and feelings. Over and over. While we'd been focused ahead, while we were working on moving toward the "end," meaning appeared  for our characters and their lives, but so subtly that even we, as the authors hadn't seen it until we went back.

I Know that  God is the greatest writer in the universe and would never miss something like this in the lives of His "characters."  He would place it there with purpose. The meaning He creates is always intentional. But we don't see it. We keep looking for it, but we keep looking for it in the wrong place. We are looking for it as we are moving forward. How can we see meaning in the present, much less the future? Its like trying to get a clear vision of the landscape as you look straight down out the window of a speeding car--all you see is a blur.

If we are to find meaning, or at least get closer to it, we must look back. For in life, as my professor said, we can only see meaning once the moment has passed us by.  

The Origins of Jane Giroux

When I was a kid, back in the 80s, we played silly games. We played mercy and chase and were sure that "bloody Mary" was going to come through our mirror and get us. One of the other things I remember is about names. A way to come up with a stripper name or nickname or some such nonsense... but for some reason, maybe because the name I ended up with was a good one, it stuck. To come up with this "name" you took your mother's middle name (Jane, in my case) as the first name and the name of the first street you grew up on ( which for me, is Giroux, Drive). Hence the name Jane Giroux was born.

As a writer, names carry a lot of weight and a lot of meaning for me. My father named me. He said he wanted a name that couldn't be shortened changed or rearranged. And I will say my two-syllable name suits me.  There were times in my life, though, that I wanted a different name. I remember fondly how I swore the year I was 8 or 9 that one day I would change my name to something beautiful ...like Jennifer. For all the imagination I had, it didn't come through in names. This held through even as I became a more and more avid reader and even a writer. In grad school I wrote my first novel, with a heroine named Joanna Clark.

I've often wondered why, for all my creativity, for my ability to create people and their lives out of thin air, I can not,  for the life of me, come up with something other than common, basic, essentially boring American names for my characters. Its irritating really, since I don't have much control over it. I know, I know. I'm the writer. But I don't. I'm not that type of writer. I'm not the kind of writer that plays God. I'm not the type of writer that see some event on the news and am like, "Now, THAT's a great idea for a story!" No. Nope, not me. I am not so "lucky" as to be an idea writer. I am a writer who is haunted by characters.

Ok, before you start thinking that I'm totally off my rocker (I'm not, I promise. I have a Psych minor to prove it) let me explain. I am a voice driven writer, meaning a character must speak to me and I must get a sense of their voice and who they are before I can write a word. My characters speak through. I don't take credit in the creation of my work really, because all I am really doing is typing what "they" are telling me. I'm a conduit for these characters to speak through. I'm a medium of sorts. And let me just say this is very rare, even among writers, most writers I've come across are "idea writers, " which makes me odd. Even to them. To be the weird one of the weird folks, is quite an accomplishment.

I would have hidden this fact for the rest of my life had I not had the good fortune and blessing to take a class with Robert Olen Butler my last year at Florida State University. Bob is an amazing writer, not just because he's won the Pulitzer Prize ( he won for a collection of short stories, which is almost unheard of) but because Bob is open about and even constantly talks about his process of  "channeling people." That one class with Bob gave me more than access to one of the best writers of our times, or the best feed back about my writing I've ever had, it gave me confidence in my process. Had I not had that class with Bob, I know that when I went into my MFA program, which was fiercely competitive, filled with people more than 10-years older than me, who were writing for praise from the professors and recognition from their peers, I would have baulked. I would have caved under their pressure to totally change my characters or my story; I might have listened as they rewrote my story by "jury" in a group discussion of one of my pieces where I was not allowed to comment or protest.

More than anything else, Bob taught me to stand my ground. I have carried that lesson with me through grad school and out into the business world. But most importantly, when someone is after me to change or be someone else, just like with my characters, I think, "She wouldn't do that. That's not who Jane is."  And I smile and stand my ground.