Why I Write, Maureen Joyce Connoly
If you ask an author why they write, you will get as many responses as the number you ask. The question implies choice, but for me, I’m no longer certain that I’m an active participant as to whether I write or not.
My motivation, if you call it that, developed subconsciously and grew over time. Most of my life I appeared normal, but beneath the surface my imagination was writhing and squirming until it became something I could no longer suppress. This process took years with fits and starts and in which uncertainty reined – you know, all the stuff our conscious minds chirp incessantly at us.
While I can tell you what inspires me, I’m not sure if I fully understand what spurs me on to capture that inspiration into words, except that I simply have no choice. Here’s a confession, I’m not sure I would write if I could get away with not doing it. There are days when it is a chore and it never really comes easily to me, (took almost ten years to finish my debut novel, Little Lovely Things). So what then is my driver?
I was always that kid, that person, who searched for meaning in the smallest details of life – an archeologist of unearthing the central metaphor of any given thing or situation. It’s as if my imagination is a type of sensory organ, one that combines all the other senses and, synthesizes them into something new; something that requires an outlet. It’s like experiencing the world as an overabundance of inspiration. To put it in my husband’s words – If you don’t write, Maureen, your head will explode.
The best metaphor that parallels my experience is my dog, Huckleberry. Think not just terrier, but a Jack Russell, which equates to terrier squared. Everything you’ve heard is true; their infamous energy, their caricature-like exhibition of the most minor doggy traits. You have to own one to understand the experience.
Huckleberry is the clown fish in an aquarium. He’s the court jester in the castle, the pogo stick at a hula hoop convention. If he does not receive a bracing walk every day in addition to furious romps around our one acre back yard, we have a raging lunatic of playfulness on our hands, one that will not take no for an answer. Think toddler. Exactly like my over active imagination.
The similarities are striking. I obsess over each and every word in a phrase – hence the decade it took to finish a novel. Everything that enters Huck’s sphere of reality is assessed with mission-like intensity. He destroys toys with surgical precision and terrifying fervor. I have ordered double stitched Kevlar playthings designed for police and guard dogs. They barely last a week. Aside from the fire place hearth where he lays belly up toward the flames which we’ve had to pull him back from when he begins to smell like dog toast (not a pleasant odor), he is rarely found without some body part on or against a human.
Just like my brain, Huck’s is brimming with curiosity. While I explore minutia about a character’s backstory – the smell of a grandmother’s kitchen, even though its generations removed from relevance – every item Huck comes across must be explored with his vacuum-like nostrils. The indentation our cat leaves after abandoning his nap spot – for the hundredth time – is scrutinized with Huck’s snout with the same vigor of investigating a new bone.
I often get stuck on a descriptive element and write pages only to keep a sentence or two in the final version. When Huck gets particularly interested in a spot during a walk, he plants himself anvil-like, his fourteen-pound body literally quaking with delight. This has been fondly labelled a sniff-a-roo moment, only one of the phrases that Huck’s antics has insinuated into the lexicon of our family. Curling into a tight nap position? That’s now called cashew-ing. When it’s time for his evening potty run, we call out Clickety-Click, and he dashes like a herd of elephants to the front door to be snapped into his invisible fence collar.
This last point is important. We send him into the smallish front yard because in the back, late at night with the moon beaming and shadows creeping, he loses himself. Every little noise becomes a rodent on the move, the wind itself a partner in his overload, carrying scents too heavy to be supported by a daytime sniffy wind. Out back, Huck is simply beyond calling in for the night. All the temptations are so great that he is unable to respond, or even acknowledge, that he is being summoned.
So, why do I write? It’s really quite simple. In the same manner that if Huck doesn’t get his walk, he just might self-immolate with curiosity, or hyper-ventilate on the poodle odor next door, or lose his voice overreacting to a UPS van droning past. My husband is correct, I do indeed write so my head doesn’t explode.
But I also write because there is no joy that even approximates the experience. Because I’ve learned that if one’s imagination is boundless, it can’t be contained. Call Huckleberry my twin soul, my four-legged muse. I know that Huck, in his own doggy way, is the very extension of my imagination. He’s my living example of encouragement, of unfettered eagerness to go, go, go!
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Maureen is a former owner of a consulting firm that helped specialty drug companies to develop medications for ultra-rare diseases. Maureen received her Bachelor’s degree in physiology from Michigan State University and her Master’s degree in Liberal Studies from Wesleyan University. Her background in science and love of the natural world informs and inspires her writing. LITTLE LOVELY THINGS is her debut as a novelist. She is also an award-winning poet, published in diverse outlets such as Emory University’s Lullwater Review and Yankee Magazine.
Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/MConnollyAuthor
Find out more about her on her website https://maureenjconnolly.com/
“A shattering adventure.” ― Jacquelyn Mitchard, bestselling author of The Deep End of the Ocean
If only things had been different
It is the wrong time to get sick. Speeding down the highway on the way to work, her two little girls sleeping in the back seat, medical resident Claire Rawlings doesn’t have time for the nausea overtaking her. But as the world tilts sideways, she pulls into a gas station, runs to the bathroom, and passes out. When she wakes up minutes later, her car―and her daughters―are gone.
The police have no leads, and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls. All she has to hold on to are her strained marriage, a potentially unreliable witness who emerges days later, and the desperate but unquenchable belief that her daughters are out there somewhere.
As hopeful and uplifting as it is devastating, Little Lovely Things is the story of a family shattered by unthinkable tragedy, and the unexpected intersection of heartbreak and hope.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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