The Full Moon Made Me Do It!

On Lunacy, Moonstruck, and Why It Might be Crazy to Be a Writer

Welcome back, and Happy Full Moon! Today, my moon angles are lunacy, why being a writer is perhaps the choice of a lunatic, and how the full moon’s dominance of passion over reason plays out in that amazing film Moonstruck.

So first, here’s how I made the perhaps lunatic decision to become a writer. Or rather, here’s when it all played out.

The summer that I turned 23, I wrote an email update to some of my best college friends announcing that I was a writer. I cringe now as I think about it, the arrogant announcement of a barely adult neophyte, but my certainty at this relatively young age was undeniable, as was my commitment to the practice of writing. To my friends and loved ones, I said this:

This announcement, looking back, is packed with hyperbole, melodrama, passion, and intention-setting. On the one hand, the voice is not so dissimilar from my voice today, and I applaud 23-year-old Kim for knowing her heart and having the courage to shout it from the rooftops. On the other hand, the last line quoted here was far more true and difficult than I ever expected it to be. It IS very difficult to get accolades or financial compensation from writing. It was then, it is now, and as the future unfolds, it looks like becoming solvent as a writer is getting more difficult, not less.

So why do we become writers, identify as writers, and write?

Is it lunacy, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “stupid behavior that will have bad results”? Lunacy is also defined as foolishness bordering on mental illness, foolishness with a dangerous twinge to it, other kinds of madness, insanity, or wild folly, or even a trance-like state of crazy behavior. Etymologically, lunacy (and lunatic) has roots in the 16th century, and this state of behavior was thought to be intermittent insanity caused by changes of the moon.

So here we are: is it lunacy to be a writer, and does the full moon cause this lunacy?

I teach writing to college students who need to be able to write effectively in their academic and professional careers. I’ve also taught creative writing to students of all ages, including adults coming to writing later in life who are desperate to tell the stories they need to express. And in my classes, especially creative writing classes, it is my belief that everyone, for the most part, needs to write. Writing is healing, therapeutic, and fun. When you write, you can conjure a story, spin an essay, or evoke raw experience in a poem—and in that moment, you are the master of the page, the god or goddess, the raconteur. Everyone needs to write.

But how many of us should try to package up our writing and sell it for others to purchase, read, and consume?

Very few of us.

It’s very difficult to take raw, unpolished writing and massage it into something that a reader really wants to read. It’s even more challenging to jump through hoops to find editors, agents, and publishers who want to sell this writing to the masses. While it’s incredibly satisfying to get that first article or story in print, and the rush of having a new piece published will never fade entirely for me, I can’t say I totally recommend staking out one’s claim on being a professional writer.

I encourage and coach students in classes to “Get Published This Year.” Yet one publication will not cover a year of living expenses, rent, groceries, or a mortgage. It’s incredibly difficult to be a professional writer only; most of us writers do work in some other capacity to pay our bills, and honestly, not depending on my writing as my sole source of income has freed me up psychologically to take much bigger creative risks in my writing. I see it as the thing I do for me and for my life, and while it sometimes competes with my day job as an educator, the writing and the teaching feed each other.

If and when I sell a book (fingers crossed, more on this another day), then that income will be icing on the writing cake. But it will certainly not be commensurate to the days/hours/years/decades I spent working on my book. Importantly, I don’t expect it to be that. The satisfaction from the writing life offers something better, deeper, and truer than a balanced budget.

So perhaps managing our expectations as writers is the key to avoiding lunacy (or total heartbreak).

But what about the best kind of lunacy—the full moon’s effect to sweep us all away and make us fall in love and forget about our earthly responsibilities and obligations?

For this, let’s go to Moonstruck.

Still image from Moonstruck by Norman Jewison, 1987, The Criterion Collection.

If you haven’t seen Moonstruck, please stop reading this and go watch this film!!!

If you haven’t seen Moonstruck in more than 5 years, please go re-watch this film as soon as you finish reading this! (Big shout out to my friend Jill for being the one to show me this film, even after we were thwarted by a scratched DVD!) The charm! The big hair! The speaking of Italian! The Brooklyn streets! Cher! A young Nicholas Cage!!!

I love this movie because it leans hard into the full-moon-as-catalyst-for-everything premise. Before the full moon, a nice family goes about their business. Cher as Loretta Castorini is sensible: an accountant, a caretaker, a moderate and measured woman in every way possible. A widow, she has decided to marry a nice but entirely unimpressive fellow, Johnny, because she decides that it’s nice to take care of a somewhat unimposing and bumbling man. He immediately leaves for Sicily to see his dying mother, but asks Loretta to convince his estranged brother Ronny (I mean, Johnny and Ronny??? This movie is beyond silly) to forgive him and come to their wedding. Sounds good, right? Everything seems pretty reasonable.

Enter a young Nicholas Cage, barely clothed, bathed in sweat, with a wooden hand, hefting Italian bread into a fiery oven, and shouting at the top of his lungs.

Ooooh, baby! Cue the lunacy!

I’m not going to recap the whole rest of the film (go watch it!), but I will say that as a writer, I feel like this movie shouldn’t work but does. Ronny and Loretta shout at each other and then fall in love instantly, while Loretta’s parents each find some sort of love/lust/connection with other partners but come back to each other eventually and her aunt and uncle rekindle the enduring flames of lust from their youth. In short, the full moon comes out and everyone goes nuts, but ultimately, everything works out just fine. Also, we get to go to the opera with these two in one of the most romantic sequences ever filmed.

Maybe the best kind of romance is knowing you shouldn’t follow your heart but you do it anyway?

Maybe one less painful way of being a writer is knowing it’s not going to pay your rent but you do it anyway?

Maybe full moons give us permission to be impulsive, follow our intuition, and actualize our souls in ways we are normally too afraid or too rational to consider.

Have a great full moon!

Full Moon Fun Facts:

• The word “lunacy” comes from Luna, the Roman moon goddess, who was said to ride her chariot across the sky. Luna was associated with the full moon, and femininity, and she was daughter of Hyperion and Theia, two of the twelve Titan children of Gaia and Uranus.

  • According to Vindolanda Charitable Trust, “In addition to femininity, childbirth and agriculture Romans believed that the moon controlled many other facets of sublunar life including the wind, rain, tides, animal life, mineral growth and earthquakes… Luna was also believed to have the power to mask reality, to pierce illusion, to awaken intuition and to spark visions. This latter arising from association of the night and the moon with dreams. She was also known as a patron of solutions which came to people in dreams, when the subconscious mind processes information.”

• Where oh where do werewolves come from? The mythology of werewolves has its origins as far back as Greek and Norse mythology, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. But my favorite werewolf will always be Remus Lupin.

  

• Another commonly held belief (that I have not yet found great evidence to support) is that the full moon makes people feel romantic, sexy, or more impulsive and aroused. While it seems plausible that the gravitational pull of the moon affects our hormones (estrogen, testosterone, cortisol), the jury is still out on exactly why and how. There is, evidence, however, that more people are active and out at night during full moons, and anecdotal evidence that people can be more sleepless and irritable. If you can’t sleep, this is a great time to chase some romance, or write!

A Full Moon Writing Prompt:

Think about a moment when you acted purely on impulse or intuition – either in love, in lust, or in some other aspect of your life. When did you know you had to act or pick a choice, even if it wasn’t the most rational, safe, or logical path?

Write for 5 minutes about this decision, reflecting on your memory with as many concrete and sensory details as you can remember—what you saw, felt, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched.

OR, write a fictional scene in which a character makes an impulsive or intuitive decision, based purely on instinct, and think about what they are perceiving as they make it (even if they don’t rationally know why they are going this way).

Here it is, Your Moment of Zen: