writing

How I Write: In Which I Describe a Man Trying To Think Up Words All By Himself

It was Interstate 40 that made me want to write again.

Specifically, it was the hour I spent driving it each day, commuting from Asheville to my job as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired in Haywood County, North Carolina, hard by the Tennessee state line. Once I arrived, I got out, stretched, and got back in my car to drive still more, from school to school, visiting students scattered throughout the county.

I logged a hundred miles a day, most days. I spent a long time looking out my windshield, wondering what would come up next on my radio. These were beautiful drives – if you’re going to be looking out a windshield for large chunks of your day, Haywood County is a right nice place to do it – but after a few years I got tired of listening to music. I turned off the radio and started talking out loud, mostly to amuse myself, and after a while I brought a tape recorder along. The next thing I knew I had the first two chapters of Just Maria.

I write best on the move. It started with the album reviews I wrote for The Austin Chronicle back in the 90s. I would grab a pile of new releases, throw on my Discman, and take myself a walk, stopping every song or two to scribble notes on a pad I kept in my pocket. Soon enough, I ditched the notepad for a mini-cassette player, and before long I was composing the first drafts of all of my writing by talking to myself. Out loud.

Those novels I mentioned earlier, the essays, the children’s poetry? All yammered out first into a recorder, and transcribed into print only later. This blog post? I’m talking into my phone right now, hiking the Pump Gap Trail in Madison County, North Carolina, a six-mile loop that runs along Silver Mine Creek and up to Lover’s Leap. I’ll transcribe these words at home, sooner or later, and run ‘em through several edits before plunking them on this site.

I’ve found that writing this way is easier for me. My thoughts flow more freely. There is no blank page to mock me; no expectant cursor, so patient and unforgiving; no first draft of my clunky prose staring dolefully out at me from the screen. I edit as I walk, going back and re-recording bits, trying out new phrases and giving notes to myself.

“Rework that first sentence, but make it funnier.”

“That’s a little maudlin. Try again.”

Just Maria was written this way, during the free time I had on my drives to, from, and around Haywood County. At first I used my trusty micro-cassette recorder; later, I graduated to the Voice Memos app on my phone. Occasionally I might stop for a stroll, to tackle a particularly troublesome patch of prose. If you saw me in those days, circling the Lake Junaluska walking path while talking to myself, chances are I was working out a minor plot point in Just Maria.

I did this for years, spilling words into the blank spots in my day. I would steal spare moments at night to transcribe those words. I still wasn’t sure I would finish the book, but I convinced myself there was no harm in prattling on. It made the miles pass by more quickly, that’s for sure. As long as I liked what I heard when I listened back, I kept going.

Three years later, I had a book.

I planned to end this post by recalling where I was when I spoke the last words of Just Maria into my phone, more than three years after I spoke the first words of the novel on some lonely stretch of I-40. What mountain pass, what lumber truck, what roadside cow bore witness to that moment, never knowing its significance?

It feels almost cinematic, this moment: a writer, yours truly, speaking the final words of his novel into his phone, his face registering satisfaction, serenity, and already a sense of loss. The world whirls past his windows as he ponders what it is he has just done.

It must have been so sweet.

But I don’t remember it at all. Not one bit.

I must have cast my eyes ahead, and just kept driving.

Next post: How I Found a Publisher

I Made Other Things, Too: A Writing History

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