why I do what I do:
FOR THIRTY-THREE YEARS NOW, I HAVE...
WORKED AT THE WRITING TRADE. IT HAS provided me astonishment and joy. I attempt to do it every day, because when I don't, my body aches, my mood is terrible, I become a bore to those who live with me or have to deal with me on a daily basis. I've spent months at a desk on a manual typewriter, years on a computer, labored over each-and-every word, written in parked cars, scribbled notes to myself when riding a bus and have written in bars, too. And the older I get, the more I am humbled by the words of a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald, who have always seemed to me to be much better at the craft than I have been. This is no longer, of course, a mere hobby. It is now a part of who I am, of who I have become. I have written stage plays, a book, newspaper articles, and essays in longhand on yellow pads and restaurant menus. Writing has now become so entwined with my life, that I can't imagine life without it.
Like so many others in the writing trade, I wanted in my adolescence and young manhood to do other things. My desire was to play professional baseball when I was 8 years old, and that passion gradually led me to the craft of cartooning by the time I was 11, and when I reached the age of 21, I was on my way to becoming a Lutheran Minister. The first words I ever wrote were back in the days when I was attending Gove Junior High School in Denver, Colorado for a teacher named Miss Smiley, who reminded me of the voluptuous Miss Lace in the Milton Caniff comic strip Terry and the Pirates. She was a young woman who filled my mind with infinite possibilities. My first essay in class was for her. She wore red-framed glasses. So I wrote about a beautiful woman who wore red-framed glasses, and won first prize.
As a young man in college, my ambition was not to embrace those general qualities of an Ernest Hemingway, or any other writer of note. By then, I was a pre-theological student wanting only to get a grade-point average high enough to enter the seminary. I was, however, an English major who happened to take a writing class under the tutelage of Professor Antes, a woman not nearly as attractive as Miss Smiley had been; and due to having been a baseball fanatic from childhood through my teenage years, when Professor Antes had us write an in-class essay from memory, I wrote about the 1927 New York Yankees, which was filled with the names of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri and Waite Hoyt, and the rest of the famed Murderer's Row, along with the batting averages of every Yankee in the starting lineup. Miss Antes was greatly impressed and attempted to persuade me to take writing up as a career.
Due to the stupidities of youth, I never even considered it.
By that point in time, the desire to be a cartoonist had derailed by the simple factor of lack of talent, I played a little professional baseball but was afraid to commit to a vocation which would eventually end when I still was a young man. So I was ordained at the age of 23 as a Lutheran Minister, and although I was proud to be making my way in the world in such an honorable profession, I didn't much care for the strict structures of the church and demitted the ministry at the age of 30. So I found work in the retail industry. There wasn''t much romance in serving customers or ordering goods or having a schedule where I had to work weekends. But within months, I found myself on a typewriter again, working in the advertising trade for a small Houston agency, writing copy for a clothing store called Harold's Men's Store...
...Which led me into writing for Blaze deSteffano's newly-minted weekly tabloid This Week in Texas Magazine in 1980, which catered to the rather large homosexual community of Houston. I was now a straight man in a gay world and had no plans for the future, no certainties about a career. It was a part-time adventure writing for a tabloid which could fold the next week. There definitely was no pension plan, but I found newspaper people were bohemian anarchists, with great gifts for obscenity and a cynicism based upon the experience of being gay in a straight world. I loved being in their company, in the news room, interviewing people on the streets, or standing at the bar after work. Blaze asked me to do a series of articles for the paper called The Bending of a Straight, which would center around my views as a heterosexual in a largely homosexual community, and the series won The Series of the Year Award from the Writers and Artists Guild of Houston.
At the age if 44, I thought I had started late and therefore must throw myself into my work. Nothing before or since could compare with the initial excitement of going out into the city and coming back to write a story. No day's work was like any other's, no story repeated any other in its details. I loved it. All of it. I loved living in the permanent present, and had no idea at the time of my initiation into the romance of journalistic writing would flow into a book, stage plays, too many screenplays which would never be produced, and thousand of words for other newspapers in other cities and other states. I didn't know that I was apprenticing in a trade that I hoped to practice until I died, or that other writing awards lay ahead.
