I Always Wanted To Be a Writer

So what the hell, why not!?

I always wanted to be a writer. The problem was, I didn’t want to write. Or, to be more accurate, I was afraid to, afraid I’d find that I didn’t have anything to say. A stack of rejection slips hitting my mailbox in the early years – now they would be rejection emails –  reinforced this fear. The most devastating one came with the phrase, “Pretty lame stuff,” scrawled across the bottom of the usual form letter. Pretty brutal stuff. But at least the editor took the time to address my submission directly. (I’m pleased to say – forgive me, I’m human – the publication folded decades ago.)

I don’t know where my desire to be a writer came from. I had no personal role models for such an aspiration. Neither of my parents finished high school, and writing, beyond conveying information and for family letters, doesn’t seem to have been a thing for either of them.

You wouldn’t call anyone else in the family a “writer” either, though some wrote as part of their jobs – especially the one or two academics among the in-laws. Though there had been writers and poets  in the family in the past (genealogy revealed that – want to hear the details?), they’d been so far back that Shakespeare’s English was the new slang for them. And, to tell the truth, none of what they wrote, that little that survives, anyway,  would have cost Will any sleepless nights.

So where did this unlikely aspiration come from? I’d like to say that it sprang out of my soul, the very essence of my being. And I would say that, but for the fear that someone might scrawl an email to me with the phrase, “Pretty lame stuff.” Not YOU, of course, but one of my less supportive readers. And, besides, I’m not even sure I believe that’s it.

Part of the credit (or blame – you decide which) may go to Miss Honey, one of my high school English teachers, whose passion for diagramming sentences came just when I needed it – or needed something – to divert me from a smoldering passion for my fellow composition students (to be more specific, the boys among them), which I sensed made sublimation essential. What better way to sublimate than by diagramming!

Or maybe it was the Rimbaud-esque young teaching assistant in my first college literature class, when I got to Washington University in 1966. His descriptions of the writer’s life in Paris and New York in the glory days (that would be the 50 or 100 years before our day then), and especially the “lost generation” made it seem the most glorious – no, make that glamorous – life imaginable. How lost I seemed myself in the big world of UNIVERSITY, and how I longed for some modicum of glamor in the drab, pimple-faced 18 year old’s life I lived then.

Never mind that Hemingway shot himself, Tennessee Williams choked on a bottle cap after a lifetime of drinking and addiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald also drank himself to death, and Capote died embittered and alone after writing too revealingly about his friends. Glamorous indeed. Luckily, I've been spared the devastation of literary fame - though one thing I seem to have in common with many of my former writer heroes is that tendency to too much drink.

My mother used to say that she always knew where to find me in a store, if I was lost: I’d be back there with the books. Those days, they were Little Golden Books in the stores we shopped, if there were any books at all. And I do remember sitting on the floor, pouring over them, Peter Rabbit, a favorite; “the story of naughty Peter Rabbit as he squeezes under the gate into Mr. McGregor's garden and finds himself in all kinds of trouble!” And the flight to escape Farmer McGregor’s descending basket – BREATHTAKING! Oh, how I wish I still had my copy. I turned the pages so many times, mesmerized by the images of Peter amongst the carrots and cabbages, that the pages fell out.

But my countless hours with Little Golden Books probably had more to do with my later decision to become a librarian, than with a yet-to-germinate writing career.

Inspired by the apocryphal belief that my father’s Maine family connected somehow with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I made fitful efforts in high school at writing tin-eared rhyming verse, some of which, those dedicated to my mother, brought tears, not just for being bad poems.

In college and grad school, I bled my anguish over reams of innocent typing paper (with carbons), convinced that what came out of such suffering certainly made cutting down the trees worth doing. I still have much of that in files in dark closets of my study. One “story” even has annotations in the hand of Robert Penn Warren, who kindly read it, and kindly did not scrawl “Pretty lame stuff” across it. Though thinking back now about his kind remarks, as we sat in his office in New Haven that winter afternoon all those years ago, I fear he might have wanted to.

Through the 1970s and 1980s and after, I did keep typing, sometimes even producing things that made it into print – though mostly journalism, of a sort – opinion pieces or current-event satires (No more than 1500 words.); and for some of it I even got paid. Not nearly enough to make a living, but enough for coffee money in good years.

This was not what I wanted to write, however – not the great literary stuff I felt defined real writers. I never made any headway in that direction. I didn’t seem to have the courage that kind of real writing required, the courage to keep going no matter what. I remember vividly the day 40 years ago when I pridefully showed a piece to someone I trusted (and, even more, someone I wanted to impress), and the flat response. That memory has stared back at me from blank pages and screens ever sense. And I’ve let it.

Now that I’m in my eighth decade (MY GOD, what a shocking thing to realize – though I keep reminding myself that it’s the lucky ones who have the chance to get old), I know that it’s now or never. I may make it into my ninth decade – with luck and enough blood pressure medication, maybe even into my tenth – but the time is growing short, not just for me to BE A WRITER, but to write. And now, with the courage of cantankerous old age, I’ve decided to dive in. It may still be that I don’t have much of anything to say – not much worth saying, anyway – but that doesn’t seem to stop lots of others. And these days, I don’t even have to wrestle with the guilt of massacring trees to do it. So what the hell, why not!?