When I was young - in fact quite young - I had an unquenchable desire to write. As I’ve said in other places, I wrote my first book when I was about thirteen, my autobiography. My first novel came when I was fifteen. The whole concept of storytelling seemed so unbelievably wonderful, I gave all my free time to it. Where this came from, I have no idea. There were no writers in my family that I know of. I wrote my first novel with a pencil on lined paper and then typed it out on an ancient portable typewriter my mother managed to buy me. My family thought I was crazy spending so much time typing away at something that probably would have no success at all. My father worried that I would get round shouldered writing.
I had no success, but that wasn’t the real point. The act of writing, inventing characters and situations, was something so wonderful, even now I can’t describe it. I wrote into my twenties and thirties. My one mentor thought I had talent, but that I had nothing to say. And as I think back on it, that was absolutely true. But it went deeper than that. In order to be a successful writer, you have to bare your soul. And more importantly, you have to bare the soul of those you love, because it is in them that your experience of life is found. Tom Wolf was not the first to infuriate his family by writing about them and he will not be the last. The book he produced, Look Homeward Angle, is a great book. I had a family story to tell, with interesting characters and events, but I could not tell that story. I could never hurt those I loved. And since my family was my only inspiration, I had no great social agenda, and knew little of the greater world, my novels were shallow and mostly pointless. I had talent, but nothing if interest to say.
And, of course, in those days, everything I wrote was rejected. And as time went on, and the novels grew farther apart, I didn’t even bother sending them to publishers. I think I sent the first chapter of the first version of Good People, the book I now have up on Amazon, to a literary agent. When I think back on it, the whole incident was ridiculous. He told me the first chapter was very polished for a first time writer and that he would look at the rest of it if I paid him. So much for that. I don’t think I sent Want, which will soon by up on Amazon, to anyone.
I eventually gave up. I became a software engineer and put my writing talent into Cobol and C and Java. I loved writing code and I think I was good at it. They paid me well.
It wasn’t until I was in my late sixties that I began to think that the world that a grew up in - a really poor dairy farm - and the people I knew as a boy would be totally lost to my grandchildren. The world they will live in, the children of very well educated professionals and and even college professors, would have nothing in common with the factory workers and farmers they came from. So I decided to write a memoir to tell my grandchildren who and where they came from. Not only that, I would print it and bind it myself.
When I looked up my family tree I found that my mother’s family came to America from England within twenty years of the Pilgrims. One of my direct ancestors died fighting in King Philip’s war before the Revolution. Others fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One great great uncle was even a member of Congress. The heart of the memoir, of course, was the farm I grew up on, a worn out affair that no amount of work could have saved.
The only reason I mention this is because writing the memoir really stirred my interest in writing again. When my daughter wrote her children’s book, Turtle Soup and Tiramisu, and self published it on Amazon, the bug really hit me again. I resurrected Good People and re-wrote it, changing one of the characters completely. I then did the same for Want, which is a much longer novel and, although it has nothing to do with farming, is really a story taken in great part from the own life. It’s about a shabby hotel with great expectations.
Those two efforts only made the writing bug bore more deeply into me. I find myself now writing like a demon. I have completed a short work about a man who has a stroke, cannot talk, and watches his family fall apart at the seams, his rich son marginalizing his working class son. Think the silent majority watching as our country is turned into an oligarchy.
And I have ten chapters done on a new novel about the triumph of capitalism, which is science fiction and takes place in the far future. The triumph is not one for the masses.
I guess the real point here is that it is never too old to do something new, even if it’s something old you did a long time ago.
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