Some Thoughts on My Life as a Writer

Although I had the usual youthful aspirations of being a pilot or a pro basketball player, I think I always wanted to be a writer of some sort. When in the sixth grade at Walnut School (c. 1970), I wrote a little piece about Columbus discovering America in 1992. I have only a vague recollection of what he found in particular, but I seem to remember something about Indians living in teepees, smoking pot and talking like Cheech & Chong. My classmates loved it. My teacher, whose husband was a semi-famous mountain musician, tried to get a national kids' magazine to publish it. She wasn't successful. I don't know if the piece really wasn't all that great or if the subject matter wasn't acceptable; either way, I think my interest in writing began there, despite the failure to publish.

In high school, when music set up a dictatorship in my brain, I started writing songs. I wasn't very good, but my high school rock band included a couple of my original songs in our set list of Kiss and Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers. When I left the band in the summer between my junior and senior years, a move intended to allow me some semblance of a "normal" last year in school, I began to focus more and more on my songwriting, which was improving but still not much good. (I-at-the-time, of course, thought it was awesome!)

I went into college as a music major (flute) and continued to write songs. I transferred to another college as a music business major and continued to write songs. I transferred to yet another college as an English major and continued to write songs. In the middle of my first semester at the third college, I decided to give up school, eventually returning to Nashville--college number two was there--to make a precarious living as a songwriter. I wasn't good at the start, but I liked what I was doing by the end.

During this period, as I got better and better at what I did, much (or most) of my identity became defined by my writing. Writing was what I did. I was a writer.

When I left Nashville and became a husband and father and student (again, picking up where I left off at college number three), songwriting slowly--and necessarily, I think--faded away. But it was replaced by the writing of short stories and academic essays, by draft after draft of a novel (begun in 1992 or so and finished in 2006), by a dissertation that with only a little coaxing became a book.

But the whirlwind of life has--for the time being--scattered all my papers, so to speak, and, to be honest, done a serious eraser job on my identity.

I'm hoping this blog will help me keep in touch with writing until such time as I'm able to write again, whenever that might be. In the meantime, I'm thinking about how years ago, in the heyday of magazines, novels used to be serialized, and I'm thinking about the possibility of serializing a story--even a novel--here in this blog. I could pick one day a week, for starters, and have my blog for that day be the lastest installment of my story in progress. I have something of a precedent for this. When I first moved to Johnson City in summer 2001, a fairly famous writer and teacher in Florida began an Internet experiment in which he was online via webcam once or twice a week and writing a story. Viewers could watch and listen as he moved from inspiration (a picture and inscription on an old postcard) through regular drafting to an end product. I don't want a webcam involved, as I'm typically in my underwear when I'm blogging, but it might be interesting to find a bit of inspiration and push myself through some writing here, on a regular schedule, housing the work in progress in my Writing Life.

It's late. I'll sleep on it and see how the idea strikes me tomorrow.

P.S. In the old days of paper and pencils, a writer who didn't--or couldn't--write well or seriously was called a scribbler. In these days of computers, the same writer could be called . . .

242.2 NWT