As Close to an "About Me" Page as You're Going to Get

Today, everyone is an expert. Everyone wants to be an influencer.

Well. I’m not an expert and frankly, I can barely even influence my kids. So that’s not the point here. But I do like sharing my ideas in hopes that others will share theirs and we can all get better together. And it’s nice sometimes, when reading someone’s ideas, to get a sense of who they are.

So let's get the big guns out of the way. I have a master's degree in creative writing and I am an editor, writer, content strategist, content designer, and creative director by trade. I haven't published any fiction, but I have published articles on a variety of topics and even a short, humorous book. But really, that stuff's boring, so let's see what else we can dig up. (Actually, I'm pretty proud of that short, humorous book. I did it for work, though, and it doesn't really qualify me as an expert.)

The exact day

I can actually pinpoint the exact day I decided to become a writer. I was in third grade and it was picture day. Before that, I'd dabbled in stories, but I'd never considered doing in professionally. My sights at that point were set on being a C. I. A. agent, or a stunt driver. Or the president of the United States. (The only one I harbor any lingering regret over is the stunt driver. I still consider that one sometimes.)

So when the time came for class pictures and we began to shamble onto the risers and Christa Norris turned to me and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I was a little surprised when I said "an author." To be fair, this is one of those fuzzy memories. I have no idea why Christa would ask me that question at that particular time and I find the whole scenario a little suspect, but I remember it very clearly. I remember her turning and looking up at me (I was on the back row, a fact confirmed by my actual school picture). I remember her asking, and I remember with absolute clarity the way my life seemed to click into focus when I answered with those words that I hadn't expected.

The declaration had power, too. I never really strayed, except for one brief period after I graduated from high school (and I paid for that insolence).

The first story I remember writing was a total rip-off of The Hobbit. I don't know anything else about it, but I can still visualize a scene from it where Bilbo and Gandalf and the others (or whatever their counterparts' names were in my version) walked to the top of some hill as they left for their adventure. I'm not sure why that scene has stuck in my head for all these years, but I still see it pretty clearly. Come to think of it, it's remarkably similar to that hero shot Peter Jackson used in the first trailer for The Lord of the Rings (you know, at the very end, when the Fellowship comes through the rocks). Uncanny foreshadowing aside, that story is lost forever.

The first story I can prove that I wrote is a horror story I wrote in third grade (it was a momentous year for my career). I can prove that I wrote it because there's a copy of it glued in the photo album my mother made of my life. It's frenetic, but it's a pretty classic haunted house/decent into Hell story awesomely titled "Ha! Ha! Ha!," a reference to the chilling laughter of the devilish antagonist. Around the same time, I know I wrote a bunch of short stories about a team of superheroes called Antidisestablishmentarianism. (Apprently, according to Merriam-Webster, this isn't really a word.) I only vaguely knew what that word meant (though I shouldn't feel bad since, according to Merriam-Webster, it doesn't really have a meaning), but I could spell it, so I was going to use it. (Yes, I could spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" in the third grade, but only because I'm weird.) Unfortunately, I only have vague glimpses of who any of the superheroes who made up that team were and none of the stories are extant.

Sex and violence (sort of...)

In eighth grade, I received my first real recognition for my writing when I won the National Council of Teachers of English Promising Young Writer award. My story was a real doozy called "The Game." It was about a man who's taken prisoner for a crime he didn't commit. As a result, he's carted away to a gladiatorial arena where he and a group of other innocent victims are forced to fight a huge monster for the sport of a bloodthirsty audience. In the end, he's killed, but his vengeful ghost is freed to wreak havoc on his dastardly captors.

It's as bloody and violent as it sounds (this was back when writing violence was just for fun) but when I was given the opportunity to read it  in front of my class, I was more nervous about the attention of Jaime Walford and Jessie Kasynski—the two girls in my class who looked and acted like real women rather than adolescent girls (or so I thought then)—than I was about the fact that my teachers were probably trying to find me some professional help.

(Jessie and Jaime were legendary in my class. They used to sunbathe in the field behind our classroom during lunch in front of an audience of hormones and acne. I wrote Jaime an anonymous love poem once, based on a line I stole from a poem my brother wrote his girlfriend and that he didn't know I'd read: "And the world could not contain my scream/If I were to wake and find that you were but a dream." She never gave me any indication that she'd received or appreciated the letter, nor that she had any idea who'd sent it. She treated me just the same as she always had by simply ignoring me. Later, in college, she featured prominently in a story I wrote about a man who's confronted with the object of his teenage lust and is forced to confront the baseless pedestal on which he'd put her.)

The terminal bibliophile

Probably the single greatest influence on my writing is my dad. Part of this is that he's a terminal bibliophile and so I grew up in a house that was almost literally wall-to-wall books. My dad had books about everything and I remember people coming to our house to borrow books like it was a library. So I grew up embraced by the presence of words and I guess it's no surprise that they seeped into me. I am happiest still when I'm surrounded by books. They soothe me like nothing else.

