I may have mentioned this before, but it seems apropos: One of my favourite bits of dialogue from the late and still-lamented two-season tv series Sports Night (Aaron Sorkin's precursor to both The West Wing and Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip) comes from the episode "The Quality of Mercy at 29K":
Casey McCall: It's a vicious circle.
Dan Rydell: It is.
Casey McCall: It's a neverending circle.
Dan Rydell: Just keeps going round and round.
Casey McCall: Never ends.
Dan Rydell: That's what makes it vicious.
Casey McCall: And a circle.
I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the past. The family reunion at the end of June seemed to kick the reverie thing off, and this past week was Xander's birthday (which also marks the second anniversary of the publication date of Before I Wake – two milestones in one day).
This weekend, though…
I've always loved the end of summer. I love the liminal quality of it, that transition period between worlds: between the freedom of summer and the on-set of school, the gradual drift between seasons. It's always bittersweet, and you know how I feel about bittersweetness…
It occurred to me this morning, though: 22 years ago this weekend, I wrote my first novel.
I was fifteen years old, and I had always wanted to write. I had written short stories and film scripts, a bunch of small stuff, but never a novel (hey, cut me some slack: I was fifteen). But the Labour Day weekend brought with it the (then) Pulp Press Three Day Novel contest, the sort of competition that can only be the result of a bunch of liberal arts majors sitting in a bar and talking about Voltaire. The rules were (and still are) simple: you start at midnight on the Friday of the Labour Day weekend, and by midnight Monday you've got a novel.
I had always wanted to write. I had always written. But the idea of being a writer, of living a life around words, around that work, was a pipe-dream. I was a small-town boy who grew up around people who worked with their hands, for whom work meant labour and exhaustion and the possibility of injury or death in the bush or in the field. The idea of a life of the mind wasn't something that came easily to anyone, including myself, and the idea of being a writer? Why not Prime Minister? Or rock star? The odds were about the same.
I don't know why, but the summer I was fifteen, I decided to take the plunge. I would enter the contest. My family was out of town, and I stocked up on coffee and typing paper, and I did it. I did it. Three days later, I had my first novel.
Now, I haven't read that novel in probably 20 years. I doubt I'll ever look at it again. But I remember how it felt — not just the feeling of accomplishment and pride at finishing, but the exhileration of the work itself, the frustration that came along with it, the bruising of my fingers from the keyboard (I had an electric typewriter that didn't have a question mark key). I remember the music I was listening to (Peter Case, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Springsteen), and how it dreamed its way into the novel. It was a book of soft summers, of loss and heartbreak, of teenagers throwing bottles off overpasses and losing their virginity in empty, end-of-summer boathouses. I didn't know much about the world, but what I did ended up in that book, and in a way, everything I came to know about writing had its roots in that weekend.
So it seems more than apropos — significant, in fact — that 22 years later, I find myself alone once again on a Labour Day weekend. The family is away, and I'm mainlining caffeine and listening to music (right now, the Grateful Dead, but Case, Petty and Springsteen are all in the shuffle, along with Richard Thompson and the White Stripes, the Black Crowes and Derek and the Dominos, The Hold Steady and Band of Horses), and I'm writing.
And sometime this weekend, 22 years later, I'll finish the new novel.
22 years later, I've had dreams come true that I hadn't dared to dream when I was fifteen. I'm living a life of words and ideas. It's not easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. This is my life.
If I could go back, now, to that empty house, the ghetto blaster on the dining room chair in easy arm's reach, tapes scattered on the floor, empty coffee cup beside the stack of pages, to that fifteen year old pounding out the words as the hallucinations started to hit from two nights without sleep, I'd tell him…
Nothing.
I wouldn't tell him anything. He did just fine on his own.
