SLOWLY, OVER TIME
[The following was written in response to a
recent Red Room Creative Challenge that asked members to describe the moment when they realized they were writers.]
I
encountered no flash on the road to Damascus in becoming a writer, no falling
on my face, crying “I hear you, Lord!”
(I
don’t trust conversion experiences; it’s too easy to flip back, or flip on to
another empty extreme; fanatics are much like vampires, draining the juicy life
out of the flower they feed on and everyone around; their certainty makes them
faithless.)
I
started writing when I was maybe five or six, copying a story out of The World of Pooh. I quickly became
bored with that. I still remember the tedium rising.
Shortly
after, I attempted to “re-write” House of
Dracula, one of the old Universal horror films. Then I made the mistake of
showing it to a no-fused older brother.
“YOU’RE
STEALING ANOTHER MAN’S STORY!” he bellowed with an outrage usually reserved for
murderers, first-degree. I still recall the shame—Me, the grubby little thief,
furtive, sneaking along the wall, returning to his hidden coffin at dawn.
Lesson
learned: Don’t show your work to anyone. They’ll just get mad.
Of
course, I eventually had to write book reports in school and the like and the
teachers began commenting positively. Meanwhile, I was subsisting on a diet of Mad magazine, horror tales and desperate
leaps to read the same books the grownups in my house were reading: Andersonville, Doctor Zhivago; much too young for these books. I should have been
reading more Hardy Boys adventures, maybe also taken a break from Winnie-der-Pooh.
Soon, I
was simply writing a lot and I still am fifty years later, with not much to
show for it. But I keep going on, because I cannot not go on.
The
drive, the urge, the habit, sunk in that slowly, that deeply, until it fused
with my atoms. What else would I do if I didn’t sit here every day? Where would
the wonder I sometimes feel at the blue sky out my window, at the butterfly
flashing by go? What’s the point in keeping that a secret?
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