(A version of this was posted in May of 2011)
I wrote a book that I'll never look at again. I don't have a copy, because it was bad. Too many laps around the little I had to say, far too many pages trying to breathe life into a story that wasn't. If you made a list of every mistake a young writer might make, I did them all twice: too autobiographical, trying hard to be "good", every sentence a flailing haymaker, no jab -- maze writing -- sprinting into a maze without a map.
I WROTE everyday. I also worked a job every day. I did other things sometimes, but I did write every day -- I had these notebooks full of word count statistics, tracking my progress like someone on a strict calorie diet; I gave myself cheat days, days I didn't write, only if I hit a number for that week. The monster finished over 500 pages. And I did it without even a fantasy of that book becoming something -- it wasn't maybe get published -- it was do it, finish it, tunnel vision, (probably scared if I did otherwise, I'd give up).
When I finished I put the manuscript away, started working on a screenplay, (you see there was a schedule to keep). When that screenplay was finished I looked back at the book. And I haven't looked since.
Why do it?
I don't know.
I still don't know.
That's it then. The why. (I don't think much about people reading what I write, it's like personality disassociation -- I look at my own stuff, and it might as well be someone else -- rather: when I like it, it might as well be someone else who did it; when it is lacking I see everything lacking in myself.
When I post stuff it helps me see the work for myself as if I was another reader, a strange trick, but it works. Once I post a thing I can see the weakness. But I think, you don't think that hard on people reading it or how could you write with all the weight of someone looking?
This book in 2003, as bad as it was there was something to it I liked. The main character, a young man, learns the identity of his estranged biological father to be an old professional wrestler.
As you might guess, the kid searches him out. A son searches out a father, that father's profession, his identity, has a deeper meaning than the average "Dad wasn't there for me" storyline -- because it had the metaphor of the professional wrestler: a strong man, a tough man, a bad man, he is himself, and he is ACTING himself: this kind of man might make peace with this son, allow this son to act out the pain of not having that relationship growing up, if it can play out as a work for the wrestling show. The story then was: the old wrestler books shows at his local carny show in which this son comes to town for revenge, and what happens between them is both real and a work at the same time. There's the old wrestler using the kid for ticket sales, and there's the kid getting to both work alongside his parent, and fight him, at the same time -- the story hinged on: how much is a work, how much is a shoot -- can it be both, and can the fake wrestling blowoff, the climax of their in-ring storyline, be a legitimate peacemaking between them? What became of them in my story, left the kid, and the reader, wondering.
WHEN I think about that part of the book -- the little metaphor I took from a few years of obsession with wrestling, as well the example given in a writing course with a brilliant professor I had, and how I learned everything I could about the history of wrestling, the moves, the sequencing of the stories the wrestlers told in their matches, (you might still be able to find where, in 2001(?), Dave Meltzer, the most famous American pro wrestling and MMA journalist, published my advice to Vince McMahon on how to properly book storylines!) I was down with the wrestling. To me it was American storytelling as any theater, carnival, comic book, or rock song, (Elizabethan theatre impresarios booked bear vs dog fights on the off-days between Shakespeare shows, storytelling's all high/low isn't it?). This good bit, the wrestling father/son bit, might have been eighty pages out of the monolith. The part that wasn't bad. The part I remember liking. Not as in, (again personality disassociation), I like me for writing something, but I liked IT -- and as I liked it, I'd rather not be reminded now that I wasn't good enough to build a proper story around it -- one that could have survived in the world. I didn't have the skills. You have to live with something like that. At the time I wrote it, 2003, I worked unloading books off trucks, around no one I knew, in a place that was foreign to me; everyday I'd stare at novels, literally I unloaded thousands of novels -- talk about juice for late-night writing sessions. Now I work with my family, and so a thing like this story, about parents and children, while seeming dead, comes up now unexpectedly; in this I know I will live with this particular failure a long time -- that I killed myself for eight months, and the result of the effort was deformed, and had to be hidden. When I post something like, Here's a story, and this story is the greatest story, I'm being about as honest as Batman pretending to be a dull spoiled rich kid. It's a scheme to get someone to read it, and if someone says, What was he talking about?, that wasn't that good, I'm at peace with that; I'll mortgage a personality to get the story some life. Why not? You can't hate them as much as I do. There's some mettle; a little extra skin. Maybe that's the Why.
IT'S tough to see a thing that reminds me of an idea I failed. It's why I avoid things like The Wrestler. Hell, I pretty much avoid wrestling all together save the occasional Rock movie; but once in awhile I put on the old Ric Flair tapes, and as I watch him heat up the crowd to a rage, I think about 2003. And in a sort of good mood about it, I can tell myself why: Because you felt you had to? Because you improved by the work? Was it dreams of adulation and success? No. Compulsion. Like this carny in the ring, I can't help it.
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