In the 1974-1975 school year, I was in the 6th Grade at Tarkington Jr. High School. Our teacher was Mrs. Parker. Mrs. Parker was a sweet, kind-hearted woman, perhaps a little overwhelmed by our youthful exuberance and childish lack of self-control, but sweet and kind-hearted nonetheless. She taught English, both Reading and Writing. One of our assignments was a creative writing assignment in which she gave us carte blanche on topic. I don't recall who took the initiative, but either myself or my friend, Chris, wrote a story about warfare (our favorite topic at that time), the characters in the tale being us and our own classmates. She allowed certain individuals in the class to read their compositions, and this person (either Chris or myself) read their composition. It was a hit.
Thus started a frenzy of composition in our class. Like-themed stories starring people we knew was the genre of choice, and Mrs. Parker allowed us to read as many of them as we liked. Must have taken quite a load off of her when it came to scheduling class time. I became a prolific raconteur in this genre, and this, along with my love of Hardy Boys novels, set me on a course which continued to today: my love of writing.
In those days, I had great story ideas. You know the movie, "Red Dawn"? Russians/Koreans invade middle America and are driven back by red-blooded, militant American youths. I wrote that story first, at least the framework for the story. Had I written it as a screenplay and submitted it to the right studio, I would have been the one with the credit instead of Kevin Reynolds.There were later works, nothing significant though until after college. I wrote accounts of two different river excursions in 1988 and 1989, the Trinity River Expeditions. These writings saw very limited circulation ("limited" = 4 copies). I had other good ideas that never materialized. I wanted to write and photograph a story commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first atomic bomb explosion. The 50th anniversary was in 1995 and I just never got around to it. It would have involved travel to New Mexico, which I was unprepared to do. Uncommitted to the idea would probably be a more accurate summation.
In these formative years of my wordsmithing skills, I was also budding as a photographer, making myself what National Geographic editors once called the "double threat"--both writer and picture-taker.
My writing feels most at home on a computer. There it can languish, unpublished, in the form of zeroes and ones and no one will know the difference. However the new millennium brought with it new freedoms for the writer: weblogging. Frustrated, unpublished writers could now self-publish without the shameful smell of desperation attached to vanity press print publications. Everyone can publish web-based works, good, bad and horrendous, and skill has nothing to do with it. All you needed was enough misplaced self-confidence to click a "Save" button and boom: you were published.
For me, writing isn't about getting published. It's about how telling stories makes me feel. I enjoy writing, and I often enjoy reading what I've written. There has to be something unhealthy and narcissistic buried in this admission, but it's true. I find myself reading things I've written and admiring them, not necessarily because I've written them, but mostly because I enjoy the way the words fit together or the feelings they evoke. Perhaps the subconscious knowledge that it's my writing steers this, but there's probably no way of knowing whether that's true or not.
Right now, I have several projects I'm working on at different times. Usually my dedication to each project hinges on what I feel like writing. The projects are rather varied, the common theme probably being they're all fiction. I have a great screenplay idea that is only partially done. The stories are most likely unmarketable, but I've enjoyed writing them. As I've said, I like reading them, too. That doesn't necessarily translate to others also liking them, but I have at least one fan.
My favorite topic involves post-apocalyptic drama, realistic enough so as to not involve vampires or zombies. This is also my most complete work. I've also started writing a crime thriller about a bomber targeting adult bookstores. I've started writing a story about a bunch of Christians escaping persecution by living in a remote wooded camp during the Great Tribulation. There are other things in the works, but I can't recall with specificity any others.
I've written a lot of other things that are more short works, primarily weblog posts. Short, topical treatments, primarily my thoughts on an array of different things. I'd like to say that they're well thought out and cohesive, but that's probably not for me to accurately judge.
So, boiling all of this down, I ask: is there a place for writing that is unmarketable, unsellable, and, in some cases, unreadable? Some would say 'yes'. The concept of journaling has long been heralded as an essential element in the writer's life. I wonder how weblogging compares to journaling? Does the element of someone being able to see it skew the motivation for writing? Journals, being for the most part diaries that no one else sees or reads, are usually written for the sake of getting ideas down or getting them out of your head. It's also a tool to hone the discipline of writing. For me, knowing that virtually no one will read my weblog, it primarily serves the same purpose.
The chances are pretty good that I will slip away into eternity without becoming published in the professional sense. I imagine that there are many good writers out there that will never be published, and I believe there are plenty of mediocre and bad writers that are published. At a certain point, motivation and drive make it happen and some good writers just aren't hungry enough. I'd like to think that it's humility that keeps many of these writers in the shadows. There seems to be a certain amount of self-love that drives creative types to get their stuff out there. Disregard the fact that this comment seems to be self-serving on my part, as I am one of the unpublished.
It's been a secret dream (not so secret anymore) that I could make a living in my later years researching and writing. I no longer put much stock in dreams, so we'll have to hope that my greatest works may be somehow unveiled posthumously and will provide a nice residual for my progeny. That or those zeroes and ones will, at some point, simply disappear.
