Writing prompt for March 12: “the seductive voices of the night”

(Yes, I am a bit behind on my writing prompts…)

That chunk of prompt, found in A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves, was taken from a letter written by Franz Kafka to his close friend Dr. Robert Klopstock, an American lung surgeon whom Kafka met when they were both being treated for tuberculosis. (Klopstock was later at Kafka’s bedside when the writer died in 1924. Klopstock lived another 48 years, dying in New York in June of 1972. I guess the lesson there is: if you are going to get TB, better to be a famous lung surgeon than a writer riddled with existential angst.) But I digress…

Kafka was comparing the seductive voices of the night to those of Ulysses’ sirens who “sounded so beautiful.” I do not find the voices of the night seductive or beautiful. I find them at best annoying, at worst scary. There are sirens in our nighttime, too, but their wail comes from the local police station only two streets over. Other not at all beautiful sounds are:

• The irregular sloshing of the dishwasher that sounds as though its heart might stop beating any minute.
• The whiz and BLAM! of cherry bombs being set off by our neighbor’s son in their driveway, which just happens to be right under our bedroom window.
• The hollow banging of the pipes trying to break out from behind the walls of our old house.
• The slamming of a car door at 3 a.m. – whose and why at that hour?
• And any sound from a thunderstorm: the rushing wind threatening to topple our giant pin oaks and send them crashing through the roof; the torturous drip, drip, drip of rain on the outside window frame that some former owner decided to cover with tin to protect the wood; the snap and crackle of electric wires as the arcing pops with UFO blue light.

No, not one of these sounds is seductive, in either the modern meaning or the Latin (seducere, to lead away). They do not tempt me or lead me away into the night.

It is the voices of the morning that I find seductive. The birds – song sparrow, indigo bunting, Carolina wren – their tiny throats throbbing with tunes as the dark begins to fade. The booming of hard rock music from a car window as our paper deliverer tosses the New York Times thwack! onto the driveway. The welcoming whistle of the first SEPTA train of the day down at the local station. Those voices call, “The day has started! Time to go! Kick off those covers!”

And I do.

The subject line on the most recent of (frequent) communications from TIAA-CREF reads: “Ready for Act II?”

Act II? Heck, I am trying to get Act IV underway!

Since leaving graduate school nearly 40 years ago, I have been a bank vice president (Act I), an English teacher and department head at a secondary school outside of Philadelphia (Act II), and a director of the Alumni Affairs Office at my undergraduate alma mater (Act III). Three acts. The End?

But what I really wanted to do when I grew up was to write, to read about writing, to write about reading. As a young girl, I spent hours at an old roll top desk in our attic writing poems and the first chapters of novels. I created little news sheets for the neighborhood. I was the Features Editor of my junior high’s newspaper.

Then something happened. I chickened out. It was safer to go to graduate school. It was safer to work for a bank. It was safer to be a teacher. It was safer to work for a university on the administrative side. I could still publish the occasional essay, book review, and then blog post “on the side.”

Well, I don’t want the writing to be on the side anymore. It’s time to get over the stage fright.

And how do Act IV’s turn out? Shakespeare always has lots of action happening in Act IV. In the tragedies, during Act IV the forces (natural or supernatural) come together to culminate in violence, and then in Act V everyone dies. Not very heartening! In the comedies, confusions are cleared up, characters are rescued, married, restored to their kingdoms, and then Act V just wraps things up before everyone goes to bed.

That’s all well and good for Shakespeare’s characters: they have their lines given to them. For my Act IV, I will have to make up all the lines, find my fellow actors, build the sets. And I have such flimsy boards on which to build…

I needed some guidance, and that led me to look for writing blogs. I was lucky that one of the first I found was Anne R. Allen’s Blog. And one of the first posts I read seemed as though it had been written just for me: “The Must-Read Story for Writers with the Impossible Dream.” She shares the story of Walter Reuben, a screen-writer and film-maker who didn’t have his first big success until he was nearly 70 years old.

Another post earlier this year, “Writers: How to Succeed at Building Platform Without Really Trying,”  helped me get over my procrastination about creating a real website, a place to build a platform out of my flimsy boards. And that post referenced “newly retired Boomers.”

I take to heart that it’s not too late to grow up to be what I really want to be. And I am not alone in wanting to have an Act IV.

So here goes…!