We
live in a world that tells us we have to make more, buy more, have more
and get ahead. It tells us that the best thing to do with dreams is
put them off, and comfort ourselves with them as we work longer and
harder toward unrelated material ends.
I told that world to shut its trap. It was the best thing I ever did.
For almost half of my life, I held onto the dream of being a writer.
I wasn't born with the dream. When I was four, I thought I was going
to be a major league pitcher. When I was six, I thought I was going to
be a policeman. At seven, eight and nine, I was a future quarterback;
future fullback was my fallback. When I was ten, though, at least part
of me knew I was going to be a writer.
It started, as I
assume the aspirations of many writers do, with a school assignment. I
was assigned to write a short story that took place in the American
colonies during the period between the French and Indian War and the
Revolutionary War. I ended up coming back to the teacher with a
ten-page monstrosity of a thing, which I have since lost. If someone
were to find it, I would not admit to being its author. At the time,
though, I loved it. I may not be a natural storyteller, but I certainly
had a natural urge to tell stories.
I assumed that
everybody would write a lot. Who wouldn't want to tell more story? I
was shocked when all of my classmates returned to the teacher with
one-page stories. Some of them might have been better. Some of them
were certainly more polished -- the ten-year-old version of me was
simply not capable of adequately proofreading a ten-page story in a
night or two. Nevertheless, that story stood out in my mind for a long
time. I'm sure every one of that class's twenty-three protagonists had
more story, and I was the only protagonist whose author would have
bothered to tell it, given an extension on his due date.
So
that was the birth of my dream of being a writer, born ten years after I
was. The dream came of age about when I started to. That was the
first time I decided what novel I dreamed of writing. It was a science
fiction novel, in my imagination, and in the beginning. In my
imagination, it grew into an epic science fiction novel, and then a
three-novel saga. Eventually, it became a very long, physical outline,
which I finished and then promptly burned. I wanted to get it out of my
head, to make room for new ideas that weren't the cathartic fantasies
of a twelve-year-old who grew up watching Star Wars, reading Animorphs,
and skimming through the occasional Redwall novel for a change of pace.
The
plan worked, eventually. But there was something more important than
an adolescent plotline that I needed to get rid of. It was, oddly
enough, the dream. In junior high, I dreamed of being published by high
school. In high school, I dreamed of writing five novels by
twenty-five. Out of high school, I dreamed about being a professional
writer. In all of that time, I wrote a handful of song lyrics, a couple
of short stories, some unsorted, disjointed chapters of a novel, a few
introductory chapters of another novel, and a very long outline. I
didn't sell any of it; I didn't try to. Little of it ever left my own
possession. All totaled, it was not a lot of writing. I probably wrote
more for school in that time.
Of course, I was doing
exactly what society tells us to do with dreams, which is nothing.
Hold onto them, like a four leaf clover. Put them somewhere, but for
goodness sake, don't take them out and do anything with them. There
are more important, unrelated, material ends to work toward. The dream
stays put away, thought of when one needs comfort after working ever
longer and harder toward the world's material ends. The dream becomes
two dreams: it is the dream itself, and the hope that it will still be
there when retirement rolls around.
When I was
twenty-three, giving college the ol' college try (again), a switch in me
flipped. By that time, I knew rationally that I was a failure when it
came to writing novels. I had never even finished writing one, not for
real. Yet there was still some irrational part of me that dreamed that I
was a novelist.
As much as I still wanted to be a
writer, I absolutely did not want to be the guy who was completely
deluded about his own abilities. So when a professor assigned me to
write an original poem, I latched onto that. I enjoyed it. I was, at
least by the standards of undergraduate literature classes, reasonably
good at it. And unlike the novels, I finished mine on the first try. I
had to proofread it, and I wanted to make a few stylistic changes, but
revision is part of the process; so is finishing, and in poetry, I could
do both.
At that point, I latched onto the poetry, and
I gave up my dream. I told myself, "Jon, so far, you have no evidence
that you can be, or ever will be, a great novelist. On the other hand,
if you keep writing, you can be a poet who really enjoys his writing,
and doesn't have to beat himself up over a low word count. Eventually,
you could even write a lot of poetry. If you decide to keep writing.
You could also keep dreaming of being a novelist, but where has that
gotten you?"
I decided that it was better to be some kind of writer than dream about being more.
I
got somewhere with the poetry. I got much further and faster than I
expected. I started off pretty slowly, with a poem here, a poem there,
maybe a few a week. But I was actually writing, and now that I was
writing, I continued to enjoy it, and I got better and better at
generating and developing ideas. Pretty soon, I was writing a lot. A
few people told me I was wasting my time. More were supportive. I
didn't care, because I was too busy actually writing.
Once
I started approaching, and had once exceeded, one hundred poems in a month,
I thought about the sheer word count I was producing. At that rate,
finishing a novel was feasible. But what would I write? Having
disposed of the dream of being a novelist, I had no urgent need to
answer that question, only an insatiable appetite to generate and
develop ideas. As long as I didn't run out of ideas, I could afford to
be patient.
My patience paid off. Eventually, I had
the right idea. It was big enough to take up two hundred pages, and
also limited enough in scope that it wouldn't spin out of control on
me. It had an ending, like my poetry, which seemed important. I knew
enough about the material that I wouldn't get bogged down in indecision
or doubt or research.
Now all I needed was time and a
deadline. Starting in June, I gave myself the last two hours of every
day, guaranteed it to myself, and made an agreement (again, with myself)
to finish by the end of the summer. After writing the first two
chapters, most of the ending, and an outline for the entire middle part,
I revised the goal to sixty days.
Then, I wrote. I
lived for those two hours every night. I looked forward to them while
the sun was up. I savored them when the evening came. Most of all, I
made them count. I did what I had to do. I kept doing it. I would not
be denied. Some people told me I ought to be doing other things in the
evening. Others told me it was a waste of time. I told them to shut
up; I had a novel to write.
I wrote it.
I
missed my deadline. It took me 65 days to write my first novel. I
decided I was okay failing with a 95%. It was a big step up from the
nine years it took to not write the other novel.
I
finished my second novel less than eleven months later. I'm no longer a
guy with dreams of being a novelist. I'm a guy who writes what he
wants to write. Some people still tell me it's a waste of my time.
There are people who tell me that I spend too much time and energy on
something that isn't making me any money, or that I don't plan to
market. They say it's no way to get ahead. Some people tell me it's
antisocial to spend so much time on a solitary, occasionally isolating,
pursuit. They say that I need to come back and live in the real world
with everyone else.
I tell those people to shut up. I have a novel to write.
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