In some capacity, I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I penned my first story in the first grade, a thriller featuring two snakes duking it out over a tasty fly at the top of a “really big rock.” (Spoiler alert: The fly makes a last-second escape.)
I’ve filled the time since with sporadic journal entries, essays — some for school, some not — personal memoirs and a couple of dreadful attempts at poetry. The most I’ve written at a time is 19 pages. Here go 300.
I promised myself I would write a novel a long time ago, a promise that I nearly forgot. Life has a funny habit of getting in the way. Until now, a novel was little more than a thought shelved somewhere in the back of my brain, piled under class readings and exams, interviews and articles. But I’ve realized something will always be in the way, and an excuse for not writing isn’t hard to find. Now is as good a time as ever. Sometimes I daydream of the perfect place to write — a cottage tucked away by the sea, maybe, or perhaps an Emerson-esque cabin in the middle of the woods. When I find my cabin, I used to think, then I’ll write my novel, sometime after I graduate college and before the real world beckons.
But I most likely won’t find my daydreams on this side of reality. I see flashes of them, though, when I type a particularly compelling sentence, when I finally write the paragraph in which I wouldn’t change a thing. These are moments of clarity, glimpses that reaffirm my love of writing, reminding me why I stick with it when it’s 3 a.m. and my eyes burn and my fingers cramp.
[quote]Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. — Stephen King[/quote]
I consider Stephen King one of the master storytellers of his generation. In eighth grade I spent several weeks staying up far too late on school nights for a couple of weeks, following with bated breath the story of seven teenagers facing an unspeakable evil in King’s “It.” His advice, then, holds considerable weight for me as a writer.
But I have to disagree with him here. Writing can and should happen anywhere, not just with the door firmly closed and the world shut out. The process — and writing is a process — doesn’t always have to be hidden from the world, away from distraction. In writing the beginnings of my novel, I’ve embraced the distractions of the beautiful mess of the world we live in. I’ve written in a cubicle, on the lawn, in the car, by the pool and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office, to name a few. I’ve based a character on a homeless man I had a conversation with in downtown Baltimore. I’ve brought life to my words.
Like dreams, novels are fictional, but that doesn’t have to make them any less real.