Luck and Pluck and WTF

Great story, Bill! Your energy in the writing, let alone in doing what you did, amazes—and humbles.

No disrespect to Goethe, but aren’t we ALWAYS trying to redeem the dreams of our youth? Seems like that’s what your story is about. It seems it took you thirty years to begin accomplishing what you dreamed of, precociously, at five.

I messed around too long in newspapers. Then again, it took me four years to learn to write a decent news feature. I am a slow learner. It has taken me four years of writing and rewriting a memoir to begin to learn what I should be doing (telling a story, scenically, to share experience). You have been instrumental in that, as I’ve told you. I have been blogging about creative nonfiction for two years, and apparently I’ve got two more years to go before I have a clue what I’m doing there.

But I have a vision of myself in twenty years, a busy geezer writer who knows what he’s doing, at long last.

Keep the party going. I look forward to another round . . .

As Updike said, “one writes by faith.” Writers are mystics–it’s during the dark night of the soul that the real work gets done, that the motives are purified, that the weak are weeded out.

Great post, great site. I’m still getting started as a writer–even though I feel like I’ve been getting started my entire life, but I’ve already found your words very helpful.
I’ve played in a lot of bands, too. For this and for other reasons, I feel like you know how I feel. Very cool.

All writers have faith coming out their noses; all writers trust Providence that they’re not wasting their time (even when there is evidence to the contrary); all writers sacrifice their own pleasure for their work (i.e. sunny days spent at the desk). I’m still on the runway, but as a writer, I have no choice but to trust I will take-off. The only other option is despair.

When I read Bill’s blog entry, I thought about David Quammen’s visit last spring to the Southern University where I teach. He was there for our school-wide celebration of Darwin and evolution, a celebration of both the 150th anniversary of the book and the 200th of the author’s birth. On the first night of his visit, over martinis in a downtown bar, we talked about evolution. It was not the evolution, however, not of field mice or mollusks, but of careers, specifically literary careers. He told the story of how he had written since he was young, mostly novels, and how he had published a novel in college. The novel did what most novels do, which is to say not much. But he kept writing, and after school moved out to Montana, where he scarped together a living while writing another novel and doing a lot of fly fishing. He remembered that as a happy time, writing hard before any real success. (One detail about this happiness I remember: his parents were supportive.)
Anyway, these days most people aren’t very familiar with David Quammen the novelist. If they know him, and have read him, as many have, it is because at some point a young editor from a fledgling magazine wanted to do some fishing in Montana, and, after making some calls, was put in touch with Quammen and a friend, who were to act as a guide. Quammen figured that the editor would be hoity-toity, that he would have to be on his best behavior, but low and behold the guy was about his age and a good guy to boot and they ended up having a great week of camping and fishing. Sometime after the trip the editor decided to start a column in his magazine and remembered Quammen and gave him a call. The magazine was Outside, the column was “Natural Acts”, and it became the platform that launched Quammen’s career as one of the country’s best and most respected writers of nonfiction.
Bill says a career is built on luck and I believe that. But it is also built on adaptability, that cornerstone of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould said this was the quality that most defined homo sapiens. The subspecies of humans known as writers have to adapt, too, that is they have to balance their resolved determination to do one thing with the possibility that they can do others. Of course, there are exceptions: stories of someone who has worked on one project for forty years, rigid in their discipline and aim, the writerly equivalent, in evolutionary terms, of the fairly un adaptive horseshoe crab, who has stuck to one simple gameplan for millions of years. But for most of us, there needs to be some fluidity mixed in with our resolve.
Like Bill, I spent my twenties working at a variety of jobs—bookstore clerk, substitute teacher, (bad) carpenter, homeless shelter counselor—and, like Quammen, came late to the realization that most of my time would be spent writing nonfiction, not fiction. Now that I have my first “real” or at least consistent job, as a teacher of creative writing, I sometimes worry about a recent trend among my graduate students. They seem to be getting younger and younger, and not just because I’m getting older. No, what I am noticing is what I would call the career track approach to creative nonfiction. Major in it in college, graduate and proceed directly to grad school. The problem here of course is that you work on the writing before living the years you likely end up writing about. But maybe I’m just being an old guy grumbler here, making a virtue of my necessity. The truth is that the writing of grad students that I read these days keeps getting better and better.

I know why I write, why I’ve always written, at least since my earliest childhood memories, and they go back to my earliest identity crisis, the one that started a lifetime of identity crises. It was a dependents’ Christmas party at a military club where I was crushed in the press of the crowd rushing to “see Santa Clause.” I fainted and came to still standing up several steps closer to Santa. The press was that tight and unaware, everyone unaware, even my parents were unaware, to say the least.

What with one thing and another, it was the moment that defined me. Learning all at once the failings, frailties, and falsenesses of adults, the truth about Santa and all the rest of childhood’s myths from being overlooked by everyone who meant something to me. I came away with trust issues, emotional indifferences, an outwardly happy-go-lucky facade masking a deeply wounded psyche.

I read and write to try to emotionally connect with the larger world in the only way I’m able. Both have been lifelong passions. Everything else is fleeting, especially enduring, meaningful relationships. I’m even emotionally estranged from family. Alhough they do love me and I do love them, after a few days, we get on each other’s nerves too much to stand being around each other, mostly because I can’t sustain being considerate of other people for long.

In the same vein, casual acquaintances along the journey have felt the same way, but are inclined to indicting me for being weird, crazy, a loser, scary smart, emotionally cold, or just plain too far off the normative ideal for any meaningful emotional connection, except the ones who I allowed to use me for their own ends. There have been a few true friends here and there, people who are as much if not more emotionally damaged. We got along because we took each other as we are and made allowances when unpleasantnesses arose.

Freelance editing work pays the bills and has for the last ten years. If only I’d been more career oriented, I might have made something of myself at one or another of the many vocations I’ve been good at. But no, even jobs have been fleeting because I’m not an insider type. I’m the proverbial outlier, reluctantly, but uncontrollably a true maveric.

Lately, traditional vocations are no longer possible even for the short term. Physical handicaps, not to mention my emotional handicaps, caused by chronic health conditions keep me from getting an entry level job anymore, even dishwashing, which was my fallback consolation job in the past.

Boozing it up to self-medicate for enduring the loneliness went by the wayside due to diabetes. I had to learn to like myself without chemical companionships.

Paperboy, lawnmower, restaurant trades, construction trades, manufacturing trades, printing and publishing trades, tourism trades, transportation trades, technology trades, agriculture trades, a transient laborer, I’ve done most of the jobs there are in one capacity or another. The taxi driver job was the most harrowing, though it allowed me time to read and write in the slow hours between the last-call bar flies going home and the morning shift coming out to work. Robbed, mugged, stabbed, shot at, crashed into by oblivious drivers, deranged psychopaths with urgent messages for the President, beat up by zealously competitive coworkers, and then some, I experienced it all.

My first published work was an opinion editorial about labor relations during a labor action brought by the union local against my employer at the time.

Harrassing phone calls, halfhearted death threats, malicious rumors, and social shunning plagued me for about half a year after the article appeared in the newspaper. In an offhanded way, the employer rewarded me for my efforts to expose the union’s shennagins. I was hired to ghost write a performance standards manual for the shop, my first paid publication. It was handsome pay, too, yet the manual was never distributed to the target audience.

The thing from writing that has been my redeeming grace, I found myself, know myself because of writing study and application. It’s not a pretty picture, but it is one I can live more comfortably with than from not knowing. The clinical diagnosis was what got me discharged from military service in my late teens, but took me a lifetime to understand. No therapy, no counseling, just an otherwise well-adjusted, harmless personaliity unsuitable for military service. Thanks, but no thanks. So long and don’t come back. I’m a loner like J.D. Salinger, afflicted with a similar personality disorder spectrum. Reading connects me emotionally. Writing is catharsis and an outlet for saying what I want to say in the forelorn hope that I’ll find kindred travelers.