When I was in junior high school (middle school for you youngsters), I was walking home from school with my sister and a couple friends, and we came across a familiar piece of abandoned infrastructure from the old Illinois-Michigan canal: the remains of a lock that helped boats navigate the changing heights of the channel. It looked like this:

If you look closely between the massive retaining walls, you can see a concrete wall going from left to right. On the side closest to you, you see what is about a seven or maybe ten-foot drop into damp reeds. (This picture was taken too early for you to see the full-grown invasive Phragmites reeds dead and broken on the green side. Trust me, that’s the green you see.) On the side you can’t see is a shorter drop into what is brackish water most of the year. The wall itself is no more than a foot wide, and to access it you must sit on the retaining wall with your feet dangling and slip downward, landing on the retaining wall.

This is important, because my sister’s two friends decided we would take this route instead of the perfectly safe footbridge a half-block west. I expected Juli (not her real name) to navigate the treacherous path relatively well, because she was pretty slim and a tomboy, but then Bobbie (also not her real name) managed it despite her plump, awkward build.

Because these were my sister’s friends, they called out for my sister to try the path. I didn’t even exist to them, being younger and awkwardly embarrassing to be around. Lisa, who has a fear of heights, passed. I, seizing the chance to prove myself to them, shimmied down to the five foot jump onto the wall. Walking it was easy, if I didn’t think of the scummy green water on one side or the sharp canes on the other. And if I didn’t consider how immensely uncoordinated I was. I didn’t think about them, because I was working hard to walk fast across a balance beam when every other time I’d been on a balance beam I fell over. And trying not to pass out.

Somehow I made it, only to find the real challenge: trying to climb up that five-foot retaining wall with only a sharp, rusty bracket to hold onto. I withheld the desire to cry. Or barf. Luckily, Juli and Bobbie helped pull me up, after waiting a suitable time to make me suffer.

Why did I tell this story? To use it as an analogy for writing. Writing to be read is like walking a narrow beam where there’s a brackish pool of familiarity on one side, and a deep fall with sharp sticks on the other.

What do I mean?

Most people need some familiarity in what they need — whether topics, themes, plots, characters, or setting. For example, I’ve been told by a psychologist (of course!) that Jungian archetypes — Persona, Shadow, Great Mother, Wise Old Man — are necessary to sell a book. Genre fiction has its own tropes — where would science fiction be without the amusing alien (porgs in The Last Jedi), the ancient conspiracy (also in The Last Jedi), and the balance between Good and Evil (also in the Last Jedi)? Familiar topics help us place ourselves into the action, and familiar plots help us feel that an age-old myth unfolds before our eyes.

At the same time, people need their minds to be challenged, but not so challenged that they can’t identify. There’s a whole range of challenge from what we call “beach-blanket books” — light romance and slice-of-life books that are a vacation in a paperback — to Umberto Eco, whose books are so dense that one had to make a concerted effort to read.

In other words, people read things that affirm them, but at the same time they like some unfamiliarity. Danger, even — if not danger of being impaled on reeds, the danger of having their minds changed, their hearts broken, their lives expanded.

*********
Writing this blog also compares to that tightrope I walked as a child. My most read topics are the more personal ones: No Coffee, Marcie, Graduation, Bipolar disorder, Richard’s aunt dying. The creative pieces get a moderate number of visitors, thank goodness. The technical ones perhaps the least, but they’re not sparsely subscribed to, either.

I want to pick topics that appeal to everyone, but I don’t want to lose the writing/writer aspect of it. I want to share my creative writing, of course, and walk through the joys and sorrows of being a writer. I want to teach techniques in case I have writers out there. (Notice I don’t say “aspiring writers” — if you’re thinking about it, you’re a writer.)

So unless you object to the mix, horribly, I’m going to keep walking that tightrope.