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The Fire of Obsession

By

Obsession is a writer’s way.  We are hard-wired for it, to collect details and study a subject with great intensity, like a four year old who memorizes all the names of all the dinosaurs in all the ages and can recite their diets and sizes and probable colors for hours if you let him.  (And if you let him, you will be his friend for LIFE.)

That does not always mean it’s comfortable.  I have been crazy in love with the ancient Irish and the Black Death and Titanic, with weaving and dyeing, with Faulkner and England and faeries and crop circles and tornados…well, a zillion other things that drove my family and friends crazy. With time, you learn to cover your tracks a bit, cover the twitch, the green glimmer of the eye.

The thing is, you can’t help it.  You don’t say to yourself, “hmm, I think I’ll find out absolutely every single thing I can about black soldiers in World War II, and meanwhile learn 12 billion details about the landing at Normandy, and then drive everyone crazy for six months reciting all the facts I’ve discovered until they wave their hands if anyone so much as mentions 1944 or Jim Crow or Dachau.”  Don’t get her started!

No, it happens because your brain is ripe for a seed.  You find out that we fought Hitler with a segregated freaking Army and your brain says, “WHAT? That’s IMPOSSIBLE!”   And you’re off.

I’m thinking about this because I am currently really obsessed with the Waldo Canyon Fire.  I mean, really, really, really obsessed.  You may have heard about the fire in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago.  A lot of people did.  It was a big fire. It was a fierce fire.  It burned a lot of homes, and devoured one of the most beloved canyons around here (and one of my favorite hiking trails, dang it!)

The thing is, despite the near certainty of what happened happening, none of us were very well educated about fire, and I learned more in five days than I’ve ever learned about anything in my life.

And the girls in the basement are obsessed.  I’m embarrassed, creeping around collecting facts and photos and stories, stashing them away, but I know what this is, and it’s not going away.   It wasn’t just this fire, actually, it’s a few things coming together.  When I visited Australia a few years ago, I was struck by the depth of fear people had for bush fires.  I climbed a mountain that was still scarred badly from a fire that had burned in the late sixties and thought about how fiercely that fire must have burned.  Shortly after I came home, the terrible terrible Black Saturday fires erupted there. 

Layered atop the fire thoughts is–weirdly–the tornado in Joplin, Missouri.  It obsessed me a bit, too.  How do people live with a threat like that, knowing a major storm can just knock down your entire town in a single hour?  I mean, really? How? Freaks me out.

And then fire broke out in my town.  Right outside my office window.  We all watched it like it was tv, smoke billowing up in pink and orange loveliness.  Scary, but not so much, really.

Until it was. Until the fire swept over the mountains and into the city and wiped out a whole neighborhood in twelve hours.

(WHAT? The brain says. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE! I like, know that neighborhood.  It’s a lot like mine, same houses, same eras, same kitchen cabinets. I spent many an evening on a balcony there, many more in a garden beside it.  I know the streets. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE.)

As everyone (except those who lost homes) begin to move on, the girls in the basement are still piling up zillions of details—terms and techniques and careers related to fighting fires (there was the most appealing African American woman with the forestry service who gave reports every day–we all fell in love with her a little bit).  I’m fascinated with a scientific aspect of the fire called a pyrocumulus cloud, which one firefighter said “exploded like a watermelon,” essentially dropping fire over a wide area.  I keep going over the what-ifs: what if the wind had shifted this way or that?  What if the whole front of Pikes Peak burned instead?  What if, what if, what if….?  What if the fire crossed the big road that stopped it, and kept rolling east?  Long ago, entire cities burned, but we don’t think it can happen now, really.  It’s shocking to realize that it actually could.

I think about the firemen, trying valiantly to hold that ridge, and failing dramatically when the wind and that cloud combined to create an absolutely uncontainable fire. I imagine how they swore, how fearful they were, how angry. What is that like, to be the guy trying to hold the line?

I’m peering at the mountains, tracing the serpentine path of fire, how it burns some things and not others, and how a patch of green can stand right in the middle of an entire mountainside that burned, whole and complete.  A woman told me about a squirrel on her street that has a burned foot.  A man told the story of how the fire came right to the edge of his patio and stopped.   My cousin fretted about some deer who finally came back. She feared they had singed fur.

