Humble Beginnings

F. Scott Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise, when he was 22 years old. As an aspiring writer of the same age, all I have to show for myself are about six completed short stories; only one of substantial length. I write daily in my job as a newspaper reporter, but AP style is about as imaginative as a manatee. There’s nothing creative about it. Newspapers target an audience with an eighth-grade reading level, and that’s at what level we have to write, changing “she was ambivalent” to “she couldn’t decide” and consulting a rigid stylebook to see if “eighth grade” or “eighth-grade” is correct.

(It depends. If the words are modifiers, there’s a hyphen. For instance, “He’s an eighth-grade student” is right, and so is “He’s in eighth grade.”)

There’s a lot to be gained, and yet also very little, for a fiction writer in the journalism business. Newspapermen have to know the English language inside and out. They have to know how to tell a story, to cut the fat and get to the essence. I absorb as much as I can while I’m at work, experimenting with syntax and thumbing The Elements of Style while waiting on sources to return phone calls, but the type of writing I really want to learn can’t be done in a newsroom.

I don’t think anyone will read this site. If you are, well, hello. Thanks for stopping by. This blog, though, is mostly just for me. It’s for me to publish completed stories or sections of uncompleted ones for me to analyze, a way for me to keep track of my personal notes. It’s for me to keep tabs of what books I’m reading, my progress with them, and my thoughts about their style and voice and characters and themes and structure. Anything I think will help me become a better writer, I’ll include in this blog.

I suffer from no delusions. I know I have a lot of work to do if I ever want to write anything remotely publishable. I may not be a prodigy like Fitzgerald, but there’s hope yet. With hard work and discipline I can, and will, improve. Ernest Hemingway was 27 when he published his first novel; Jack Kerouac, 29; Alex Garland, 26; Stephen King, 27; and Cormac McCarthy, 32. And, of course, there are a whole slew of authors who didn’t start until they were well past middle age. So I still have a few years to get my shit together, right?

Currently Reading: All the Pretty Horses, By Cormac McCarthy (Page 141/302)