Dr. Robert Beeman
©2011 all rights reserved

Military pilots recognize three grades of landing an aircraft:

A Good landing is one you walk away from;

a Great landing is one your crew walks away from;

and a Textbook landing is one that doesn’t require fire suppression.

Writing requires fire suppression because writing is passion, and passion leaks.

Passion leaks out and gets all over everything just like aviation fuel across a hangar floor. You smell it first from yards away, an indefinable ‘something’ about you that marks you apart, not an especially pleasant odor, but strong and pungent, promising delivery of enough energy to loft a pair of wings over the next hill or to write a scene so horrible that even you shrink to revisit.

Everything around you is damp with it, a thin film, odorous, and to the casual dabbler in discourse extremely dangerous, It goes with you, soaks your clothing, suffuses beneath your attitudes toward everything. Nothing is untouched by the passion. Nothing is ever again free of the fuel’s sharp tang.

Your eternal, damnable “Why?” unsettles every fixed marker. Ah, so dear those markers…so carefully erected and set in place, so lovingly tended by those who move their death along day by day and need to mark their passage through a life of no whys.

Once in a while you yourself becomes one of those markers. Can’t be helped; if you’re good you sneak into the culture. And if you’re good enough to discard your own golden prose because it isn’t quite…good enough, well then, you might be a writer. Twain said it. “Eschew surplussage.”

AvGas can flash to fire in an instant and will take you with it through the hole that suddenly appears in the roof. The passion of writing is slo-mo except that every once in a while a holyshit moment sucks breath and robs speech. It was thus with this little piece on passion. It drove this writer up out of his warm, empty bed and to his keyboard, pausing briefly on his way through the kitchen to snatch a cup of industrial sludge sometimes referred to as day-old coffee.

Passion takes a little longer than aviation fuel but is no less consuming. Be careful of the fuel; it can snuff out your life in an instant. But be very wary of the passion of writing; it will consume your life just as completely but with far less film at eleven.

Markers…jet fuel…too many metaphors. Just say it. Say that being a writer means being apart from a world you might otherwise fit neatly into, being ignored by those whom you might wish to dazzle, thought arrogant by those whose favor you might covet, branded a social disease by those whom you might love, and generally appearing to be a major pain in everyone’s tookus.

This isn’t a persona put on and taken off like an overcoat, but a necessary part of loving oneself enough to shun the path well trodden and instead to strike forward and away toward the depths of the dark forest on the horizon. It roots deep, this passion; abides tight, holding the writer a willing prisoner in a lover’s soft, insistent embrace. And as you see all your words drop noiselessly into the Black Hole, it’s only good effect, it sometimes seems, is to destroy your small talk. How about them Bears?

A writing-person can write stuff and sell stuff without passion. But you’re not a writer until you spill the avgas all over the hanger sometimes throwing a match to it yourself.

Some youngster might read these words and feel the flame inside him. Might decide to turn his back on what everyone else tells him is real. That dark forest might call to him, ignite his own passion which would then leak forth like all the passion and all the good writing and sometimes like aviation fuel. All over the hangar floor. And of course nobody wants that.

A writer’s ‘why’ is a paper cut on the lower lip. Hurts all the time but won’t heal.

If he’s lucky.

So if, after my stern warnings of extreme danger you still feel the passion welling up inside you, starting to take control of your better judgment, forcing out of you the whys and then the heat and then the words that will brand you arrogant, selfish, distant, different…my friend, take heart! You might not be as good as you think you are, but you’re a damned sight better than most others think you are.

And after all, as somebody willing to go through life smelling of avgas – as a writer – you and I both know that your opinion is the only one that matters.

Author Bio: Dr. Robert Beeman\’s current novel, No More Time for Sorrow, is a rousing adventure story of the next terrorist attack on the Homeland, this time with atom bombs. Let\’s DESTROY global terrorism! Visit No More Time for Sorrow, Visit Dr. Beeman\’s anti-terrorist web site, Visit Dr. Beeman\’s blog site

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