Gravediggers: Respecting Death, Part 2

Photo 1: Elmsgrove Cemetery, NH.  Notice the doorknob on the upper left.  And think: What if something were to suddenly peer at you from the hole?
Photo 2: Weeping willow, or tree, or fountain design.  Cemetery in the middle of a gravel road in the mountains of NH. 
Photo 3: Tree and urn design.  Very common.  Sometimes just tree; sometimes just urn.  Sometimes tree and urn.  In Sharon, MA.
Photo 4: Sometimes a grinning skull with wings design.  Billings Cemetery, Sharon, MA.
Photo 5: And sometimes nothing at all, especially if you're poor.  A crude and uneven cut that you can tell someone did his best with.  (Notice the equidistant measuring line down the middle.) In NH.
Photo 6: And sometimes you get a stone that's isolated and forgotten about forever.  (Stone's buried in greenage just to the left of dead center.  Sorry.)  Upon closer inspection, this was of an Abigail A.  Up the street from #2, one gravestone by itself in the woods.  Makes you wonder.

(cont'd from previous entry)

It wasn't always that way.  People used to die in their homes all the time--i.e. Romeo and Juliet and The Last Days of Dogtown, among many other works.  This was up until the early 20th century.  During plague and flu epidemics, people had wakes in their living rooms on a weekly basis, if not daily.  And elderly and/or dying people weren't shipped away to die, either--they stayed home and died in front of everyone, slowly and often painfully, and not without a little bit of smell.  They were there, always in the mind's eye--and the center of the living room, if not in their own little room, hidden away upstairs.  But this was why Death was more of an actual character in fiction and poetry then--like in many of Chaucer's, Caravaggio's and Poe's tales.  Death was always there, a part of daily, accepted life.  Gravestones show this (see last post)--as Death predominated, so it did on headstones, often dancing and smiling.  Later, as it ebbed somewhat from daily occurrence and acceptance--as medicine improved and facilities and hospitals flourished--angels and fountains replaced skeletons and grinning skulls on tombstones.  Life got easier--or at least we made it seem that way.  Today, if you've noticed, the faces of the dead people themselves are frequently on their own gravestones, as the focus has shifted completely from Death to ourselves.  Or we make it seem that way.  I can't tell which is creepier--the grinning skulls or the grinning, life-like, dead people.  I think I'd take the skulls.

Or maybe Death just used to be handled more immediately, more respectfully.  Not as something to be dismissed and shunted aside--like we do when we banish the dying or elderly to facilities--but as something instead that must be DEALT WITH.

So, anyway, Gravediggers does that.  Death is IN YOUR FACE on every page--because, man, that's the way it used to be.  That's the way it was before we got so scared that we SANITIZED everything.  Gravediggers has an incubus (or is it a succubus?) and flus, and plagues and AIDS and a future filovirus so that there'll be no one to sanitize death anymore--it'll be a dead body in every room in every house, or in every backyard, basement or attic, every crypt, every church--it'll be everywhere, felt by everyone, so that there'll be no one left to even bury the gravediggers.

A Real Achievement

A bit of an eye-opener today: an e-friend of mine wrote to say that I should be congratulated, that a 76,000-word, complete novel is a real achievement.  Funny that I'd never, not once, thought of it that way.  I've always been so hellbent on being published that the actual completion of the manuscript wasn't a big deal to me.  I'd felt, and still do to an extent, that if I didn't get the novel published, I (and it) was a failure.  Period.  The completion of it was nothing special--though I'd been through a bit of hell to finish it--and the only purpose of its existence was to see it published.

I now see that this was a bad attitude to have toward the art of writing, as well as towards the business in general.  First novels don't sell, usually.  Unless you're J.D. Salinger, or Harper Lee, or maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald, your first completed manuscript won't ever see the light of day.  More importantly, most aspiring writers don't ever finish their first novel-length manuscript.  They say they're writing, and they call themselves writers, but they're not writing, and most of these writers never complete anything.

I did.  I not only finished what is called a publishable manuscript (even by the agents who've rejected it), but I also wrote a lot more stuff and eventually sold a story to a print magazine.  These are achievements--not only the published stuff, but the completed stuff.  Novels, stories, poems, essays, etc.  Everything a writer finishes is an achievement, and as long as I continue to see it that way, I will finish more pieces, and perhaps sell more.  If I only think of my writing as a success if I sell it, than most of the time I will feel like a failure--which I had, especially during an eight-year hiatus from writing at all.  (For some reason, I found myself saying that to a roomful of professors and writers, all of whom expressed their condolences to me, and who told me to continue writing, that I was too good to stop for any reason.)

So I say all of this not only for myself, but for every writer who reads this blog.  Do not think of your writing solely as potentially published pieces; if you do, and if they don't sell, you'll fall victim to despair like I did.  Look at your writing as potentially living and breathing pieces; this way, once you've completed them (and I do mean fully complete, not just a "rough draft" complete), you'll feel as if you've given life to something that had never existed before.  You'll feel a sense of accomplishment.  This way, also, you won't be waiting around for that piece to sell; you'll feel successful and write (and complete) something else.

Tricks to Write Consistently

I used to write very consistently, every day.  Of course, that was before I had a rewarding, but draining, job; this was also before I had anything closely resembling a life, as well.  Now I have both, and the caveat to that, which in a million years I never would have foreseen, is that I don't do as much writing anymore.  Sitting down and getting into a writing zone now takes more time than the actual writing itself used to.  I just can't focus; I can't shut my mind down on my day, or things coming up, etc. and focus on what I need to write.

If you've read this blog for awhile, you saw entries on all of my ideas about viruses, vampires (of course; though in my defense, I started The Gravediggers in the mid-90s, before it actually became something that everyone and their brother wrote), concentration camps, WW2, and all of the other things I've mentioned as ideas.  I have a million of them, and I start things, and then I get excited about something else, or my career rears its head, or I simply lose focus on writing in general--and everything just peters out.  All of those great ideas, all of that energy and positive feeling...just...drift away.

Reading a lot used to help.  Now, all of that reading time is all I've got for creative time, so all reading, no writing.  Reading used to help writing--until about two years ago.  Then a few months ago, I started taking pictures that tied into my writing, and that helped a lot...for a few months.  Now that I've taken all the pictures I can take, that process is of little help now.  These days, it's all photos, no writing.

Then, a few days ago, I realized that I hadn't written any poems in a long time.  While I would never say I was a gifted poet--or even a good one--I can say that writing poems would focus me, ground me into whatever I was writing at the time.  The poems themselves didn't have to correlate with whatever project I was working on at the time--though they sometimes did--but the very process of writing them apparently would hone my focus to such a degree that I was able to work on my longer creations.  Somehow, as so often happens to hyper and unfocused people like me, I stopped doing that, got sidetracked, and never went back.

So now I will work on poems again, and although Frost and Dickinson don't need to worry about their posterity, maybe, just maybe, some present-day novelists should be looking over their shoulders and not ignoring the dustcloud that just kicked up a long, long way back, just ahead of the horizon behind them.  Wish me luck, everyone, and if you have any tricks to help me along, I'll gladly listen.