Writing Yourself Out of Life's Unexpected Calamities
     Paul Alan Fahey

If you really think about it, it’s amazing what can happen in a month’s time, especially when you enter, what many laughingly call “the golden years”. Here’s a description of my recent unexpected life calamity: a string of words and phrases so powerful they had the ability to stop me in my tracks. The calamity I mention began with a biopsy then a cancer diagnosis followed by a bone scan that culminated in major surgery and the subsequent loss of peripheral vision in my right eye. (The ending of my story is a hopeful one, and I have a good prognosis for recovery.)

Yes, a lot can happen in a month, but along the way, I discovered, once again, I had great friends who loved and supported me, and who helped me shift gears into that age-old philosophy of one day at a time. And thanks to the above-mentioned side effect, I am now literally seeing life in a new and different light. Pollyanna Paul? No, not quite but close.

Caveat: I realize for many of you reading these words, those of you who have encountered plenty of these unforeseen interruptions in your lifetime, this revelation is not news. Granted. Yet these experiences do shake you up, set you on a different path and quite often change your life in ways you never dreamed.

 Now let me tell you the really bad news, the thing I’m most ashamed of (is that sentence grammatical?) My journal informed me I hadn’t written a word since the literary world stopped for me on September 7th. Well, I wouldn’t count filling out insurance forms and hospital admit papers writing, would you?

I couldn’t focus. I tried. Pulled out every journal and writing aid I could lay my hands on, but the words wouldn’t come. See, for writers, this really is the worst thing. I didn’t lie.

I missed my writing routine like some child at summer camp might miss his bedroom or his Game Boy or his Mom and Pop. (Maybe not in that order.) I missed the smell of brewing coffee, the weight and feel of my writing box as I carried my books and materials to the dining room table. And I desperately missed the feel of my Bic Velocity Gel 0.7 tipped pen as it glided over the wide-ruled lines in my composition book, the place where I made daily entries of writing progress and where new scene ideas, characters and complications often leaped from the page at the most inconvenient and unexpected times.

Has this ever happened to you:

You’ve been writing disjointed prose for over two hours. You hate what you’ve got. You’ve been hitting dead ends since you began. Your synapses won’t synapse. Then all of a sudden you realize the major turning point of your story isn’t at the end of act II but is actually an event near the second scene in act III. You have an idea about how to write that scene and you have to write it. Now!

See what I mean? This stuff is just too good to miss out on.

What you’re reading here is my first piece since September 7th. It ain’t Shakespeare, and I know it’s far from the best thing I’ve written, but somehow it worked for me, and I bet it will work for you too after your own unexpected life calamity. So don’t despair and jump right back into writing. It does get better every day when you return to what you love and miss the most.

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About the Writer:

Paul Alan Fahey is a California Central Coast writer. His work has appeared recently in Byline, New Times, audience, Crimson Highway, Boston Literary Magazine and in the Cup of Comfort Anthology for Single Mothers. He is a five time recipient of the annual "Lillian Dean Award" at the Central Coast Writer's Conference. Paul has just completed two screenplays and three short stories using Syd Field's three-act paradigm as a guide for structure. He lives in Nipomo, California with his partner, Bob, and three loveable yet very unruly shelties.