It was my first job out of college. Her company needed to hire an hourly “contract” worker (temp, no benefits) to read 20,000 lines of Fortran code and describe them in English. My degree was in the sciences, and I had taken exactly one programming course and no writing courses whatsoever. I had no idea what I was getting into.
The pay was just OK and it was an hour commute each way, and despite the fact that our workspace was five people crammed into a 30 by 40 foot offsite “office” I was still expected to wear pantyhose. It was the early 1990s and we were working on, I think, two Macintosh LCs [0] with these nifty 8.5 by 11 inch monitors that you could rotate on the fly to either portrait or landscape orientation. Adobe was the undisputed king of desktop publishing in those days and we produced seven books in Pagemaker, ginning up flowcharts and other line-drawings in Freehand. I thought our setup was the neatest thing in the world, going as I was from typing term papers in WordPerfect 5.1 [1] and sneaking into an unused lab in the biology building to run off free printouts on a University dot matrix printer [2] to WYSIWYG layout design and laser printing. (more…)
I’ve mentioned a time or two that I spent some time writing and drawing my own comic books. Nothing big time. They were photocopied minicomics that I distributed by hand and through mail order ads in The Comics Buyer’s Guide.
This was still early days of the internet circa 1999 to 2001 and I didn’t have access to a scanner so I didn’t do a lot online. Believe it or not, a lot of things that younger people take for granted now were simply beyond my financial scope at the time.
The second to last comic I drew told a story about the birth of the main character’s child. It was pretty similar to what I experienced in the birth of my own child.
One of the last comics I drew had a much deeper effect on me though it was about an experience I shared with the entire country and many, many people around the world.
Although he looks rather similar, this isn’t actually Ralph. My camera was lost overboard when the ship got caught in a bad storm.
There was a time, many years ago, when I struck out on my own and went backpacking in the rainforests of South America. The heat was sweltering, and the humidity stuck in my lungs, making every breath an effort of will. The group I was with consisted of a bunch of tree-hugger college kids, a missionary, and our guide. We called him Ralph, because, since he was a native, there was no way our American mouths could recreate the sounds of his actual name.
One week into the trip, a python strangled Ralph in his sleep. We were on our own. We tried to find our way back to civilization, but with Ralph gone, we walked in circles for three days. Our rations ran out by then. There was plenty of water, but we didn’t have the training to feed ourselves. The missionary girl, I think her name was Grace, volunteered to try some berries we found, hoping they weren’t toxic. Turns out they weren’t. But one got stuck in her throat and she choked to death. The Heimlich maneuver doesn’t always work. (more…)
I believe that every experience a writer has shapes his or her writing. Everything we do informs and influences who we are, and therefore what we write. Some of the things are minor. If I read a really good book, maybe my writing sounds like that style for awhile. If I find something incredibly unjust, I get up on my soapbox and include that theme in a story. Writers are like sponges, soaking up what is all around them, and then wringing it out onto a page. We mimic real life so that it feels real when it’s being read, and the best way to do that is take what happens in our lives and re-purpose it for our writing (although this isn’t always a conscious process).
Then there are profound life events that can forever change the way we think and feel, which can drastically alter our writing. Marriage. Children. Divorce. Death. These experiences dig deep trenches within us which fill with pools of emotion. From these pools we have an even greater depth to pull from when we write.
When my Mom died after struggling with breast cancer on and off for almost a decade, I was profoundly changed as a person. My mom was the most important person in my life. There really are no words to describe what it was like to watch her die for years, and then lose her before I was even 30 years old. I wrote an entire novel for National Novel Writing Month in November trying to find the words, and they still seem inadequate.
This is how I like to imagine my wife and I when we write.
Seven years ago, I married my best friend.
I could tell you the story of how we met. I’ve told it a million times. I could tell you of our mutual love of all things Disney. I could tell you of our honeymoon at Disneyland, during the 50th anniversary of the park opening.
But I’d like to talk about a different aspect of our life together, and how she saved me.
You see, when Rachel came back into my life about eight years ago, we hadn’t seen each other in years. Despite being great friends, our lives had taken different paths. She was married, had kids, and traveled. I stayed here, working and trying to be a writer. And we both went through some rough times. She got divorced. I lost my parents. We both struggled for a while. But we each came through it stronger.
After a short engagement, we were married. And a few months later, when I told her I wanted to leave the information technology support position I had held for five years, she understood. She encouraged me to pursue my dream, whatever that may be.
The following years were rough. I tried teaching for short time, but that wasn’t for me. So I put our savings and my trust in a plan to build a home business on the Internet. I failed fast, and started looking for work. This was around 2006, just as the U.S. economy was starting to turn south. Finally, as the last of our savings was spent and we were paying for groceries with credit cards, she noticed an ad for a copywriting position.
I applied and was offered the job, which started my second life in the corporate world. For the past several years, I’ve been happy working as a copywriter for a digital marketing agency.
Once we had some solid ground under our feet, I started writing again. As I mentioned last week, it wasn’t really until 2010 that I began writing short stories and novels again. After more than a decade, the stories started to come back to me. Little by little, I started to remember how to use those tools in my writer’s toolbox. She dragged me to a local write-in for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Though I didn’t finish that first year, I finished the next one. And I haven’t looked back since.
The Confabulator Cafe has given me a great base of operations, forcing me to write something every week. It’s a nice departure from the marketing work I do all week at my job. Most importantly, it allows me to work alongside some wonderful local writers who amaze and inspire me.
I don’t know if I could pick the moment in my life when I decided to be a writer. I was likely still very young, pecking away at my mom’s typewriter and dreaming of stories to be told.
But I can tell you when I became a copywriter. And when I entered NaNoWriMo for the first time. And I can tell you that neither would have been possible without my writing partner.
Stories like this are tricky. Ultimately, they’re subjective. All I can do is lay out the events as I see them, and you have to understand that I’m giving you a single point of view. This is my own admittedly biased experience, and others in this tale could take exception to my interpretation. Be that as it may, this is the event that I feel has done the most to shape me into the writer I am today.
Growing up, my brothers and I hit the daily double of childhood. We were both rural and poor, and from an early age we were taught to distrust authority. Most of our conversations with non-related adults consisted of the following phrases: “I don’t know,” and “they’re not here right now.” The tenants of our family were simple and observed like dogma: support it, defend it, and keep everything in house.
If you weren’t blood, our affairs were none of your damned business, and marrying in didn’t necessarily afford you with a right to know.
As a child, this sort of fierce loyalty appealed to me, and I saw something noble and good in its application. My brothers and I belonged to something greater than ourselves, and we thought it was something worth defending. I no longer feel that way.
Sometimes, tears can be our greatest inspiration. They force us to react, and rise above ourselves.
Almost a year ago, I really kicked up my writing output. I wrote a lot. I read a lot. I started to find myself as an artist. Then, in December, my Grandpa Joe lay in hospice, dying of cancer.
This affected me in many ways. Perhaps the most direct is the blog I wrote while struggling with my feelings about his impending death: A Train Ride to an Unknown Stop
I wrote it in the middle of the night, right after finding out. I bought a domain name so that my blog would be easier to find, and then I posted it. My post had nearly six hundred views in December.
Few of us can separate our writing from our personal lives. The stress of life’s tragedies and the joys of life’s celebrations can affect the ability to write. Whether dealing with family problems or issues at work, it doesn’t take a lot to hurt creativity.
This week, we asked the writers in the Cafe which life events have affected their writing. What did they do to work past it? And how can creativity bloom in the garden of misery? We hope you learn something from their answers.
