The Rules of the Game

Agents, editors and writing “teachers” (is that an oxymoron?) all have their own nifty set of rules: Never do this. Always do that. Be careful of… Avoid too many commas. Try to not use “that” if the sentence reads fine if it is eliminated. Don’t begin a sentence with “And” or “But.” The list goes on and on. Pay strict attention to these rules and you could wind up with a severe case of writer’s constipation.

If Jack Kerouac had adhered, he’d probably never have written a word and wound up teaching Latin, geology, the fine art of drinking cheap wine or just sitting on the rocking chair in his mother’s house watching the seasons change. But Kerouac was not one to be told how to express himself. Like a lot of other great writers, Kerouac followed his inner voice even when people were screaming at him to conform. He didn't even use a typewriter the way other novelists did.

The standard typewriter back then just wasn't suitable for Kerouac's style. He wrote very fast in a sort of jazz riff, so he had no patience for changing paper. Instead, he had a roommate who was an AP writer steal one of the long spools of paper used back then in wire service machines. Those machines would teletype news that rolled off and cascaded to the floor in one long piece containing multiple stories. Copy boys would then use a scissor to cut up the stories and deliver them to the appropriate editors.

Armed with this big AP roll (think toilet paper custom-made by Charmin for Goliath) he'd hook it up the cylinder of his typewriter and start the music, writing and writing and never having to pause from his rhythm to pull out paper and insert another page. Rules weren't for Jack, who wrote some of the longest sentences every put on paper, often a paragraph or more, using commas whenever it suited him.

The point of this riff/rant is that some of the best and brightest have ignored rules and done quite well. When I was laboring under the dos and don'ts, I felt they constricted the flow and rhythm of my words. One day, feeling especially frustrated, I decided to leaf through the novels of my two favorite mystery writers, Michael Connelly and Lee Child. To no great surprise they broke many of the rules, and it wasn't just because they were bestselling authors who could do as they please. They were faithful to their own style which was evident early in their careers. 

Sure there are certain elementary rules which theoretically are necessary to writing a novel or a screenplay: have a beginning, middle and end; define your characters early and have them change and go through an “arc;" don’t telegraph what’s going to happen next or 40 pages down the line, let it come out gradually and surprise the reader. Etc...

But that being said, history has shown us that style trumps even these basics, in both novels and film. Orson Welles’ in the 1941 classic movie “Citizen Kane” abandoned linear narrative in favor of a then radical mosaic structure which was more suited to the telling of his story. Nine years after Kane, the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa -- undoubtedly influenced by Welles (as he was by many Western directors) -- created one of his masterpieces, “Rashomon,” in which a crime is recounted from five different witnesses, each having their own perspective on what actually happened. (Rashomon was most recently copied in the American movie "Courage Under Fire," starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, and pilfered by other filmmakers).

The lesson? There is no lesson. If you're a writer who turns to the craft to express emotions and ideas without regard to the “Voice” telling you: “Don’t,” then money is not the main reason you took up the insane act of putting words onto paper in the first place. Sure, it’d be great if you got the big bucks down the line, but mostly you do it in the beginning to just be “you” in print, not the person your parents, peers or teachers expected you to be.

Well, I guess I’m wandering, another rule no-no. Where is my tight, coherent string of thought? Hell if I know. I’m a rogue writer. I live in the “Void,” a place where chaos and random events shape lives, creative writing, and in a larger sense, the planet. If you have realized I have absolutely nothing instructive to say about writing, go read Dear Abby, Page Six of the NY Post or the National Enquirer in order to find true wisdom. Me? I'm going to move on now to much more important things, like structuring my Netflix queue, checking out what my very few friends are saying on Facebook and immerse myself in email. I mean, let’s get our priorities straight!

 The Sun Also (finally) Rises for Aspiring Novelist

Guest Blogger Robert Jones

It’s been about four months since I wrote my debut guest blog (http://visionsinthevoid.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html) where I discussed both my fears and my desire to start finally writing a novel.  For a couple of weeks after writing that blog I was my usual procrastinating self, finding time for every other thing but writing.  Finally, one night in the middle of June everything hit me like a tidal wave. 

