Why some do and some don’t

You should write a book.

For a long time now, that has been the response I would get from friends and relatives when they would have read something I had written, liked the way the piece was composed and, I suppose, wanted more. But I never thought there was one in me. Fiction didn’t seem a possibility and for one very compelling reason — I simply lack the vivid imagination it takes to create a plot and characters and diversions and events and subplots and endings. Most of all, endings. I could never imagine where a story might be going. My best hope was for a newly introduced character to come in with a machine gun and just kill all the book’s cast members. Lame and pretty morbid, right?.

But what about nonfiction? What about history? I was a history major in college and have never stopped being a student. History doesn’t require imagination. It requires truth. Attention to details. It also requires research…lots of research. And I’m always amazed when a new history book comes out on an old subject like the American Civil War. Really? What hasn’t been said? I don’t think I have anything new to add to the 60,000 to 80,000 books that have already been written on the topic.

How about a text book on communication skills…something I’ve given more presentations on than I can count. Maybe, but like with history, it feels like just throwing another log on the fire.

But there was a time. Oh, there was a time. In my youth, I was sure I would be a writer…a novelist. From the moment my father bought me my first typewriter — an old Remington that had so much metal in it, it would have withstood a midwest tornado — I was at the keyboard daily writing something. I loved the way it felt to strike the keys and expose the words that came to my mind like stars appearing in a summer sky above the 20-acres of a Missouri farmland where we lived. I was sure this was my calling. Me and that typewriter went to college together and apparently produced the following.

Chapter One

Where Wesley Brook left off being a writer, he took up being one of his characters. It didn’t happen all the time, but it happened too often. And it was an unfortunate habit that usurped his talent to the degree he was embarrassed about using some his best lines dropped casually, but with effect, in conversation. He was never able to justify the molding of a novel around his own dramatic and secret private life. At 25, he knew he had lived the plot of four or five good novels, yet he was apprehensive about using the material. He feared people would recognize themselves and dislike him for speaking so frankly of their faults, since there were two things that characterized Wesley Brook the most — his fear that people would dislike him and his habit of probing people’s faults. But this greatest apprehension in approaching these novels was an almost psychotic fear that people would recognize him. Even in the moments he felt the freest from his role as an author, his concentration would be abruptly interrupted with a dread that the words he spoke came not with sincerity, but like an experimental electrode seeking a reaction.

And now as he sat in his study burdened with a plot that refused to accommodate his designs, he knew it would be the same way tonight. In three hours, he would be at the East Inn having dinner with Alice, and in five hours he would be back in his apartment with Alice, and if everything went well, she would be make him breakfast in roughly twelve hours. But he was already on his guard, carefully screening his thoughts and fearing he might find some he would have used in the book. Although he denied it vigorously, he had known from the start that this book was about Alice. Despite the absurdity of the situation, she had fired his imagination nearly from the moment he had seen her dressed in yellow cotton and golden hair. In the three months since, he had maneuvered their relationship to fit his imagination with almost complete detail. He had coaxed from her the right words at the right times. He had been appropriately gentle or angry as the situation in his mind demanded.

And now he realized that the troublesome plot he had spent four days on building was only a problem because he was up to date. The admission and guilt sent his arm thrusting out in anger, releasing a letter opener that fell on the daybed by his desk.

And that was the first and only page of something I started writing in college a very long time ago. I suppose it must have been in 1964 or 1965, and I was pretty sure I was going to be a novelist. The truth is, of course, I wasn’t. I did make a living from writing for the next forty-five years or so. And when people ask me what I did for a living, I say that I was a writer. It was the truth, but it felt like a bit of larceny. Like I had stolen something that really wasn’t mine. On the other hand, it was so much easier than trying to explain the real title I had — Vice President and Senior Policy Advisor. There were no Junior Policy Advisors. I had made up the title when the new president of an organization where I had worked for the past 30 years and from which I had recently retired asked me to come back to work for him. And what I did mostly was dig through my then 30 years of history with the organization to educate him and put rising issues into historic perspective. As a new president, he was invited to give lots of speeches and I wrote them — dozens of them. And lots of other pieces in defense of what we did as an organization.