I have a bucket of absolute, cold-sweat terror I collected when the fire exploded.  I have a memory of a woman in a Subaru with a guitar and a dog and her car packed to the brim, creeping along beside me on a street so thick with smoke that ashes as big as dollar bills were falling on our windshields.  I wonder if her house still stands.  What her life is like now. Is she, like the woman who told me about the squirrel with the burned foot, living in a hotel as she awaits word on renovations?  Is her house one that stands along on a street where the others all burned?  Is her house gone entirely, along with her forks and that book she was reading and a necklace she picked up in Brazil?

I want to know what happens next, to the ones who stay and the ones who go and the ones who rebuild and the ones who will not recover.  I want to write about bears invading a mountain town when all the people were evacuated and the little arcade in Manitou that was spared, and the line that held.  I want to go to the top of Pikes Peak and look down on the scar, get a feeling of the spatial aspects.  I want to plant flowers in Waldo Canyon, someday, when it’s open again, because I did love it madly and whatever it was is now gone, something else.

I’ll write about all of it in some way, at some point.  Not for a long time, not until the blood of my obsession has subsided a bit, when the scientist and observer can reassert herself, sort through the vast material the Girls have collected, and decide what matters most to this writer’s mind.  Until then, I’ll try to keep a mask of dignity over my obsession, respect those who are grieving (maybe including me), and let the Girls collect the data they need.

I’m a writer. This is what we do.

Have you ever written about a cataclysmic event in your world? Have you ever obsessed about something to the point that you drove family crazy?  Do your muses collect particular things?  

About Barbara O'Neal

Barbara O'Neal has written a number of highly acclaimed novels, including 2012 RITA winner, How To Bake A Perfect Life, which landed her in the RWA Hall of Fame and was a Target Club Pick. She is a highly respected teacher who also publishes material for writers at Patreon.com/barbaraoneal. She is at work on her next novel to be published by Lake Union in July. A complete backlist is available here.

Comments

  1. I’m glad it’s not just me! I thought casually that I might like to write an old fashioned vampire historical, and now I know more about Ottoman foriegn policy in the 18th Century than I ever thought there was to know.

  2. I have the same kind of obsessions, but I tend to project them into the future. I’ve just started thinking about and making notes for a dystopian novel that, oddly enough, will have a reference to the Ottoman Empire Janisseries.

  3. Barbara,
    First I hope the people affected by the awful fires can recover and get on with their lives. The period that fascinates me is the 1950s–that decade of false tranquility that ushered in the turbulent 1960s. I have a first draft of a novel centered on events of the 1950s and the repercussions in later years. Thanks for sharing these thoughts. You are not alone in your curiosity. As you said writers are hard wired to think in this way.

  4. My brain works like a ticker tape of thought anyway– my little fascinations just make it roll faster.

    I live in a small mountain town (in Colorado, actually– fortunately away from the fires this summer so far). Odd events that come and go in the headlines capture my attention. For example, a young gal placed her still-born (or was it?) baby in the ceiling tiles of her dorm room until the smell alerted roommate. Tragic, but the questions haunt me.

    In another incident, two guys were joy riding in a small private plane and hit a power line above a lake and were killed.

    I want to know the background stories behind the people and events. Who were the people? What thinking lead to such pivotal decisions? Who were the families? What ripples grew from these events?

    Maybe it’s this almost obsessive curiosity that motivates writers.

    Thanks for the thought-provoking post.

    Julie

  5. My ‘friends and family waving off bystanders’ topics are American Indian lore, WW2, the ancient Roman Empire, JRR Tolkien, and the Germanic tribes, among others. I have learned some restraint but, as you say, don’t get me started.

    I love your ‘what comes after’ empathy. I really is the heart and soul of The Garden of Happy Endings–what comes next for each of the characters after their worlds are rocked. You demonstrate so ably what powerful stories emerge from it.

    Thanks for that, and for this wonderful post, Barbara.

  6. I loved this post. I wholeheartedly identified with that obsessive nature that doesn’t seem to make sense to others but allows me to translate things from life to page.

    And while you may need some time to process what happened there, you have already captured something really universal that made me feel for all my fellow human beings over there.

    Well done.

  7. What Michelle said. This post left me feeling like a good novel does, transported, enlightened, a bit wrenched and wistful, but hopeful in the end.

    And it convinced me I really must read your books.

  8. I think those of us who live in areas regularly threatened by natural disaster learn to live with the fear in compartments. I grew up not far from Joplin and spent many summer nights in the basement with our emergency supplies. The destruction is so sudden and the recovery is so slow.

    It’s reassuring to know that serial obsession with topics is common to other writers. I’ve always been aware of it. I’ve blessed it in my freelance writing career. I’ve cursed it as a problem in the academic world–where most hold fast to a single lifelong big obsession. But I’ve never connected it to the place where the the stories come from. Thank you.

