Taking It All Off: Part Two

(continued from yesterday's post)

“My heart is raw from revelation,

keening to be covered,

yet I am pressed on by the elation,

of the you I have discovered

when I tiptoed to the edge, the edge of you,

only to flee from your intimacy,

then crawl to the edge anew..."

I am in awe of the teenager who had the courage to write these daring words to a twenty-three year old man she hardly knew. In a made-for-TV movie, the script would have called for the man to callously rip up the poem, rejecting me along with my rash lyrics. I would have spent the next two and a half hours descending into alcoholism, prostitution, and petty crime, hitting bottom in a murder-suicide moments before the last commercial break.

Why didn't these tragic consequences occur to me as I wrote? I think it was because I was so high on "elation" that I ignored the risk. I had the courage to write. I had the courage to reveal myself.

And that’s when I knew, sitting there with that letter from long ago in my hand, that I was finally hearing Revelation speak. It wasn't a command to write young adult thrillers. It wasn't the title of my middle grade novel that would capture the Newbery Medal. It was simply that I had been looking for answers in the wrong places. I had been searching the sky for a booming voice when I should have been searching myself. I had been awaiting a revelation, when I was the one who was supposed to be doing the revealing.

If I wanted to see “What I Was Here For,” I was going to have to take off some clothes and look. At myself. More than that, if I wanted to write convincing fiction, I was going to have let other people look at me in my (emotional) underwear. Or in even less. For it is only the revelation of my soul will draw readers to my words. Readers who hope to watch me dancing naked there, and learn something from my awkward steps about the dance they were created to perform.

Can I do this? Can I do it for my intended audience of young readers? Children are not ashamed of their nakedness. More than that, they snub any book in which they sense the author is a coward. If I want to earn them as readers, I will have to write about my ugliest mistakes and my most humiliating moments. I will have to write about laughing so hard on the third-grade playground that I peed in my pants. I will have to write about dreading school bus conversations, when I had to fake knowledge of the Fonz to conceal my family's embarrassing lack of a television set. I will have to write about crying in sixth grade when my best friend hid my glasses, and ridiculed me for my near blindness–in front of those she expected to be her new best friends.

How will I be able to do this? My hope is that elation will shove me on, that the promise of its heady joy will push me off cliffs and into snakepits. That its glow will not allow my work to hide in the recesses of my desk drawers. Without elation, I would cringe at Revelation's voice. For it really did say, "I have created thee to dance naked on the tabletops of Knoxville, Tennessee." And everywhere else I want my words to be read.