But more importantly, my father was the most ruthless editor I've ever had. He doesn't remember it, but he was brutal. He never gave me a free pass for being in the third grade. He questioned my characters and their motives. He wondered about the logic of my settings and plots. He was unyielding about vocabulary. I remember long, heated discussions with him about the appropriate usage of words like "antediluvian" and "cavernous." I fought him on cavernous for a long time over the line "a small, cavernous cave."

Somehow, though, he managed to do all this without making me feel attacked. As a professional editor who offers criticism every day to professional writers, I know how difficult this is, but my dad seemed to do it without trying. He gave me the gift not only of better writing, but of knowing how to handle criticism and of understanding that it's the story that's important, not my ego.

This experience came into play during my graduate program as well. In fact, the most valuable part of my program (and the part that I think justifies getting a master's degree in creative writing) was sitting in endless workshops listening to people offer anemic praise for your stories and vague, sometimes insulting criticisms. You start to understand how to listen past the words they're using and capture what they really mean. You begin to ask questions to help them articulate their comments and to illuminate the real problem. And you discover that it's okay to ignore some comments, but that it's not okay to ignore others. A workshop like this becomes an opportunity to brainstorm, to take the experience of others and to use it in your own recipe, seasoning each story with the spices of the Other.

A time-honored excuse

Since the point of this little exercise is to offer some context for the kinds of things I might be saying here, I think I should close with a few words about what I read. The truth is that while I love books and I love to read, I don't read as much as I should. I could appeal to the time-honored excuse that I don't have enough time (which is true), but in reality, it goes deeper than that.

I learned when I was a kid that I could get the sense of a book pretty quickly and once I did, I didn't really need to keep reading. I don't mean I could somehow psychically capture all the plots or character, but I could always tell pretty quickly what a book was going to give me and whether or not it was worth it. This sounds arrogant and it is. But it's also true.

In college, this served me well when each semester, I was expected to read twelve behemoth volumes in two or three months. I'm not an extraordinarily fast reader, so I struggled with this and when I realized that I could read the first parts of a book, get a sense for the characters and the cadence, and then easily keep up in class discussions and write capable essays by simply listening to the reactions of my classmates, I did. I'm not sure I finished any of the books I was assigned in college and still regret it. Some of them were pretty great and there's no excuse for laziness.

The other problem is that I'm a pretty egregious snob when it comes to books.  For one thing, I'm easily bored by mediocre writing and let's face it, most of the books out there feature mediocre writing. But that's just the beginning. When I read a book, I expect to get something for my time. Reading's a covenant, a contract, where you pour yourself in and it pours itself out and I'm not that interested in books that don't keep their side of the bargain. To be honest, a book has to pretty much change my life to be truly satisfying to me. Change my life, or drastically change the way I see the world. It has to challenge me, in one way or another.

(Incidentally, when it comes to movies, I'm much less discriminating because it takes a lot less for a movie to meet these criteria. If a movie has some decent production or creature design or something that inspires me, I'm usually willing to give it a pass. The commitment is much lower, so that payoff can be much cheaper.)

That's not to say that all the books I like have changed me in the same way. Not every book has the same covenant, and so my expectations differ and I end up liking Artemis Fowl, The Grapes of Wrath, The Road, The Lord of the Rings, and the stories of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft all for different reasons. Each held up its side of the bargain. I gave and they gave back and so each expanded me and made me bigger. If a book doesn't do that, I have a hard time wasting my time on it, so I try to be discriminating about what I choose. And so I've begun a lot of books, I've read summaries of a lot of books, and I've listened to discussions about a lot of books, but I wouldn't say I've read a lot of books. Sometimes I think this is a failing. Sometimes I don't. I listen to a lot of audio books now at any rate, trying to confront the "no-time" excuse. Also, it helps (or hurts) that my wife reviews books for a book blog and I edit all her reviews. That means I know about a lot of books without actually having read them.

(Someday, I'll write about the books that have changed me the most. You may be interested to learn that a piece that's close to the top of that list is a piece of flash fiction. That little story has arguably had more influence on my writing than anything else I've read.)

The creator thing

So I’m not an expert, but as I said, that’s not the point. I'm not really trying to give advice. I'm trying to explore. I'm trying to figure out how this whole creativity thing works, how lies can be truth, how subjective can become collective and universal. But I've been exploring and asking for a long time. That's the point of this whole mess. And I've found some answers, but they're probably wrong and most of them are really just more questions in disguise. Next year I'll probably have a new set of ideas about how the whole thing works. I know last year I did.

I imagine that if you're reading this, you may be in the same boat, asking the same questions, so the only thing you have to decide now is this: am a reliable companion in this exploration?

I can't say anything about that.