At around 2:00 a.m. one night I finally began writing the novel I had been preparing in my head for four years.  You hear stories of people who buy every “How to Write a Novel” book and prepare lengthy outlines, flow charts, and Venn diagrams in anticipation of writing a novel.  That may work for you, but it certainly wasn’t going to work to me.  The very first words I wrote regarding my novel were the very first words of my novel. 

I am currently 30,000 words into my novel, and while I have been told this is pretty good for just over two months of work I still feel constrained by the fears I wrote in my previous blog.  When I write, I am a machine.  I knockout 2,000 to 3,000 words in an hour when inspiration hits me the hardest.  However, if you add that up, which I have, you can see that at best I’ve spent 15 hours on my novel in 2.5 months.  Not a bad work schedule if you can get it, but also not very productive.

My productivity level has been a topic of conversation with Nat, but surprisingly to me he has defended my productivity rate while I have been the one questioning it.  Nat says I should just write when I feel like it, which is clearly what I’ve been doing, but he has also mentioned that some of that lack of production has been “the fear.” (EDITOR: not exactly what I told him. I said try to put in a little time every day to get in the habit and learn discipline, but if he couldn’t do that, it was okay to write when he wanted because some writing is better than no writing – Nat)

Since starting, week after week I have entertained the idea of going on “lockdown.”  There is something romantic to me in the stories you hear of writers who wrote their novels or screenplays in 4 days (Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” and Sly Stallone’s “Rocky” immediately come to mind) with nothing but a pot of coffee (or bottle of scotch) and what you need to write.  But, as Nat and I have agreed on, forcing yourself to do something like that would be hurtful to your story if you are just writing for the sake of writing, and you aren’t used to putting in long hours like that.  For me, my best writing comes when it comes to me in spurts.

I won’t get into what my actual novel is about now, but I will get into some of the difficulties I have came across during my initial stages of writing.  Hopefully other aspiring authors can learn something from my mistakes, but if they can’t I’m sure they will be able to sympathize with some of my issues. 

One of the biggest problems I’ve had, and it may seem silly, is remembering the name of some of my secondary characters.  With just writing the story as it comes to me, as I have, I have routinely just come up with names off the top of my head.  More than a few times my main character has had thoughts about these secondary characters and I find myself pressing ctrl + f on my computer in an attempt to find that person’s name.  When I started I just assumed I would become intimate enough with my characters to remember their names, but just like real life I realized I forgot the names of people I haven’t grown too close with. 

Another problem I’ve had is finishing scenes, and thoughts.  Dating back to high school, I would have people who read my writings (teachers, friends, girlfriends, etc.) compliment me on my skill of turning a phrase and being able to segue into other topics smoothly.  In 1,000 to 2,000 word essays and short stories I think it was easier for me because it was generally a centralized topic.  Fortunately, instead of writing “and then, and then, and then” I was able to come up with a phrase that both emphasized my previous point and prepared the reader for the next.  In a novel, it’s a entirely new ball game (See what I did there? Ha!).

While the main idea of your story may be the same, your main character is virtually going to go to places, both figuratively and mentally, that you are unprepared for.  Being unprepared is sometimes a surprise because you’re writing something you didn’t expect to, but getting from one place to another becomes tougher.  I have spent long minutes when I reach the end of a chapter or important point staring at the screen wondering how to get to my next point.  This may not sound like a huge deal, but in my book my character is going through a lot of things, and I feel if I don’t successfully segue to his next thought while giving proper consideration to the one he is presently in then it could hurt my book drastically.  (EDITOR: he needs to let his CHARACTERS tell him where to go next, and in order to do so, he must inhabit them and be them and then he will know exactly where to go next)

Those two examples of the issues I am facing will most likely be fixed with editing, but for me that poses perhaps my greatest issue, and it’s one that’s still potentially months away.  I have a confession.  In my writing career – boxing, poker, biographies, personal stories, school reports, etc. I have estimated that I have written close to 1000 pieces of work.  Of those 1000 works, dating from childhood until now, I have personal edited maybe 10 pieces of those writings, all within the last year.  It’s most certainly a self-esteem issue, but I hate reading what I have wrote until a lot of time has passed, and of course by then it has been edited.  The majority of these works, especially lately have been edited by my step-mother and my wife. 

