How did I become a writer? Pizza, beer, and impossible deadlines

Note: I will try to keep updating on Wednesdays going forward – please feel free to let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated … except for the spam I get. That’s just annoying.

 

Like rain before first pitch, or mud-slinging during election season, one of the first questions people always seem to ask when they find out you’ve written a book is, “how did you become a writer?” The variations are, ‘how did you know, or when did you know, you wanted to become a writer’ but the answer is the same regardless of how you dress it up.

For me, like many people I think, there was never a grand strategy to become a writer. There was, for a brief shining moment when I was 18, a desire for pizza.

Despite the mother of one of my high school friends suggesting to me once that I should be a journalist, the thought never seriously entered my mind. But an Air Force recruiter called me one day and offered me pizza if I took a test. This was in the mid ’80s mind you so there was precious little else to do. I took his test and I ate his pizza and chuckled to myself all the way home.

Then, one day, as I was sitting at home staring at a blank television and wondering what I might possibly do with my life as all my friends went to college or joined the service themselves, the phone rang and it was Kermit. I swear to God, my recruiter’s name was Kermit – his first name, mind you. Kermit told me there were, at that time, something like 252 jobs available to enlisted people in the Air Force, my scores qualified me to take my pick.

For reasons known only to fate, I chose something called Public Affairs Specialist. I had no idea journalism was involved and to be fair, neither did Kermit. I thought I’d be giving tours and such (which I did) and that was fine because I enjoy speaking in front of people. No joke, I really do.

After basic I went to technical school and the Army person there welcomed me with the words, “Welcome to the Defense Information School and the Basic Journalism Course.” I stared at him, quite vapidly I’m sure, and said, “you mean the public affairs course?”

He chuckled. “Why do all the Air Force people say that?”

Why? Because our recruiters had no idea, that’s why! And so began my four year dalliance with journalism – or that was the plan. Four years, in and out and on to college. Yup, good plan. Solid plan.  

Journalism school, even in the military in the 1980s, consisted of a lot of typing, spelling, editing and, as it turns out, drinking. This was really the perfect occupation. Alas, I was only 18, but the guy who lived in the room next to me was comfortably in his 20s but, alas again, a Mormon. However, as the gods have seemed to smile upon me more often than I perhaps deserve, he was a decidedly bad Mormon and we spent much of the next couple of months, slurring our words while we banged out whatever stories we had to bang out on electric typewriters in the stairwells. In the morning the Army would gather under our windows and yell at us to wake up, and like good Airmen, we would tell them to shut up and go back to sleep. 

After school (and I realize I’m supposed to be telling you how I got into writing and I promise I’m almost there), I went to my first base and my supervisor asked me if I had ever read two specific books – Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Understanding that I had not, my first official duty in the USAF was to go to the library and check out those two books and read them. They would teach me, he said, how to write. I did. And perhaps they did to a degree.[image error] [image error]

As luck would have it the other Airmen I worked with on our weekly newspaper was something of a disciple of Hunter S. Thompson (who was himself a graduate of the same Defense Information School I had attended and an Air Force public affairs Airmen … for a short time). I will call this Airman…Matt. In addition to a love of psychedelic literature, Matt also enjoyed a beer or ten and within a few weeks I found that while the duty day was often a good time to watch Matt stare out windows and smoke cigarettes, (which one could do back then) after duty hours when everyone else was gone, we could bring a 12 pack into the office and really do a lot of work on the base newspaper. Hell, we won awards.

Anyway, one week, on a Thursday morning, about five hours before our paper was to go the publisher to be printed, Matt looked at me and said these words, “Roe, I need you to do a two page feature on the F-16 tire shop. I need photos too.”

I said, ok and asked him when he wanted it. He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s for this week, so you better go now, do a quick interview, take some photos and get back here. I figure, you’ve got maybe two hours.”

THIS was the best training I ever had. Because of Matt’s inability to plan sober, I became a master of the one-question interview – “What do you do?” That was it. If they looked at me strangely, which they often did, I would expound: “tell me what you do from the moment you walk in here until you leave.” And they would and it was brilliant.

Working with the time constraints Matt often imposed made me think through how a story would flow together while I was writing – hell, while I was taking notes – so editing was minimal. The time crunch meant I wasn’t asking unnecessary questions that would only serve to clutter up the story. I was writing the story in my head before I ever started writing it on paper, and that has made all the difference.

Now, my four years in the Air Force turned into more than 25, and I never stopped writing. When I put the uniform in a closet for the last time, I got an MA in English/Creative Writing and that helped pull together the last pieces of my novel puzzle. So, while I’ve pretty much always been a writer, it’s only recently I’ve become an author – but I think I knew sitting there with Matt, in the middle of the night, drinking beer and putting together an Air Force base newspaper, I probably understood I was in the right place.

I don’t know whatever happened to Kermit, but I’m glad he didn’t know what public affairs was about. I’m glad he didn’t find out, and if he did know, I’m glad he didn’t tell me. Sometimes it’s better to let something find you than to go looking for it.