The Hang Glider Effect: an essay on flailing and soaring by Amy Truncale

This is purely metaphor. That writing is just like hang-gliding. There are particular rules for the writer/hang-glider. You have to carry your own glider up a nineteen-mile mountain. Wings must be fully extended, the ungainly apparatus strapped to your back as if you are ready to soar at any moment.

A supportive friend may be waiting for you here and there along the rocky trail, ready to hand you a tiny Dixie cup half filled with water, but that is all. They vanish as you scrunch up the cup and stuff it into your front pocket. No writer would litter in the pristine wilderness, unless you are not struggling up the hill but staring blankly into the abyss—but that would require a separate blog post.

So you have a giant wad of crumpled up plastic paper things in your pocket to remind you of your support group, also known as the people to whom, in a rare moment of joy at your unfolding story, you stupidly announced that you are writing a novel, memoir, poem or screenplay.

And by the way, writing is also amazingly like dying you know? No one can do it for you.  Your loves may gather around your deathbed, hold your hand or press a cool cloth to your forehead, but ultimately you must take this journey alone.  Writing is also like dying in a hundred other ways, but I’ll spare you for now.

It’s a difficult climb up the dusty slope. A trail too narrow, in fact, for a fully extended hang glider strapped to your back.  A sudden gust may grab the nose of your kite and jerk you upright and back a few steps. Make sure you grab a tree branch so you don’t tumble all the way back to the bottom.  This has happened before, and it is either the greatest tragedy, a divine revelation or both; you get to decide.

Also, don’t bend forward too far, or the nose of your ridiculous appendage will jam into the rocks and exposed roots on the obliquity in front of you.  The jarring effect of a dead stop at point zero one miles an hour is surprisingly arresting.  But you get used to it.

It’s easy to forget why you are carrying this thing. If you do not succumb to the ten thousand attempts of your ego to get you to give up, to un-strap yourself and run back down hill, IF you make it to the top where the wind is unpredictably gusting in several directions simultaneously, and IF you climb on all fours to the cliff ledge without letting your kite have its way with you (there are a few handholds by the way), then, only then you can take your leap.