While I still have a while to go before my novel is done, I am forcing myself to self-edit before anyone else edits it, even if it kills me, and I do mean forcing. I hold solace knowing that Jack Kerouac never edited any of his work, leaving it instead to his friends, but for the novel to truly embody what I want it to be I have to edit it myself or at the end of the day I will not be happy.  Don’t get me wrong, I suspect no less than ten people will offer editing and formatting tips by the time my novel ever sees the light of day. If I just release my work to others to complete it could be just as big of failure as never have even writing the book. It would be like hitting a game winning home-run and stopping at second base.  A year ago I would have never dreamt of saying this to an audience about editing.

I have just one final point about my previous five paragraphs before I finish up.  I can only hope that potential and experienced writers get something from my issues, but if you don’t I hope you at least enjoyed reading about my ups and downs, though and the grand scheme of YOUR writing they aren’t that important.  These are just the things that I am personally going through heading down my walk of solitude.   My advice at the end of the day is the same as it was in my first blog and was passed down to me from Nat.  Just Write.  Those two words are more important than anything I’ve written in these two blogs. 

Journey From Writing Screenplays

to Novels Can Be A Tough One

After writing screenplays for several years, and abandoning my career as a novelist after two publications, the transition back was very difficult and painful. Screenwriting and novel writing are two different animals. Yes, both tell a story, but a movie is a story told in pictures with words. A novel is a story told in words.

In screenwriting the rule of thumb is to get into a scene as quickly as possible and get out as fast as you can. A friend who is a writer/director, told me it was in the film editing room when he cut his movie that he really saw how much a movie is slowed down by ignoring this rule.

No matter how powerful a scene you have setup, say with two characters in strong conflict with snappy dialogue, in films you rarely can get away with “running” it as long as you want. The scene becomes too “talky.”

With that mindset, when I returned to writing novels I found it difficult to give myself the freedom to stay with a scene for as long as it was going good. The first draft of “The Hurting Game” was short, very tight and made for a quick, breezy read. But as Gertrude Stein once said about her native city of Oakland, “There’s no there there.” Same held for my novel.

The first of what would eventually grow to be over 50 drafts in several major reconstructions simply didn’t have enough meat on the bones. When I wrote screenplays, I did so with a more experienced partner in L.A., and if I wrote a scene that ran long, I would be scolded. That scolding voice stayed in my head for at least five or six drafts of “The Hurting Game.” Now, four books later, if a scene is going good, I give it free reign, even if it runs pages.

Screenwriting and novel writing are not completely incompatible. Two good lessons a novelist can take away from screenwriting is the use of character arc, and making sure each scene advances the story. In a good movie, characters change from beginning to end, or go through their arc. Audiences like to see a person evolve over the course of time. Same holds true for novels, and of course in “real life.” If characters in my book are interacting with each, then it stands to reason they will eventually be changed by each other.  Of course story action also changes people: if you put a character through a life threatening scene, or have a loved one die, they will be altered in some way, too.  

Any scene in a screenplay--no matter how sensational it is--should be discarded if it doesn’t advance the story.  If you leave it in, it becomes a “set piece,” something that exists for its own good, not the good of the story. I have employed that rule in my novel writing, and it really improves the book.

Screenwriting also teaches you economy. Description in screenplays is short and there just to set the scene. The real “description” comes later in the filming when a director chooses what to put in a scene in terms of color scheme, positioning of characters and many other creative choices. As a result,  my  books don’t have an excess of description. I rely more on dialogue. If, for example, a scene takes place in a public park, it is not necessary to draw a full, in depth portrait of that park. You are writing a novel, not a travelogue. Too many times in reading the work of other writers I run into a passage with an excess of description, and skip over it and get to the dialogue or action that it is supposed to be setting up.

