As I said in my last blog entry, I just finished reading ‘The Motion of the Ocean’, and also mentioned that I used to have B-HAGs of my own, including my two or three years of long distance cycling.
I was living in Colorado at the time, didn’t know a whole lot of people, and started riding my bike for exercise. I then started getting more and more serious until I was riding organized rides with the Rocky Mountain Cycling Club, and in September of 1996, I completed my first metric century (100 kms) in a single ride.
In 1997, I got a lot more serious and started training for the Denver to Aspen Classic, a 200 miles in a day ride that is pretty damn hard, considering there are 4 10000 foot passes. I rode over 2000 miles in training that year, but in the end, I dropped out of the ride that day at 112 miles due to stiff headwinds, an aching knee, and a bonk that I couldn’t fight through.
My body physically gave out after that summer of training, and I spent most of the fall and winter fighting a case of mono that kept me out of work for 3 months, confined to bed or the couch for days at a time. It was, I believe, the lowest point of my entire life. A walk to the end of my driveway would sap my energy for hours. By spring 1998, I was healthy again, but I had lost so much weight and so much muscle mass, that I didn’t ride more than a few miles that year.
In 1999, I moved to Kent, WA, and never really got back on my bike. I rode a few times, but I had a much busier life, and never felt the desire to ride. Kent wasn’t the most friendly area for bicyclists either. Partway through my first ride, I was nearly made a hood ornament on some redneck’s jacked up pickup truck.
Today, after spending the morning doing yard work and having a late lunch, I looked forward to having a nice nap on the couch. I was actually on the couch, and asleep when two little ones who refused to take their naps woke me up. They were sent back to their rooms, and I tried to get back to sleep, but it was no use. I was awake. And my mind was on.
I was thinking about riding. The weather was beautiful today, the wind was light, and I still had some energy left in my legs. I fought the idea for a few minutes, the decided to just do it.
Things didn’t start out so well. Both tires were flat (expected), and the rubber nose piece fell off my Oakley riding sunglasses as I put them on. The cycle computer was dead, so I’d get no feedback on my ride for length or speed. It took me a few second to remember how to clip my feet into the pedals on my Bianchi, but after a few turns I was off and pedaling. It was just like riding a bike, but not quite.
In the past few years, I’ve lost a great deal of function in my thumbs due to Charcot Marie Tooth disease. I’ve tried physical therapy, stretching and acupuncture, but nothing seems to work. Today, I discovered, that functioning thumbs are really critical for two things: shifting gears, and braking. I figured out how to do both with less orthodox grips on the handlebars, but for a second, I was really worried.
The greater worry was that as I pulled away from the first stop sign, I heard a clunk. I looked behind me to see that part of my bike had fallen off. Specifically, my pedal had fallen off. I had taken the bike in to be tuned up last year, and apparently, they forgot to tighten it down. It took a moment or two to get it back on, and for the rest of the ride, I was a little worried, but it held.
Back when I was a serious rider, I often rode in pelotons, those large groups of riders that you see in races and organized rides that achieve mythical speeds by literally sucking the riders along in a draft. The rides in pelotons were some of the most awesome experiences I’ve ever had (on a bike).
I remember one day, I was about to take my turn at the front of a pack. It was early in the ride, and we were charging up a hill near Castle Rock, Colorado. As I pulled into the lead, I slammed into a higher gear, and shouted with bravado, “Okay boy’s, let’s go. It’s a big ring day.” Which basically meant we were going to keep the bikes in top gear all the way up the hill.
And we did, as I recall. I cranked with everything I had. There was whooping and hollering as we got to the top, and I began to drift back into the pack. One rider shouted at me “Thanks for the pull, buddy”, and the whole pack disappeared down the hill. Without me. I had spent everything I had on that climb trying to impress people with the hope that I could hang on to the tail long enough for the lactic acid to work its way out, but by the time it did, they were out of sight. It think I had 71 miles left that day in an 83 mile ride, and I was doomed.
Anyway, today was not a big ring day. It was barely a medium ring day. On a day with no real wind, I was downshifting on the flats and couldn’t carry speed down the hills. I got off the saddle only three or four times for short bursts of 4-8 pedals. I used to be able to stand up for a quarter mile on a 15 degree grade at the top of an 18 mile climb (Left Hand Canyon, near Boulder, CO, my favorite ride of all time).
I struggled over what might have been 8 miles, to keep my cadence up, and prayed I’d hit green lights at the end of the ride so I wouldn’t collapse on my shaking legs. I got back to the house, and parked the bike, and drank a lot of water.
But a few hours later, when the initial shakes had warn off, the euphoria of a good workout kicked in. The runners high. And I wondered if I could do it again tomorrow.
We’ll see.
I finished a couple of books this week, despite a new addiction to the TV show Dexter, which is chewing up my evenings at an astonishing rate, and giving me weird dreams to boot.
“The Motion of the Ocean” by Janna Cawrse Esarey is a true story of a Janna and her husband Graeme’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal (B-HAG)to quit their jobs and take a two year honeymoon by sailing 17000 miles around the South Pacific, from Seattle to Hong Kong. The opening lines of the book are two of the best I have ever come across:
“Somewhere fifty miles off the coast of Oregon I realize the skipper of this very small ship is an asshole.
He also happens to be my husband.”
This book is not chick-lit, at least not like the chick lit I ever, um, heard about, so guys shouldn’t fear that it’s all about PMS and the horrible consequences of mismatching nail polish to lip gloss. While the book is definitely from Janna’s POV, being a guy allows me to guess exactly what Graeme is going through at the same time Janna is describing her reactions to certain events. I think guys might get even more out of this book than they think.
My fear of deep water, along with my horrible sense of balance keeps me away from trying to sail around an ocean. Okay, Lisa also keeps me from it, but I remember my days of having B-HAG’s (anyone remember my long distance cycling days?). I know how those goals can change someone, and this book pretty much nails my experience as well. Well worth the money.
I also finished reading “Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us” by Jessica Page Morrell, another local author (she teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia). It’s a non-fiction book, a writing guide from the point of view of an editor who has been called ‘The Angel of Death’ by her clients. There’s a lot of good stuff in this one, especially what she calls her ‘Deal Breakers’. I know there are a few of her deal breakers that apply to my writing, and at some point I’m going to have to tackle them.
It’s definitely good to read a few different writing books, because you begin to sense the general pattern, and sooner or later the ideas get drilled into your head, even if you don’t remember everything. I still like Noah Lukeman’s “The First Five Pages” the best, but this one is in a close fight for number two with Steven King’s “On Writing”.
As far as movies go, last night we watched a documentary called ‘Helvetica’ about the development of fonts in the last half of the twentieth century. (Don’t we know how to party on a Friday night.) It was interesting, for about the first 40 minutes. It was at least 20 minutes too long for my tastes, and I actually dozed off for at least ten minutes, but to be fair, I was exhausted when we sat down. I would recommend it as one of those that you watch for half an hour while you are riding a stationary bike or something else, but definitely not while driving.
I wrote my first novel in college, living in a bachelor apartment in Toronto near York University in 1993. It was a very small place, 440 square feet with faux parquet floors, on the 17th floor of a 26 story building, about 3 blocks from one of the most notorious intersections in Canada – the corners of Jane and Finch. This was a place you didn’t walk around alone a night, male or female, and when I was alone, late at night after a night of partying on campus, I usually ran. Jane and Finch was the address for a small shopping center nicknamed Murder Mall. I kid you not. It was a scary freaking place at times.
In that tiny little apartment, in a crappy chair my father bought for five bucks from a bank being remodeled, I wrote that first book “To Cage the Eagle”. I wrote pretty much every day, and the words just flowed to the tune of about 170000 words by the time I was done. Actually, I finished the book in a townhouse in Waterloo, Ontario where I was working during the summer, but that first apartment was where I built a writing cocoon that I have yet to be able to duplicate.
To my left, I had heavy drapes over a glass wall that looked east to another apartment block. If I opened the curtains just a bit, and leaned back in my chair, I could almost see downtown Toronto. If I was brave, I could step out on to the 3 foot wide balcony, and get a better view, but that was taking your life into your hands. More than once there was gunfire in my neighborhood, and standing out on the balcony was just asking to be target practice for someone. The night the Blue Jays won the world series in 1993 was like a wedding celebration in Beruit.
I had a stereo at that point with my first CD player, and the sound was crisp and solid, and I alternated whatever matched the mood of what I was writing. I wrote a chase scene to CCR’s “Fortunate Son”, and wrote the aftermath of a military battle to Dire Strait’s “Brothers in Arms”. Most of my writing was done to Bon Jovi, Enya, Dire Straits and Beethoven. Hey, I had, and still do have, very eclectic tastes in music.
I had an afghan that I used to wrap around my legs, and a huge root beer mug full of hot tea that I constantly refilled as I wrote late into the night. I made sure all my studying was done before I sat down to write, or I would have never gotten it done. I’m just guessing, but I’d bet I routinely wrote a couple of thousand words a night, and sometimes, as many as four or five thousand. I’d force myself to bed at 3:00 AM, exhausted and my mind still churning. These were the days I could survive on 3 hours of sleep, and I routinely did just that.
What I remember most about that place was the way my banker’s lamp, perched high on the hutch over the desk, created a cave of light, barely illuminating anything more than 10 feet from my chair. The rest of the world didn’t exist. I had a small, 13 inch TV with crappy reception, but I never turned it on. I had stacks of books everywhere, and a bike up against the wall to the right of the desk. But those all just disappeared into the darkness. It was me, the blue screen of the computer, maybe some research material, and the story.
When I left college, and started working, I brought all that stuff with me, wherever I went, and set everything back up exactly as I had it, but it was never the same. I worked long hours. I had a car that made it easier to find places to go at night. I watched more TV. I lost touch with the stories in me.
I wrote, every once in a while, from 1994-2008. 14 years of 25 page starts, and then distraction. Writing was suddenly too hard, and life was too busy. I was out in the real world, building my career, making money, and doing all the things I couldn’t do when I was just a poor student in North York. I had a few stories in my head, and I thought, hey, with just a little effort, I could sell my first novel and be a millionaire like Tom Clancy. Writing was my fallback career if this computer thing didn’t work out. And besides, I just couldn’t find a place that felt as right as that little apartment in Toronto. I had to have a place like that back before I could write again, didn’t I?
Fast-forward to 2008, and replace the quiet isolation of the 17th floor, with a commuter train running at 60 mph with fifty people sitting around chatting and snoring and clearing their throats and bumping my arms. And it seems like that is the only place I can write now. The evenings are suddenly too short, and the mood isn’t right, and there’s something on TV I just have to watch, and the kids won’t go to bed, and I have to log on to work.
I still have the lamp, the afghan, the music and the mug. The chair is gone, as is the stereo, and the desk has been replaced. But the ideas for the stories are there, and I know more about writing well than I ever did before. I’m not exactly sure which story is next, but something is coming. I feel the need to write.
And as soon as I get over this cold or flu or whatever it is that has had me bed ridden for the past 24 hours, and as soon as the Olympics are over, and TV sweeps week is done, I’ll get back to writing at home, and not just on the train. Right?
Write.
A few happenings and goings on…
Lisa and I have been slowly working our way through episodes of Season 1 of ‘The Big Bang Theory’. Pretty funny stuff. Sheldon is hilarious. I try not to watch too much TV these days, but sometimes you need half an hour of funny, and these guys bring it.
I’ve also been watching a British series called ‘The IT Crowd’ via Netflix on Demand. Also very funny. Especially the first two episodes.
We’ve watched a bit of the Winter Olympics, but since Prime Time for NBC is 8-11 and I go to bed at 9:30, I don’t get to see much. I try to catch stuff on-line once in a while, but it’s hit and miss. NBC’s coverage has been horrible, and as I’ve said many times on Facebook, it sucks Donkey Balls.
The kids are doing well, though their annoying habit of not listening to us is getting really old, especially around bed time. They just don’t get that it is not okay for them to watch TV at the top of the stairs every night. Friday night, I was going to watch the movie ‘District 9’, but one of the previews was for a horror film, and Lorelai saw a scene that was pretty scary, and for a while there, I thought we were in for a really long night.
We spent the weekend doing yard work, and have the gardens ready to go for the year, with the exception of the kid’s garden, which just needs a little more dirt. I don’t think their vegetables are going to grow much this year, since peas and beans aren’t resistant to the Tonka Bulldozer fungus, but we’ll give it a try and see how it goes.
I’m currently reading ‘Boneshaker’ by Cherie Priest, who I met at last year’s Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference. I like the book, though the beginning was a little… forced. She had to cover a lot of back story in a short amount of time. I know how that goes. The middle is pretty good and makes me want to keep reading. It’s my first foray into the genre of SteamPunk and Zombies. I don’t think zombies will make many appearances in my books, but you never know.
On the writing side of the house, my break from writing (to read and do some other things), is quickly coming to an end. I was planning on working a whole other book, separate from the Jake Clarke series, but I’ve been forcing myself to try to figure out the plot for the next book in the JC Series, which eventually turned into the next 2 books, thanks to a suggestion by my wife. I’ve had the 3rd book figured out of a few days, but the 4th was giving me headaches, until this morning, when I finally hit on a plot that made the hair on my neck stand up. That’s usually the sign for me that’ I’m onto something. So with a little more refining over the next couple of days, and I’ll have the general outline. Then I’ll dive a little deeper to make sure there aren’t any major holes, and break the plot for each into acts. Once I know where each act is going, it’s time to write. Hopefully this approach minimizes the full scale re-writes that have plagued the first two books. We’ll see.
I always keep a book with me when I am riding the train, in case the battery on my laptop dies, or I am uninspired that day, or I just need a break from writing. Sometimes I have required reading for work, a tech magazine, or some new tome to do with software development. These development books are rarely less than 400 pages, and usually closer to 800. I make every effort to read them as quickly as possible so I don’t have to lug them back and forth to work. I set a page count to read on each trip, and will usually stop writing all together while I am reading them, otherwise it’d take me months to get through them, and no one wants to lug that kind of weight around that long. By the end of the book, I am usually page skimming, but that’s okay, I’m just trying to find the good stuff.
Rarely do I find a novel where I need to use the approach that I have to read it fast to get it out of my backpack. I can honestly say I’ve never had a novel I refused to bring on the train with me at all. That was until I got my secret Santa present at Christmas: Stephen King’s latest, “Under The Dome”. This behemoth ran 1074 pages. By my count, at about 315 words per page, and 1050 of actual writing (there were a lot of section breaks) that’s about 330,000 words. That’s 190,000 words longer than my first version of ‘Nowhere Home’ that was rejected because it was too long.
‘Under the Dome’ stayed at home, and I read it at night and on the weekends, and I got a different book (actually several different books) for reading on the train while I slowly worked my way through it.
So how was it? Good. No buts about it. It’s a damn good book. I hated the antagonist, cheered on the protagonists, and empathized with the supporting characters. There were times where I told my wife I just wanted to reach into the pages and strangle the antagonist. That’s how a book should make you feel.
Did the size of the book detract from the enjoyment? Maybe a little bit, but after reading King’s ‘Dark Tower’ Series, I’ve changed my approach to reading fiction. I don’t read to get done. I read to relax and to hear a good story. And this is a great story. It’s memorable, and perhaps the size actually made me enjoy it more, because I knew I was going to be invested in it, and I wasn’t going to read it all on a Sunday afternoon, and have forgotten about it by the next morning.
If you have the time, I recommend this book. Turn the TV off, curl up by the fire, or out on the deck under a heavy blanket, and read for an hour. Then repeat that for a couple of weeks. But don’t treat it like a race. Just enjoy it.
Part of me hopes that I can someday write a book like ‘Under The Dome’, with a huge cast of characters, great dialog, and a ‘faster and faster’ pace. But part of me is utterly intimidated by it, and there are few writers who can do it. King is one of them, and ‘Under The Dome’ is a great book, and not a bad workout as well.
I’ve spent a lot of time editing the last few months, and have done little new writing. I’ve been trying to get the two completed books knocked into shape so I can turn them over to an agent (if I ever find one), and get on with my writing life.
I’ve gotten some feedback on the first book from a couple of different people over the last month or so, and while it’s moving in a positive direction, there still seems to need to be more work done on the first few chapters. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to fix what needs to be changed, but I’m edited out at this point, tired of looking at the same book and the same characters for the last 18 months, and ready to get onto something new.
So, this morning, armed with all the lessons learned from the past two books, and all the reading I’ve done about writing, plots, planning, style and themes, I sat down and tried to write a synopsis for my next story.
And I drew a blank. Not a complete blank. I have scenes in my head for at least four different stories. I have characters in my head. I just don’t have a plot in my head. I can’t figure out what the conflict is, and where to put people to push them somewhere else. And that’s what I need in order to start. Otherwise, I don’t know where the story is going. I’ve been down that road before, many times, and I end up with forty to seventy five pages of a story that goes nowhere. A writing exercise, maybe, but a bad exercise, like lifting with your back instead of your legs. Your writing gets injured like that, stuck in dead end books, and gradually your love of writing dies a slow death under the weight of half finished failure.
I feel the need to get my ideas organized. The software architect in me says I can write some pretty cool WPF application with a SQL Server backend where I can input my story ideas, plot, characters and scenes, and in no time, I’ll be back to writing, inspired by the organization and brain dump. But the realist in me knows that I will end up with software that is barely what I want, (“Look at what I drew Daddy” – “That’s a great turtle, son” — “It’s not a turtle, it’s you, daddy”) and have burned dozens of hours when I could have been writing, reading or doing something else valuable.
So I’ll spend a little time out on the internets tonight, Binging (not binge ing – bing ing) and Googling for something that already does what I want, and will end up using Word or Excel. Or maybe a whiteboard with post its… it I can keep everything out of the reach of the kids.
Oh yeah, I need to find something to take this fucking glare off this Acer 1420-piece of crap. This is the first day since I got this thing that the sun has been up / out on the train ride home, and it’s almost impossible to see the screen. Arg.
I haven’t blogged in a whole week because I’ve been knee deep in editing ‘The Forgotten Road’, integrating some changes suggested by the agent who rejected me a week or so ago. It takes me about a week to get through a typical edit now, and I chopped out about 3500 words on this pass, wrote a new prologue, and tied some themes into the story. I don’t know if a story is ever done, but I feel as good about this story as I have at any point in the last year, so here’s hoping the next round of submissions meets with some type of success.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the last two weeks as well. I worked through Strunk and White’s ‘The Elements of Style’ and am about halfway through Christopher Vogler’s ‘The Writer’s Journey’. Both should be required reading for writers. S&W is not an easy read, nor would you ‘read’ it end to end more than once. It’s a reference book, and it’s like reading the dictionary, but every lesson in there is worth learning. I’ll probably pop it open to random pages once in a while and reinforce the lessons.
Vogler’s ‘Journey’ absolutely must be read by every fiction writer, and read early on in their career. Actually, if you love movies, I highly recommend it as well. It’s Hollywood’s Bible about characters and plots, and by the time you’re a hundred pages into it, you will be watching movies and reading books with a completely different eye. For me, it helps to reinforce that I have done some things right, and missed out on a few other things. It will definitely come into play in my next book, and should save me some time by eliminating a number of editing sessions.
I read two books by Jonathon Tropper in the last couple of weeks as well: The Book of Joe, and How to Talk to a Widower. I’d be lying if I said these weren’t a bit of chick-lit for guys. Light and quick to read, with a good flow, they’re pretty good. But I have a hard time believing they’re written by a guy. But if you like Jasper Fforde (which I do), you’ll probably like these.
We actually got through a few movies this weekend as well:
North By Northwest – Classic Alfred Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant. Great story, great dialog, and well worth the watch. 3.5 stars
Monsters vs Aliens – CGI Animated – not really for little kids, and honestly, the animated stuff has lost its wow factor for me (yes, I now take it for granted). Maybe it was because I was sitting next to a 3 year old asking questions every 30 seconds, but I was glad it was only 96 minutes long. 1.5 stars
Yes Man – Jim Carrey – Not bad. Very little gross out, mildly amusing. Wow, did I see the influence of “Writer’s Journey’ in this one. Very formulaic. 2 stars
On a personal front, I’m proud to report that Lorelai has completed potty training, and is now diaper free 24 hours a day.
Reece is still working on it, much to our chagrin.
Both Lisa and the twins celebrated their birthdays in the last week. We decided to do an outing for a birthday present instead of more toys, and got a tour of the local fire station. It was a great time for all of us, and I learned a lot too. I highly recommend it as a family outing. Just call up your local fire station, and arrange a tour!
Here are some pictures of the parties and the station.
Lisa’s Birthday party was reserved affair
Fireman Lewis had a couple of shy kids on his hands at the start.
Lieutenant Babcock put on all his gear for the kids
The shyness went away when Reece was allowed to drive the pumper truck.
Lorelai likes being in the driver seat too
Reece liked the ‘moving ladder truck’ the best
A table of our own, with cousin Lily
Time for cake!
Videos later, I hope!
The last 72 hours has been a rollercoaster for my writing. I have resumed sending out query letters for ‘The Forgotten Road’. Writers who have been doing this a while, learn to set their expectations very low. Sending out a query letter has the following possibilities:
- No Response. If your query letter is crappy, this is probably what you’ll get. Writing a good query letter is crucial. It has to be perfect, and entire books have been written just on how to write a query letter. You also have to know the targeted agent and what they are interested in reading. Miss there, and you probably will never hear from them either.
- The ‘thanks but’ Response. This is probably the most common, now that most agents, or at least the one’s I’m querying, work by email. The ‘buts’ that I have encountered include things like not taking submissions right now or not a market we’re interested in. The only thing you as a writer can do to avoid this response is to do better research. But you will always get some of these responses, as no amount of research will tell you that just lat week that agent was slammed with 200 manuscripts, and they just aren’t accepting any more right now.
- The ‘We liked your work, but.’ response. This is different from the ‘Thanks, but’ response. This is definitely a step up from the ‘thanks, but’ response, because it means they got past your query letter and looked at your work, and there was something about your work that wasn’t quite right.
- The ‘We loved it. When can we offer you a deal.’ I haven’t seen one of these yet, so I’m just guessing how it might look.
I got a #3 for the first time yesterday. I sent out a query letter on Thursday evening, and received a reply back that they wanted to see my work. They sent the note on Thursday, which either means they really liked the query, or they as fastidious about keeping their email in box clean. Either is fine with me.
On Friday night, I sent the first 50 pages to the agent, and they replied they would try to read it within the next two weeks. Most agents say to allow 6-8 weeks for a response on submitted material.
The response was in my inbox by 1:30 that afternoon. It was a rejection, but they had read the entire fifty pages that morning. That is pretty amazing, seeing as it was a Saturday. An agent doesn’t work normal business hours, I guess. I won’t post their feedback here, but the gist of it was that there is a lack of conflict, of foreshadowing, of ‘something happening’ in the first thirty pages. However, they loved some of it, calling it ‘wonderful.’ They gave me a full paragraph of explanation of why they thought what they thought, and I agree with them. So it’s back to the editing process, adding here, subtracting there. I’ve got multiple ideas on what to do, but it’ll take me a few days to dig in an settle on a course of action.
For me, getting a rejection like this is inspiring. It’s a step forward from the form rejection letters, and a confirmation from someone in the industry that tells me that I am close, that I have some talent. I’ve heard that from friends and relatives before, but they don’t know the industry, and what it takes to sell. So I won’t mind doing ‘1 more edit’ on a book I wanted to be ‘done done’, if it puts me that much closer to getting a #4.
This morning I finished re-reading Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing’. Like I’ve said previously, I don’t reread books too often, but this one I read a couple of years ago (maybe it was just a year ago), and I remember getting a lot out of it then. That was before I discovered that there was more to writing than just letting your fingers dump words onto the screen like a sinking supertanker dumps oil into the water. I learned that you can’t be careless about your words in a story. Every single one of them is important. So I went back to this book because I was sure I would learn something new from it, and I was sure that I had misread or missed parts of it all together.
First, I had a direct recollection of Stephen King saying that a good sized book was 180,000 words, and a vague recollection that he also often wrote first drafts in the 380,000 word range. I talked about this with people at the PNWA conference last July, and people thought I was misremembering. I wasn’t. King does say both things. I blame Mr. King for making me feel like the first draft of the original ‘Nowhere Home’ was woefully insufficient at 139,000 words. Little did I know it was almost twice as long as it should have been.
He also rails against laying out the plot of a book ahead of time. The book is the book. It will go where it goes. Yes, to a point. Writers with 50 publications to their credit can say that, and people will read it. But for a new writer, writing without a plot can be deadly. Not just for the book, but for the writer’s morale. If a hundred pages into the first draft, you have no idea where it’s going, it’s crushing. That said, I’ve written all three of my novels without a plot outline. My next one I am outlining, because I want to write faster and better. That’s not to say I won’t deviate from the plot if the story changes direction. I actually hope to God it does. But the outline is at least my fallback to keep me going when the ‘muse’ is taking a day off.
King also says he reads about 70 books a year. That’s 1.35 books a week. A very impressive number. I would almost bet he didn’t read that much when he was working a full time job (or two). I know I don’t have time to read that much, unless I am not writing. However, it did point out to me that I still suckle from the ‘glass teat’ (television) far too much, and yes, there are bits and snippets of free time that I can use to get more reading done, or more writing, or more marketing for my work.
Those issues aside, I loved this book, and it is a must read for every writer. In fact, anyone who likes Steven King at all should read the ‘CV’ and the ‘On Living’ sections. The ‘On Living’ chapter brought tears to my eyes. King puts you on the shoulder of that road in Maine after getting hit by the van in 1999, and you can’t help but to BE him while you are reading it. After reading The Dark Tower Series earlier this year, the scenes are doubly powerful and interesting.
But the critical question I came out of the book with is ‘Why do I write.’ I would love to say I am as altruistic as King and I write because I can’t stop. Sure, I have those moments. But there are many other reasons.
I write in the hope that I may someday be able to do it for a living. As a child I always wanted to be an astronaut. That dream was given up sometime around 1994 when I squeaked through my last finals in college and realized I just didn’t have ‘The Right Stuff’.
Around the 5th or 6th grade, I realized that not only did I love to read, but I loved to write stories as well. I plotted grand adventures inspired by Farley Mowat (Lost in the Barrens) and Robert Arthur, Jr (The Three Investigators) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan). When I say inspired by, a lot of what I wrote was just pure copy, with my name instead of the original author. Ruth Ann Jensen, my teacher in Grade 7, and the mother of a good friend of mine, really inspired me to start writing my own stories. She’s also the one who, when trying to teach the class the meaning of ‘outspoken’, said:
“For example, Joe is outspoken.” I looked at her slightly hurt, to which she replied. “That’s not always a bad thing, Joe.”
But from the 7th grade on, writing was always my backup plan if the whole science thing didn’t work out. In high school, when it came time to apply for colleges, I actually applied to a journalism school, but chose science instead. Probably better for my pocketbook in the long run, and a better lifestyle for me, but there will always be part of me that wonders, what if I had gone the other way?
So writing is something I’ve always enjoyed. It gives me power over the worlds I create and the ability to have adventures I will never have. It allows me to escape from the mundane and to escape from a physical body that has been limited over the years by a progressive disease that will probably cripple me complete by the time I die.
Writing also allows me to feel productive. I work hard at my job, but, by and large, the work I do is not Important, with a capital ‘I’. It pays the bills (very well), and allows me to care for my family. I don’t have any worries about not making next month’s mortgage, or putting food on the table. I ride the train back and forth to work every day, and if I were to sit there day after day and do nothing but read or do crosswords, I’d feel like both my life and my talents were going to waste. Five years from now, most of the work I have done will be irrelevant. No one will remember it, except that it has sustained the people who used it for that time. There just won’t be anything of it left. There are days where I go to work so I can ride the train and write. If I ever become a full time writer, I sometimes worry that I’ll still have to get up at 5:00 AM and catch the train, because that’s the best place I’ve found to write since I was living in a crappy apartment in North York, Ontario while in college.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t want the fame and the money that goes with breaking out. But that would be part of enabling me to write full time, and sometimes I fear that a rash of sudden celebrity would steal key years from my life with my kids, or destroy my desire to write.
But what writing really gives me, is a chance to leave a legacy. A mark on the world, or to influence the reader in such a way that they feel better for having read my stuff. I am supremely jealous of those who have done that in any art form. I look at the Beatles, and the songs they created, and I wonder if they knew, way back when, what an effect ‘Eleanor Rigby’ would have fifty years later. Did Beethoven know how long his Symphonies would be played?
So I write so I can write more. I write to make me feel like I am inspiring the next generation of adventures. Hopefully someday, as mankind is setting out for a new planet, or a young boy (or girl) is deciding that they want to do something with their lives, that one of the stories I wrote somehow influences them for the better. Hopefully, one of those kids is my kid, or my grandchildren, and they’ll have pleasant memories.
For now, I’ll just settle for people enjoying my stories and recommending them to friends. Maybe someday, I’ll see some stranger reading my book on a train or an airplane, and I can smile to myself, open up my laptop, and be inspired to write the next page.
Joe Beernink 