In a previous writing life, I was a poet. I wrote a lot, had a small amount of micro-success publishing in little literary magazines, and loved investing the time, energy, and money into finding rare books of the minor writers I came to identify with and love. This felt like I was living a life that was unique, original, and aesthetically principled, but ultimately, I wasn’t as uncommon as I wanted to feel: I had the same dream a lot of other people did, which was to get my undergraduate degree, then get my MFA in Creative Writing, then get a teaching job at a small Pennsylvania college like Haverford, where I’d write poems, teach creative writing to motivated students, and gather my poems into a book every two or three years where I’d have a readership ready to buy whatever I’d put out. Eventually I’d have enough books for a Selected Poems volume. I’d own a leather chair, I’d sit at an old desk, and I’d type on a vintage typewriter. 

For a variety of reasons, this never materialized, and I don’t recall exactly what killed the dream for good. But I do remember, vividly, the moment that dream was born. When I was somewhere around 16, my friend Sharlene gave me a copy of Run With the Hunted, which was a Charles Bukowski reader. It contained a poem called “john dillinger and le chasseur maudit,” and this poem managed to stop me in my tracks, instantly. I was aware at that moment of a new direction my life was going to go: I was going to be a writer. I didn’t get all of the references – pre-Internet, I didn’t know who Dillinger was, or Franck, or what ‘plagiostomes’ were, and made no effort to find out – but something about the language hooked me immediately. It was hard, tough, crass, with little bullshit. It was more than iambic pentameter, more than dactyls and trochees, and in no way resembled the antiquated, overwritten meditations I was meant to perpetually decode in school. 

My reaction to the poem was not to be moved by it as a poem, or to see myself in its lines, or to run to an Encyclopedia and learn who the poem was even “about.” Instead, I finished the poem and thought “that was pretty good, but I can do better.” 

I don’t know whether I should be proud of that or not. It’s pretty absurd for a high schooler to think that highly of himself before ever writing a poem, but we don’t always get to choose what drives us or why. Re-reading that poem over the years has been strange, as I don’t feel much of that connection any longer; I now just think I could do better because it’s not that great to begin with (so maybe it wasn’t that absurd for this high schooler to feel that way). But to be fair, I do still feel a little tingly spark at the end of the poem that does remind me, if just a little bit, of that first read almost 30 years ago. 

So what happened? Did I do better? What happened after that is probably familiar to many writers: I did start writing, but began by copying my inspiration. The first stuff I wrote was garbage, so no, I did not do better, at least not for a while. I loved that Bukowski gave me permission to use simple, aggressive, blue-collar language, but I hadn’t had any experiences that lended themselves to that language. It was raw, direct, no-nonsense, tough guy writing, and I wasn’t that guy. 

Fast forward through a bunch of stuff I’ll probably write about one day. Right now it’s six months after my decision to write mystery/crime/noir stories, a much better outlet for Tough Guy Language than poetry ever was, especially since I have characters who are actually tough. But it’s early, and I have what a lot of writers probably have to show for their earliest efforts: a lot of drafts. Certainly nothing finished. I do have one draft, considered maybe 80% “done,” of what will probably be the first thing I submit to a publication. Maybe I’m not submitting it with total confidence, but I‘m submitting it. The story is currently called “The First Walk Home” and the plot was something that came, almost fully-formed, while I was walking some books back to the library one night, making up stories in my head about the people who lived in all the houses I was walking past. Eventually I walked past a blue car in a driveway and imagined it was locked with the keys in the ignition, and off my imagination went. 

Well, maybe it wasn’t fully-formed. The idea for the story was fully-formed, and that made it pretty easy to sit down at the computer and type out a first draft. But I cut a ton of the material that was in that first idea, because it ended up being not very good. I was making a lot of classic blunders in my very first attempt at a mystery/crime story: I was making the main character too passive, in that the story was happening to her. I made her rush around, which isn’t the same thing as action. I also wasn’t clear on the stakes of the story, as she was barely emotionally invested in resolving the case; she didn’t know the criminal and had no stake in the victim’s life. What would happen if she failed? Well, not much, as it turned out. If I was being honest with myself, I had to take my completed draft of my first story, read it over, and think “that was pretty good, but I can do better.” 

That strikes me as a perfectly healthy attitude to have about one’s own work. Further, it should probably always be the attitude about one’s own work. That story will hopefully be something I link to here, to whatever mystery/crime magazine it gets published in, or available as a download or ebook that I self-publish. Either way, right now it’s simply not done. It does feel great to have something where the story flows, logically things make a kind of sense, and there are some nice sentences, but it needs a lot of polish. 

I have mixed feelings about Ron Carlson’s book “Ron Carlson Writes a Story,” which is a detailed account of how one of his stories came to exist, how it changed, and how it ended up the way it did. On the one hand, it’s a deep dive into a relatively minor story. I don’t know how illuminating that ultimately is; if dinner was merely OK, I’m only listening to your story of how you made it out of politeness. On the other hand, most stories are minor stories, and that’s especially true in the world of genre fiction; yes, I can do better, but how much better? And if I took pleasure in finding rare books of minor writers that were major to me, isn’t there some kind of dignity in being a minor writer? 

All that is to say, I’d like to write more about “The First Walk Home” and share it here. If for some odd reason it doesn’t end up being the first story I complete and submit, then I’ll write about whatever that story is. The process part of making work is important regardless of the reach, cultural impact, or whether it was made by that professor at Haverford. Making something minor is infinitely better than making nothing at all.