My rule for description was actually learned early in my writing life from reading something about Hemingway’s learning curve. He said he acquired his clipped style by studying the paintings of the “pointillism” school of art, where a short brush stroke or a dot would imply a person or a tree and so on. In novels, include just the “brush strokes” that set the scene and nothing more.

They say in films action defines character, not words, and that holds true for novels and in real life. A person can tell you about themselves all they want, but the truth lies in what they do during the course of the story or life. As the old adage goes, action speaks louder than words.

In “The Hurting Game,” a private investigator with a somewhat jaded view of life (outside of his family), is thrown together with a young boxer who plays by the rules and sees life through rose colored glasses. The only thing they appear to have in common at first is their goal: find the killer. By the end of the book, however, the boxer and the PI discover they have several things in common. The boxer eventually “moves” a few feet closer to being like the PI, and vice verse.

In one of my favorite scenes, the PI, Frank Boff, tells the boxer, Danny Cullen, his life philosophy (indulge me in my excerpt):

“You want the ‘Boff Theory on How to Get Through Life?’”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I start with one basic assumption--all people suck and are out to screw you. That way you aren’t aggravated when it happens. The bonus with my theory is when you meet someone who doesn’t suck or try to screw you, like my wife, then you feel blessed and never complain about them, even when they do something you don’t like.”

“Most people go under the assumption human beings are basically good.”

“That’s because a lot of them listen to their priests, comical considering the penguins are among the most perverse human beings on earth. I’m not just talking about the child molesters. I mean what kind of man chooses never to have sex with a woman? That’s sick.”

“They call it devotion to God.”

“Why would God want priests to keep their peckers in their pants? Give me one good reason. Fact is God wants people to get laid, because that’s how the human species propagates. Ministers claim to have channels to God, yet they marry and lead relatively normal lives. So do rabbis. It makes no sense God would tell only priests not to get their dicks wet. Bottom line, if there is a God he’s the only one more clever and diabolical than me.”

“You’ll never get into heaven with that attitude.”

“Is that where you think you’ll be going?”

“I like to think so.”

“You love to box, right? Do you think they have boxing in heaven? What are you going to do up there to kill time? Play the harp? From what I’ve observed, you have no outside interests, everything is boxing. The reality is heaven is a pipe dream. Nobody in the history of Man has gone through the pearly gates and come back and given us the skinny on what they do there all day without sex, sports, movies and all the other things we love here on earth. This life is ‘The Big Show,’ so enjoy it before the final curtain comes down. That’s why I tell you not to take things so seriously. If there was a trial to prove the existence of heaven and twelve priests were on the jury, I guarantee I could convince them there isn’t any evidentiary way to show beyond a reasonable doubt there is such a place. Face it Cullen, when you die the only place you’re going is into the ground or an urn.” 

Cullen is changed by that scene, and eventually so will Boff.

Instead of forgetting about my period writing screenplays, I have taken the best of what I learned and used it in my novels. Not a bad life lesson in general, now is it?

Imagine Writing A Novel On A Typewriter!

Back in the day when there were no home computers, I wrote my first two published novels on a big old Remington manual typewriter. Today, addicted to my computer, it is hard to figure out how the hell I did that. For those of you too young to have experienced composing a book on a manual typewriter, or for those who did, let me explain what my own ordeal was like.

First, I had to make sure to have an endless supply of white paper, a bottle or two of “White Out” and a very deep waste basket. I’d insert a piece of paper and start clanging away. Make a typo, no problem, white it out. Want to change a sentence or paragraph, big problem. If the offending paragraph was in the middle of the page, you had to pull the whole page out and discard, then retype perfectly fine copy before and after the bad graph. After a couple hours of this, if you had pulled more paper than you care to remember, you became angry and resentful of the typewriter. Now when you had to remove a sheet, you ripped it out hard, crumpled it tight in your fist and then hurled it like a 95 mph fastball at the waste can. My basket was always four or five feet away. I guess psychologically I felt if it was closer to me, that would mean I was going to make a lot of mistakes that needed discarding. Earlier in the day’s work, I would pretend to be making basketball shots. Later, I threw nothing but high hard ones.

