Barbara Roush

            I’ve been writing stories ever since I was six years old.  It’s not something I recommend.  It’s isolating, frustrating, eye-blurring.  There must be a thousand other activities that are more satisfying and useful for humanity.  Nevertheless, I write.  I don’t know why I write, although I suppose I could make up a lot of fancy-sounding explanations.

 

            I just know that I HAVE to write.  If I don’t, I become fidgety, grouchy, intolerable to be around.  Does this sound like an addiction?  I guess you could call it that.

            Most of the time this drug makes me miserable.  There are days when I can’t get started, or when I have to rewrite a paragraph five, ten, or twenty times.  Now that there are computers I can waste a whole morning looking up irrelevant items on the internet.  But oh, the highs!  The wonderful feeling of knowing that a certain phrase is just right, that the plot has finally gelled, that a character has taken on a life of his or her own, so much more interesting than my original intentions!

 

            There are all sorts of writers.   Some have incredible imagination, conjuring up amazing planets, galaxies, creatures; others tell tales dripping with horror and blood, murder and mayhem, devils and phantoms.   I myself belong to the group which needs something personal as a springboard; even in my one attempt at historical fiction, with a mixed-race narrator and a murder or two, there are still psychological truths that remain close to what I have experienced in my own life.  Indeed, sometimes I wonder if the reason I write might be to take an event that happened in the past and then mull, macerate, and manipulate it until I can deal with it.

 

            Some writers latch onto a formula and, if they’re lucky, they can make money at it.  I don’t know what they’re like inside.  However, I believe I speak for the “personal” writers like myself when I say that a necessary ingredient is just the right amount of unhappiness (with anger, disgust, and anxiety thrown in to varying degrees).  If one is too happy one cannot manage to get up from the couch where one has been conversing with friends, watching TV, or eating delicious take-out; who wants torture when one is having a perfectly good time?   If one is too unhappy, just getting out of bed is a major accomplishment and therefore writing a page is too much to hope for; besides, what’s the point?  Therefore, a just-right amount of unhappiness is necessary, although I would admit that many authors seem to lean more towards the deeply miserable side of the equation.  Indeed, I am beginning to wonder if I am unhappy enough to continue this passion that has taken up so many years of my life thus far.  I am less fidgety, less needful of writing to compensate for whatever it was that caused anguish.  Somehow, now that I am retired and on my own time I have found peace.  I can spend hours simply looking at the sunlight on the leaves or walking in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, which is right across the street from my apartment. 

 

            Thus, I am beginning to think that I will never write The Big One, or at least, the One that current-day publishers are looking for.  It is possible that I am a dinosaur.  One needs to have the right thoughts for the right times.   I was ahead of my time for many years.  Now, I suspect, I have fallen behind.  But there must be some like-minded readers out there, and with that in mind, I have created this site (with the help of my friend Matteo Pittoni) to share some of the things I have written.  I continue to send out a few short stories and some of my novels.  One can always hope, after all!  But basically, I have resigned myself to being a nobody, as Emily would say: