A bright summers day in a small classroom. Children are scribbling on worksheets while babbling to each-other about football or their brother or how far they can kick either object. Not much work is getting done, but it’s late in the year so no one really minds. The teacher sure doesn’t, and is sitting absent-mindedly marking something or other, or maybe she too is doodling aimlessly.
She looks up to a boy standing politely beside her desk. He beams shyly and waves a stack of pages. Each is covered in a dense scrawl of bad joint-up handwriting. 07/05/2015 is written in the margin, like it’s a homework. He says it’s a story he’s written, and asks if he could read some of it to the class.
And of course she says yes. It’s not often a child wants to speak publicly, of their own volition – this boy in particular is not the type to speak up much at all. And besides, it’s not like the kids were doing much anyway.
So she stands up and the hubbub dies down, and she tells everyone there’s going to be a story read out, and everyone should listen. Then she sits and gestures for the boy, standing stiffly centre-stage, to go ahead.
He begins, shakily at first, squinting at his own smudged letters as his hands shake gently. Then a joke gets a laugh, and he beams. He continues on louder than before. More laughs. He lifts his eyes from the manuscript momentarily to see 20 eyes staring back, transfixed. He starts doing voices for the characters, gesturing actions with one hand, and inflecting just like the people on the audiobooks would do it.
Then there’s a hand on his shoulder, and it’s time for break. He asks if he can share more tomorrow, and she says maybe. And he runs out with the rest of them, all of them flocking to him and asking him question upon question about where it was going and how he’d written it.
If you asked me, years ago, what I wanted to be, I would probably have said author. That or “inventor”, before this cruel world revealed to me that there is no job where you construct zany contraptions for the heck of it. But I loved reading, and I thought being able to write something as good as Tolkien or Pratchett was a goal worth spending a life achieving. At some point my answer changed to programmer. I’m not really sure when.
I write this in a Subway. Not the most poetic place to write, I have to admit, at least in one sense. The place glistens when you’re hungry, seems like a palace, and then the moment that foot of bread, meat and sauce is gone you look around and get insta-depressed by your surroundings. Bleak, hard table-tops surrounded by single-colour seats so apparently coveted that they had to be bolted to the floor. There are crumbs all up my fore-arms from setting them on the table to type, and I’m sure if you scraped all the stray lettuce free from my shoe-soled you could construct the world’s grittiest salad. So many people have come in and out, some staring stupidly at the ingredients while the server loses the will to live, some barking orders like their sandwich is for some visiting dignitary.
A group of kids came in, said “please” between every syllable, friggin’ adorable. Presumably they’d been loaned a parent’s card for the purpose. As they sat down I heard one say to another very seriously, “I think we just spent a lot of money”. Welcome to Subway, kid.
I want to learn to write. Fiction, I mean. For a post like this, I can just say whatever I please. The words just come out of me, no problemo. I’m sure I could practice and get better at it (perhaps you’re nodding your head after having to read all the preceding), but it’s stories I crave. And try as I might I still don’t know how to write them, not anymore.
We all have an inner critic, a part of us that’s adept at seeing flaws and judging things by comparing them to what we’ve seen before. I have quite a strong critic – I mean why wouldn’t I, I’ve read some great books, I know them when I see them. But when I go to write something of my own, I get one word in and already he’s telling me I’m way off the mark. That it’s going nowhere.
Some of you can guess what all this means. Resourcing is postponed, indefinitely. If I ever do return to it, I’ll start it from scratch, but I need something different. I had no idea where it was going. Don’t get me wrong, I had ideas. The core concept was pretty cool (if I do say so myself), and I hadn’t even got a chance to show it off. But the characters… they were only there to stand around and bring you there, only present to grab the proverbial camera and shove it towards the interesting thing I came up with. Their names (as I only fully realized yesterday) are Alice, John and Bob, for crying out loud.
And that’s not a story. It’s a glorified thesis, a show-and-tell. Like a kid showing off something they’ve made, but instead of acting it out, raising their voice and performing, they skip, in unmoving monotone, to the part they thought they were so very clever for making.
I think I just need to simplify things, accept all the advice I’ve heard and thought I was too good for. Like, “write what you know”. That Subway section a few paragraphs back wasn’t Shakespeare, but I could write it and keep thinking of more things to write, more angles and hidden details. When John opened his mouth I’d stare at the page for minutes wondering what the heck he wanted to say.
Not that I should abandon big ideas. I do love those. Sci-fi and fantasy make up the vast majority of all I’ve read. And you can write from experience anyway, from the understanding of people your own life has given you, and use it on something novel. Take, again, that Subway passage. I lied. I’m not in a sandwhich shop. I’m in the library. Yet you, reader, have been imagining me typing this in a busy room filled with the scent of Hearty Italian this whole time.
Maybe that’s the power of writing that I love. The power to take someone somewhere else, for a little while.
Did I just take some deep meaning from saying I was in a Subway when I wasn’t? I think I did. Time to bring this in to land, Caleb…
I’m going to keep writing, but the idea that forcing myself to publish serial chapters would improve my ability was bogus. From now on, I’ll put something up here when it’s finished and ready. In the mean-time, expect more posts like this. Or maybe a review or too. That’d be interesting.
Anyways, it’s getting late and we’ve been talking for a while. I’d better be going. I’m sure you remember the way out. Don’t forget to turn the lights off when you leave. Until next time. Peace out.