A Writer’s Memoir
So.
A writer’s memoir. It begs the
question, at least to my mind, what is a writer? Generally, I tend to think of a writer as the
author of books, poems, scripts, magazines articles, etc. My definition of a writer is that of someone
who is paid for their work: one thinks of someone like Stephen King, Toni
Morrison, or prolific SF author Alastair Reynolds: you know, people with money who smile a lot, and
who go to the bank to cash fat advances from major publishers. And then there are the unpublished writers:
students with term-papers, bloggers, occasional poets, writers on bathroom
walls, and all the rest of us who can tap out words on a keyboard or put a
pencil to paper: do they count too? If
we consider a writer as somebody who enjoys writing, who feels a certain urge
to write, who tosses off poems, essays, and short stories every once in a while, then I suppose I too
would be counted as a writer.
Not
that that’s something I would put on a resume, understand. I’ve written three (as of yet unpublished)
novels, a plethora of poems (and even had one published in a magazine), and a kazillion
papers on a variety of subjects over the course of my university career (and
here I am doing it again!). I’ve got a
whole folder in my filing cabinet entitled “rejection slips” (the mark of a “real”
writer if ever there was one!). I’ve
written speeches, reference letters, and a series of articles on Korean culture
for the English language newspaper The
Korean Times. I even minored in
writing when I got my Bachelor’s degree.
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about
writing throughout my lifetime, mostly from people who find it drudgery, but I
never found it so. Writing is a pleasure,
and something I take some pains to do correctly and well. Generally, people seem to think my pieces are
entertaining and or at least worth reading, and I take a certain amount of
satisfaction in that, so that’s something as well. Of course, perhaps they were just being
polite.
Personally,
I don’t enjoy reading people writing about writing. The skill itself (and it is a skill, and one that
requires a good bit of practice at that!) is so subjective: what works for one
person does not work for others. Also,
what is good writing to some people is bad writing to others: I distinctly remember throwing my copy of James
Joyce’s Ulysses hard against the wall
in my disgust at the density of its prose.
Generally, learned people consider it a classic, and well written: well,
I beg to differ.
Like
I said, I don’t enjoy reading about people writing about their writing. If you’re like me, so feel free to stop here
if you choose, because I’m going to talk a bit about how I write.
When
given an assignment to write about something, the first thing I do is sleep on
it. And then I walk on it. Not literally of course, but a text is
organic, and so I give it time to grow within my mind and assume vague contours. Writing, after all, is a mental thing. The text itself is muscle memory pressing
keys upon a keyboard, but the writing itself is one’s thoughts crystalized and
made manifest for anyone and their brother to see. So I give my writing time and space to grow
and breathe, to become alive for me. I
often wake up at night with ideas for the paper, or as I’ve trudging along on
the hour-long walk I do daily, I talk to myself and try ideas out to see how
they sound. Only after the idea is more
or less fleshed out in my mind, with a beginning, an end, and some ideas about
what I’m going to say do I actually boot up the computer and begin to write. Sometimes, however, ideas take years to
germinate. For instance, my (as of yet!)
unpublished novel The Buddha Smiles.
This work sat in my brain for months
until the time was right. I was in Korea
at the time, and spending a lot of time in Korean Buddhist temples. I would watch the bowing and chanting shaven-head
monks pound away at their fish-shaped drums, I would look at thousand-year-old
temples floating in a cool morning mist, I would bow to the stone pagodas, and
most importantly in this context, I would look at the paintings that adorned
the temple walls, sometimes ten or more to a shrine. They were not random, these paintings, as they
often told stories that began at the door and wrapped themselves around the
entire circumference of the building. Some
of these stories / picture series include the eight (sometimes ten) ox-herding
pictures that are an allegory of the process of Enlightment, scenes of the
torments of Buddhist Hell, Korean / Zen cultural stories, and other
besides. One of the most important
stories the temple walls told told was the life-story of the Buddha, beginning
at his birth ending at this death. And
looking that the story gave me an idea: I would write a biography of the Buddha’s
life seen through the eyes of the people that surrounded him. So that’s what I did. And each chapter, each new set of eyes,
required me to walk with that person, and “interview” her to get her story down
correctly. It took me months to write
the 51 chapter, 400 page manuscript, but it was, creatively, one of the best
periods of my life.
Other writing does not require huge
lengths of time. My other (also unpublished)
novel, which was also written in Korea, is called The Goddess of Dragon, and it took much less time. I had an idea for a planet, just kind of a
mental exercise, which was originally supposed to be a memory palace of
sorts. I didn’t know much about my
location, but I knew it was a massive planet on par with Jupiter that was populated
with many different races all of whom lived together in a Utopian society. The planet was called Dragon because there
were only two continents, an upper and a lower with the massive ocean between
them: from space: it looked like a ball of jagged teeth. I drew a map of it, and then I realized that there
not just aliens there: humans were there too.
How did they get there? I started
to wonder about that, and I walked with it, and after a few days, I knew the answer. And once I had the answer to that, I had the
whole history of the human race upon the planet, and the novel was pretty much
full-grown within my head like Athena squirming about in the brainpan of Zeus. The rough draft of it was 150 pages, and only
took me two weeks.
I’ve always loved the idea of being a
writer. I remember when I was very
young, I wrote a short play with Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein sharing a
castle. My teacher asked to see it, but
I can’t remember what she said about it.
In my first year of university, in my very early 20s, I wrote my first
attempt at long fiction. Fragments, which, unlike my other long fiction,
I have since totally abandoned as being unpublishable melodramatic garbage,
took its name from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Wasteland” (part five): “These
fragments I have shored against my ruins”.
It involved an old woman, who, as she lay dying, saw her (oh so tragic!)
life in a series of stream-of–consciousness fragments, all of which grew
shorter and shorter as her mind started to dissolve and break down. The first third were chapter-length fragments
and made more or less linear sense, the second third were generally out-of-snyc
paragraphs as she was become mentally disordered in time, and the final third were
only three to five lines at a time and made no logical sense. The final pages were short sentence
fragments, and the final lines simple words. At the time I wrote it, I
thought I was being deep. Now I realize the word would probably be pretentious.
Still, Fragments
gave me a taste of what I could do as a writer.
I realized that this was something I truly enjoyed, and while I was not necessarily
skilled at it, it was something I could see myself getting good at someday with
practice. So that’s what I did, I practiced.
I had some limited success: a poem published in a small underground
press (which paid in a single copy), and some articles in the newspaper in
Korea. Yet real, tangible success has
thus far managed to elude me. More
practice, I guess. But that okay, as I’m
a patient person.
Turning to the computer, I bring up MS Word and find
my manuscript for The Goddess Of Dragon. I take a long moment to look at it
reflectively, chewing at my lips. I hit
the print button and have lunch while I wait for the 400 pages of my novel to
print out. When it finished (still warm
from the printer…), I place the heavy manuscript into a box and take it to the
post office. I give it to the clerk, and
watch my manuscript disappear into the bowels of the post office on its way to
a publishing company. Maybe this
time? Hope, as they say, springs
eternal. I turn, walk out, go home.
