The terms were simple enough. He would give me the story and all I had to do was write it.
Of course, that is exactly how the devil would describe the contract. Apparently, writing an entire novel was all there was to it. That’s it. That’s all. Done.
But there was a ritual before I could enter the space where the story was waiting.
Refusing to sleep in a bed, keeping an irregular sleep schedule. Nighttime excursions walking around the house talking to myself. Sometimes those excursions become nighttime caffeine runs where I contemplate light and shadows and ruminate on the shadows within my own mind. If I remain there long enough, I hear the faint pleas of my characters.
Characters. These people I concocted. Or at least I thought I concocted them.
In order to enter that space, one must pass through the darkness of separation from this world. It can be symbolic in the form of some physical ritual, or it can be a literal passage into darkness and the underworld of the caves as our ancestors did. I imagine them down there grappling with their growing sense of self. Awareness. I cannot know exactly what they thought. I just keep thinking about what it means to leave daylight behind and enter a place where you can only see the little bit of light you carried with you.
That is what the house becomes for me.
Loneliness, darkness and confrontation with our own shadows are part of that process. I’m in that place right now. It’s part of the deal.
And somewhere in all of this I realized I was not merely walking around inside a dark house. I was walking around inside the mind who concocted this whole scheme, these characters, this story.
My mind.
That was where I sat with the devil.
I looked him squarely in the face and he said he would give me the story and all I had to do was write it.
Don’t think. Write.
Don’t come up with fancy phrases to impress. Write.
Shoutout to my man, the legendary blues singer, Robert Johnson.
It was as if he reached out his hand, touched my soul, and spoke to me from the darkness…
In order to share it with those who inhabit the light.
The strange part is that I thought the devil was supposed to tempt me with vanity.
The devil in us is us.
I keep returning to this thought that one must pass through hell and consort with the devil in order to truly make it into heaven. Men and women of great… depth? Spiritual courage? I still cannot quite find the word. They accomplish this before they die. Suffering by itself is not the art; people suffer every day. The art is entering that place and returning with something.
Then I started thinking about the characters.
The first way I said it was that the characters are merely different manifestations of this devil inside of us.
James is easy. He owns people. I can point at him and say there is the devil and leave it there. Then I get to Logan with his father’s voice already inside his head. Alexander has rage and payback in him. Then Auntie Mary and Venus and it gets more complicated because I don’t know yet. I haven’t written enough of them. That’s the God honest truth.
Then I started thinking how we would have loved to see George Lucas do this while he was writing Star Wars.
The process I’m working on is simply this…writers hide behind the characters in their story. I’m turning the tables on this by selectively, and I want to emphasize selectively, revealing my deepest repressed thoughts to include my fears and hopes while weaving the narrative and do it in such a dramatic fashion as to create a behind the scenes mythology surrounding the work.
As soon as your eyes see the title you misunderstand it. You think I’m referring to some type of witchcraft where I literally sit down and make a deal with a devil. The same thing with certain things in a book.
Listen, I’ve got to have the restraint to just let the story reveal itself without sitting down and explaining everything.
Let the reader figure it out. Let the reader draw their own conclusions.
Interestingly provocative!