Writer's Memoir

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  And then there are the unpublished writers: students with term-papers, bloggers, occasional poets, writers on bathroom walls, and all the rest of us who can tap out words on a keyboard or put a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   I’ve written three (as of yet unpublished) novels, a plethora of poems (and even had one published in a magazine), and a kazillion papers on a variety of subjects over the course of my university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.