Campbell Editorial - The Editor's Desk

If you remember your first kiss and if you're a novelist, sooner or later you're going to tell the world about it. But unlike kiss-and-tell memoirs, you're not going to tell anyone who you were with.

The writer who describes his first kiss is writing what he knows. That's what we're told to do; and it works, because readers who also remember their first kiss--first dance, first plane ride, first swim in the ocean--will feel a strong resonance with emotions and sensations they know to be true..

Of course I remember my first real kiss, and I'm not counting random aunts and grandmas and the older women of the church who were forever saying, "give us a kiss" as they enveloped me in Chanel Number 5 and a sneezy brand of face powder. I can write about those aunts, grandmas, and women of the church, but I prefer not to.

She who was there for my first kiss will not be named, for if she still walks this earth, she might chance upon this post and wonder why I'm talking about her decades after our lips met beneath the moon next to a quiet lake. Her lips were in no way like cherries, but they were wetter than I expected. Her green eyes were open and so were mine and our mixed breaths spun away from us as little wisps of steam in the cold night air.

This kiss is filed away in my mind's inventory of experiences in a box labeled "First Kiss." The dark-haired young woman whose lips were wetter than I expected is not identified in any of the files, notes, dreams, impressions and other artifacts in the box.

Now, whenever I write about a character's first kiss, I walk into the storage room and open that box. I mix and match what I find there with my character's traits, frame of reference, agenda and personality, so that by the time MY FIRST KISS appears in a novel as Frank's first kiss, she who was with me beside the quiet lake might feel a sense of deja vu. Perhaps she will wonder if I remember her. But she won't recognize our moment wrapped in a blanket on the cold night.

There are days when I wish I could forget, but the memories of first this and first that are too dear to discard. They are a part of what a writer knows--the raw material that he converts into realistic scenes and three-dimensional characters.

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet. but his books were read.'"

--Hilaire Belloc

"A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."

--John Milton

"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book."

--Samuel Johnson

"There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this."

--C. N. Bovee

"For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed."

--Henry Thoreau

“My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.” -- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

When I read this passage from Franny and Zooey as a high school student, a previously badly configured section of my brain booted up and I looked out the window at the yard and the children playing and the great wood behind the house and said, "yes!"

I cannot view the world without feeling that it and everyone in it are divine. Looking past what I see with physical eyes, I see swirls of energy. "Light" is a wonderful word for it. The world of form appears solid and real and I love it for it is beautiful and dear and provides experiences that are all part of the writer's journey--of everyone's journey.

Writing as a spiritual ritual connects me with the world beyond the physical. My sense of this is similar to a close-up view of an old newspaper half-tone where the very solid picture on the page is, at closer inspection, a sea of dots. This is easy to visualize now via the pixels in a digital photograph.

Sages and philosophers have told us that "all there is, is light." Writing, for me, is a connection to the light even when I'm writing my satirical "Jock Stewart" material or a quasi-mundane weblog post. But when my focus is on what I'm most passionate about, that connection is almost palpable. I am a being composed of photons holding a pen composed of photons pouring streams of photons--"I love you" "The stars filled the night sky" "Bob and Alice made love"--down upon a sheet of paper shimmering on my desk like a subset of the northern lights.

There is no separation here. Dualities and differences disappear. Races and cultures and religions and political viewpoints merge into a swirl of sparkling points of light, and it's all the same. There's nothing here that needs preaching about, no dogmas, no "my religion vs. your religion." Thinking of the world in this way is who I am. This is not to say that the words on the page are a prayer or an inspired gospel or a meditation, for that (to me) makes no sense.

What I feel as the words flow is a rhythm as sure and distinct as a shaman's drum and then the best of my words begin to come from a higher part of myself, the part who sees the light and the connectedness of all things. I write to experience that connection and the "inner knowing" that accompanies it.

As a writer, I live magical realism while I'm putting words on a page. The words may be variously badly organized, silly, pointless, boring, or covered with flaws I can't even see. Within the ritual itself, the words are the least important part of the process.

The process is its own reward.

When another writer tells me he had a wonderful writing session wherein his consciousness and his muse's consciousness were one and the same, I wonder if he felt that he was pure light writing with pure light.

Your Desktop Wallpaper

Just Might Inspire You

I've always wanted a cabin in the mountains for my writing space. While I like my crowded office, it doesn't have a window looking out onto an inspiring view.

So,I create my own with my desktop background.

I like this photograph of Grinnell Lake in Glacier National Park for several reasons. I know the valley well after having worked at the nearby Many Glacier Hotel.

I set my novel "The Sun Singer" in this valley and am now working on its sequel which is also set here.

So, it's easy to get into the novel when I used my computer screen as "my view" into the very world that I'm writing about.

My novel "Garden of Heaven" is about a mountain climber who climbs one of the most difficult peaks in the world, K2. It was easy to find inspiration looking at this image every day: