You might write to entertain or educate. You might write because you want to communicate, to tell stories about people like you, to let others know they are not alone in the world. You might write simply because you enjoy it and you’re good at it.

Sometimes, you may choose to write a story or poem or essay to ask questions, as a form of exploration.

This inquiry overlaps with the question of theme, but can explode into other directions. Considered thematically, your exploratory writing might consider the existence or nature of God, or the source or meaning of evil. You might look for meaning in life, a purpose for our being alive. History, morality, free will, identity, power, what it means to be human…all big questions and major themes in literature.

But you might also have smaller, more personal questions.

Other people

While one writer tries to throw his arms around the nature of evil, you might ask similar questions about people you know. Why was my parent abusive? Why did my spouse cheat? Why does my child act in a manner so far outside my morality?

You are allowed to write about what you don’t understand. You have permission to speculate, even about someone you know in real life.

Do you have such questions or people in your life? Take a step backwards from the situation and treat the individual as you might a character in a story. Write what you know about their background and their personality as you experienced it. What do you know about their successes and disappointments, the people who shaped them? Write what you know about their morality, their choices, the repercussions, their mental state, and any external factors that could have made an impact.

Though the focus of your exploration is a specific person, event, or brief time, you still tap into broader themes. Write until you begin to understand them. Write until you begin to feel empathy. Write until you start to root for them.

You may never know the right answer, but you may develop theories.

Yourself

You can also turn this lens on yourself. When have you let yourself down? When have you acted not your best? What could you have done differently? Write a new ending to the story.

Don’t limit yourself to looking backwards. Speculate about what’s coming next. Write about your future and where you might end up. Who is with you? Who doesn’t make it?

What would your parents be like as grandparents? What would you say to your high school bully or worst teacher if you met them again as an adult? Will they change? What will become of you and your best friend? What’s going to become of your wild, reckless cousin?

Perhaps you’d like to write about the person you want to become. Create a character who is not you but who embodies the qualities you admire and would like to emulate. Who would you become if you could be anyone?

You cannot literally become a new person, but you can steal their qualities for yourself. What would you look like if you were braver, more confident, less distracted, less mindful of negativity? What if you were the person who followed your dreams, instead of the one on the sidelines?

And what if you don’t evolve? We’re not required to change and most humans don’t. We learn, we grow a bit, we make incremental change, but at a fundamental level, most people stay on the path where they are set. What would happen to you then?

Another way to frame this question is to write about what worries or scares you. Imagine a life where the worst happens and another where the best happens. What choices take you down those paths?

Write until you can see an ending for yourself and if you want, write a better one.

All of us

You can also turn this inquiry to civilization. What would the world look like if you could choose our path? Writers envisioning the future often turn to dystopia, as in Brave New World, 1984, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Parable of the Sower, but you might prefer to explore a world more to your liking, as in the Culture series, The Ministry for the Future, or Walkaway. Or you might like to imagine one of each, as Marge Piercy did in Woman on the Edge of Time.

The two basic questions

Underneath your explorations are two essential questions: Why? and What will happen?

If you’re looking backward, ask why and keep asking why until you reach an answer that feels right to you. Consider someone’s behavior – negative or positive, though you might find that negative behavior elicits stronger emotions and memories – and make your inquiries. Ask why about their surface behavior, their motivations, they underlying emotions, the source of those emotions. Go back until you find the root of the issue. The person whose behavior you question can also be yourself.

When you’re looking forward, ask what will happen. What will happen if I don’t change, if I leave this situation, if my dream comes true or doesn’t? What will happen if (when) I lose someone important to me or lose my health? What if the world doesn’t get any better (by whatever measure you choose). What if it does? Consider what these possible futures look like, what events take you there, and who else is there. Imagine how you’ll feel and how others around you might react and behave.

Is this therapy?

Maybe.

It depends on the questions you have and how you approach them. In general, I find people unfathomable, so I write, in part, to understand them. Writing is my way to getting my arms around the world, to make the messiness of life a bit more manageable.

When I was younger, I also had a lot of questions that my family, religion, and education didn’t help answer. Writing gave me a way to tackle those questions privately, in my own way and in my own time.

Writing can be cathartic. It can provide understanding and perhaps closure.

Your mileage may vary. How you use it is up to you.

Bringing it together

As I continue through this list of what we know, you can see how all the disparate things we know begin to converge.

Your questions about human nature and behavior arise from what you’ve observed and learned. Your questions about the past are influenced by what you’ve experienced, and perhaps by your obsessions and fascinations. Your speculations about what may become of you, your loved ones, or the whole of civilization grow from what you are observing about them today.

What you do with these questions depends on how you feel about what you’ve experienced and observed, what you’ve learned and what you believe.

In contrast to previous topics, writing your questions requires you to lean into speculation and fiction. The answers are things that haven’t happened yet, or something you can never know with certainty. And yet, your questions about life are your own. They are already inside you. Your answers are as unique as your experiences and observations.

I reiterate that this doesn’t require you to think in grand terms or explore universal questions. You have permission to write about yourself without worrying that anyone else will find it relatable.

It’s human nature to wonder where we come from and where we’re headed. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Unlike nearly everything else I’ve written, this post would have been easier to write when I was a kid.

I was a child of obsessions. Unfortunately, none of my obsessions turned out to be very useful in adulthood. I could have hyper-fixated on physics or chemistry or higher math, but no. Instead, I lost myself in comic books, television, and mystery novels, over time progressing from Encyclopedia Brown to the Hardy Boys to Agatha Christie.

I don’t have those kind of obsessive interests any more. I’m not going to regale you with trivia about early 20^th century jazz or the minutiae of post-modernist theater or the New York School of artists and writers.

When I spoke of writing what you know, I described myself as a jack of some things, master of none, and that’s a fair assessment of my mindset when it comes to obsessions and fascinations. I have a lot of individual interests, but I tend to delve into them to the extent I needed them for a specific purpose. I might be a more interesting character if I cultivated a serious geekdom around something I enjoy – mid-century confessional poetry, Grand Guignol theater, 80s independent film – but on the other hand, at this stage of my life, whom would I entertain with my repertoire?

My geekdom

I do have interests. I am drawn to specific types of characters and stories in film, television, and books, and am repelled by others. I have tastes. I’m not a Philistine, even if some of my tastes are lower brow.

If I were to emulate someone like Howard Chaykin, who combined his interests in jazz, sex, politics, demons, and zombies in his masterful Time², what niche interests would I pick?

If I were writing the most indulgent work imaginable, it would likely feature some combination of tough women and mean gays, secret societies, kid gangs and chosen families, political intrigue, fringe religions, the Kennedy curse, comic books, early 20th century European literature, ghosts, Nazis, writers and artists, theater and film, time travel, talking apex predators, conspiracy theories, Celtic mythology, alternate worlds, and doppelgangers.

Probably not all in the same novel, but that would be pretty cool now that I think about it.

My themes

That said, I do have ideas and questions that I explore repeatedly, even when I’m not aware that’s where I’m headed. My characters ask questions like:

• Who am I?
• Where do I belong?
• How do I choose between belonging and being myself?
• When do I start getting it right?
• Who do I trust?
• What hill will I die on?

Even if I didn’t want it to, my indulgent novel would inevitably explore themes of identity, purpose, individuality and authenticity, spirituality, alienation, belonging, and sacrifice, wrapped up with more questions than answers. There’d be awkward sex, moral codes, casual violence, vengeance, loss, family secrets, love’s cruelty, passion for creation, and resistance and dignity in the face of life’s absurdity.

It would definitely mash up genres (SF, fantasy, horror, true crime, murder mystery, superhero, alternative history) and if I could work in an Excel spreadsheet, ice cream, and a dinosaur, I’d be in Heaven.

I could have titled this segment “Write Your Geekdom” but I didn’t want to give non-geeks the wrong idea.

But also, you’re a geek. Maybe you aren’t a traditional geek, immodestly obsessed with science fiction and fantasy books, films, and other paraphernalia, but you go hard for your hobbies, interests, and likes. You might be a sports or political geek, or a music or film geek. You might be a foodie or love gardening. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re pursuing some creative geekery.

Put simply, a geek is someone who loves what they love, passionately and unapologetically. And you must love something.

My favorite books are those in which the writers put it all on the page, not only their passions or deep background knowledge, but all the fringe elements and garnishes that make the work uniquely theirs, the kind of book that could not have been written by anyone but that single author.

I see a lot of this in comics, a form that lends itself to both geekdom and mashing up varied concepts. In the world of comics, writers have to be comfortable indulging their interests. It’s easier now that superhero film franchises make multi-millions at the box office, but still – the people who write and draw comics aren’t doing it for the money or prestige. No one is writing about superheroes with a Pulitzer in mind.

Side note: Of course, I’m referring to comic books, not comic strips. Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, and Garry Trudeau did make tons of money and win prizes. But only the very luckiest and most popular of comic book writers and artists have that kind of breakthrough.

Aztec Ace; art by Dan Day

In a comic called Aztec Ace, writer Doug Moench created a comic that combined a vast range of interests: time travel, the Aztecs (naturally), Depression-era America, Sigmund Freud, comic books and pulp magazines, and philosophical paradoxes. The result is a compelling, intelligent, and yet action-packed science fiction/mystery adventure comic. It’s Dr. Who for conspiracy theorists, with gams and boobs. It’s astonishing how much detail Moench crammed into a single-issue script, and yet the comics never felt crowded or over-written.

Time2: The Epiphany by Howard Chaykin

In Time², writer/artist Howard Chaykin explored an other-world where time is experienced at a different level, and where demons, advanced robotics, and zombies co-exist. Film noir mobsters, city politics, urban renewal, Jazz-era New York, and sex collide in Chaykin’s most personal work. Chaykin has said he did not expect Time2 to find a large audience, either at the time of its creation or later. He proudly affirms that – damn the torpedoes – these stories were for him.

When he launched Time², Chaykin was coming off his very popular American Flagg! series, which itself was an amalgam of Chaykin’s interests in speculative fiction, late stage capitalism, pop culture, sex kinks, and soft-core porn, which formed the foundation for a series of stories that were part science fiction and part political thriller, with frequent interludes for quickie encounters between the protagonist and various side characters, and sometimes side characters with each other.

Your geekdom

Investigating your obsessions is a bit of a throwback to write what you know, but with the added spice of permission to indulge a niche interest. The best part? You can write about whatever you want. That’s always the best part of creative writing, but it’s especially true here.

If you are writing a blog or memoir, here is where you find topics. Do you want to write 1,000 words about an alien who appears on-screen for 8 seconds in the original Star Wars? Go for it! Do you have esoteric knowledge about some kind of craft or manufacturing, the natural world, politics, or pop culture? Break down what you know in ecstatic detail.

Pretend you’re writing for an audience that is as deeply invested as you are. No one will try to change the subject. No one will accuse you of hijacking the conversation. No one’s eyes will glaze over with disinterest. Picture your readers being enthralled by your nuggets of information and insight. If you choose the blog route, and if you are consistent and good, you will find those people. It may take time, but – as I often tell myself – you are not a unicorn. There are other people with your interests and they would like to know you.

If you are writing fiction, give your geekdoms to your characters. Why shouldn’t your police detective collect Star Wars action figures? Why can’t an attorney chase UFOs in her spare time? Why shouldn’t a construction worker follow the various threads of JFK assassination conspiracy theories?

Imagine a Tarantino film without a main character delivering an extended monologue about a piece of trivia, niche interest, or pet peeve. You probably can’t.

Speaking of which, pet peeves are another great obsession to explore. Mine include people who need to look at the menu at a fast food restaurant, drivers who repeatedly tap their breaks on the highway, and people who don’t pick up after their dogs. If I gave my pet peeves to a protagonist, I could fill half my word count with complaints.

If you’re willing to go deep with your weird obsessions, doling out hobbies like knitting, gardening, or cooking should be even easier. Let your characters be smart and a bit obsessive, but first, start with you. What grabs you?

Your themes

Hobbies and interests are merely the external interests that may obsess you.

As you write, you may find yourself returning to certain questions and ideas. The same situations and themes will bubble up again and again. You may sense some overriding emotions that surface no matter what you’re writing about.

You may come back to questions such as “Where do we come from?” or “Why are we here?” Depending on your writing, you might explore different phrasings of those questions or discover new answers. Perhaps you want to explore fear or the various ways humans find and express love.

As you progress in your writing, you may fear that you are repeating yourself. This may be true especially when you explore questions that don’t have an explicit answer, such as why people do evil things. However, don’t shy away from your big questions and ideas that fascinate you.

Anne Tyler has never tired of writing about suburban, middle class family life in Baltimore, Maryland, but while her stories may feel familiar, she does not repeat herself. Steven Spielberg explores his sense of wonder in the universe, including the concept that humans on Earth are not alone. Martin Scorsese returns again and again to the nature of violence, often in films about the mob, but not only there.

What questions do you have about life or human nature? What themes would you like to explore? If you’re not sure where to start, consider the books, film, and television shows you enjoy watching. What do they have in common? What questions do they ask?

As with all our topics, start simply. Once you begin, find areas that intrigue you and go deeper. Trust yourself and trust the writing. Keep exploring.

I believe a lot of things, probably many of the same things you do. I believe in honesty, forgiveness, peaceful co-existence, a bit of charity. I have political beliefs, which are not germane to our relationship.

But those aren’t necessarily the beliefs that are important to my writing. What do I feel so strongly that I write about it, perhaps without realizing it? If a reader had to guess any of my philosophies, could they find evidence in my work?

I looked to my current and upcoming projects for clues.

• All but the very worst people can be redeemed. They won’t be, but they could be.
• Showing up is half the battle, but understanding when and where to show up is more important.
• Everyone has a reason for what they do. The reason almost always involves something that hurt them.
• Life is better when you belong to a family or community, but it is misery when you are trapped in the wrong one.
• People don’t always learn from their mistakes. Sometimes, the best a person can do is make different mistakes.
• Life is best lived through a strong moral code. People without a code lack direction and tend to drift. People who violate their code eventually become miserable. People with an immoral code usually do alright.
• Knowing yourself can take a lifetime, but the journey inward is worth it. Most people don’t take it.
• You need grit to be yourself in a world that wants you to be anything but.
• It is important to have faith, and your strongest faith should be in yourself.
• When all else fails, double down.

You are a partisan. You have a moral point of view. You can’t resist it, so make the best of it.

Only the foolish writer would argue that his writing betrays no evidence of his personal beliefs, opinions, or biases. We do not all believe the same things, but we believe and those beliefs drive our choices, including of what we write. If you are embarking on a writing life or struggling with where to start or what to say, look to your beliefs.

Unless you are the Unabomber or Valerie Solanas, no one wants to read your political manifesto and very few readers will tolerate a story that preaches a moral value. However, your moral, ethical, intellectual, political, and artistic beliefs – whether you realize it or not and even if you don’t want them to – form the basis for everything you will write.

My belief is that writers approach their work with more thoughtfulness and integrity when they understand and choose their values before the writing begins.

When you write from a moral point of view, you are writing with intention. You have purpose. Your story has meaning. You know what you want to say, even when you aren’t sure of the best way to say it.

This is especially important if you feel stuck for ideas. I have found in my writing that the desire to say something is enough to power me through any obstacles that inevitably arise. If I want it badly enough, I’ll find a way, and I believe this will be true for you, too.

Personal beliefs

As with every source of raw material we have discussed, your beliefs are personal. They are already within you. Maybe you haven’t thought about them too much. You probably have never taken the time to write them down. You might find it hard to get started with this inventory, so go easy on yourself. You may find it difficult to put your core values into words, but this is a valuable avenue of introspection for the writer.

As always, I recommend that you start simply.

Honesty is the best policy. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Actions speak louder than words.

These are clichés but the point is to get your thoughts flowing. Begin with your basic morality, the way you live life or the way you try to. If your beliefs are guided by religion, there is another avenue for you to explore. If they are not guided by religion, explore that. Ask yourself why. What do you believe about religion, if you don’t believe in religion itself?

Ponder social issues. If you can stand it, watch cable news and make a list of current political topics or controversies. Don’t default to the position of any particular party or politico, and don’t lean on slogans. Think through what you believe and why. If you could solve a social problem, how would you do it? Why would you? What beliefs would guide you?

What makes a good father or mother? What do we owe our previous generations? What do we owe the next? Do we owe them anything at all?

You may celebrate the extended nuclear family or instead value the chosen family. You might hail the virtues of stolid independence or the warmth of community and belonging. You might have an opinion about assimilation versus separatism. You may believe in the value of helping others or that charity makes one weak, or even both at the same time. You may believe in god or not, in fate or not, in redemption or not. Your moral code may reflect life as you have experienced it or embody the kind of person you wish to become. Does your writing lean into harsh truths or hopeful yearnings? It’s up to you.

As you write through your beliefs, back up your thoughts with evidence. Why is your moral belief correct? When have you seen it in action? What happens when people don’t abide by your moral code? Go back to your feelings, your observations, and your experiences to find support for your beliefs.

Human nature

Write what you believe about human nature.

It is possible that you have come to similar conclusions or adopted another person’s belief about human nature, as many have done with the quote from Anne Frank. I suspect adherence to that belief is more aspirational than most like to admit, but it remains something worth believing in.

What have you observed about other people or yourself?

Aphorisms about human nature capture how people act on repeat. What do you observe in human nature over and over and over? Your belief may be true about all people – according to you – or it may be true about a subset of people.

What is the best way to live life? All out or with guard rails? Do you pursue goals no matter the cost or do other considerations come first? Does the end justify the method you used to achieve it?

At his trial on charges of corrupting youth, Socrates purportedly said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Do you agree? What does that mean to you?

The real world

Let’s look at some real world examples to spark your imagination.

During the spring, I re-read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird for the umpteenth time and blogged my thoughts on her advice and observations. In the book, she shares one of her core beliefs: Grace bats last.

By that she means that good eventually wins out over evil and adversity, that we will find comfort and maybe some understanding at the end. Others have phrased this same belief with slightly different words:

In All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum presented his beliefs for living in language even children can understand: Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.

In the movie Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s Crash Ryan had a slightly more colorful statement of beliefs. Pardon his French.

At the beginning of this series, I shared this quote from The Martian that I believe reflects Andy Weir’s approach to life:

In his A Song of Ice and Fire series, George R.R. Martin wrote a family motto for each of the major families of Westeros. While none of these are lengthy statements of beliefs, is there any doubt the families lived by these credos? Anyone familiar with the novels or HBO program could create lists of “I believe…” statements for the families flowing from these creeds:

Ours is the Fury (Baratheon)
Winter is Coming (Stark)
Hear Me Roar! (Lannister)
As High as Honor (Arryn)
Family, Duty, Honor (Tully)
Growing Strong (Tyrell)
We Do Not Sow (Greyjoy)
Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken (Martell)
Fire and Blood (Targaryen)

Your writing

You might write what you believe about writing itself. Should stories show us how life is or how life should be? How should a story make us feel? Do you intend to disturb or comfort or do you attempt neutrality? Should a story teach or only entertain?

Do you write to communicate, to leave a legacy, to make others feel less alone?

Should you write about people not like yourself? How do you balance the competing interests of representation and appropriation?

No matter where you sit in the writing life, take a moment to think about what it means to you. What can you do with it? What will it do for you?

What do you believe?

I suggested you approach learning as a joyful pursuit, which I would not have done if I didn’t love researching and learning new information so much.

Seriously. I love geeking out with a new topic, especially if it’s a topic that has practical application in the real world or in my writing. Even when I’m struggling with some element of story – a scene that doesn’t work, dialogue that wanders, description that feels trite – I love the hunt for good advice and creative strategy. I treat writing blocks as puzzles to solve and get a bit tingly when it all comes together.

So what have I learned? I’ve learned a lot about writing and being creative and being true to yourself. I’ve already shown you quite a lot of that. That’s the point of this series. I hope sharing what I’ve learned shortens someone else’s learning curve or helps them feel less lost or alone.

But there’s more!

Study

I have written that I’m a jack of many fields of knowledge but master of none. This is true. I tend to follow an obsession for as long as it intrigues me, but no further. I wish I had chosen a few topics to which I could have truly dedicated myself, but sometimes life gives you enough energy to get from A to Z and do a little shopping without a lot left over. I am satisfied with my capacity to research, learn, and retain new information and that’s sufficient for me. I know that if I want to throw myself into a field of knowledge, I’m capable of it.

These days, I tend to learn what I need in the moment for my writing. Medieval weaponry, how tornados form, life in 1930s Arkansas, President Eisenhower’s initiation to expand the interstate highway system in the 1950s and its repercussions for small town America, the contents of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum circa 1890. Much of that goes out as soon as I get it into a document, but I have it and I confess getting lost in the occasional research hole.

Experience

Life is a tough teacher. It’s tougher when you don’t listen. If you don’t learn the lesson the first time around, the next test in the same subject is more difficult.

Here are a few things I’ve learned, and some of this required summer school. I don’t have the space to tell you how I learned all this, but believe me…I have stories.

Never let anyone else define what success looks like for you. Set your own goalposts in life. Move them if you like, but never let anyone else touch them.

You cannot please a person who does not want to be pleased. You will know this person cannot be pleased because they will keep moving your goal posts.

You cannot help a person who does not want to be helped. If you keep trying, they will drag you down to their level. Sometimes this level is underwater.

If someone takes advantage of you or treats you with disrespect, the first time is on them. If they do it twice, it’s because you’ve given them permission.

A cheater will cheat, no matter how often you change the rules to accommodate them. The same applies to people who ignore boundaries.

Never assume a conspiracy without first ruling out incompetence and greed.

Never trust a creative person who is not generous with advice, and never take advantage of one who is.

Ask for help when you need it. The people who love you want you to ask.

When you have the chance to pursue an opportunity, ask yourself which part of you wants it: Your soul or your ego? Chase the goal that satisfies the former, be wary of the goal that intrigues the latter.

Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary. That’s Oscar Wilde, but it’s true.

Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you. That’s Roger Ebert, and that is also true.

If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet. That is from the Book of Matthew and that is also true. Apply this advice to people and book reviews.

You’re lucky if you believe you are. When you feel unlucky, look for the silver lining.

The best way to learn is by doing. Try, fail, and try again. Learning what not to do is also valuable. You’ll figure it out.

Trust your gut. Believe in yourself. You may achieve only 10 percent of what you want in life, but that’s more than zero and more than most people do.

Dreams will shrink to fit into the space you make for them, but dreams will also grow to fill the space you give them. Plan accordingly.

Earlier I wrote that the difference between observation and experience is often a matter of choice. You cannot orchestrate the actions of others or arrange a natural setting to your tastes, but usually we choose our experiences. No one climbs a mountain by accident. Until they do.

Sometimes experiences befall us, whether we welcome them or not. Illness, accidents, crime, unemployment, a failure of some kind. Our mishaps may result from our choices, but we rarely choose the bad outcome on purpose. Occasionally, we may even stumble into good fortune and that too can seem random.

Whether and what we learn from these experiences is always a choice.

Experience

Experience is our best teacher, we are told. Learn from failure. Learn from your mistakes. This is good advice. While we often repeat our mistakes and failures, none of us enjoy the process. But we also have good learning experiences, when we solve a problem, handle a crisis, or succeed in an endeavor. Sometimes it is easier to remember what not to do than to figure out what we did well, but the information is there. You have likely had good learning experiences from talking to people, reading, listening, researching, studying, and taking classes.

Brainstorm what you’ve learned. Think of mistakes you made. “I’ll never do that again!” is a great place to start, but don’t stop there. Look backwards to examine what led you to the mistake. Did you lack a life skill, such as open communication? Did you rely on bad advice? Did you doubt yourself? Go into as much detail as you can. Why did you take that bad advice? Did your gut tell you it was bad when you heard it? Who or what taught you to doubt yourself?

You’re allowed to write about these things. The result might be something less than a full story but something more than a journal entry. Try not to paint yourself as the victim, but also don’t beat yourself up for making mistakes. Do your best to maintain a neutral tone as you write. Stick to facts.

Consider your successes as well. Have you experienced moments when good planning paid off or you took a calculated risk that proved the right one? What risk did you take? Who supported you or didn’t? Did you have to make an emotional leap of faith, for example by trusting your gut or some untested skill? Maybe you overcame negative thinking or a poor belief. You might have learned that trusting your skills and experience leads to better outcomes than being modest about your accomplishments. What steps did you take? What were the crossroads? What might have happened if you chose the other path? What obstacles did you face?

You can also learn by observing human nature in others. Perhaps you have learned that people would rather be told an affirming lie than a truth that might call into question what they believe. You may have noticed that some people will work very hard to avoid a task, when actually doing the task would have taken less time and energy, and created a better outcome. A fairly common observation about human nature is that we often accuse another person of what we are guilty of.

Some of what you learn about human nature will be specific to a few or even one person. Sometimes, you will discover a truism that you believe defines human existence. Write them down. When you write your stories, these observations of the human experience will help you develop character and theme.

Study

You also have likely taken a more active hand in learning by reading, researching, or taking a class. This calls back a bit to write what you know – hard facts, information you could teach to someone else – but also, you should take note of what you would like to learn.

Do you have any curiosity about the natural world, geography, history, politics, languages, carpentry, physics, race car driving? Make a list and spend some time doing that, and then write about it. Yes, this sounds like homework, but most writing is essentially homework, so you should become accustomed to it.

You don’t have to write a thesis paper or book report. Write about your interest in the topic and where you found new information and what surprised or intrigued you. Write as if you were telling an interested friend about what you discovered. In addition to being good practice, writing about what you’ve learned is an excellent way of committing the information to memory.

What you’ve learned this way often goes into creating verisimilitude in your writing, the internal consistency and believability that helps your readers suspend their disbelief. If it is important that your protagonist has carpentry skills, you might buy books, watch instructional videos, take a class, or talk to experts. Be wary of writing what you don’t know or winging it.

Whatever you write, have fun with it. As you begin writing, you are embarking on a journey of continuous learning. Every piece you write will present its own challenges. Every story, setting, character, and theme will be different from the last.

If you approach learning as a joyful pursuit, you will never have a day of drudgery.

As I considered which experiences to write for this post, I had to quash many familiar thoughts.

That’s boring.
That sounds like bragging.
That’s not exactly a WOW memory.
I’m not reliving that, thanks.

I imagine you had or will suffer those same plagues when you begin to write about your experiences. I can only offer you the same advice I give myself: Shut up and do it.

Whether this is your first draft or first time ever writing creatively, your early efforts don’t need to be good, they need to exist. You will make them better with revision. You will make yourself better with practice.

I considered and discarded a few thoughts for this post, such as writing about the experience of being unemployed and the difference between the several times I was unemployed in California and being unemployed in Florida. I could have also written about the difference between quitting and getting laid off and getting let go unexpectedly. I could have written about helping to care after my mom and dad in their later years, and watching their decline. I came close to writing about the two times I was a small press publisher of fiction and poetry.

I could have written about a lot of stuff. I wrote about this instead.

I Will Do My Best

When I turned eight, I was a Boy Scout, technically a Cub Scout, in an uncomfortably snug blue pseudo-military uniform, cap, and yellow kerchief. I don’t consider the Boy Scouts something I know a lot about, because despite 10 years of mandatory participation, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about scouting. If all troops were like ours, boys and their families would flee the BSA like snakes hightailing it out of Ireland.

But it was an experience, he said ruefully. In my case, scouting was sponsored through our church, which I have previously described as fringe. Ridiculously large families, siblings whose names all started with the same initial, matching homemade prairie dresses, lots of hymns about toil and pestilence. You get the idea.

Even among this then-minor sect, our congregation was itself an outlier, the fringiest of the fringe. I grew up near a military base, so most of our congregation were service members. Coming of age in the Reagan years among military members eager to fight the Evil Empire and in a religion that believes in the apocalypse, I was more fluent in paranoic conspiracy theories than scripture.

Also, the majority of our local members – including my family – were converts to the church. If you’ve ever met a group of new converts to any type of movement – cult, political party, veganism – you know what they were like. Ride-or-die believers, hungry for rules, desperate for direction, eager to report infringements, and ready to shun at a moment’s notice.

Militaristic, nihilistic, and rabid is quite the mix of personality traits.

Being military, families moved in and out at regular intervals, usually after three years, but sometimes less. Only a few of us called the area home, and whatever friends we made – at church or school – were lost to military transfer, often without even a chance to say goodbye. It is already difficult to grow up in a religion that encourages the avoidance of outsiders, but the itinerant nature of our congregation left me constantly unsettled, without a sense of history or permanence, wary of forming attachments.

Maybe this is why for most of my life, every three to four years, I felt the need to relocate. I got to be the one who leaves for a change.

This has nothing to do with Boy Scouts, but does set the stage for what’s coming. Outside a NAMBLA convention, I can’t think of a worse environment in which to foster a group of boys through childhood rites of passage into young manhood.

As was customary, church leaders assigned two moms of boys in the group to be den mothers. I don’t know what other dens were like, but I imagine the scouting experience is greatly improved when the adults want to be there.

I suppose it’s only fair that the adults came under duress, since I also was being forced to participate. I already hated going to church, so bonus church on Tuesday was not something I looked forward to. In the interest of time, I will only briefly mention we already had bonus church on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I spent more of my childhood in a church pew than I did outdoors.

The first lucky den mother was my mom. If you’ve read previous entries, you might have come to the conclusion that my family wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. You would be correct. And, as with corporate culture, the example was set at the top.

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. My mom wasn’t a monster. My older siblings may beg to differ, but my upbringing wasn’t as bad as some.

But my mom was not fun. She didn’t like games. She was not playful, nor spontaneous. She was not approachable, nor good with children. She excelled at dirty looks. In another life, she would have been the nun at the Catholic elementary school who terrified all the children. It baffles me that anyone who knew my mom thought she would be a good candidate for wrangling a bunch of squirmy eight-year-old boys and teaching them about good sportsmanship, nature, problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership. Also I’m only guessing that the Boy Scouts teach those qualities, because we didn’t learn any of them.

Her assigned partner in leading the Cub Scouts was my friend Danny’s mom, the only person at our church, and perhaps within the county, less fit than my mom for this job. Earlier I said my upbringing wasn’t as bas as some. Allow me to introduce “some.”

How to describe Danny’s mom? When Dana Carvey introduced his Church Lady character on Saturday Night Live, I was convinced – not metaphorically but with absolute certainty – he had met Danny’s mom. It would not have surprised me if Carvey had claimed to be possessed. He had the performance down pat – the know-it-all attitude, dowdy yet comfortable wardrobe, short conservative hairdo gone prematurely grey. And the voice! The high-pitched, back of the throat squeal, the smug lecturing, the condescension…it was an uncanny impersonation, down to the cat’s-eye glasses.

This might give you an idea of my feelings for Danny’s mom.

As I said, she was even less fun than my mom. My mom was capable of reason, if not compromise, and the occasional twinge of conscience. She could be worn down, if I made myself sufficiently pitiable, but tears were lost on Danny’s mom. Tears didn’t mean you felt sorrow. Tears were a confession you’d sinned.

Danny’s mom – I’m trying to avoid naming names and I hope she appreciates it – was a prissy rules-follower and earnest scold and, as is the wont of such people, a massive phony. She beat her kids. She stole her daughter’s babysitting money. I didn’t know this first-hand, but my mom and older siblings did and they talked. (Our secrets were off-limits, but other family’s secrets were fair game.)

Maybe that doesn’t sound too bad. Maybe Danny’s mom looms larger in my memory because I was a child. Times were different then and maybe church leaders didn’t know everything that was going on at home.

But there’s one thing I am certain they knew. Everybody knew. It was pretty hard to miss.

Danny’s mom shot Danny’s dad.

This was a few years prior, about when Danny and I were kindergarten age. She didn’t kill him, thank goodness. She also did no jail time, I presume because Danny’s dad chose not to press charges, back in the days when spouses could shoot each other without repercussion, as long as one agreed to it. He did leave, however, and good for him. I don’t have a lot of strong memories of Danny’s dad, but I remember he was fun. He always took time to talk to me, and he liked to laugh. I liked him and I know my dad liked him, and we missed him when he was gone. Everyone else at church pretended this never happened. It was never spoken of afterwards, unless someone brought it up.

Guilty.

So, how was my scouting experience? My Cub Scout den mother shot her husband.

These are who my church thought best suited to den mother a small group of eight-year-old boys: My mom, whose parenting style veered from near total neglect to shrill, micro-managing rage, and Danny’s mom, of similar style but incorporating more frequent physical abuse, petty theft, and the occasional gunshot. And that’s not even the best part.

The best part?

They hated each other.

I was too young to remember at the time, but once they had been thick as thieves. Neither of our families were military so we were among only a handful at our church that did not live on base. My mom and Danny’s mom had a lot in common. They were not too far apart in age. Both were stay at home moms with fairly large families – five kids in ours, seven in theirs, generally in the same age range. And both women were zealous, diehard converts looking for direction and approval.

You might think it was the shooting that caused the rift, but no. That came later, so the breach was still relatively fresh when Danny and I were old enough to join Cub Scouts. I know the story, but I’ll save that for another time.

That they did not like each other was clear. Danny’s mom was stiff and formal around my mom, which is quite a feat for a woman who already had a broomstick crammed up her. She spoke condescendingly, in an icky sweet yet lecturing voice, as if my mom were stupid or a sinner. For her part, mom freely talked trash about Danny’s mom at any opportunity. I was no fan of our church or its people, even as a little boy, but I might not have taken such a dim view of Danny’s mom if my mom had been more careful with her talk.

Naturally, I absorbed all this, and I’m sure Danny did as well, which made friendship awkward. I don’t know what he knew, but he had to sense the tension. It felt disloyal, being friends while our moms nursed mutual animosity.

Once, I even told Danny I hated his mom. He said, “Me, too,” and if that wasn’t the saddest damn thing you’ve read today, I don’t know what is. I’m not proud of that, but in my defense, I was eight. Later, our acquaintance became a bit more antagonistic, though never physical or too loud. Like our moms, we treated each other with forced politeness and mutual disdain.

So with this background, what was actual scouting like? I mentioned what we didn’t learn at Scouts, i.e.: anything about scouting. We did recite scripture. We learned how to tie adult ties, since our clip-on days were numbered. We read the Boy Scout manual a lot, but never did any of the activities. We memorized the Scout Motto, Law, and Oath. I vaguely remember looking at pictures of nature, so we could avoid poison ivy, but I don’t remember ever going out in nature. We were too young for overnight camping, but I don’t recall any day trips or even walks in the woods. Maybe we collected leaves or something? It could have happened, I suppose. 

I was in Cub Scouts for at least 2 years, but have almost no memories of those afternoons. Other than Danny, I don’t remember any of the other boys, which is weird, because I have vivid memories of home and school from much earlier. I can remember the faces and names of kids in my kindergarten class who moved away before first grade, but I don’t remember more than a few scattered moments from two years of Tuesday afternoons.

I suspect I spent most of the hour thinking about the episode of Batman I was missing.

So that was the environment of our weekly Cub Scouts gathering: A Tuesday afternoon hour of what amounted to a second Sunday School, led by two strict rules-following women with unhappy homes of their own devise, who each resented the presence of the other and trickled this discomfort down onto their boys, at least one of whom was actively dissociating.

That’s a lot of material to put into context. Writing about Cub Scouts isn’t exactly my zone, but I could write about two women of similar backgrounds, who perhaps felt lost and overwhelmed by life, whose friendship is at first bonded by emotional need and their most unpleasant qualities, and later severed by the same characteristics.

I could write about generational grudges, passed down from mother to son, and how two women couldn’t put aside their personal issues to allow their kids to have a friendship. I might ponder my mom’s choice to isolate me from the one kid my age who lived nearby and wasn’t likely to move away, when I had no way to foster non-church friendships and the all other church kids vanished every 2 – 3 years. I could write about how awkwardness and tension decayed what should have been formative childhood experiences, and codes of loyalty and silence between parents and children.

Of course, I didn’t think of that as material for writing when I was a kid. All I knew is that I hated Scouts and I was missing a Batman rerun at 4:30. I would never have considered writing about this even as a college student or young writer. Cub Scouts? Danny’s mom? Are you kidding? As previously noted, I didn’t want to be there the first time.

It’s taken me years to realize that these experiences provide grist for our writing, even if we don’t know exactly how to use them or if we have to heavily disguise them before putting them to paper. I might never write about Boy Scouts, but I can write about my people and my experiences, and how they made me feel, and how I carried that into the future.

In just this short anecdote, I have material about broken friendships, isolation, multi-generational grudges, forced connections, loyalty tests, trauma, community silence, and someone even fired a gun.

And before I forget, let me remind you all of that happened when I was between 8 and 9 years old. Anyone who made it through childhood has their own version.

If Danny were alive, he’d have some story to tell.

I touched on experience at the very beginning of this series, as part of write what you know. In that opening segment, I defined what you know narrowly, the way beginning writers often do, to make a humorous point about its inadequacy. Many writers interpret this advice as meaning we should write only what we’ve done, adhering closely to facts, or to write only about things we know well, topics we could teach in a classroom.

As an example, I noted that I had helped care for my elderly parents, though I would never describe myself a qualified provider of elder care. It’s not something I consider my expertise. Drop me in a stranger’s house and I might be able to whip up a sandwich or run a load of laundry, but I couldn’t offer any opinions about diet, physical exercise, or medications, and please don’t expect me to initiate small talk. I could barely handle that with my own folks.

So, in the strictest sense, I don’t know how to take care of the elderly.

But still, I had that experience. I couldn’t write a manual about caring for generic old people, but if I were inclined, I could write a story about siblings coping with the physical decline of their parents, about two old people who weren’t very good at the parenting thing and who perhaps didn’t care for their children as well as their adult children (a few of them anyway) would eventually come to care after them.

I could write about the tedium of preparing the same three or four meals on rotation and the constant blare of the television and having to hide the remote control from my mom because she had terrible taste in shows and an inexplicable habit of changing the channel ten minutes before the end of a program, which more than once sent me to Wikipedia to find out how an episode of Little House on the Prairie ended, even though I didn’t want to watch it in the first place.

I could tell you it was easier to get my dad to give up his car keys than for my mom to relinquish the check book, and that would tell you a lot about their personalities and marriage. I could write about watching for signs of forgetfulness or changes in eating habits that might suggest a new question about their health. I could tell you about all the information they withheld from their doctors over the years, because for my parents not knowing was always preferable to knowing, and I could probably connect some dots between that and their lifelong habit of keeping secrets.

I could tell you a lot more, but I won’t because most of it is gross. I’ll save it for the book.

As we parse write what you know into various components, there will be overlap. It may be hard to distinguish the difference between various strata but there is nuance.

What you know is transferable. You can teach what you know to someone. However, knowledge may or may not be relatable, depending on whether it has bearing on another person’s interests or well-being. In contrast, experience is relatable but not transferable. You cannot truly understand an experience unless you go through it.

Put another way: I will listen to your experience caring about an elderly parent, but I would never read a how-to manual about it.

Experience is also more than observation, though both can help you gain knowledge. When you observe, you watch, but may not interact. What you observe might make an impression on you, but it doesn’t touch you the same way internally and may not stay with you. In contrast, an experience is something you’ve done or something that has happened to you directly. Experience is intimate. Experience is a choice. Ideally, the choice is yours, but sadly others may choose to impose an experience on us.

Observation is passive, experience is active.

Importantly, experience has no regard for performance. In most cases, your experiences are more interesting because you didn’t excel. You had to struggle. You had to overcome obstacles. Experience is something you lived through. Experience is story.

What have you experienced?

Childhood, your teenage years, rites of passage, various first times, relationships, jobs. You may not believe your experiences amount to very much. I had that bad idea in my head for a long time. Some of your experiences might embarrass you or make you feel ashamed. Some might be too painful to talk about. But you have permission to talk about your experiences, even the ugly ones. And if you want to, you should.

Another difference: Experience triggers deeper emotions than observation.

If you’re writing with me, reflect back on experiences that have stayed with you. You might recall a moment that changed how you see the world or a peak experience, something that made you feel alive. Though I brought up sad and challenging experiences, don’t limit yourself to them. Rapture, belonging, and fulfillment are also experiences worth exploring. You might write about a time you crashed and burned or a time when you felt the full glory of faith.

Remember to cross-pollinate what happened and how you felt. What you felt adds context and depth. It adds perspective. In contrast, something you observe may anger or amuse you or make you think, but you may not have a strong emotional response until what you observe resonates. It may remind you about a time when you had a similar experience, which could trigger anger or empathy. Pure observation can prompt ideas, but experience shapes a story.

If you wanted someone to know you well, what would you tell them? If you trusted someone implicitly, if you were certain you wouldn’t be laughed at or betrayed, what would you share? Write that down. You don’t have to show this to anyone. Trust yourself and trust the writing.

Unlike today, drag used to something of a rarity. It wasn’t uncommon, but it was not ubiquitous, certainly not as visible as it is today. Some larger cities – San Francisco, New York – had more regular cabarets and entertainment than smaller cities far from Gay Ground Zero, but this was still years before televised reality competitions. When we experienced men in women’s clothing on television, they were part of a sitcom gag or a ratings stunt for a local talk show, something to be laughed at or sneered at, depending on which seat they filled.

In Baltimore, we had drag pageants, and they were an affair. Each of the major bars had their own annual competition for Miss Hippo, Miss Allegro, Miss What Have You. We had Miss Gay Maryland and Miss Gay Mid-Atlantic. These were events. A larger venue like The Hippo might have a few shows every year, mixed between pageants and fundraisers, and they always drew a massive crowd.

I attended my share of pageants during the few years I lived in Baltimore. I don’t remember much about any of them, to be honest. A few performances stand out, but I couldn’t tell you the names of any of the queens without prompting. I remember one performer lip synching to Natalie Cole’s “Jump Start My Heart” while dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein. I remember a group skit where the performers came out dressed as Patsy Cline, Judy Garland, Janis Joplin, and Mama Cass, each acting out the star’s death one by one in a drag grand guignol.

The ersatz Patsy came out with a toy airplane tangled in her wig, smiled and waved to the crowd, then threw herself down the stage steps. I may be misremembering the details, but I very much remember laughing my ass off.

But one particular performance at one pageant, and one special performer stood out from the rest, and even all these years later I can picture myself in that nightclub as if I were there.

I don’t remember the exact year or even which pageant. I don’t remember who won or the name of five of the contestants. But I’ll never forget the sixth. This is what I observed.

Bang Bang

This one particular evening, a drag pageant began as anyone might have expected. One by one, the MC introduced the contestants, young, slender queens, dressed to the nines in sequined gowns.

Back then – I won’t say exactly when – drag pageant contestants were judged against traditional standards of beauty and realness. The point was mimicking – not mocking – popular contemporary pageants and so we were conditioned to expect younger, slender, dolled up contestants on the walkway. In keeping with the realness standard, queens generally chose conventional stage names that signaled both glamour and soap opera. Delilah St. Clair, for example. I just made that up.

Non-contestants – the MCs, stand-up comics – could get away with less conventional looks, but in a pageant contestant, we expected glamour on the hoof, high hair, puffy shoulders, and every sequin in the box. This was fashion on poppers, and if the girls were a slightly more muscular and perhaps exaggerated version of Miss America contestants, that was part of the fun. Most had a significant tell – height, shoulders, leg muscles, shoe size – but when a queen captured both spectacle and realness, the result was breathtaking.

The first contestant came out, then the second, a third. I don’t remember their names, but you can imagine something like Stephanie, Staci, Alexa, Jacqueline, waists cinched, boobs bedazzled. And then came…

Bang Bang LaDesh.

The stage name Bang Bang LaDesh was one of several used by Harvey Fierstein’s character in his play Torch Song Trilogy, along with Virginia Hamm, Bertha Venation, Kitty Litter. I didn’t know that at the time. If Fierstein swiped the name from someone else, I’m not aware of it.

An unorthodox name, but fitting, as the figure of Bang Bang herself did not suggest glamour or soap opera vixen. No, Bang Bang was noticeably shorter than the other contestants, even with her hair teased up to God, and she was stout. She was technically in drag, but her dress was not snug. It was not covered in sequins that glinted in the limelight. As I recall, she wore flats. Imagine your mom being pushed onto the set of Dynasty to compete with Joan Collins for the Carrington fortune, and you might have an idea how incongruous this looked.

To its credit, the crowd did not gasp, but the mood of the room tangibly shifted from tipsy anticipation to oh, shit. Remember, this was long before the days of body positivity and plus-sized pageant contestants and winners. This was something different.

The crowd applauded politely, but no one cheered or called her name, as had happened when every other contestant walked on. It was clear Bang Bang did not have a group of friends to root for her. She was on her own.

After introducing the remaining contestants, the MC attended to the evening’s housekeeping, introducing the judges and the categories: evening wear, interview, talent…and swimwear.

A slight murmur went up from the crowd.

The contestants came out again, individually, for the evening wear walk, in the same outfits they’d worn to be introduced, again as I recall. Bang Bang wore a dress she’d made herself, the announcer said, adding that tonight was her first night out in drag. We were not surprised by this.

It was a perfectly fine dress, in that it was not a potato sack, but it was not like the gowns of the other contestants, which wouldn’t have been out of place at a prom or an actual beauty pageant. It stood out, and not in the way someone wants to stand out in a contest of beauty, glamour, and realness.

By now, I had already begun assembling an impression of Bang Bang. She did not have a cheering section in the crowd. A few of my friends who knew everybody did not recognize her. Her clothes were, in comparison, plain. Knowing how much some of my drag acquaintances spent on gear, I guessed that Bang Bang might not have had the money to buy the kind of gown that won contests. I imagined the availability of plus-sizes was a factor, not to mention the limited number of places where a drag queen could safely shop for clothes.

But she had guts. During the interview segment – which generally contained the usual contestant blather about wanting to be a good representative for the community – Bang Bang was nervous, but composed, articulate. She must have known how badly she’d stand out from the other contestants, in size, clothes…everything really. And, as she confessed, she’d chosen a competition for her drag debut. That took more courage than most of us had.

No one knew what to expect for the swimsuit competition. In drag pageants, one-piece suits were common, but a daring – and very very skinny – contestant might risk a bikini. We waited anxiously for Contestant 4.

Bang Bang came out in a one-piece, as expected, wrapped in a brightly colored hip length silk beach robe and – as I recall – carrying a small beach ball. She may have been outgunned in height and hips, but she knew how to work with what she had. Again, she presented a vivid contrast to the other contestants. She didn’t look like the others, but she didn’t look bad, which is all she needed to do. I suspect I’m not the only person in the crowd who was relieved on her behalf. As it turned out, it wouldn’t be the only surprise of the night.

The talent segment always came last and took up a good half of the evening. Contestants generally lip synched to some popular song, though I had heard that sometimes a performer might sing live. As with the contestants, I recall few of these performances. The memorable queens went an extra mile, with props or an unusual song choice, a full skit acted out on stage, like those I mentioned above. Most didn’t. They came out in another glamour outfit, usually something less “prom queen” in favor of a little black dress equivalent or an aerobics outfit, depending on what kind of song they’d selected. They mouthed their lyrics, flounced and shimmied, maybe interacted with the crowd or their backup dancers, until the record faded out awkwardly.

Finally it was time for Bang Bang. By this time, we expected something unusual. Whether that would be something unusually good or unusually bad remained to be seen, but if Bang Bang had any chance of outshining her competition, her only hope was the talent segment.

The lights went down. A spotlight framed the very center of the stage. Bang Bang shuffled out dressed in a heavy patchwork skirt, several layers of blouses, a threadbare cardigan sweater, cloth wrapped around her feet. Her wig had been ratted up and tangled, her face was pale and smeared with dirt. She lugged a collection of shopping bags on stage.

In a competition that valued conventional beauty, glamour, and realness, Bang Bang had come out for her talent segment dressed like a bag lady.

The room went deadly silent, but this time not with empathy for someone in over her head, but with expectation. We had no idea what she was about to do, but it was clearly going to be something we had not seen that night, or maybe ever.

What she did was perform to Diana Ross singing “Home” from The Wiz. The song begins softly, with Diana/Dorothy thinking of home.

When I think of home, I think of a place where there’s love overflowing
I wish I was home, I wish I was back there with the things I been knowing

Bang Bang sang along and her preparation was evident. She didn’t merely flap her mouth in a close approximation of the lyrics, as a lot of queens did. She articulated, not in an exaggerated way, but with showmanship, what you would expect on the stage. During this opening portion, she pantomimed feeding pigeons, adjusting her hair, cleaning her face, and applying makeup, as she sat on her imaginary stoop.

The song slowly builds in tempo and volume.

Suddenly my world has changed it’s face, But I still know where I’m going
I have had my mind spun around in space, And yet I’ve watched it growing

At this point, Bang Bang started performing to the crowd, making eye contact, pleading for understanding, connection. The song builds toward a dramatic diva-ready fanfare at the conclusion.

And I’ve learned
That we must look inside our hearts
To find a world full of love
Like yours
Like me
Like home

The final note on “home” lasts 10 full seconds, during which Bang Bang stood, stared up into the spotlight, and clasped her hands as if she were calling on God. It would have been hard for anyone to miss the meaning in her song choice and performance. Like her bag lady character, Bang Bang was looking for her world, her love, her home, as much as any of us were in those plague years. Bang Bang tore that shit up.

When the music faded, the club erupted in a roar like I’d never heard before and never have again at a drag show of any kind. She sold that song beginning to end. The fact that she had entered the evening as a clear underdog, if not a sore thumb, and ended with everyone on her side was nothing short of spectacular. You couldn’t have written it better if it were a movie. None of the other contestants received an ovation like that at any point during the evening.

In the end, Bang Bang came in third place, second runner up. We assumed that she had been rated lower in evening wear and swimwear, but held her own in the interview, and made up serious ground in the talent portion, where she had clearly been the best of the six. That wasn’t enough to win, but enough to put three queens in her rearview mirror. Pretty damn good for a first night out in drag. I knew some performers who competed over several years and never reached the top three.

When the MC announced her as second runner up, the crowd roared again. Bang Bang’s face told the story. She had come out earlier that evening to polite but perplexed applause. No one, even she, expected her to win, place, or show. But she won the crowd and if she didn’t take the crown, she came closer than anyone thought she might. She was surprised and proud, touched and humbled. She’d done it.

And then, as the crowd hushed, some guy standing down front called her fat.

In the quiet, the word echoed across the club, like breaking glass, impossible to miss. Bang Bang’s eyes shot up. I doubt she could see who had spoken, not with the spotlight on the contestants, but she had heard. You could see it on her face. Everyone had heard.

All that work. Sewing her outfits, planning and rehearsing her performance. Having the guts to come out without a cheering section. New to the community. First time ever in drag. Coming off a massive triumph in talent and placing third of six in a contest no one would have expected her even to enter…

And this fucker stole that from her with one nasty comment.

Before anyone could speak, a lesbian standing next to this guy ripped him a new asshole, all the way from his who the fuck do you think you are? to his who gives a shit what you think?  There is no doubt: A gay’s best friend and worst enemy is an angry lesbian.

I didn’t recognize the guy who’d spoken. If he’s alive, I bet he remembers that moment. I bet his ears are still burning from that dressing down.

The evening moved on. The first runner up and pageant winner were announced. It was fine. But I could see a bit of the glow had come off Bang Bang’s face. This was her community, but it might take more work to make it feel like home.

In fact, Bang Bang did keep competing. A year or two later, she won her first title. I had moved away by then, but I was so happy to hear that. I hope with time she had more applause and fewer assholes.