WRITING ADVICE FOR A BROKEN HEART HOSPITAL CAMPOUT

Writing advice from writers usually comes with a warning, or should: This is what works for them.

It might work for you or another writer, but it definitely works for them.

After a single night campout in a hospital bed, their advice carried more weight for better or worse.

A week out from the event gives it more clarity, like pulling an old manuscript out of the drawer for another go.

Now I’m an old man-uscript? If that’s true, then at least I’m out of the drawer.

WRITING ADVICE FROM:

Ernest J. Gaines:

“Content is probably only 40% of it, no more than 50% as far as I’m concerned.

“If a book doesn’t have form, then damn it, it ain’t no novel. We can go down the block right now and find a guy on the next corner who’ll tell the biggest and truest story you can ever hear.

“Now, putting that story down on paper so a million people can read and feel and hear it like you on that street corner, that’s going to take form. That’s writing.”

They said something about my wrist. Hey, my wrist is fine. It’s not my wrist. Has anyone read the file? It’s not about my wrist or my ankle. I didn’t come in for either wrist. Let’s leave my fucking wrist out of the picture?

They talked among themselves while they gathered their gear.

“We’ll try the wrist for the angiogram first. If we can’t get it there, we’ll use the groin so let’s shave the region just in case.”

Shave the region like everyone heard about in seventh grade? “If you shave it comes back twice as thick,” said the hairy kid in PE class,” which is not a question for medical staff, but they need to know their patient.

“Great, now I’ll have a five o’clock shadow on the six.”

“This is standard procedure.”

“So no artistic designs?”

Buzzzzzz, zzzzz, zzzzz.

“Not this time.”

THE HEARTBEAT OF LIFE?

Walt Whitman:

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

I like a good secret, though I need work on keeping a secret. I wouldn’t tell me anything secret.

The problem with writing in the moment in a cardiac ward was the gear on my right hand.

With an IV plugged into the top and the thing in the image around my wrist, a pencil didn’t fit in with the program.

My wrist had what looked like a clear watch and watch band but the crystal was on the bottom. Its purpose was to apply direct pressure over the hole in my artery the angiogram tube went in. The syringe was an air pump.

Somehow my hand didn’t turn purple from lack of circulation because someone figured out how to apply direct pressure directly, which was reassuring with words like ‘bleeding out’ from a broken artery floated around.

Instead of a spurting a fountain from the end of my arm, I had a bracelet with a window. They came in to check often and release a tiny bit of air until it healed enough for a bandage.

Along with, “Don’t use this hand for two weeks.”

“So the wrist artery worked for the angiogram? Can’t wait to show off my new do.”

STILL A GOOD MYSTERY

Ken Kesey:

“The job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”

The need for mystery is good writing advice, not so good for a broken heart syndrome in cardiac care. No mysteries, thank you very much.

The real mystery started with a memorial service postponed a year. It was for my step-dad. The last time I saw him was through a window in a surgical re-hab unit on 9-11-2020.

He was the answer to a relationship question my mom had decades earlier.

First we climbed out on the rocks of Sunset Bay at low tide, then gathered up later at a wonderful rental near Bastendorff Beach. The whole day glowed with the sort of heart warming love you hear about in movies.

It filled my heart with joy, and more.

A lot more as it turns out, so much more I grew an extra space to carry it.

On one the best days of my adult life I wouldn’t change a thing. Sure I landed in a hospital, but I still wouldn’t change a thing.

Is that a mystery in any sense of looking for an answer? It’s one I can live with.

‘Live with’ being the key word here.

Writing Advice To Live By

Everyone’s got a story, a good story, but not a story often told.

Then when they do tell their story they have to cut through to an audience looking at their phone, the TV, their computer.

On top of that, we hear that everything worth saying has been said before.

So why bother, you ask?

Because not everyone has heard what’s already been said before. It takes repetition with a twist to get past the barriers to some semblance of undivided attention.

The story teller on Ernest J. Gaines’ street corner a couple of blocks over changes volume and voices and moves around and makes eye contact. He suspends disbelief for his unbelievable tale.

Walt Whitman’s moment is shrouded in personal mysticism:

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not 
my soul.

Ken Kesey’s work is an answer to the question of what to do with everything you started.

Keep working.

Keep working to understand yourself and others.

Keep working to feel the empty places in people’s lives and how they fill it.

Most important, lock your mind to the notion that what you do and who you are matters beyond your own perceptions.

Check your own heart on that last one.