Writerly

Up into my twenties I aspired to become a writer of favorable repute. I think these hopes were kindled in the third grade when I was assigned to write about a village. Our choices were Spooky Village, Happy Village, Silly Village, and a few others. I chose Silly Village and dashed off a page-long exposition about a community where the kids smoked cigarettes and drove cars and the grown-ups rode tricycles and played kickball. The piece garnered such resounding guffaws from the other kids that my ears are still ringing.

Let me tell you, it's tough on a guy to peak at age nine. I will forever feel a certain kinship with Rodney Allen Rippy.

I never topped "Silly Village," but for years and years I tried. These efforts weren’t always honorable. Often in my youth, desperate for ideas, I appropriated tales that were already in the public domain. One that comes to mind was the fable about the dog with the bone in its mouth. This unsatisfied hound happened upon its own reflection in a pond and decided it wanted that bone. Of course, the dog ends up with nothing but a broken heart. Feeling only the slightest pangs of shame, I put that story into a Big Chief tablet as if it were my own.

A couple years later, I planned to top "Silly Village" by publishing a sports biography. We had dozens of those cluttering our house--bios of Jerry Kramer and Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and the like. In fact, this idea was inspired by a paperback on the coffee table nearby. Called Earl the Pearl, the book chronicled the exploits of the legendary cager Earl Monroe. I figured local hero Len Dawson might be a good subject for a biography, but I didn't have his address or phone number handy, and I was really in a hurry to publish. So instead I chose Earl Monroe as my subject and began transcribing from Earl the Pearl into my spiral notebook, careful to rearrange a few words and punctuation marks to appease any uptight copyright judges.

On most weekend nights in high school, while my peers were off wasting their time dating and having fun, I sat in a recliner with a pillow on my lap and a notebook on the pillow, and I wrote in longhand for long hours. Those days, I didn't date much. I was five-eleven and weighed one-twenty. I drove a car that made the nuns laugh and point. I wore my hair in the style a friend calls “the Julie Andrews cut.” I clipped the same necktie to a polyester shirt every school day and wore cowboy boots before they were cool—back when all of Garth Brooks’ friends were in low places because they were crawling around in diapers.

On some of those nights I went for a solitary drive with the goal of immersing myself into any experience I could later write about, the way a Tom Wolfe or a George Plimpton might. This goal was conditional: I would not immerse myself into anything that might result in bloodshed, embarrassment, or harsh words from grown-ups, other teens, or outlaw bikers.

Writerly matters were always on my mind. Anything could inspire a trip to that recliner and the aforementioned pillow and spiral notebook. If the night was speckled with fireflies, for instance, or if the dusky sky had a peculiar-shaped cloud, you’d find me hard at work, incorporating such visions into a brand-new novel.

I began writing a brand-new novel just about every day, a habit I shared with Joyce Carol Oates. Unfortunately, I presumed a novel must begin at daybreak and must chronicle every move the protagonist makes. By the age of fifteen I had completely worn out every way to describe the brushing of teeth and the sizzling and crackling of bacon in a skillet.

Often I tried to build the stories around what I believed were exceptional metaphors or funny lines. For example, one evening I worked like the devil to construct a story around the simile “he’s as slippery as a bar of soap in a bathtub.”

I now recall an anecdote that sent me speeding to the writing chair. As the story went, while on a car trip in high school, an older brother and some buddies stopped for gas in the kind of sweaty southern town that might employ Rod Steiger as its sheriff. In the men’s room, a townie said to one of them, “From where we come from, we wash our hands after we piss.” And my brother’s friend said, “From where we come from, we don’t piss on our hands.”

For better or worse, I never resorted to spirits or hallucinogens to help me complete a piece of work. In college another fledgling scribbler often boasted of how liquor was an inspiration and a device. He once told me, “When I sit down to write, I got a pen in one hand and a bottle of Jack in the other, and I don’t stop writing till the pen or the bottle goes dry.”

At least his approach resulted in something. He became an alcoholic.

The most important years in the development of a writer are ages fifteen to twenty, roughly speaking. During those formative years, I squandered a lot of time by emulating such raconteurs and lightweights as Hunter S. Thompson, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Kerouac. And, regrettably, I enrolled in all the creative-writing workshops I could, where the prevailing advice was “show, don’t tell,” and where consensus by committee, which is always a bad idea, was driven by the blowhardiest among us.

So the fact that I’ve yet to surpass “Silly Village” is really no surprise.