I had this weird dream a couple nights ago.
I don’t remember much of it, but one thing stands out – someone handing me a golf ball with a pink flower.
I’m sure this means nothing to you. You probably know nothing about golf balls, and if you do, a pink flower on one of them will likely have no significance for you.
I’m not a golf aficionado. My dad plays it, but it’s never held much appeal for me. And yet, when I was in junior high, I flirted with sports, taking up tennis and then for a very brief period, golf.
It’s misleading to say Cross Junior High had a golf team. What we had was six or eight kids who came out to hit some balls around after school. The best of us even got to go out on a real golf course now and then with our coach, while the rest of us hit balls at the driving range.
But we also practiced at the school, on a wide grassy lawn alongside one of the buildings. And in the sack of golf balls we used, there were dozens of standard white golf balls and one that had a single pink flower.
I don’t know when it first happened, but at some point that ball became the most valuable one in the whole bunch.
We had these golf ball collector things – basically a long plastic tube that would suck up the balls we’d just hit out into the field – and as soon as we’d hit the last ball, we’d race out there as one with our collectors in hand, in search of the pink flower. And whoever found it would call out “got it!” in a triumphant yell.
Was there anything inherently better about that particular ball?
No.
Was it strange that a group of (supposedly) athletic guys in (fairly) repressive early eighties Arizona were excited by a pink flower?
Maybe.
But of course, it never was about the flower per se.
It was because it was unique.
As writers, we have an impossible task. We are usually also avid readers, and we have a body of work (in modern fiction) decades and decades long. We know from long experience that there is nothing new under the sun. And yet we are tasked with creating something shiny and moving and original, something unlike anything that anyone has ever read before.
And why?
Because people crave golf balls with pink flowers.
We watched an episode of the gay procedural “Instinct” with Alan Cummings yesterday, and it featured a singer who killed himself because he had epilepsy-induced deja vu that made everything around him, even his most original creative impulses, tired and unoriginal to him.
Can you imagine living in a world where nothing was ever new again?
That’s what it’s like, being an author. Our internal critic sits on ouyr shoulders and lectures us about how derivative we are, how boring. How banal.
And yet we soldier on. We strive to create something impossible. We throw all the old pieces up in the air and hope they come down to us transformed.
And every now and then we succeed.
So the next time you find a pink flower while reading, celebrate it, and realize how unlikely its very existence is and how hard the author worked to make it blossom for you.
And if you manage to write one, throw up your hands in joy and dance under the silver light of the moon and stars.
New and unique are precious things that we all should cherish, whenever we find them.
Scott lives with his husband Mark in a yellow bungalow in Sacramento. He was indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine. He devoured her library, but as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were.
He decided that if there weren’t gay characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.
A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi, QueeRomance Ink, and Other Worlds Ink with Mark, sites that celebrate fiction reflecting queer reality.