By the time I had reached the age of 50, I had won The Texas Playwright Festival award for a stage play I had written called Wunderlick. This is not a claim that I have produced an uninterrupted series of written amazement's. I have often winced; if I'd only had another three or four inches of space, perhaps this piece would have been better or that piece written would have been wiser. There were too many pieces written limited by my ignorance or lack of experience. Sometimes I completely missed the point or was far too egotistical to see the truth in my writing ability. Once a piece is published or produced on a stage, there is no going back; it's too late to deepen the insight or the stale language of past pieces written. The only thing that a writer can do is vow never to make that error again and start fresh the next day.
Over the decades, I have written newspaper articles for This Week in Texas and The Brentwood Press and had stage plays produced in Houston and London and New York, all of which became a kind of public diary of who I was and where I was and what I saw along the way. I have written about Houston or New York or Mexico, in memory, myth, and lore: and often chose subjects which I knew nothing about. My ignorance would force me to learn, to engage in a crash course of reading new books, attending fresh stage plays, talking to strangers on a variety of subjects. Along the way, I learned about myself from Hemingway and Faulkner and the blues and the love of fine jazz, or by reading the history of Sparta and looking at the drawings of George Grosz.
When I began my writing career, my hope was to be another Ernest Hemingway. That obviously did not come to pass. That ambition was amazingly presumptuous, but as I attempted to fit my articles into 700 words or less, I always remembered his words about what must be contained within the writing of all good works: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. That small piece of wisdom has helped me to understand that even fragments could serve a larger purpose. His words helped me to understand that there was no great novel roaming about in my soul, and with that, the modest knowledge of a more unassuming ambition awaiting release, came to me...
...I only needed to understand the way the world worked and how I fit into it...
...And if I did that and only that, I would be doing just fine...
FOR THIRTY-THREE YEARS NOW, I HAVE...
WORKED AT THE WRITING TRADE. IT HAS provided me astonishment and joy. I attempt to do it every day, because when I don't, my body aches, my mood is terrible, I become a bore to those who live with me or have to deal with me on a daily basis. I've spent months at a desk on a manual typewriter, years on a computer, labored over each-and-every word, written in parked cars, scribbled notes to myself when riding a bus and have written in bars, too. And the older I get, the more I am humbled by the words of a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald, who have always seemed to me to be much better at the craft than I have been. This is no longer, of course, a mere hobby. It is now a part of who I am, of who I have become. I have written stage plays, a book, newspaper articles, and essays in longhand on yellow pads and restaurant menus. Writing has now become so entwined with my life, that I can't imagine life without it.
Like so many others in the writing trade, I wanted in my adolescence and young manhood to do other things. My desire was to play professional baseball when I was 8 years old, and that passion gradually led me to the craft of cartooning by the time I was 11, and when I reached the age of 21, I was on my way to becoming a Lutheran Minister. The first words I ever wrote were back in the days when I was attending Gove Junior High School in Denver, Colorado for a teacher named Miss Smiley, who reminded me of the voluptuous Miss Lace in the Milton Caniff comic strip Terry and the Pirates. She was a young woman who filled my mind with infinite possibilities. My first essay in class was for her. She wore red-framed glasses. So I wrote about a beautiful woman who wore red-framed glasses, and won first prize.
As a young man in college, my ambition was not to embrace those general qualities of an Ernest Hemingway, or any other writer of note. By then, I was a pre-theological student wanting only to get a grade-point average high enough to enter the seminary. I was, however, an English major who happened to take a writing class under the tutelage of Professor Antes, a woman not nearly as attractive as Miss Smiley had been; and due to having been a baseball fanatic from childhood through my teenage years, when Professor Antes had us write an in-class essay from memory, I wrote about the 1927 New York Yankees, which was filled with the names of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri and Waite Hoyt, and the rest of the famed Murderer's Row, along with the batting averages of every Yankee in the starting lineup. Miss Antes was greatly impressed and attempted to persuade me to take writing up as a career.
