This was an assignment out of the textbook that asked us to write about what nature is to us.

Nature is not what we’ve been conditioned to think it is. It does not mean trees and forests and animals and oceans and jungles. You’d be closer to a metaphorical truth if you said it was the daily struggle for life and death between the wild animals in those places. You’d be even closer if you related the struggle to the cycle of the seasons, or the star-stuff that Carl Sagan says that we are all made of.

Nature is what was begun millions of years ago in the primordial soup, when lightning struck a particular chemical and molecular flavor, and the predecessors to one-celled bacteria began doing their thing. Nature is that one week when god said, “let it be,” and it was, ending with two (or three) humans. Nature is the rolling-up and unrolling that was supposed to happen when enough Native Americans had performed the Ghost Dance. Every creation myth ever written shows us what nature is, and lets it sit there, in the back of our minds, folded up and stashed in an unnameable shape.

Just like life, death, and taxes, nature simply is.

This assignment was to describe how you get ready to write.

While there aren’t any hard and fast conditions that I need to write, there are some situations in which inspiration is far more likely to slap me in the head. My favorite setting is a greasy spoon restaurant, preferably 24-hours. Either a journal or my dinosaur laptop is in front of me, sitting next to a cup of bad, highly-creamed and highly-sugared coffee. I prefer the smoking section, despite not being a smoker. The atmosphere just seems to have more grit, more grime, and more reality. I can look up and always see a regular, usually trading snide remarks with a waitress. They let me sit, headphones on, and always keep my coffee full. Little grease or coffee stains on the journals add character for posterity.

When a story starts to move my pen – never a pencil – I lose any track of time. Hours, minutes, it doesn’t matter. I’m lost in the act, lost in the pictures and scenes in my head. The smell of fries blends with the dusky scent of a castle or keep. The cream twisting in the hot coffee becomes fog or strange-colored smoke twisting around and through a ghastly and skeletal apparition.

The images in my mind flow and stutter so quickly that if I type a story from the beginning, it jerks and twitches instead of flowing. I was so frustrated by this when I started my novel, until I picked up a lab book, barely touched. Forcing myself to hand-write slowed me down and made me consider detail and progression as I put the story on paper. It began to flow, make more sense, and I was able to get more down the slow way. Irony and irony and irony.

There is another situation in which inspiration will regularly visit. The great sternum-vibrating bass of a dance or electronica club, the smoke and dancing and black-lite and people-watching seem to just pull a story out of me. There’s something about watching the near-ecstatic bodies on the dance floor and the preening of the socialites and the mechanics of the mob at the bar that either unlock or just give me idea after idea.

In either of these settings, I’m usually able to relax and forget that people may be looking at me. It’s like a giant sigh and sitting in your favorite chair. It’s like finally letting the day go as you surrender to sleep. It’s like stepping over your home’s threshhold.