Here’s the big reveal. I worked for the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. And I had worked for that bunch for 30 years before that new president arrived. Much of it spent writing for previous presidents — speeches, position papers, Congressional testimonies. Whatever was called for. And that’s what I did for him. So, I wrote. Lots and lots of stuff. And I think I was pretty good at it. I was good at using argument, effective language, persuasive tone, finely tuned summations, and a hearty thank you for your attention. Also, I learned to write something that could be read in 30 minutes — like a speech. Now, I can’t seem to write anything longer than that.

I retired from the NCAA in 2013, which means I retired from required writing. I no longer had to write anything. I continued to write the occasional piece on some topic in intercollegiate athletics for some purpose, but not much. My wife and I traveled. We had a 43-foot RV and we drove all over America — more than once — for the next nine or ten years. Oddly, I didn’t write about that either and more about that in a moment. That was a great adventure. My wife and me and our black doodle named Bob — a 75-pound fur mass of love and companionship, who wanted nothing more than to be included in whatever the two of us were doing. And he generally was. We have pictures of him sitting in the driver’s seat of the RV, looking back over his shoulder with that look on his face that asked, “Where next?” and “Can I drive?” Just to be clear, we never let him.

That was a wonderful time of shedding — for us, not Bob, doodles don’t shed. We were shedding fixed schedules and never changing obligations. We were staying busy, busy, busy being casual. And doing this while trying not to notice that there was no more income and while living like there always would be. Then our personal financial guy (for future reference, we”ll just call him our PFG) delivered a cross-body block to our do-as-we-want-and spend-as-though-money-grows-in-back-of-our-RV spree and reminded us that if we kept going at this rate, we should plan perhaps on not living as long as we had thought or consider the likelihood of living among the homeless because…we were going to run out of money.

“How could that be?” I asked with mock shock. Mock because I knew the answer but denial is always my first stop in such moments. “I thought we were set for life with a retirement that would keep us going the rest of our days.” His response was, “Children, you did, but you no longer have steady income and you spend as though you do or that you’re a trust fund child…and you ain’t. You will become poor faster than you think.” So, we ashamedly and with no small amount of regret stepped off the fast track of the can’t-ever-outspend-our-investment-income crowd, had our PFG set us up with plans that, in fact, will sustain us to that final trip home, and settled into our new normalcy. And that’s where we’ve been for the last half-dozen years or so, and it ain’t so bad.

Which somehow leads us back to our discussion of writers and those who can write. It has long been a contention of mine that the difference between those two groups is compulsion. I believe writers are compelled to write in the same way composers are compelled to compose, or artists are compelled to create art. There is a force that will not let them be idle. They must write or compose or paint. Those who have the skills to do those things but lack or are not burdened with compulsion don’t feel the same. That, I believe, is why while traveling around a continent that is amazingly diverse and beautiful and that can cause you to pull your 43-foot RV to the side of the road when suddenly a new and spectacular visage is presented, that is why I say I never spent evenings hunched over my laptop’s keyboard trying to capture what I had seen or experienced or had thought deeply about. I was not compelled to do so. A writer, I argue, would have been. He or she could not have resisted the tidal pull to record his or her reactions, emotions, being brought nearly to tears by exposures to what wind and water and sun and cold can do if you give them 12,000 years or so to do their work. I love to write…I just don’t feel compelled to do so. It is also true that those who live by the pen are compelled to write to pay the bills to put food in their mouths and the mouths of their loved ones. My two favorite “really serious” writers (I guess I’ll have to explain that description, also.) are Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. In their age, they were out in front in terms of creating a writing style that was new and fresh and that led the pack among writers of their eras. And, as I understand it, they were stone cold broke about as many days as they were flush. They were also compelled to write to survive

Maybe that’s the price to pay for creative compulsion.

Anyway, I ain’t got it. And I’m glad for it. But I’m also a little ashamed that I haven’t used my writing skills to greater benefit. I’m sure I have more to say. I’m pretty sure I can say it interesting enough to draw attention and to be read with interest. When I write, I can’t wait to read what I’ve written to my wife (she who will always give an ear and pronounce the piece well done, expect for this little part here, which it turns out is the missing key to the whole damn thing) and send it along to my friends for their appraisal and await their now almost inevitable response, “You should write a book.”

So, here we go picking up where I stopped 60 year ago:

More than a little embarrassed and frustrated at his own behavior, Wesley turned back to the keyboard of his ever trusty Remington typewriter and commenced again.

“Alice was rushing through her own frustrating day with no thought to and as if it didn’t matter that tonight would be her last evening on earth…”

📷 Photo by Unknown at Unsplash.