You Call Yourself A Writer?

Hitting your forties isn’t all bad.  We’re conditioned to hate aging, but there are benefits gained along the way.  You stop giving a shit about two-thirds of everything, which is nice.  What’s left, if you’re sane, are the things you have some control over and a great deal of perspective.

It’s the perspective that keeps bringing back to blogging.  I use it to sort it all out.  For instance, even though I believed I began taking writing seriously about five or ten years ago, the truth is I’ve had the instincts and actions of a writer since I was a tiny little dude with a cowlick.  No one was paying any attention, and I certainly had no guidance of any kind, so it all went unnoticed.  I was raw and I didn’t recognize my love of writing, even though it was all there in front of me. 

It’s difficult to find a starting point, so I’ll just pick fifth grade. My friend Eric already was a reader and comic book collector.  He drew his own stick figure comics and I quickly joined in.  I loved to be funny, so mine were goofier as opposed to Eric’s adventure-style comics. I also remember recording cassette tapes of comedy bits and sketches that were ridiculous.  Maybe the goal was to get them on the radio?  I don’t know. I enjoyed my creative writing assignments at school, and I borrowed the occasional book from the library, but I wasn’t a big reader. We also were pretty broke, so I didn’t get into comics, either.

I fell in love with the 1980’s comedy boom and I started my own comedy notebook when I was around sixteen or so. It was all hacky shit, but I was consistent, and I dreamed of doing stand-up.  I expanded my creative writing journal into a daily journal with comedy writing, poetry, and lists of insane shit.   The reason I didn’t set off into the world of comedy is a large book in itself, but mixed in there were a few open mics and writing for a sketch comedy show for a little while.  Now, what I didn’t notice at the time was that I got a bigger charge coming up with ideas for jokes and sketches than I did performing.  So much so, that even though I intellectually knew that a comedy career was never going to happen, I still wrote material.  I still journaled.  I still scratched down ideas. 

I also learned three chords on a guitar and started a band with my friend Sam.  We played for ourselves and we knew we sucked.  It was for fun and to spend some time together as we dealt with fatherhood, work, and bills, plus I got to write lyrics. Lyrics to me were free verse poems that could be anything.  I may have learned two more chords, but I wrote a shitload of poetry. 

I was in college at the time taking writing classes and I began to learn that a lot of my stuff didn’t suck.  Some of it had promise.  I purposely took extra English and writing classes with six-thousand-word requirements to get more practice.  (Was I a writing major? No.  A history major.  Remember, understanding myself didn’t come to my late thirties.)  My poetry got a little better, but I switched to short stories.  I had great professors, and even a few of my upper-level history professors commented on my papers.  I was good.  I could organize on my feet and I knew how to communicate.

I was ready to…become a substitute teacher.

You can guess how that ended.  Pretty soon I had a weird job working from home that paid the bills and kept me around for when the kids got home from school.  It was right around then I started to understand the disaster I had wrought.  I didn’t want to perform.  I didn’t want to sing.  I didn’t want to teach.  I wanted attention, for damn sure, but the thing that kept me going was the writing.  I didn’t want to be a movie star, but I would write a movie. Better yet, I would like to write the book that was made into a movie.

Around 2003 or so, right before we uprooted our lived and moved to Oregon, I took a crack at writing my first book.  I set it in the hotel I worked at while I was in college and it was about a guy in my situation dealing with life’s bullshit.  It wasn’t good. But, it was 76,000 words and I put it together. I tried a movie script, too.  I found a copy of the Clerks script online to estimate length and the structure of a script. Scripts are pretty fucking boring to write. Finished it.  Put it in a drawer.

We moved out here in 2005 and I started writing a book by hand while I had a desk job.  We had nothing to do and I wasn’t allowed to use the computer to write anything, so I bought a pack of yellow legal pads and wrote by hand during the day and transcribed it onto my computer at night.  It also wasn’t good, but I tried switching back and forth between timelines, which is something I like in fiction.

When we moved into our new house, I looked through the box where I keep all my old writing shit.  Tattered journals and school notebooks with half-conceived premises and characters.  Binders with song lyrics and shitty poems and more story ideas I forgot about years ago.  The box weighs a ton. There is so much of me and my time in there.  Ninety percent of it has not been seen by anyone.  It took me so long to see that I’ve been trying to write and get it out there the whole time. The proof was sitting there for years. I had to go to therapy to see my own development as a writer.  I had to go to therapy to have the nerve to call myself a writer.

I’ve had about ten abandoned projects since then, and four completed books.  I write now because it’s who I am and who I was designed to be.  I’ve made about nineteen dollars as a writer.  Do I want to make more?  Hell yeah.  Do I want to do it for a living?  Absolutely.  Whether or not that ever happens is mostly out of my hands. All I can control is the work and the enjoyment I get from it.  Anonymity gives me the freedom to experiment and do whatever the hell I want.  There aren’t any expectations. 

It’s just me and my ideas. 

Just a writer.