Welcome to the Fall Semester! A little bit late, but excuse me, I’ve been a bit preoccupied teaching actual students! For this edition, we look at one of my students who is studying classic sci-fi and fantasy novels. One of their readings is a Jules Verne, and they had noticed that much of the writing is a bit cliched and dog-earred. Perhaps, but crossing two centuries into 2019, we’re still reading him. That led me to thinking what made this author so popular? Why does his writing still resonate? My observations on that were thus…

We tend to forget, in our sophisticated world of writing and reading, that all writing and reading had to start somewhere. What seemed dated and clichéd was at one time innovative. Jules Verne, when he wrote his tales of (then) high-tech and science was prescient for the times. His stories were forward-thinking as well as fantastic to readers, and the Victorians ate them up. The times were also rife with innovation—think about the technology that emanated from the period. Railroads, telegraph, telephones, automobiles, sanitary medicine, vaccines—and the novel, which was considered the scourge of the masses at the time. But the era that spawned Jules Verne also gave us Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain—all masterly writers whose wit and wisdom and style are still the standard for excellence in prose. So where does that put Verne? Well, think about it. There are writers and there are authors. 

An edit is a cruel, cruel thing to the mind, but especially to the body. It’s not enough you’re forced to rethink all those trite plot twists, kill some of your favorite characters, remove 97 out of a 100 times you used your favorite word (yes, my moral failing, I just can’t get enough of the word just), as well as barrel higgley-piggley to an ending you’ve changed a dozen times and still can’t get right. No, all that upheaval isn’t enough. No, you must suffer more. And suffering doesn’t come any crueler than when your body starts breaking down.

Look at that hand above. It’s in a “Futuro” brace. (I just love the name. It reminds me of the robot in this scene from the 1927 movie Metropolis. I don’t remember what the robot’s name was, but I think “Futuro” would’ve been just dandy.) What you’re seeing there is a textbook case of carpal tunnel , brought on by an excessive use of just about anything that involves a keyboard. Particularly highlighting to cut and paste, which I find extremely hard to do with my left hand, which I am now forced to use if I want to continue Life As I Know It. Today’s Wednesday, and pain has been shooting up my middle finger since Sunday, when I picked up a fork–I suppose–the wrong way (how does one do that wrongly enough to injure themselves??) The pain’s easing, but it’s still not gone. And it’s a prime pain-in-the-ass to someone who makes their living by spending three-quarters of their work time using a keyboard.

So am I quitting? Hell no. I’m a writer, and I need to get this book done. Why would you even ask me that? Sheesh. But I sure wish there was someplace to apply for hazardous duty pay.

You first felt it when your were in grade school. You had an assignment to write a poem for Valentine’s Day, like for a greeting card. You got a little tingle down your spine because you knew you could do it. You started right away, scribbling in your notebook, those cutesy-sweet words that moony-eyed fifth-graders would love. But those words linked together, as made-for-each-other like a daisy chain, and that tingle reappeared, because you knew you’d done it so well. So well, your desk mates noticed. “I wish I could write a poem like that.”  You got that tingle again, but this time in your brain. “You could,” you said. “For a quarter.” A quarter later, you made your first sale. Four more, in fact.

You knew you couldn’t stop there. You had to write short stories. Adventure and love and mystery filled your notebook.  Soon, you got a special one you filled in the summer, more poems, more stories, and one notebook later, you started a novel (about a girl and her horse, of course). You got a library card and you read. And read and read and read. The more your read, the more you learned how the words played off of each other. They more you learned how a scene can bleed into the next, the more you built secret lives around each character. And you wrote. More and more. A diary. Essays. More poems. For the school newspaper. You graduated, and entered the real world. This time writing for a small-town newspaper, in the days when small-town newspapers existed. From there you graduated again, from college and into a “real” job. You wrote copy. Press Releases. Advertisements. More short stories, and started a novel for real this time.

It was awful. But still you wrote, finishing it.  But as awful as it was, after dozens of tries, it got you an agent.  (Who apparently didn’t believe you could do awful. Who probably believed in unicorns, too.) But the real world was more realistic. You parted, still friends.

You wrote. Another novel, and another. Three, four. More agents, more parting as friends. All those finished books, all going nowhere. But still you wrote, asking yourself why over and over. You wrote more. Wrote a thesis. Graduated again. You hear other people say they don’t know why they write. They just do. But you know why.  You found this out after years and years of practicing going nowhere. You also found out your reasons for doing it sound too hokey for words. That you write because to not write is worse.

That for some weird, bizarre, sadomasochistic reason it makes your fractured self seem whole. That it gives you a raison d’etre not only in the morning but in the middle of the night. That once in a while you write the perfect turn-of-phrase and when you do, it’s akin to an orgasm. That your moving and arranging of words around a page can sometimes move you to tears or laughter or unfiltered fits of rage. That sometimes those words shoot out of you like rivets to steel, and when they do oh my fucking Lord you need to get out of their way — because you need to get those words out before they stop like a crash into a brick wall. Because inevitably they will stop and when they do, the only thing you can do if you want to call yourself a writer is to keep your ass in that chair until your Muse and your own determination break through. Because there is no magic cure for creative constipation. There’s just you and the words and no magic formula, just a million monkeys at a million keyboards who sometimes, sooner or later, when the planets all line up and you finally get it right, and there’s the world waiting for you to step right up.

So you want to be a writer, huh? Then you can be. But only if you’re not afraid to say it out loud. Can you?