    I won’t bore you with the list of my current obsessions, though I must admit one of them is the Ottoman Empire, 14th to 15th century. Maybe we need to form a support group?

  9. A good ten years after the end of my Great Vandean Obsession, my mother still goes glass-eyed at the most casual mention of the Vandean Wars…
    As you say, I have learnt to cover my tracks since, and not to inflict ossessions on family and near friends – unless asked.
    My current obsession is Elizabethan theatre, and I find I have come to a point where I can happily cultivate it by myself, most of the time.
    I’m told it has made me a tad easier to live around… Still, when someone asks, there *is* some hand-waving, and warnings that, once I’m started on the topic, I am a real liability.

  10. Love the phrase “the girls in the basement,” and Pamela’s term, “serial obsessions.”

    Obsession’s soul mate is passion, and you’ve got that in droves.

  11. Great post! I never know what’s going to stoke those creative fires or when. I will hear ten different news items or factoids that all have potential for a story but it will be something about the eleventh that makes me take note.

  13. How funny that three people are fascinated by the Ottoman Empire. Must mean there is some power In it.

    Replying via phone this am. Forgive typos and such, please!

  14. I’m working on a novel about a fresco painter (pictor imaginarius) from Pompeii in the first century AD. And, of course, we all know how that one ends. But the novel doesn’t have so much to do with the eruption of Vesuvius as with the life of the pictor imaginarius during that time. For me, it’s more of a connection to time and place. My previous novel was partly about Auschwitz. Again, it was a connection to time and place. In fact, the second part of that novel deals with the issue of connection to place.

    We all feel certain connections, and it’s from these connections that we derive emotional sustenance. These connections are important to everyone but especially to writers.

  15. Hi Barbara,
    I read your posts religiously but never commented before. Probably because I never felt I had anything worthwhile to say. But this post did strike a very deep chord within me.

    My particular obsession/fascination is with the American Civil War, and it has been for more than 30 years now. I thought there was something very, very wrong with me, (I am a female, which makes it even more weird because women are supposed to be caregivers and nurturers, not war fanatics.) I’ve learned to shut my trap around family and friends, so much so that even when I’m asked questions about it I answer as sparingly as possible. I just can’t stand to see the eyes glazing over.

    All this time I thought maybe I was a little nuts and, to be honest, it scared me. You have no idea how your post has comforted me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  16. I figured you’d be writing about this. I hope when you do it helps the people in your community feel…heard? well-represented? There’s something very validating about reading something and feeling “yes, that’s exactly what it was like!” And please keep the Af-Am forest ranger! I’d love to see that character in fiction.

  17. First off, mad respect for the people fighting these fires. I live in New Jersey, so the most we see are car fires on the Parkway, but I’ve been out west a bunch of times. Fighting these things is like walking into hell. That people are able to face that is amazing.

    In terms of obsessions, I’ve had my share. Mostly, I’ve been obsessed with religion and spirituality. I’m not very religious myself, but as a phenomenon, I think it’s incredibly interesting. The Abrahamic religions, old pagan religions, the “Devil-Worshippers” Yazidi clans of Iraq, you name it, I’ve looked into it. It reflects a lot in my writing.

    Coming to terms with death, life, and one’s purpose are some of my standard themes. It’s a lot of fun to bring something from the real world and find a way to incorporate it in fiction.

  18. My 13-year old daughter is the person who is currently obsessed in my house. We have a dog, but she wants a small pet for herself, to keep in her room. First she started with beta fish, then moved to hermit crabs. Now she’s decided on a hamster. She has spent countless hours searching the internet and reading books to find information about the pet of the moment. Then she relays all of the information to anybody and everybody who will listen. She is definitely my writer of the future. :)

  19. Seriously, Barbara, this is one smoking hot post. What passion, what fire! Read it twice, just for the thrill. Harness it now, dive into the mind of that front line fighter and write ’til your fingers are raw. Build it and they will come.

    Denise Willson
    Author of A Keeper’s Truth

  20. Here’s to curiosity and the willingness to do the work to sate it.

    I, too, have serial obsessions: WW II in general (especially the home front that I witnessed at six), Iceland during WW II (we invaded it then gave it back), Savannah during the Civil War (where Sherman was a gracious and benign conquerer), compostion of the House of Lords, progression of the Great Houses of England from feudal fortresses to show places, etc., etc.

