THE ONE-EYED QUEEN: Inspo and Sanity

What inspires me to write is that I’ll go insane if I don’t. It’s very motivating.

My first recollection of using it as a coping mechanism, I’m not sure how old I was. Four, maybe five, unable to sleep because I was certain there was a tangle of snakes under my bed. I crept to the end of my mattress and stepped on the tiny pink chair to my tiny pink desk, then wrote a picturebook about princesses and monsters until the sun started rising, whereupon the snakes went to sleep and so could I.

I wrote a memoir when I was eleven, which strikes me as more and more hilarious the older I get. It was a thick black binder filled with loose leaf paper I kept at school in sixth grade, and whenever I finished the classwork ahead of everybody else, I would compose. It was essentially a journal, but I was sure it would someday rival War and Peace. Not that I’d read War and Peace at that age. Not that I’ve read it yet at the age I am now.

I tried novels all through junior high and high school, but I could never seem to finish one. I’d fall in love with an idea, scribble a few opening chapters, jump ahead to the part I really wanted to write, then give up.

It was in college that things changed. With writing, yes, because I stopped. But also with my life, my worldview. Several core beliefs I’d held dear turned out to be lies. Among the lesser of them was the truism that if you work hard and get a degree, a career complete with health insurance is yours as a parting gift. My liberal arts majors seemed worthless in 2003’s bad joke job market. I was twenty-two, working three part-time jobs, no benefits, no prospects, no direction, no hope.

One late night, driving home from my closing shift as a bookseller, I remembered a sketch I wrote in high school about a girl named Rainy. That became my ritual: get done with work, drive home, think of Rainy’s story.

Soon I was thinking of it during work, during the drive between jobs. During dreams.

I didn’t have a computer and couldn’t afford one, so I went to the public library. I was there whenever I didn’t have to be earning a paycheck, banging away on their public PCs, running to the reference section to consult an atlas on the frequent occasions I needed an interstate number.

Four months later, I had a draft. More than that, I had a reason to get up and fight.

It’s not a coincidence that, despite a lifelong adeptness with words, I couldn’t buckle down and finish a novel until my world fell apart and I had to cobble it back together. It was holding its shape on spit and a prayer, but it was my spit, damn it, and I’d finally learned a few things so ugly and fearsome in their truth, no one would ever dream of stealing them.

That almost all love is conditional.

That people rarely attend to the deeper motivations underlying their actions.

That ease is a far more common goal than decency.

That deciding to succeed at anything is deciding to fail a near-infinity of times first.

The drawback was, these truths were horrifying enough that even I turned away from them. I didn’t write for three years. I lived and taught in France. I worked retail in Minnesota. I got manicures. I went to parties.

None of it fit. I was an imposter in my own life.

It’s an exaggeration, I suppose, to say I was going insane, but I truly believe that if I’d spent much longer in this ruse, I’d have done something drastic. Joined the circus. Become a roadie for a rock band (which is basically joining the circus). Some crazy change that put me on highway after highway, city after city, gig after gig.

Instead I read my old book again. It was beyond awful. I’d had no idea how awful it was back when I first finished it — of course I didn’t, you never do, and nobody you share it with is going to tell you. But Rainy was in there somewhere, hidden and muzzled and badly pissed off.

I spent the next decade digging her out. I wrote eight other novels so I could get her novel right. I got an MFA, found an agent, sold my first book and tagged Blood Highway onto the deal, because I owed Rainy her day in the sun. She taught me that a great book isn’t entirely about inspiration, but it’s all about grit, just as a great life isn’t entirely about luck, but it’s all about doing the work.

And crucially, she taught me that when you choose to accept this as your reality, people will think you are nuts. Even though you could tell them, if asked: No, this is how I stay sane.

—

Gina Wohlsdorf is the author of Blood Highway and Security, an Amazon Best Book of 2016. She was born in Bismark, North Dakota, and graduated from Tulane University. In 2013 she earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia. She now lives in Colorado. Visit www.ginawohlsdorf.com.

About BLOOD HIGHWAY

“A sensational hard-boiled thriller as tough and uncompromising as its main character, Rainy Cain. Don’t miss this.”—Lee Child, bestselling author of The Midnight Line

Meet Rainy Cain, a tough, smart seventeen-year-old whose primary instinct is survival. That instinct is tested when her life is upended by the sudden appearance of her father, Sam, who she thought was long dead, but instead had been in prison for his part in an armored truck robbery gone murderously wrong. Now escaped and on the run, he kidnaps Rainy, who he is convinced knows where the money from the robbery, never recovered, is hidden.

Accompanied by a henchman with secret motives of his own, they set off on a cross-country dash to Big Sur, where Sam suspects his late wife stashed the cash. On their heels is a Minneapolis cop intent on bringing Rainy safely home.

It is an odyssey that will push Rainy to the limits of endurance, and that will keep readers guessing until the very end. What does Rainy really know—and what is she willing to sacrifice in order to live?

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing