Ramblings On The Craft : Regret

INTRODUCTION : Please accept my humble thanks for your interest and for checking out my blog. This essay is the debut of a new series that I will be hosting here, with a new addition made each month, in which I will share some general thoughts and ideas I have about the craft of writing as well as my own experiences in honing my art. I hope you enjoy this and if you have any feedback or ideas for future topics, please feel free to pass them along. I am now, as always, humbled and honored that you would take time out of your crowded lives to read my pathetic excuse for prose.

DISCLAIMER : I consider myself to be a life-long writer but I am still an aspiring author. What’s the difference? Essentially, to me anyway, it means that while I have devoted a great deal of time to my words and my art, the amount of money I have made as a professional writer to date could maybe be used to purchase a nice steak dinner for two. So while I have a deep and devoted passion for writing, I do not claim in any way to be an expert or authority figure. What you will find in these essays represent my personal thoughts and feelings about various issues related to writing. I think that in any endeavor, it is essential to have the mindset that there is always something to learn, something you don’t know. As soon as you start to think that you are an authority on anything (besides how to eat a hot dog or perhaps, spelling your name) there might be a problem. With that in mind, I am fully cognizant and comfortable with the fact that on any and all of these issues, I could be completely wrong.

Put another way, I recognize and admit that I could be full of shit.

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Over the course of a life full of writing, there have been any number of important factors and influences along the way, seeds that germinated in the creative garden and factors that led to me being the person I am now. As I think back however, I can also identify one thing that, over the years I have come to regret as something which ultimately posed the greatest threat to my abilities as an artist.

I stopped writing.

Let’s go back a little and come at this from the other side. I started writing at a very early age but, I was reading even earlier. It was the love of words on the printed page that came before my love for the creation of those words. The ability to create such things seemed alien, almost mythical. So when the day came that I realized that I could do it myself, I was immediately hooked.

For the most part, when writers get their start, it is generally in emulating whatever forms of fiction that they are excited and passionate about. For me this meant a few key areas of source material: Star Trek, horror movies, comic books and Star Wars, probably in that order. As such, my earliest ventures into the narrative form leaned in these directions. It’s unfortunate there is a certain amount of shaming that comes along with writing fan fiction, as if it demonstrates an inability to flex your own creative muscle without using other people’s work like a prosthetic. I’ve always found this stigma perplexing as it is common practice in other art forms to start with the classics of those who came before you. My love for writing could not be disentangled with my love for popular culture and it is a perfect way to learn the process of story telling. You might as well start with something you love, and use that as the bricks and mortar to build your own creative house upon.

It’s a natural part of growing up that as you progress towards adulthood, the excitement and thrill of the “childish things” wanes and you start to get more serious about whatever your professional ambitions happen to be. The toys are left behind. As my academic studies grew more serious, I started to apply the expectation that my writing should be “intelligent” and “thought provoking” and “insightful”. I needed my writing to be as big as all of those buzz-words. Essentially, I needed to put away the “childish” genre fiction and write “serious” fiction.

Which is to say that I was as idiot.

I had the misguided idea in my head that if I wasn’t Faulkner or Joyce or Hemingway, I was wasting my time. Adults should write “adult” things. What I needed was for someone to sneak up on me and whack me upside the same head that I wasn’t putting to any worthwhile use.

Every once in a while, I tried to write. I tried to sit down and write strong, serious works. It felt good for the first few pages but eventually I would lose steam and put it down. Later, I would come back to what I had thought was brilliant prose and discovered instead, pretentious shit. As I got older, my passion for writing waned a little more each year until it was a thing of my past. I settled myself with the thought that I just didn’t have it in me anymore. Life is about moving on and that’s what I did.

Years went past me without giving even a thought to writing, other than the occasional bout of “what if?” The creative urges were clearly still deeply seated within me however, as I took up music during this time period and played bass in several blues/rock compositions. I think I was a decent, functional bass player but I never thought of myself as a musician. I always felt like I was reacting to the force of the music instead of being that creative spark myself.

Eventually, the dormant words on the inside started to want to show themselves again. I think it’s appropriate that ultimately, when I made my return to writing, my love for the craft was preceded again by a revitalization of my love for reading. As my distance from college and academia grew, I had to re-learn what it felt like to read for pleasure, to read for amusement. I started to remember what it felt like to be excited about going back to a book and for the pride of being able to close the cover on another book finished. More specifically, I re-discovered Stephen King, a writer who I had loved at a younger age but had turned away from, and it wasn’t long before I felt the compulsion to resume writing myself. I think that an important switch was toggled in my brain where, instead of trying to exert some kind of external pressures on my writing and to artificially make it into what I thought it should be, I became more willing to let the writing just be what it was. I think that there are certain writers, like the names I listed earlier, the Hemingways of the world, where if you don’t already have that level of talent naturally, it just isn’t going to happen. I realized that the key is to be satisfied with the kind of writer you are, instead of trying to make yourself something that you aren’t.

I started with a Justice League Of America novel, nothing amazing in scope or structure, but it was the most fun writing had been for me in years. And more importantly, I was able to do something that I hadn’t been able to accomplish in a long time.

I finished a story.

This might seem like a mundane issue but it’s not. The fact is that pretty much anyone can start a book. It takes a special kind of resolve and tenacity to be able to work that project through all the seas of doubt and uncertainty and land at the finish line. The fact that I was able to finish this was huge for me. I had no intention of trying to sell the piece, it was just for me. But from there, I went on to write an original horror novella which would ultimately end up being the title story of my first book. I devoted myself to my craft and things really started to take off. For the first time, I found that I could consistently sit down to work and produce a reasonable amount of words where as before, I might sit down to write and end up just staring at the walls, trying to find a narrative footing. I was having original ideas and I became increasingly able and efficient at executing those ideas. It was a road that would eventually lead me into 2014, when I reached one of my most treasured, life-long dreams, that of seeing my name on the spine of a book.

Everyone’s life is going to take a certain amount of twists and turns as it is in progress. I don’t know if I would have achieved my dream of publication earlier if I had stayed true to my craft instead of walking away for so long. It’s entirely possible that it would have taken the same amount of time for my narrative voice and confidence to develop. The sad part is that I never will know. That time is gone. So I suppose this long, rambling story has been to get to this point. If you have an artistic passion, whatever it may be, stick with it. Don’t let your enthusiasm for what you do be deterred or swayed by what you might perceive as the expectations of others. When it comes to art, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is if you are happy with what you just did. If those are your words on the page, or if those are your notes or your melody or your brush strokes and you can look upon them with pride, that is all that matters. If only someone had said that to me much earlier than this. I can only wish now that I had allowed myself the freedom to explore my narrative voice and hadn’t been so quick to give up on it. It’s hard to not feel like I let myself down somehow.

Love your art. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. It was the mental hurdle that for myself, made all the difference in the world. It was the key piece to the puzzle that gave me the confidence today to be able to say what I never had the courage to say as someone who played music in a band.

I am a writer.