Due to the stupidities of youth, I never even considered it.
By that point in time, the desire to be a cartoonist had derailed by the simple factor of lack of talent, I played a little professional baseball but was afraid to commit to a vocation which would eventually end when I still was a young man. So I was ordained at the age of 23 as a Lutheran Minister, and although I was proud to be making my way in the world in such an honorable profession, I didn't much care for the strict structures of the church and demitted the ministry at the age of 30. So I found work in the retail industry. There wasn''t much romance in serving customers or ordering goods or having a schedule where I had to work weekends. But within months, I found myself on a typewriter again, working in the advertising trade for a small Houston agency, writing copy for a clothing store called Harold's Men's Store...
...Which led me into writing for Blaze deSteffano's newly-minted weekly tabloid This Week in Texas Magazine in 1980, which catered to the rather large homosexual community of Houston. I was now a straight man in a gay world and had no plans for the future, no certainties about a career. It was a part-time adventure writing for a tabloid which could fold the next week. There definitely was no pension plan, but I found newspaper people were bohemian anarchists, with great gifts for obscenity and a cynicism based upon the experience of being gay in a straight world. I loved being in their company, in the news room, interviewing people on the streets, or standing at the bar after work. Blaze asked me to do a series of articles for the paper called The Bending of a Straight, which would center around my views as a heterosexual in a largely homosexual community, and the series won The Series of the Year Award from the Writers and Artists Guild of Houston.
At the age if 44, I thought I had started late and therefore must throw myself into my work. Nothing before or since could compare with the initial excitement of going out into the city and coming back to write a story. No day's work was like any other's, no story repeated any other in its details. I loved it. All of it. I loved living in the permanent present, and had no idea at the time of my initiation into the romance of journalistic writing would flow into a book, stage plays, too many screenplays which would never be produced, and thousand of words for other newspapers in other cities and other states. I didn't know that I was apprenticing in a trade that I hoped to practice until I died, or that other writing awards lay ahead.
By the time I had reached the age of 50, I had won The Texas Playwright Festival award for a stage play I had written called Wunderlick. This is not a claim that I have produced an uninterrupted series of written amazement's. I have often winced; if I'd only had another three or four inches of space, perhaps this piece would have been better or that piece written would have been wiser. There were too many pieces written limited by my ignorance or lack of experience. Sometimes I completely missed the point or was far too egotistical to see the truth in my writing ability. Once a piece is published or produced on a stage, there is no going back; it's too late to deepen the insight or the stale language of past pieces written. The only thing that a writer can do is vow never to make that error again and start fresh the next day.
Over the decades, I have written newspaper articles for This Week in Texas and The Brentwood Press and had stage plays produced in Houston and London and New York, all of which became a kind of public diary of who I was and where I was and what I saw along the way. I have written about Houston or New York or Mexico, in memory, myth, and lore: and often chose subjects which I knew nothing about. My ignorance would force me to learn, to engage in a crash course of reading new books, attending fresh stage plays, talking to strangers on a variety of subjects. Along the way, I learned about myself from Hemingway and Faulkner and the blues and the love of fine jazz, or by reading the history of Sparta and looking at the drawings of George Grosz.
When I began my writing career, my hope was to be another Ernest Hemingway. That obviously did not come to pass. That ambition was amazingly presumptuous, but as I attempted to fit my articles into 700 words or less, I always remembered his words about what must be contained within the writing of all good works: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. That small piece of wisdom has helped me to understand that even fragments could serve a larger purpose. His words helped me to understand that there was no great novel roaming about in my soul, and with that, the modest knowledge of a more unassuming ambition awaiting release, came to me...
...I only needed to understand the way the world worked and how I fit into it...
...And if I did that and only that, I would be doing just fine...
No comments:
Post a Comment