I Want to Be a Writer
I don’t remember when it was that I first thought I wanted to be a writer. I remember wanting to be an architect from the latter part of elementary school until about the end of my junior year of high school. This desire was not in any way George Costanza related. I was almost 15 when Seinfeld started, so it’s actually more likely that I had given up any desire to be an architect by the time this part of George’s disturbing psyche became known to the world.
In my 10th grade English class we had a weekly writing assignment called Wednesday Writing. Every Wednesday we had to turn in a two page (if handwritten – this was back in the days before everyone had a PC at home) writing assignment that could be fiction or nonfiction, as long as it was two pages of prose. I recently unearthed a pile of these that my mom has apparently been saving for 17 years. I reread them and began to question whether my desire to be a writer was doomed to be a fruitless endeavor. They were very bad. On the other hand, I was 16 when I wrote them, so I guess I’ve had time to improve. I’d like to think that I have.
While I don’t remember when I first wanted to be a writer, I do remember exactly when I first thought it might actually be possible for me to pull it off. It was shortly after I finished reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which is one of my all-time favorite novels. The main character, Mike Noonan, has been suffering from severe writer’s block since his wife mysteriously died of an undiagnosed brain aneurysm. It has been several years since she died, but no one knows about his writer’s block because he spends several hours a day at his laptop (mostly playing Scrabble) and because he still publishes a book once a year. He is able to do this because in the ten years since his first novel, he published one book a year, but in four of those years he actually wrote two books, the second of which he stored in a safe deposit box.
At one point in the narrative Noonan is essentially confessing this fact to the reader and he says on page 37 of my paperback copy, which is not the copy I was reading at the time, but it’s the one I have now (I was going to paraphrase it, but I decided to go downstairs and pull my copy off the shelf, so you get the actual quote instead), “What the publisher wants… …is perfectly simple: a book a year… …Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta optional but very much preferred.” This, to me sounded like a lot, but I thought maybe I could do it.
A week or so later I was reading one of Robert B. Parker’s many Spenser novels (possibly Hugger Mugger or Double Deuce – I have since read all 35 of the published Spenser novels, but I had only read a few at that time) and a thought about Mike Noonan’s statement came back to me. The Spenser novel was a hardcover and it was only about 225-ish pages. The font was huge, the lines were unnecessarily far apart, and the margins were enormous. I started doing a little math and decided that Noonan’s 380 pages worked out to not quite 100,000 words. Unless the work is very dialogue [semi-interesting side note: Blogger thinks that's a typo, but I'm confident that really is how "dialogue" is spelled - don't quite know what to make of that. I'm sure that dialog, a variant is also acceptable, but it looks wrong to me] heavy, you can count on being in the neighborhood of 250 words per page, so 400 pages is 100,000 words. I figure that most of Parker’s Spenser novels come in at fewer that 60,000 words. When I got to that number I thought, “Hey! I can do that!”
Now I will more than willingly grant the premise that there’s a lot more to it than just being able to string 60,000+ words together. You have to have the ability to tell a story in a way that makes people want to read it, yadda, yadda, yaddda. Sadly, there’s much more beyond that. I recognize the reality that even if I have the stories to tell, and even if I tell them in a way that will make people want to read them, and even if I’m good enough to write novels people would actually buy – all of which adds up to a ginormous pile of IFs, I still have to convince the right person to give it a shot, and that person has to belief that all the aforementioned ifs aren’t ifs.
So I acknowledge the magnitude of this quest. But I’m 33 years old and I don’t have to give up on my dreams just yet. I’m an accountant by trade, and I’ve just spent the last eight months not working so that I could go back to school, at my wife’s suggestion (read: insistence) and finally finish my degree. Theoretically this means that I’ll be able to make more money to do the job I’ve already been doing. It turns out I’m just about to find out if that’s true. I haven’t actually graduated yet, but I just finished my last final for my regular on-campus classes. Over the next month I will be A) shopping my resume (I hate typing that word without the accents, so that it looks like “resume,” as in “pick up where you left off,” instead of “resume” with accents on both e’s, meaning one’s curriculum vitae) around, trying to find a job before the last of our student loans runs out, and B) finishing the three online classes that will actually complete my degree so that the claim on the newest version of my resume will be true where it says I graduated in 2008.
While I’m doing that, and after I get a job and return to the everyday grind, I will continue to spend my free time writing. I spend too much time reading, but that’s certainly not a bad thing, except in that it takes away from my writing time. Unfortunately, I also spend too much time watching TV. This is pretty much a complete waste, but I can’t really not do it because it’s the thing that Kristin and I spend the most time doing together (Kristin would prefer almost anything in the world over watching TV, but AJ wears us out, so we don’t get out much these days).
[If my cousin-in-law ever reads this she will surely scoff mightily at that last parenthetical statement. If you read her blog (I've given the link before, but here it is again), you know that she and her husband have four kids, who are 8 (almost), 5, 2 (almost), and 4+ months old, so she'd probably be right to mock me for saying that our 6 month old plus our 8 year old (who lives with her mother half the time) could possibly "wear us out."]
I suppose I could do it less, and I plan to do that, but I prefer to find time when she’s doing something else already and use that time for writing. Certainly I could make excuses for writing if I could actually make money at it. If I didn’t have to go to work for 8-10 hours a day, but could stay home instead, that would be a pretty good excuse to write. I’m honestly not even really hoping to make millions as a writer (that’s a big fat lie and everyone knows it. Of course I want to make millions, but I’m trying to be sort of semi-vaguely realistic), but if I could make enough money writing to support my family, well, that would be… you know, great and stuff. If what they tell their readers can be believed, a lot of fiction writers spend about four or five hours a day writing. I’d be willing to spend 10 hours a day and more if I could do it for my job. I’m not sure Kristin would be entirely on board with that kind of commitment, but past experience tells me that a high level accounting job will require a minimum of 40-50 hours a week. Factor in the commute and there’s your 10 hours a day and more.
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