I spent a long time living with a self-imposed fallacy that I had to somehow pick one creative pursuit and that was the Only Thing. And beyond that, I had to pick one genre, one thing that people could recognize as My Wheelhouse, and that would be the Thing.
That led to a great many years padlocked by my own flawed ideas about how creativity worked, about Art, about Making Things. As a kid I did all the kid things; I drew, I crafted, I wrote, I played. There were even attempts to teach me musical ability. At some point, I discovered that writing and building worlds and spending time in them with imaginary friends was my favorite of all the creative pursuits, and here’s where the little flaw crept into my thinking: I made that My Thing.
I lost interest in drawing, or making stuff. My skills at building model cars faded away. I was a crafter of words and I threw myself into that. No shade on other pursuits, of course; in many ways the flashier, performative arts get much more recognition than writing. All of it is necessary and good to keep the world spinning. It’s just that I had this idea in my head that I had to choose One Thing and that was it, that was what I did.
And really, that was fine for a long while. I scribbled, I told stories and built worlds and wrote books about them. Good times. If I indulged in other creative pursuits—dancing, occasionally painting stripes on a piece of furniture or a car, or shoving a floor lamp through a defunct cello—that was just a thing I’d done. Not art, per se. I wouldn’t have dared CALL myself an artist, that wasn’t my One Thing and it was arrogance to say otherwise. I was a Writer, everyone knew that. Education, career, and primary creative pursuits all revolved around the written word. I explored the world and translated it into my own worlds.
Then, as they say, some shit happened. Things got awfully broken in the really-real world. My words, the ones for the outside at least, dried up. Inside? The imaginary friends kept right on, and the worlds churned away, but none of it escaped to the outside. I wrote a little for myself here and there, pasted together ridiculous things to share with friends, but that was largely it. I stayed away from the keyboard, my handwriting turned illegible and swallowed anything I wrote longhand.
I started playing in the trash instead. Dragged home furniture from trash piles and fixed it, or turned it into other things. I scooped out my house and started refilling it with repurposed things, things screwed together from other things. I pulled down the drop ceiling and replaced it with trash-salvaged antique doors. I fixed things. As the really-real world tilted farther and farther off-center, I went with it, I dragged even more junk home, attached it to things. The boundaries of what were and were not allowed to be got really … watery. Why couldn’t I combine a bicycle and a grocery cart? I knew people who could help with the welding, and junk bikes are cheap. Why couldn’t I cut the roof off of a car? It was mine, and the roof interfered with the way it needed to look.
“This is art,” people said, and I thought, No, it isn’t. This is just the dumb stuff I do. No shade, of course. I like my dumb stuff. But I didn’t think of it as having the same higher purpose as, you know, actual art. Not the same as writing. You pick one Thing You Do and stick with it, that’s the rules.
I don’t recall what junkyard I was wandering through when that changed. I don’t remember what I was looking for either. I only recall suddenly being aware of roaming through a vast trashpile of possibility, of looking at the scrapped vehicles and disembodied car parts and the discarded fragments of lives that inevitably end up in the scrap heap with them, and it was recombining itself in my head, begging for ways to be repurposed into new forms.
Just like the real world, and my imaginary ones. It was the same process. Take bits of the real world, shake them up, paste them back together, and use their shadows to create new worlds. Busted-up bits of junk could do the same thing, in a different way. One can’t grow up in Tyree Guyton’s stomping grounds without having an innate knowledge of that.
Even with that staring me in the face, not gonna lie, I still didn’t see it right away. I tricked myself into it.
See, here’s the thing, I’ve always been a car kid. Since birth, just about. Insert so many anecdotes about being a tiny car addict that it’s embarrassing. Cars, like writing, were My Thing, and have been for as long as I recall. And I had combined the two before; I spent fifteen years as an automotive journalist. It was a pretty natural intersection. Cars and fiction, not so much. I learned early on that if you stuff too many cars into a story, it gets … weighed down. We’re talking Andy Weir-grade hard sci-fi, only with cars instead of science. Not a big market for that. I was fully aware of this: at some point I dashed off an incredibly long and rambly Stupid Car Novel, was very pleased with myself, and put it away, having gotten that out of my system.
That never stopped me from building them, though. Oh, yes—hand in hand with worldbuilding came car-building. In anything I wrote, there were vehicles. All the cars rumbling around in the background of my writing were fully-formed from sunroof to lug nuts; I just left the details out, because for the most part, nobody cared if the truck in question had a supercharged V8 or a diesel-powered straight six under the hood.
That’s the idea that snuck in the back door as I opened myself up to the possibility of the junkyard: I’d imagined plenty of cars and the really-real world had gotten some big cracks in it, and I started thinking that maybe those cracks were big enough to drive a car through.
So I did. I built a car from the stories, just like I had created it. Then, I went the other way, and built a car, and put it in the stories. As I wandered around in the scrap and brought things back to life, the words started to flow again. How did I not realize it was all coming from the same place?
Yeah, all this stuff is intertwined, the cars and the scavenging and the writing. I don’t know if it’s safer to say that I have a bunch of Things, or if I have one large, sprawling, extremely specific Thing. Maybe I’ve just decided that it’s safer to live in my made-up worlds and the best way to do that is to drag a bunch of stuff out and set it up around the entrance to the really-real world, like a metaphysical foyer. The Mercedes that’s been gutted and rebuilt as a post-apocalyptic scavenger’s vehicle direct from my book is a metaphorical fern in a flowerpot on my porch, letting folks know what kind of house they’re about to walk into.
What all that taught me was not to worry about sticking to my Thing. It’s not a finite reservoir that it all comes from, so there’s no waste in letting it take whatever form it wants to and not thinking too hard about it. It’s all coming from me, so it’s ALL going to be my Thing.
Somehow, that wasn’t obvious from the start.
