Join us for this tour from
Nov 23 to Dec 11, 2020!
The Joy of Being Lost
By Kevin W. Bates
Seriously, I remember lying in my bed at home in Berkeley when the room
evaporated and the music that often accompanied my literary journeys hushed. Wow.
That was and is a heady experience. I became addicted. I couldn’t get enough of
that feeling. At one point in junior high, I “borrowed” a book a day and returned it the
next. (Borrowed is in scare quotes because, to the chagrin of my lovely middle school
librarian wife Marianne, I never checked out any of these books owing to my
being pathologically shy and incapable of actually speaking to the librarian.
Fortunately, my sins were not revealed before we were safely married and she
couldn’t back out. Marianne discovered my black past when, five years after my
high school graduation, she stumbled on a book stamped “Berkeley High School
Library.”)
When I started writing after I retired, I discovered I could achieve the
same feeling when I wrote, only now I
was in charge. Such exhilaration! My characters were mine to command, or at
least so I thought at first. Soon I understood that my mastery over them was
limited. Showing a surprising stubbornness, some of them refused to obey me but
insisted on acting in surprising ways. And they pestered me. I had heard
authors talk about their characters as if they had separate lives, and I never
understood what they were talking about until I created my own. But frequently
when I took a break from writing Crossing
the Border or Prospector’s Run,
the characters would hound me to complete their story. It was eerie, but I came
to understand it as part of the experience of losing myself in my work.
No doubt this phenomenon says something deeply troubling about my psyche.
Certainly I have complexes aplenty. (If you’re a mental health professional
reading this, please don’t enlighten me in this regard. In Orwell’s immortal
words, “Ignorance is Bliss.”) At this point I’m tempted to offer a full-throated
defense of my habit, but you know what? I’m not going to. I enjoy it. That’s
the only defense I need or want to offer. I don’t care what it says about me or
my mental state. In fact, I’ll be even bolder: I hope my readers lose
themselves in my novels when they read hem the same way I was lost when I wrote
them. Because to me, imagination—that fierce engine behind losing ones self in
reading—is one of humankind’s greatest attributes. Every human creation, from
visual art to literature to technological marvels, first came into being in a person’s
mind when she was lost in thought.
So, lose yourself and revel in it. Train your mind to unmoor itself from
the physical world. Beyond the pleasure it brings, you may discover something
the world desperately needs.
Enter the Giveaway:
Thanks, Jasmine for hosting Prospector's Run on tour and allowing me to guest post!
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome! :)
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