I knew almost as soon as I
could write that I would become a writer. In my childhood, I put a schedule on
my door insisting on undisturbed writing time each day. I had my parents
custom-build a desk into the nook of my closet, with a small bookshelf
installed above it, a gooseneck lamp, a door I could close—barely into a
double-digit age, I had my own writing space. I wrote my first book by age twelve,
won writing contests, and had only to wait for success to find me.
None of that is true. Or, it
is true, but not of me. Working for a city newspaper during my college years in
Texas, I was assigned to report on the local library’s youth writing
competition, and all those wonderful, writerly details—the schedule, the desk
in the closet, the book, the ambition—are from the profile I wrote about the
young girl who won that year.
In my actual story, my
parents gave me a desk, but I used my pencils and ballpoint pens to stipple the
surface until it looked less like wood than like pumice. In second grade, I spent
hours alone in my room writing pages and pages of material, but it wasn’t
creative—my mother got tired of forbidding me my misadventures and told me to
copy the definition of “No” 100 times, unaware that “No” comprised a full three
pages in our family dictionary, two columns each page, in tiny print. I didn’t
write a book by age twelve, but I did invent lyrics to absurdist songs about
defecation and once adapted “On Top of Spaghetti” as a bawdy sex lyric.
In other words, I wasn’t
born to be a writer. Or at least, I didn’t behave like one when I was a kid. My
father wrote scathing editorials and short satirical pieces, my paternal
grandfather was a natural storyteller full of a ship captain’s sea yarns, my
maternal grandmother was a closet memoirist—but I was just a kid. There was
nothing magical about my upbringing, no prophetic sign that I would take up the
pen and the keyboard and become a writer.
Though there was my seventh-grade English class.
My middle school had begun a
program of weekly “sustained silent reading” periods, and my English teacher,
Mrs. Hoffmann, added a second period of “sustained silent writing.” We were
allowed to write whatever we wanted—journal entries, rap lyrics, love poems—and
I decided to write a novel.
I’d been reading a lot of my
father’s action novels and was just beginning to discover Stephen King, and I
realized that when I tried to predict what might happen next in whatever novel
I was reading, I wasn’t hoping to decipher the story, I was wishing the story
had gone differently—I was inventing stories of my own. I was rewriting stories
as I wanted to read them. And right around the time I began to think that if
Don Pendleton could knock out half a dozen Mack
Bolan/The Executioner novels every year and sell millions of books, then
surely I could, too, my English teacher gave me the gift of designated, disciplined
writing time.
My first novel was about a
teenager whose parents were killed by an evil crime boss surrounded by ninjas;
in his sorrow and anger, the teenager devotes himself to martial arts and
fights his way through the ranks of minions to confront the crime boss.
I eventually gave up on that
novel, but Mrs. Hoffmann—who, after school, had become my first writing
mentor—insisted I keep telling stories. My father signed me up for a writing
workshop on how to publish (neither of us knew until I arrived that the
workshop was for romance novelists, but I eagerly took notes on plot outlines
and novel advances). I developed a sci-fi series about an alien race and
invented a religion and a language. I began writing horror, stories about
necrophiliacs and occult serial killers and mutated warriors held prisoner by
secretive government agencies. I found Anne Rice and spent most of high school
and college toiling over a melodramatic vampire novel.
Which is to say that by the time
I wrote that newspaper article on the young library contest winner, I already
was a writer. Yet I still hesitated to call myself one, and I marveled at this
kid living a literary life I still felt outside of.
When I started that novel
back in middle school, I began imagining the origin story for my writing
career—publication as a teenager, phenom status, appearances on talk shows—and ten
years later, working on that article about the kid writer, I began to wonder if
I’d missed my chance. My origin story was too long delayed. I had wasted all
those years poking holes in my writing desk and making up feces songs instead
of becoming the writer I dreamed I ought to be.
In some parallel universe,
there is a version of me that did publish as a teen and go on talk shows. He is
telling the origin story I wrote for him decades ago. In another universe,
there is a version of me who has never published. He is still concocting new
origin stories, new fantasies. They will go into a password-protected file
where no one will read them except that other Sam, late at night, only the
computer screen and his fantasies alight in empty room. In yet another universe—this one—there is me, many
writerly milestones behind me but still sending ahead invented milestones to
reach for (an advance on a book deal, film rights, career stability). And here
I am, revising my childhood origin story, realizing that I started out as a
writer in exactly the way I ought to: by daydreaming, by writing the stories I
wanted to read, by crafting the story of myself, by always trying to make it a
better story.
_________________________________________
Samuel Snoek-Brown teaches writing in the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in dozens of literary journals, and he serves as production editor for Jersey Devil Press. He’s the author of the chapbooks Box Cutters (sunnyoutside 2013) and the forthcoming Where There Is Ruin (Red Bird Chapbooks 2016), the forthcoming novella In the Pulse There Lies Conviction (Blue Skirt Press 2016), and the historical novel Hagridden (Columbus Press 2014), for which he received a 2013 Oregon Literary Fellowship. He is online on Facebook, Twitter, and at snoekbrown.com.
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