12/21: A Writer's Story

This isn’t really a story. Rather, I just couldn’t figure out what to title this blog post until suddenly I did.

My father gave me his first bit of feedback on the initial draft of “The Clear, The Cloud, and The Volcano” just the other day as we sat in a darkening theater. There’s something oddly fitting about that. Before I get into it, I should note that the feedback was stellar and promising and hearing it from someone I admire so much, who has always shot straight with me about the quality of my work, was one of the best moments of my life. True, as is very on-brand for me, I immediately began to wonder if the second half would let him down, but that’s a conversation for another time. I don’t know yet and so, neither do you.

He told me what he thought on December 21st. Coincidentally, that’s the birthday of the person who first convinced me to be a writer and her name was Christina Hewitt. Then again, maybe “convinced” isn’t the right word. In fact, I’m quite certain it isn’t.

Way back when I was a 17 year old spitfire who was full of life and repressed emotion, I started talking to a girl. She was pretty cool, pretty cute, and she had a septum ring. So in other words, she was my teenage Kryptonite. Did I mention she wore lots of black eye-liner? Let’s face it, anti-social Luke was a goner. The only problem was, I was exactly as exciting as you’d imagine a boy that age being, one who never got around to having many friends and spent his days mowing lawns, bird watching, reading books, and typing quite awful stories on an old typewriter in the basement of his childhood home. Which is to say, I was boring. I hadn’t quite found myself yet and there was just not a whole lot going on for me at that point in time.

So when she asked me what I wanted to be, I thought about that one chapter of a book I wrote (that wasn’t as bad as all the other ones) and said: “I’m going to be an author.”. It wasn’t that big of a leap and we had initially met on a fantasy author’s forum, so it seemed like a safe bet. As it turned out, I nailed it. She thought that was exceptionally cool and so I did the only thing I could do to try to salvage the situation: I started writing. I started writing a lot because I tell you what, when you tell a cute girl that you’re going to be a writer (and you didn’t know that about yourself), then you need a back catalog. I wrote short stories (they weren’t great) and the beginnings of half-formed novel ideas (they weren’t either), and I sent her each one as I finished them. Turns out, she liked them and said nice things about what were clearly the works of a lunatic who had yet to develop any talent whatsoever. But it made me feel good about myself and gave me this strange sliver of hope.

So I kept writing and we even started to co-write a novel together, our goal being to become best-selling novelists. Spoiler alert: That part didn’t pan out.

The funny thing is, none of it panned out except for the part where I decided I was going to be a writer. We never finished the terribly lame fantasy rip-off we were going to write and I never won the heart of the girl I didn’t really know but was desperate to impress. Eventually, she simply drifted away. Last time I heard from her, she was working in a bookstore somewhere in Canada. She was a really cool person and someone who helped me wander into a passion I didn’t know I’d have, so I still think about her sometimes and hope her life is turning out alright. I don’t know if mine is, but I’m trying. But the thing I think about sometimes is this: I wonder, if I could go back in time and tell that lonely and younger version of me, if I’d be happy knowing that I didn’t win the heart of a girl I never really knew even if it meant I’d turn into a somewhat decent writer who (at times) has his moments.

Maybe I would. Maybe I’d sit back and think “Hell yeah, buddy. Way to go!”. Then again, maybe I’d sit there and wonder how my path had diverted so quickly into a world I wasn’t ever planning on visiting. Because see, when I was 17, my passions were basketball and girls with septum rings. They had nothing to do with writing. I was just a lonely kid who read a lot of books. So now, as a struggling writer who’s just turned thirty, it’s easy to sit in this chair, typing on this computer, and wonder what would’ve happened if I’d told her something else. Maybe I should’ve told her I was an aspiring juggler. Or perhaps I could’ve said that I was going to be a great adventurer like Christopher Columbus (but without the whole murdery thing).

Maybe I could’ve said that I wanted to be happy. How odd it would’ve been if I’d accidentally become that.

Instead, I’m a writer. And that’s not because I have some god-given ability (you have no idea how much trash I’ve had to write on the road to getting better). It’s not because I’m a pretentious fellow who thinks he has the answers to all of life’s unanswerable questions. It’s nothing nearly as interesting as all that. Nope. In the end, I’m just a guy who, once upon a time, told a girl that he wanted to be writer because that seemed as good a way as any to woo a bookworm with parentally-unapproved facial piercings.

So here I am. Her birthday came once again (Happy Birthday, Christina Hewitt) and on that day, my dad said he was loving my new book. Which, if I’m being perfectly honest, was one of the greatest moments of my life.

What a strange world I live in. What a weird thing life sometimes turns out to be.

So in the end, I am part of the shortest of stories: I became a writer because of a cute girl and I’ll continue down that path because it’s all I know how to be.