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Why I Even Bother?

It has always been a belief that I was intended to write. I am not certain where the impetus originated. I am not sure that it is even necessary to fully comprehend the reasons for what I choose to do in life. I have thought about it a lot and have yet come up lacking a clear rationale.

It is certain that no one in his or her right mind would ever write with the hope of making a lot of money. I think the odds are better for winning the lottery or perhaps being crushed beneath the mass of an elephant that just could not fly. Even for the writers that are fortunate enough that their skills and talent are appreciated and rewarded, converting any royalty income into an hourly rate would demonstrate the futility of writing in order to earn a living. There are far more lucrative ways to spend the time of day.

I write because the desire to write has generally been with me. It may seem very odd to read the confession that follows as I can generally claim to have been a writer or at least in the writing mood for most of my life. Still, for a very long time I chose not to write. I suppose that I was too busy with other things, among them serving in the military, learning Chinese Mandarin, and then later on making a living for my family. A little before any of that I had reached a point in 1981 when everything that I had written seemed trivial, thin and lacking of substance.

I destroyed most everything that I had written, except for a novel in progress that at the time I thought was completed and a few notebooks that I didn't realize I was keeping. Everything else, some 20,000 pages I would estimate, went into a dumpster at my apartment complex on East 38 1/2 Street in Austin, Texas.

I remember pretty clearly what triggered the great purge of pages. It all started when I was resting on the sofa in my apartment. As I was prone to do, I had CNN on the TV for background noise as I took a nap. I had just finished taking exams for the semester and I needed to complete four more courses to receive my degree. I planned to attend both summer sessions in order to accomplish that.

I had been interviewing for jobs and had even gone on a few trips to visit companies for follow-up interviews. Despite having interviewed with a good many companies only three went well enough that I felt I even had a chance. I flew to Ft. Worth for a tour of the facilities of a oil extraction company. Then I flew to Houston for an interview with a bank that knew that with the upcoming deregulation that they needed to get some marketing people onboard even if they didn't quite yet know what to do with them. They interviewed me for a personnel position. And finally had a trip to to Miami to interview for the international operations division a very large banking company.

I had been hopeful of landing the job with that bank in Miami. The job entailed traveling extensively throughout Latin America. I felt that I was uniquely qualified in that I had studied some Spanish and Portuguese while I was at Purdue University. I had more recently minored in international business. The problem was that had I known when I was at Purdue that spending a little more effort at acquiring Spanish and Portuguese might be a determining factor in landing a very good job, I might have opted not to attend this or that party in lieu of cramming for a foriegn language exam.

It was my birthday. I was lying on the couch, half listening to CNN, I was pretty depressed. I had been rejected in my bid for the job that I had really wanted. It was not a standard form letter, though. Someone had been concerned enough to have explained the reasons. In light of what I would do over the ensuing years, it is ironic that the reason I was not hired was that they doubted my ability to acquire fluent command of foriegn languages.

I took the rejection as a time for me to regroup, redouble my efforts and become even more focused on finishing my degree. I did not need the distraction of writing. I had already written a book. Someday I might go back into that book and have to revise it. Deep inside I knew that even though I was finished with the story, it was not a completed work.

CNN was in a self-congratulatory mood over having defied their critics. Hardly anyone except Ted Turner believed in the viability of a cable TV based all news network. Even so CNN had lasted longer than most industry experts had thought it would. Billionaire Ted had taken the risk and defied the odds, as billionaire entrepreneurs seem prone to do.

I don't know why but I took the CNN report as something of a personal call to action. I was 25. I had a degree and soon I'd have another. I was written a book. Those three things were the sum of my accomplishments. I had lived for a quarter of a cedntury and has not done much of anything at all. I felt that I should have been in a better situation. I had pinned hopes on landing a job and now that I had been rejected I was depressed and trying to nap on a couch in my apartment in Austin Texas. I felt like a total loser. I was a loser but I had not resigned to accepting defeat.

Disgusted with my response to the rejection letter, I got up and went to my desk in my room. I wanted to reassure myself that at least my writing was pretty good. As I began reading some of the drivel that when I was writing it I had thought was insightful and witty, I was mortified that I could possibly believe that it was even adequate English. It was vague, filled with typos and essentially pointless.

I firmly believe that an amatuer writer should never read his or her own writing. Having said that I know that it must happen and whenever it happens the reaction might be pretty much the same as mine. I was so disgusted with my writing to the point of destroying what I completely believed was everything that I had ever written, except for the novel. For some reason I did not have the heart to open the novel at that moment. Rest assured that it survives to this day only because I did not open and attempt reading it. The writing in that novel was no better than anything that I threw away.

The years that followed I had written advertising copy and stocked grocery store shelves. I lived near the beach and was pretty-much a health freak, the sort of annoying prick that always gave others advice on what they should do to lose weaight and exercise. All along I pretended to still be writing but in truth I was not.

I joined the military, learned Chinese Mandarin to a certain level of fluency, traveled to Asia and worked for a couple of years. While I was there I inadvertantly told someone that I had studied journalism for a while and suddenly I was given a desk job and the responsibility for writing a unit history. The previous unit historian had produced a marginal effort. I soon learned that all I needed to do was write a history was complied with the Air Force regulations and publish the required copies. It was like an open book test, really.

It took a lot of time and effort to compile the information and enter it into an old Wang computer for word processing. However I learned that it was much easier to write using a computer. It was my first experience with a personal computer. I had done a bit of programming in college but I was amazed at the power that the word processor had. The unit history was really the second book that I ever wrote. As it received an Outstanding rating I guess it was appreciated even if it could never hope to be widely read.

Somewhere along the way Jina and I finally decided to marry and start a family. Afterwards I had every reason not to write. There were other people that depended on me.

I returned to Texas and served out the remainder of my military service in San Angelo. From May 7, 1981 until January 13, 1987 I did not write much of anything in the way of fiction. There is amazing synchronicity in those dates, is there not? I remember it was a Tuesday when I started to write stories again. I had not felt well the previous evening. I woke with with a fever and so I had called off sick from work. I have to be very sick to call off.


I am not sure what compelled me to drag out my typewriter on 1/13/87. I certainly did not feel well enough to sit at the kitchen table and hammer out a page or two of nonsense. I remember that I wrote about how miserable I was feeling that day, fictionmalizing under the name of Andrew L. Hunter. Who would ever want to read that? Write about what you know, though. I knew I felt miserable; it was somewhere to start.

For a while I wrote a little something almost everyday. I was frequently interrupted, of course. Life as a father can be that way. That little baby that cried so much and kept me from writing is in college now.

Soon enough what I was writing turned into the foundation of a journal. I didn't intend to ever do anything with it. Perhaps I thought it might serve as a historical reference one day should my son ever want to read it. Jina thought it was pretty silly, really. She always thought I should have a purpose for whatever I was doing. Life to her was far too important and time way too valuable to waste doing something that had no focus or goal. She was right of course. Writing is probably the silliest thing that anyone could ever do. It is completely and utterly pointless and without worth, merit or value...that is until the writing is polished into something that approaches art.

The trouble is that in order for a writer to get to the point of taking raw text and transforming it into art, he or she needs a lot of practice and experience. That is why writers have to write - almost continuously. Writers have to find their comfort zone and adopt the craft of creating beauty with only the written word as the medium. It helps to have talent as a foundation. Some writers are born with more raw talent than I ever had. The only thing that I had going for me was a eye for the ironic, that and I could always find humor in almost any situation that was just short of tragedy. I do not laugh at the misfortune of others. Well, unless the other is a pompous ass deserving of a good firm god-smack.

The economics of writing has never made much sense to me. I haven't made much money from the endeavor but since I didn't expect anything, I have not been disappointed.

I probablywill never know why I write. What I do know is when I started, paused and then resumed writing. I know that whenever I wrote anything it was never with the intention of actually doing anything with it. The only reason that something I had written was published was as much the result of boredom with my life in the late 1990's as the need to rebuild my pride when Jina pretty-much removed the kids from my life for while. Out of that pain I had written a couple of things that I thought were pretty good. The books evolved from that.

E

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posted by Unknown @ 9:23 AM