Now I'm listening to "Sacred Chants of Shiva from the banks of the Ganges". Shiva the destroyer of the world, who is responsible in the Hindu god pantheon, for change both in the form of death and destruction and in the positive sense of the shedding of old habits. The music makes me want to read the Mahabarata again. I'ts been 15 years since I've read this epic, and I still have my authentic Indian book I bought in NYC.

The sun was out briefly this morning, but now it's raining again. I had a productive morning and already completed a timed freewrite. I am going back to basics with my writing, and doing timed freewrites. I think my writing has become too introspective, too inner directed. When I did first timed freewrite late last night and read it over, I was shocked how seriously lacking in detail my piece was.

Natalie Goldberg is right. Journal writing is not great writing practice. It's good for getting your thoughts out and reflecting on the events of your life, but it's too focused on the self and your own thoughts. Journal writing has been good for me and I have but one regret; that I did not keep my journals from age 8 to 18 years. It would have been fascinating to see what I was writing about during that time period. At least I have my journals from college on, and a file full of all the poetry I wrote in college.

But timed writing is different. When I wrote this morning and trying to get more detailed in my writing, I felt fear coming up. It's the same fear I felt in acting class that I could never get over, and that was being "naked" on stage". When you're on stage, you have to open up, you have to let the world see all of you, see your character in all their gloried humanity and flaws. It was too frightening for me to open up like that, even though I was always playing characters that were never like me. When I took my first acting class in college, I remember thinking that acting was great because I could hide behind a character and let my emotions out. It really wasn't me on stage being watched, it was me being someone else, and I could let my feelings out through my characters. Acting was therapeutic back then.

I should have remembered a friend of mine telling me back then how freaked out how became when he was playing a murderer on stage, because he had to reach inside of himself to find the cruelty necessary to play the character. Once he found it, he realized it had always been there and that bothered him because he had always thought of himself as a kind person.

My first monologue in college was a speech from a Eugene O'Neill play that I fell in love with in junior high. The woman was a morphine addict, and I so related to how she talked and felt. II know I was thinking to myself, I can do this. I know what this feel likes, I've experienced youthful drug addiction; this speech is going to be a piece of cake.

But when I was rehearsing the monologue my acting teacher Sandy kept telling me I wasn't reaching far enough inside, i wasn't relating enough to how my character felt. My speech was when she was high on morphine and talking to one of her sons. Sandy kept saying I wasn't achieving the distance from reality that a drug takes a person, and I kept thinking to myself but I know how that feels, I experienced it myself, I know how drugs take you away, so far away to a place where you feel safe, where it's only you and the drug and everyone else in your world is at a safe distance where they can't hurt you, they can't touch you, where the hurt and rage you feel inside subsides, is quiet, you know it's still there but the drugs have quieted the demons.

But looking back, Sandy was probably right about me. I couldn't really get that character right because I would have had to go back and experience that distance, which have meant experiencing that hurt and rage all over again and I know I couldn't have done it back then. I was too young, I was still too close to the experience and it had only been a few years since it all happened. Besides, I was still walking around with 4o hits of pharmaceutical speed in my backpack just in case I needed it. I loved that distance, I loved my safe place, but not without the help of my drug to get there and I knew that despite my need to carry my drug, I could never visit that place again because the price of my health I paid for the fare to get there had been far too high and I was unwilling to pay that price again.

When I did a timed writing this morning, it made me cry to remember the details. Remembering the details brought back all the pain, all the hurt, all the rage. They god is the details, but the hurt and pain are also there and writing about them makes it all come back in real time. And in my writing I couldn't slow down. I kept trying to, to remember details but with details come pain and memories. Screw "show don't tell"! Showing means reliving again and again. Telling is better, telling achieves distance without the necessary drugs.

But I have to able to show, I have to be able to write details, and so somehow I must get through this wall that I could never get through in my acting, and that I only very rarely get through in my writing. Maybe mining my own memories doesn't work for me. Maybe I need to get through to the memories with a character like in acting. Characters are not me, they are a fictional me. I can make them stronger, I can give give them strength I know I don't have. They can mine my life for details that they can transform as details in their own world. I know my writing works best for me when I write as a completely different character and my character is telling their story, which is sort of my story only transformed into their fictional world.

There's a line from the USA series "Witchblade" that I like, "in your world, parallel lines always meet".

From Natalie Goldberg's book, "Wild Mind" when she was talking to a friend about how writing is an addiciton and the friend told her, "No, Natalie, an addiction diminishes you. You have not been diminished by writing. It is your passion."

And then she writes later on in the book about Linda Leonard, who was writing a new book about creativity and addiction.
"....both the artist and the alcoholic have parrallet paths. They both go into the darkness, but the alcoholic gets stuck there. The artists (if he/she is alos not addicted) goes into the darkness and is transformed by the experience and comes out more alive. I picture the artist as someone deep-sea diving, holding her breath and bursting out of the water into the air six minutes later, one hundred feet from where she begain, with sun catching the water spray. The alcoholic dives down and gets caught in the sludge or is mesmerized by the underwater world and drowns. The good thing is the artist can move through the experience, learn from the experience, and not be caught by it. Writing and reading can give us."

In my world, I hope parallel lines do meet to create heart-breaking stories.