I did. I made other things too. I’ve been writing my whole life, give or take. Progress reports, postcards, and stray doggerel, sure, but also essays, poems, and novels.
I don’t mean that to sound obnoxious. Lots of people write. Many of them write more than I do, and better. You should read their stuff. But the fact is, time and again, when faced with a little free time, a dull patch in life, or just a small spark of inspiration, I’ve used that as an excuse to string a few words together.
I’ve had some modest success along the way. I’ve seen my name in print, often, and sometimes even gotten paid for it. You can find more about my published work on my Writing tab. But most of my work never got past the slush pile. Countless hours, countless words, most of them forgotten, forlorn, and largely unread. I won’t belabor this point. Every writer has a collection of these sad guppies in their drawers. It’s part of the deal. Most of my unpublished work got that way on merit: it’s not worth publishing.
I got started with creative writing, for real, after college. In my twenties, I wrote a coming-of-age novel, titled As One Familiar and Well-Beloved. Surprisingly enough, it featured a college-aged boy from Knoxville who left home and discovered loneliness, nostalgia, and cheap beer in equal measure. It wasn’t very good. I sent it out anyway. Despite a few friendly responses from agents, not one of them took the bait.
Next I considered an MFA in creative writing, a default option for liberal arts graduates of my era. I applied to two programs, got accepted to one, and sat in on a graduate fiction workshop trying to imagine that life. It was collegial and quixotic, boring and brutal. I passed.
After that I set my sights on ephemera. I wrote music reviews, essays, and humor for a succession of alt-weeklies and trade rags, honing my craft at a dime a word. Every journalist will tell you: the best writing teachers are regular work, firm deadlines, and word limits (with the last of these most important of all). Some would say I had lowered my sights, but I disagree. I did some of my best writing in those years. It was a great gig, but it ran its course. Once I found myself writing album reviews that had more to do with my own state of mind than the music itself, I knew it was time to get out of that game.
Next I tried my hand at creative nonfiction, writing a few essays and a book proposal about my first year as a teacher at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. It had a great title, courtesy of one of my favorite students: Love Sounds Like a Two-Stroke Engine. Still, I didn’t get a bite.
I wrote another book, a comic road novel in which a pair of laconic Cajuns travel through the Southeast, sampling food from local greasy spoons while chasing a woman on the lam who is either a schizophrenic drifter or a child of God. (I know, I know.) The title was Me and Fat Eddie. It was ludicrous in places, confused in others, and it borrowed way too much in both tone and substance from Charles Portis’ classic Dog of the South. Looking back at it, I find it equal parts amusing and abysmal, but when I finished it, I was proud. My goal in my twenties had been to write a novel before I died, and now I had written two. They were unpublished, unread, and unloved, true, but they were mine.
When Me and Fat Eddie failed to ignite bidding wars in the New York publishing industry, I turned to children’s poetry. I was victim of the notion that befalls many parents when they start to read bedtime books to their kids: I could do that. It turns out I couldn’t. There were some good poems in the batch – some I’m still proud of today – but editors saw right through them, dismissing them as derivative and mundane, the work of a dilettante. The world of children’s poetry is filled with work that rises above, books of true power and beauty and awe. All I had were a few clever rhymes.
(Speaking of derivative and mundane, I lifted that phrase straight from Bobby Bare Jr. No one likes a plagiarist, but sometimes I can’t help myself.)
So there I was, aged 42, with a whole bunch of words behind me. Millions of them, surely. I’d sold some smaller stuff, but had no such luck with my bigger, more ambitious projects. I had a few good clips, a few extra bucks, and a basement full of promo CDs from my time as a music critic. Like I said, it was a good run, but it was time to stop writing words no one would ever read. I had surveyed the land and found my chances wanting. I decided to pack it in.
Next post: Ambition and Indolence in Middle Age
