Writing

It’s an odd thing to do as a hobby, I suppose. After all, most of us during twelve years of mandatory schooling did everything we could to avoid writing assignments. When we couldn’t, we would scrutinize the wording of the assignment to discern the minimum effort that would meet the teacher’s requirement as to word count, spacing, sources, etc.

We all looked askance at the one person in our class who actually enjoyed writing and would turn in the well-researched paper, the interesting opinion piece, the compelling story. That person always seemed intent on ruining things for the rest of us, poisoning the well so that none of our more minimalist efforts would could possibly satisfy. Not as long as the ‘good student’s’ submission was available for comparison.

To this day I can bring to mind the faces of (names withheld to protect teacher’s pets), the students with whom I shared teachers and recess but not our dedication to our studies. With one of them I shared every classroom and teacher from kindergarten through eighth grade. She was my nemesis, that evil kid whose presence on the class roster each September quite effectively banished my own thematic offerings to the realm of less-than.

So, one might think that my emergence from state-sanctioned education would signal the end of my interest in writing. As you’ve probably figured out by now, it didn’t quite work out that way. After high school I found myself writing just to write – bad poetry, song lyrics, a couple of atrocious scripts, the occasional short story. During my time in the Navy I found that long hours sailing the ocean blue provided lots of ideas for story lines and plenty of time to explore them in writing. Foolscap became my single largest non-nicotine expense. I didn’t enjoy cards in the mess or board games, so my down time was divided between playing guitar in the shelter of the blast shield for the #2 Terrier missile launcher and writing at an unused desk in the calibration lab.

Writing settled my soul at a time that I felt a bit shut off from the world. Then, in the course of transferring back to the States for discharge, somewhere between Subic Bay and Treasure Island, I lost the bag that included all my writing to that point. Never got it back. Crushed me. But rather than being discouraged, I found myself even more attracted to writing. And it sort of freed me. I was released from the history and weight of all my earlier attempts at coherent writing.

And so, I started anew. Wrote a book (now lost to the ages), then another (got an agent but eventually abandoned it in a welter of rewrites). Wrote song lyrics as a volunteer staff singer for a church. Wrote essays and small stories, edited a few theses. Basically, I would write anything just to be writing. Took creating writing courses four different times at four different institutions of higher learning.

I’ve never stopped, never entirely. And now, I can’t stop. As I’ve shared before, anywhere I’ve spent any time at all is likely to be awash in scraps of paper, browbeaten notebooks, my computer filled with starts, a few paragraphs on this or that idea, the sourdough starter of the writing addict.

I have a monkey on my back. And this particular monkey is welcome to ride.