I have long thought of myself as a writer. Since before I could write, actually. My first stories, back in grade two, were printed in ruled composition books. They usually tended towards things like ghosts in deserted mansions: they were almost painfully derivative of things I'd read.
I would often be asked to come up to the front and read my compositions to the class, whereupon I would stride up and claim every eye, conjure a campfire, and let my tales wag in the smoky wind. I'm sure every teacher figured I'd grow up to be a successful author.
Well, I'm all grown up, now. And I've simultaneously succeeded beyond my wildest wishes...and failed, utterly and completely.
I've succeeded in that I am, technically, a published writer, and a prolific one at that. I'm coming up on my three hundredth chapter of a neverending saga called The Breadbin. My work is accessible to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. With the help of tools that most people in 1979 couldn't even begin to imagine, I have fashioned for myself a cosy little writer's nook in cyberspace.
I've failed because...as usual...I've shunned doing it the conventional way. My words have seen print in a few newspapers, but not so much as one tree has died to construct my literary platform. And, while this blog--a word that sounds, to a grade two mind, like a synonym for "barf"--can be read by millions, it most emphatically isn't.
Where did I go off the path? What serpent tempted me to stray?
The short answers are: one, I never really started on the path, and two, 'twas Laziness.
The first thing any reasonably successful writer will tell you, when you tell her you want to emulate her success, is that you must read, read, read as if your life depends on it, because it does. This I attempted to do, but that damned serpent commenced to hiss at me before I had gotten too far.
Lisssten, it said. Thessse booksss sssuck.
"These books" were classics of English literature, and I couldn't help but think the serpent was right. The first time it spoke to me, I was drowning in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a tiny little novella that is at least five times as dense as the jungle it's set in.
"Story!", I screamed, waving my hands in the air as I tried to extricate myself. "Where the hell's the story?" The paperback is 112 pages, and on at least a hundred of them nothing happens.
Oh, but wait a minute! I can hear all those English majors wailing. There's subtext everywhere in this here jungle! Why, just hack through this word-foliage and chop into the grove of verbosity over there and hark! all is revealed!
Oh, go hark! yourself. Can't a story be a story? Must reading--the thing I do to escape life's drudgeries--be such drudgery?
This attitude is the biggest reason I wasn't cut out to be an English major. Where my classmates revelled in getting right down into the guts of everything they read, I didn't want blood on my hands. You could tell when you read my essays: here is the work of a man with a gun to his head and a voice shouting in his ear, with apologies to the writers of The Simpsons, 'knife goes in, guts come out.'
Eventually I just got sick of it all, and stuck to reading for pleasure. Contrary to the opinion of many snobs, there is much to be gained by reading novels that, while "literature", don't merit the capital L. For me, historical novels and science fiction in particular shed light on odd corners of human endeavour: to successfully create or reflect a world, it helps to have your facts right.
And my writing now is not much different from my writing in grade two. I've got a slightly larger vocabulary, for sure, but I still try to conjure the campfire and simply tell a story.
Dan Simmons, a writer for whom I have a profound respect, has an excerpt from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms on his website. He states categorically that if you can't recognize it, "you haven't read widely enough or well enough to consider becoming a writer". Well, I state just as categorically that I've never read a thing by Ernest Hemingway, or Henry James, or any number of other 'canon' members, and I think Simmons is full of bunk. Perhaps if I aspired to write novels like those of Hemingway or James, I could grasp his point, but I do not. I want to tell my own stories, thank you, Dan.
I have a writing style that many would call slipshod: I edit on the fly, backing up at most a sentence to change a word. I subscribe to the theory that the story's already fully formed, lurking down in the deep, and must only be extracted, not built. Of course, some days I arrive at the dig to find myself bearing only a pickaxe. Other days, I've brought the heavy, earthshaking yellow mechanical beasts that thunk down into the story-bed and bring up whole paragraphs which need only dry in the sun. My desire is always there: my discipline, for whatever reason, only shows up when it feels like it.
For a long time, I thought I'd become an editor. I believe myself to be ideally suited to the job: I pick out typos and grammatical slipups without effort and I like to think I know my way around the written world. Unfortunately, it seems that to become an editor, one must first subject oneself to large doses of blood and guts...and then, more often than not, spend years as a reporter, asking stupid, none-of-your-business questions and writing down the responses. No thanks. What does that have to do with writing editorials, anyway? Never figured that out.
So here I sit, writing. And, by dint of a stubborn streak a mile wide, here I'll probably continue to sit. But that's okay. I've got you, after all.
Thanks for reading.
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