There were times at the end of the writing day when I wanted to pick the typewriter up and hurl it out the window, but my Remington weighed about thirty-five pounds and I would have gotten a hernia trying to heave it, never mind if it fell two stories and hit someone on the head. Murder by typewriter would get you the death penalty. So I settled for merely glaring at the typewriter for several seconds to let the damn machine know I was pissed at it, then put its tarp cover over and walked away. That sure beat facing the truth that you’d written miserably that day.

The only pleasure I got out of that old Remington was pounding the keys. You really had to hit them hard to make them print. For an emotional, rhythmic writer like me, it perfectly suited my mindset. I felt like I was working out in the gym doing an aerobic exercise, my arms and upper body in sync. The banging sound of keys hitting paper and spitting out new words was music to my ears. The faster you went, the more noise you made, and I always felt like the typewriter was saying to me: YOU GOT IT! YOU’RE ROLLING, BABY! Conversely, if there wasn’t much sound coming out of the room you were working in, anybody living with you understood that it was shaping up as a bad mood day. My wife at the time knew to stay away from me after one of those quiet days, at least for the time it took me to suck down a Wild Turkey on the rocks. Then I mellowed. Well, as mellow as a firebrand like me could have been in those days.

Many old newspaper reporters, like the great Jimmy Breslin, will say they missed the maniacal sounds in the newsroom back then, the multitude of typewriters clanging away in a symphony of discordant sound…the thick cigar and cigarette smoke that hung like a poisonous cloud overhead…and reporters yelling out “COPY,” the lingo for asking a copy boy to come over.

When home computers first started coming out, I found it impossible to compose a novel on them. Looking at the screen seemed too foreign to me. So I would write on the old machine, and at the end of the day, take what I had done and type it into the computer. Ludicrous today, but made sense back then…and was a royal pain in the ass!

My experience as a newspaper reporter was somewhat different, and just as annoying. I was a sportswriter for 19 years, and traveled all over the country with Knicks, and later the Yanks and Mets. The computers we took on the road were office-issued and designed to transmit your copy back to the newspaper’s computer. The first one I got was the size of a medium suitcase, and had to weigh forty pounds. It “saved” copy on a video cassette you inserted. To send your copy, the machine came with “cups” on top where you could insert your telephone and give the computer commands to transmit.

Some of the arenas, particularly the ancient one in Chicago, were extraordinarily loud places and gave the computer fits. Bulls fans were easily the noisiest in the NBA. If the yelling got loud enough, it would send a false signal through the cups to “transmit,” so I had to put my sports jacket over it at those times.

Before those ancient computers, the way reporters on the road got copy to the office was by handing your story to a man with a fax machine. There was one present at all ballgames. The operator would insert your page into a cylinder which spun round and round transmitting it to your newsroom AP wire service machine. It took three minutes to transmit one page. Sometimes it didn’t work and had to be resent. So after you wrote your first page, you’d rush it to the fax guy, then go back working on a second page.

If there were three or four New York sportswriters in the press room or press box with me, we would be in competition to get to that damn machine first or else have to wait three minutes or more – while on deadline! Tempers flared between us, fist fights seemed like they would break out at any moment. There was even one Daily News sportswriter, whom I constantly scooped and had much better insight into games than he did, who would sneak back to the fax machine and look at pages of mine that had already been sent and were lying on the desk of the fax guy. Often he copied my ideas. This came to an abrupt end when I…well I won’t go there.

Flash forward to the present. I have now written four novels in my mystery series on the computer and cannot even remotely imagine how I would have done them on a typewriter, with the constant revising each day, and then the journey through the later drafts, sometimes as many as twenty or more. While writing, I am constantly changing sentences and graphs, and each new work day I go back and read and edit what I wrote the day before.

