Category: Writing

There is something about human nature that makes people want to tell you all of the reasons why something can’t be done. And I just don’t get it. Because all we need is for one person to tell us that it can be done. And then suddenly it is possible.

I have to be honest and say that I have not read very many books about the craft of writing. I know there are many good ones out there and I even looked up a few lists before I wrote this post to jog my memory but for better or worse I have not taken the time to read most of them. To tell you the truth, I don’t think you need to read books about writing in order to become a good writer. I just think that you need to write. But I do have one book like this that I keep close.

A few years ago on a trip to Barnes and Noble I picked up The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop by Stephen Koch. Right away I started marking up the copy with a highlighter because I thought there were so many good ideas in it. But a part of the book that really stuck out for me was a story he told about his early teaching career. He that felt he needed to be honest with his students and so once a semester he would give a speech about how hard it was going to be to become a writer and how much they would struggle. Then after one of those speeches a student came up to him and said that they already knew how hard it was going to be. Everybody had been telling them their whole lives that failure was the most likely outcome. Their mothers or their fathers. Their aunts or uncles or friends. Everyone. But all they needed to hear was that one person who said it was possible.

And it is possible. The proof is all around us. Everything that has been created by mankind was created by someone just like you and I. Someone was willing to do what someone else said was not possible. But it was possible. It is possible. And it will always be possible.

And now the reason for the title of the post. Josh Ritter. Animal Years is my favorite record of his but the lines below are from the song Lantern on the So the World Runs Away record. What has always stuck with me from this song is the line: “If there’s a book of jubilations, We’ll have to write it for ourselves”.

“So throw away those lamentations
We both know them all too well
If there’s a book of jubilations
We’ll have to write it for ourselves
So come and lie beside me darling
And let’s write it while we still got time”

– Josh Ritter

I spent most of my life writing songs. Somewhere around the age of fifteen I started writing lyrics or poetry or some form of cadence (that may or may not have had elements of Dr. Seuss) all in the name of getting the girl. Why lyrics? I blame Journey.

I went to see Journey play a show on the Raised on Radio tour at the Capital Centre in Landover, MD in 1986. This would be the middle period of the band’s arc, after the Atari video game and when they had Randy Jackson of American Idol fame playing bass. Now I don’t remember how many of us went but I still have a vivid recollection of looking over at one of the girls and seeing her screaming for Steve Perry and then mouthing the words to Open Arms. Let’s say it made an impression. So I started writing lyrics. Really bad lyrics.

I wrote really bad lyrics for a long time actually. It wasn’t until I got to college and decided that I needed to write everyday that I began to improve. I made a pact with myself to write one entire song everyday. Even if it sucked. And many of them did. There were flashes of something decent now and then but most of the first year of the experiment resulted in pretty unusable lovey gibberish. But I kept at it and slowly I began to get better. A little less cheese and a little more meat. Of course some of this was experience as well. I was growing up and learning more about the world and the way things really worked. But I also started listening to better songwriters. (Not knocking Steve Perry and Jonathan Cain of course, I may have listened to other lesser talents over the years and they are of course who I am knocking.)

So when I decided to write a novel I took the same approach. I just began to write. I gave myself a word count every day. And I only paid attention to a certain kind of writer when I was reading fiction.

The first thing I did was write a few pages of a story that had nothing to do with my original ideas, just words on a page. I wanted to get something down and begin to discover my style.

Then I started writing the novel first novel I had in mind. It’s called “The Dolphin Maker”. I hope someday it will see the light of day but after getting into the heart of the story I realized that I needed to do a lot more research than I had time for. The novel has two story arcs that intertwine and one of the stories is based on the life of a canoe builder during the Polynesian migration across the Pacific. As you can imagine this will take a great deal of research to get right and I have a very specific idea in mind of how this story will go. But while I was working on it I was still doing writing exercises and I came up with the first page of the novel I just finished. The story took off very quickly and I ran with it.

As I said before, another thing I did was only pay attention to certain kind of writer while I was doing my own writing. When I was working on the dialogue for the first novel based in the Pacific, I realized that any dialogue I wrote would be wrong because any dialogue I wrote in English would sound odd. So for that story arc there is no dialogue. But in realizing this I also quit reading any fiction that had been translated. Which meant saying no to any Dostoevsky, Kundera, Murakami, or anyone else who did not originally write in English.

This narrowed down things a bit for me. Then I concentrated on writers who wrote in a way that I had come to love and that spoke to me personally. This is a fairly thin band of writers. I put the following books next to my workspace and read them for inspiration as I went.

Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian, Suttree, The Road
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping, Gilead
Herman Melville – Moby Dick, Typee
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and the Sea
John Graves – Goodbye to a River

It was only after putting these books next to my desk and writing for six months that I found out about a book called Pen of Iron by Robert Alter. It nearly made my head explode. He used these authors specifically as well as Saul Bellow to make the case for the influence of the King James Bible in the works of these writers. And can you guess what other work was sitting next to these? Yep. The King James Bible.

I grew up reading it. And many of my favorite writers other than those listed above cut their teeth on it as well. Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne. It has shaped much of the cannon of America and I was surprised to see how much of an impact it had made on the writers I was drawn to. Well maybe not surprised really, but I could see clearly that it was one of the principle reasons I was drawn to these stylists. Their prose was familiar. Like eating a home cooked meal.

Which brings me back to Journey. All it took for me to want to write lyrics was to see the impact they had on a girl. And what it took for me to want to write a novel was to know the impact that writers like Melville or McCarthy had on my sense of the world. And each of these writers were led them down the path by someone who came before them. Cormac McCarthy said it pretty well in the interview he did with the New York Times.

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books,” he says. “The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

And everything that exists, exists in this way. All the way back to what Aristotle called the unmoved mover. Every song, every chant. Every novel or movie or video game builds on what has come before. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And if you read my novel you will see clearly on whose shoulders I put my feet. Just the same way you will clearly hear the influence of say, The Beatles in the songs I have written.

But even with all of the forces that have shaped us and formed us into we have become, we are still each one of us, original. You have listened to or read hundreds of things that I have never heard of. And in this new age of ever more art available for consumption that list will only get longer. So if you are a fellow writer or just a fellow human being, don’t worry about trying to be completely original. You already are. Don’t worry about hiding your influences. You don’t have to. We can all see them quite clearly if we choose to look. Just come to us with open arms.