    I love to write about — and therefore, research — things I would like to know more about. Now that my traveling days are over, this is my vehicle for adventure.

    Thanks for the encouragement. Maybe I’m not crazy after all.

  21. Great post (as always,) Barbara. I have family in that area (including a nephew who is a fireman)–a fact which made your descriptions twist my insides even more. I love how your writer energy is in full throttle! Glad you and yours are safe.

  22. I felt SUCH kinship with you when I read this post. Though I’ve never written about a disastrous event, I know too well the effect my obsessions have on research and my writing. Like you, I tend to absorb facts at an alarming rate when I’m interested in something. My husband calls them my little “Research Projects”. I adore learning and gathering minutia about cultures, traditions, people, events. I think many writers have this same impulse. We’re like little magpies collecting bits of EVERYTHING for our nests. :-)

    Thanks for sharing this wonderful article!

  23. You’re not the first one to be fascinated by wildfires. Check out George R. Stewarts 1948 novel “Fire” about a forest fire in the Nevada-California mountains. What’s neat about it is that, although it follows a number of the firefighters and others involved, the fire itself is the main character.

    Stewart’s “Storm” is another example of a fellow obsession with the anatomy and effects of natural disasters.

  24. Your post brings to mind the three most scary events I’ve lived through: the Mount St. Helen’s fire (although I was south, in Corvallis, there was ash all over our cars and the news stories were frightening), the Santa Barbara fire (where we were housesitting one of the homes and had to leave, came back the next day and the two neighboring homes were fine but ours was burnt to the ground), and the 1989 San Francisco Bay Area earthquake (my husband couldn’t get back over the bridge so he was invited to a street bbq by people he’d never seen in his life). Oh, the stories that people can tell whilst in the midst of a disaster….
    Patti

  25. When has my obsession NOT driven my family crazy? A new show, tea, robots, video games… I never really go halfway with these things, and while my family is supporting a rogue comment about it being a bit annoying always sneaks in eventually.

  26. This is some beauty of a post, Barbara. I’m thoroughly obsessed with reading and rereading it!

    My own obsession with two local events that have run about in my mind long enough to become my latest novel. It all started when a well known criminal (there is a movie about him and his family starring Sean Penn and Christopher Walken) escaped from prison and was on the lose and hiding-out in the area for several weeks before being recaptured. Add an arsonist on a crazed spree a few years later and a writers obsession you have :-)

  28. Not my own cataclysms, can’t get there yet.

    But I recommend you read ‘Young Men and Fire’ by Norman Maclean. He was a firefighter as a young man, and spent his life trying to understand the loss of 12 of his fellow firefighters in the USFS. You’ll understand his obsession.

  29. And sometimes it sneaks up on you. You wake up in the night thinking, “I wonder why it’s called ‘port’ and ‘starboard’.” And three days later you’re staring at sails, figuring out what the different shapes are for and suddenly you realise, “I’m writing about boats.” And you don’t know WHY yet, or WHAT, but you’ll figure it out…

  30. This post has been a great find! In John Irving’s book Hotel New Hampshire, I remember a character saying, “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.” That stuck with me because I come from a family where OCD runs deep and everybody wishes everybody else would just stop talking already. (Holiday meals are a battle field of factoid projectiles.)

    I think it makes life more interesting and digs the roots of a single life down deeper. It seems that people with a scorching curiosity have an expression or posture that broadcasts that curiosity to others. My daughter refused to go shopping with me because it takes so long. I’m forever stopped in an aisle as a stranger tells me their life story, which I enjoy more than anything. Does your curiosity, or the curiosity of others commenting, ever put you in that position? I’d love to hear how opinions on why this happens, and how it intensifies one’s curiosity even more.

    I’d also like to ask how you can keep your emotional distance from the obsession. I’m currently researching, in depth, the economic events of this global economic depression, and it’s so overwhelming that I can’t get the book written, despite a deadline breathing down my neck. The information can be organized and put in the memoir to make it more universal, but not until the emotion is out of the way.

    How have you been able to digest what you’ve witnessed with those fires without the experience taking over?

    I’d love to hear from others on this subject, so perhaps I should make that my next blog post.

    Thanks for getting my thinking into gear, and thank you for acknowledging a family “disorder” as one of the many gifts given to writers.

  31. Im grateful for your obsessions, Barbara! Did you see the aftermath of the wild fire that destroyed Slave Lake, Alberta, last year? It was a miracle and a horror; no one killed but so much physical and soul damage. Blessings.

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