Not So Great Expectations: How the Hell Did I Become a Writer?

I grew up in a very small town in a working class family. No one on either side of the family had ever gone to college, let alone graduate. We knew no one famous or rich or noteworthy, though my father once went on a three-day bender and somehow got Chuck Connor’s number in Los Angeles, waking him at three in the morning so I could tell him how much I loved The Rifleman. If expectations for me and my brother and sister were openly spoken of at all, it was usually in terms of getting a job after high school. My family worked and drank and played. Long range planning meant making sure the next mortgage payment got to the bank before the grace period expired.

That pretty much described our neighbors, too. Some worked harder and drank less, their ambitions reaching as high as starting their own roofing business or becoming a floor supervisor at the local wire harness factory or inheriting the family dairy. There were a few folks in town who had gone to college, or at least were planning for their kids to go, but they were regarded by my family and most of our neighbors as snooty. Uppity strivers. We rarely interacted with them. Some of us harbored secret knowledge, often not admitted even to ourselves, that they were somehow superior to us and, by extension, we were unworthy to mingle with them.

One thing that was vitally important to all of us non-strivers was entertainment. Our day-to-day lives changed little. We looked forward to the joy and distraction of TV and books and movies at the drive-in (we kids hidden on the floor behind the front seats, a blanket thrown over us so my parents could save the six bucks admission). My Mom liked to read, mostly the novels of Louis L’Amour. She got me a library card and I read Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson and Vince Lombardi on Football. But it never occurred to us that these things came from somewhere, that some living person made them for us. They just appeared, like that day in May when the leaves seem to materialize where none had been the day before. If it did cross our minds that someone actually made movies and TV shows and books, they were other-worldly creatures from strange places like New York and Los Angeles, places where people were born with different kinds of brains or some mutant super-power of creativity. Certainly I would never have dreamed that I would write and come to know others who wrote books and screenplays and TV scripts.

My scholastic career certainly gave no indication that I might go on to something so exotic as writing. I kept my grades just barely good enough to stay on the football team in the fall, the wrestling team in the winter, and the baseball team in the spring. I slept through English class and only passed because the teacher let me outline the entire textbook the last day of school.

Somehow over time my expectations for myself changed. I became aware of possibilities and potentials foreign to my family and hometown friends. The explanation, I think, lies in the company I kept after high school. My inability to make good life choices, my lack of sense when it came to choosing friends, lovers, jobs, and places to live, brought me into contact with people very unlike myself, with backgrounds unimaginable to me before we met. People who not only went to college but got doctorates, people who went to war, sold drugs, sailed, ran guns, flew planes, traveled in Europe and Asia, grew up in Germany, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines, backpacked in wilderness, fought in Bronx bars, scuba dived in caves, and had sex for no other reason than fun. And some wrote stories. They sat right there in front of me and made things up and wrote them down. Fantasies and daydreams traveled from mind to hand to page and became, to me, a real thing that real people did. And I was real people, wasn’t I? So one middle-aged day I lay down on my belly on the living room carpet with a pencil and notebook and no idea how to proceed and I wrote a story. It wasn’t a good story. But when I showed it to my girlfriend at the time—she knew every other dark secret of mine already, anyway—she didn’t laugh. The story was graphic and clumsy and artless, but she took it, took me, seriously. What a wonder. What a gift.

Once I accepted that I could write stories, I took a class, then another. I met other writers, published authors, editors and agents. My world expanded in direct proportion to how seriously I took myself as a writer. And the more I wrote and tried to improve, the more value I saw in my writing, the more others saw in it.

Now, when I see a movie, I wait for the credits to see who wrote the screenplay or the story from which it was adapted. I want to know who wrote the play and about their life as a writer. I make it my business find out who put the words in the actors mouths. I give the new novelist a chance to draw me into the world they imagined into existence. It has become natural to me to create people and places and incidents and put them on paper in a way that touches and entertains. And these days the people around me expect it.