I am also an internet addict. Writing scenes about places I have never seen would be impossible without my beloved Google searches. Since I am not a cross dresser, describing a woman’s designer dress, shoes, blouse and evening gowns, I would be lost. Online, not only do I get descriptions of women’s clothes, but Google “images” put the clothes right before my eyes. Ditto for hundreds of other details, such as how many bullets are in the clip of a powerful Desert Eagle handgun; the sound a bullet makes coming out of a gun with a silencer; what a 911 officer actually says on the phone to someone calling in an emergency; the layout of the Plaza Hotel lobby, and so on.

Back in the day, if you wanted to know what the Plaza lobby looked like, you had to haul your ass over and visit it. The only alternative was to make up a fictitious hotel. Living in upstate New York, and having a mystery series that takes place in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section, I would have to move there were it not for Google. Instead, I  keep a “Brooklyn file,” updated daily with news from the borough, always looking for unique places, festivals, anything that could be used in one of my novels.

In my third book of the series, I have a character who is a high class call girl who works for an elite escort service similar to the one that brought former NY governor Elliot Spitz crashing down. Online, I was able to find out how much these gals make, how the money is split with management, the procedure involved in getting one sent out to you etc. In researching these elite services, I came across a gem of tangential material, which I immediately worked into my book: in Japan, there are “professional seducers,” who work for large investigative firms. When a wife suspects hubby is cheating on her, she goes to one of these firms. Rather than waste time and money having their ops trail the cheater around and wait until he commits adultery, they speed up the process by using professional seducers. These beautiful women “accidentally” meet the spouse, share a drink and begin a courtship that eventually lands them in the sack, where a camera hidden inside a pack of cigarettes and placed by the love bed picks up every detail. It is not prostitution, and perfectly legal, because the seducer gets paid a weekly salary by the firm, pays her taxes and never asks her target for money.

Thinking back to the old masters like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe and many, many others, it is hard to understand how they typed such marvelously-worded manifestos, especially Wolfe. He would routinely turn in a “finished” novel to his Scribner’s editor, the great Maxwell Perkins, which was rarely less than 1,000 pages, usually much longer. Maxwell had to edit and cut out scores of pages, a herculean job.

All of that is a world gone by, never to be seen again.

Thank God!

Guest Blogger Robert Jones

Robert Jones is an aspiring novelist and freelance writer who currently resides in Las Vegas, NV.  He has worked for many of the top poker and boxing websites, including most recently Pokerworks.com and Pound4Pound.com.  Recently Robert has put many of his freelance writing assignments behind in hopes of succeeding at his real dream, becoming a novelist.

Fear and Trembling in the Writing World

When Nat asked me to do a guest spot on his blog I was both honored and terrified.  I was honored because Nat has been one of the biggest influences on my writing career over the last six years or so.  I was terrified because I wasn’t sure what to write about. But the more Nat gave me ideas, the more I became comfortable.  Nat thought it would be a good concept to let his readers see one writer (Nat) in the prime of his writing career, dealing with the issues that go along with preparing to get published, and someone just starting their quest down the novel writing road (me).  I couldn’t have agreed more.

While I’m a complete novice when it comes to novel writing, I am not a complete novice when it comes to writing in general.  I first became aware that I was interested in writing in high school when I started reading any book I could get my hands on.  From kindergarten to my sophomore year in high school, it was an accomplishment if I read one book a year.  That all changed in my junior year when I read a Muhammad Ali biography for a history class.  I had always had an interest in boxing, so reading that book led me to all the biographies and autobiographies on boxers I could find, many of which are still on my shelf today.  I began to frequent boxing message boards. I found that I enjoyed writing about the fighters I had learned about, and being engrossed in the arguments you find on those boards about the “greatest fighters ever,” and “is Mike Tyson really insane?” 

One week after graduating high school I was rewarded with the best graduation gift I could ask for – back surgery.  The surgery forced me to be bed ridden for the better part of the summer, so once again I started to read, but this time instead of reading boxing books I read many of the ones I was assigned to in high school, books I had opted to pass on at the time.  All summer I read as many of the classics I could get my hands on, my favorites being “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Animal Farm,” and “Lord of the Flies.” 

Around the time I could walk without assistance I started classes at a community college.  I really had no desire to go to college, but an ultimatum was put to me by my parents (one they regret since, but we all make mistakes) so I tried to find a few classes I was interested in.  I passed exactly one course that semester—Philosophy--but that class, particularly one assignment, changed my life forever.

For the final exam we were given the assignment to write “The Philosophy on ___________” with the blank being anything you wanted.  Sitting there the night before the assignment was due, I chose a natural subject for me, procrastination.  I wrote how procrastination wasn’t always a bad thing. Then I brashly wrote, “despite me not starting this paper until a few hours until it’s due, I will still pass, and I will still get a good grade.”  I wasn’t saying this in a cocky way, and I’m far from conceited, but I truly believed that my idea for the topic, and the way I was writing it was unique.  Luckily, I turned out to be right.  On the day the teacher was to hand back the assignments, now graded, he paused and said, “In my 20 plus years of being a teacher I have never even considered reading a student’s paper aloud. However, there was one this year I was going to, he’ll know who it was when he gets his paper back.”  I still had no idea it was my paper he was talking about, but when I got it back he had written numerous praises and “LOL’s” on it.  Still, he gave me a “B” because my references weren’t done correctly.  So despite failing every class that year, I had discovered that I may have some kind of future with writing. 

Over the next few years I didn’t really like school any better, but I did find classes I genuinely enjoyed, including English and creative writing.  During this time, I also started writing for a few boxing websites. There was no pay, but it was still thrilling to see my stories published on a website.  Then something terrible happened, I began to get paid for my work.  That may sound odd, but when I started getting paid, first for a boxing website, and later for a poker website, it was thrilling.  The downside was that after a while you couldn’t tell anymore if you were writing “for the love of the game,” or because you needed to get paid.

Ironically, it was at a website for which I was getting paid that I met Nat.  At first our conversations revolved around my work, but over time the emails got more personal.  It was here that Nat told me I have a real penchant for writing, and more importantly the right mind mindset to be interesting.  Even back then, Nat wished I would put aside some of the boxing and poker freelance jobs and do some writing for myself.  I dabbled here and there, but I never seriously put the time into any of the personal ideas I had mostly because I was busy with other things. 

Fast forward eight years and here we are.  A few months ago, after seven years of making a living as a freelance writer, I began to suffer burnout.  I dreaded writing another poker story, and some of the characters in the boxing world were wearing thin on my nerves.  Over those last few months most of my writing has come in the form of Facebook status updates, and writing a list of things I need when I go grocery shopping.  In the meantime I have recharged my batteries by playing a lot of poker (i.e. social interaction), and once again reading books, something I have put off over the last few years.

Not to be overlooked is my wife, Jessica, who has put up with what I’m sure looks like laziness in her husband over the last few months.  If she’s had an issue with it, she hasn’t told me.  In a recent e-mail to Nat I compared my wife to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Zelda.  Zelda put up with a lot from her husband while waiting for him to not only find his muse, but also do something about it.  Jessica has been a saint when it comes to dealing with my issues over having a writing career, and that’s truly been an inspiration to me. 

So now I am ready for the next phase.  If I told you it was without reservations, it would be a lie.  Nat’s writing style is intimidating to me, mostly because of the amount of work he puts in improving his writing via the process of editing.  Nat often reminds me of one of my favorite Hemingway quotes.  When asked why he edited “The Old Man and the Sea” 95 times he responded, “because I didn’t have time to edit it 96 times.”  That process worked for him, as that book won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.  The endless editing is the one thing most daunting to me when it comes to writing.  However, Nat has a simple response to that.  “Just write.”

As I haven’t accomplished anything as of yet in the world of novel writing, I can’t leave you with any great keys to success. All I can do is to wish you success in the path you choose to take down your own personal writing road.  I will warn you, though, the path you think you’re choosing, and the path you actually go down will not be the same.  As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”