I was off and running. After getting that A+ in fourth grade, I was hooked. I submitted myself to constant bombardment of Universal Classic Monster movies and 1950’s “Big Bug” science fiction films. Whenever I had free time — which is to say whenever I wasn’t at school, doing homework, or riding my bike with my childhood friend — I was watching monster movies or writing horror short stories.

Most of my stories only ran three or four pages. That was okay by me. I was just having fun, telling and retelling quickly paced, poorly worded stories about Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy. Hey, I was about eleven years old. At least I knew a sentence needed both a subject and a predicate, and I knew the difference between a noun and a pronoun. So I was happy with it.

As weeks turned into months, the page count slowly started to tick up. Within a year, most of my stories ran an average of about six pages. Bear in mind, I was writing by hand in blue ink on wide-rule notebook paper. This was 1971 or 72. This was long before laptops, word processors; this was an age when electric typewriters were the tool of businesses and the status symbol of wealthy individuals. So in addition to practicing the mechanics of the craft (letters create words, words create paragraphs, paragraphs create stories, and stories communicate emotions and convey thoughts and feelings), my cursive penmanship improved simply due to sustained repetition.

When I finished a story, I stapled the pages together down the left side so the pages could be leafed through like any both book. Three staples only. I had no cover. The thought never occurred to me. The top page was the first page of the story. The title squatted, centered on the top line followed by name immediately underneath. Then skip two lines, indent a quarter inch, and start the story.

My desk was of sturdy pine. Constructed with a wide flat top and ample leg room underneath on the left, the right side sported three (count ’em! THREE!) drawers. The top and middle drawers were identical, each about nine inches wide, and two or three inches deep. The bottom drawer, however, was three times deeper, a full six to nine inches deep.

After Operation Stapler had been successfully completed, I opened the bottom drawer n my desk and consigned my new literary creation to its gloomy bowels. Over time, they started to pile up. By summer, that deep bottom drawer was almost half full.

Prior to this, my summers had been comprised of riding bikes, climbing trees, and convincing my Mom to take me to the swimming pool. Now, all I wanted to do was sit at the desk and write every day, and watch TV when I got tired of writing. Even then, I somehow knew that every writer has to take a break and recharge the creative batteries.

But a true seminal moment, a moment that was going to change my life forever, was right around the corner.

As I said at the end of my previous blog post regarding creative writing, “I was sure  of one thing: I was going to apply myself and see where it might lead”.

Actually, I can’t look back and call it creative writing, since I had totally ripped off a Godzilla movie and scribbled out three ages of mayhem in order to score an A. But I certainly loved the attention, and got me to thinking that maybe, since this writing stuff came easy to me and I got positive attention (ego strokes!) when I did it well, maybe I should really try to come up with something original.

As many young amateur writers do, I wrote what I knew. That meant that since I spent all my time watching Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, et al., I started writing out (in longhand!) story after story after story. Naturally, they were not good, as I simply lifted characters (copyrighted characters at that!) from the movies I watched, and plunked them down into settings created by my own imagination.

Since I had not developed a voice as a writer, my stories simply mimicked the writers I was reading at the time. Most writers start this way; it is all part of that growing process of a writer finding his or her path on the road to being able to see what others see, but be able to take away something different from the norm and then relate that to others in a unique and interesting way.

So in the evenings, on weekend, and on school holidays, I put pen to paper and wrote. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. Then I’d take a break, play with my friends, watch a scary movie, etc., then I went back and wrote some more. And some more.

You get the idea.

Writers WRITE.

Artists learn their craft, flex and develop their artistic muscles, and sharpen and hone their skills and instincts by actually DOING what it is they want to do. Certainly, students of any art can and must learn the fundamentals through organized classes. Teachers become mentors. For me as a would-be writer, that meant English Comp. A lot of it, all through Elementary, Junior High (Middle School) and High School.

But mostly, it meant WRITING. Putting the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair, staring at a blank page, and getting the ideas flowing from my mind, through my hand and pen, onto the paper, with only my eyes to guide me. Sometimes it took me days to finish a story. After all, I as just a kid. I had chores, homework, playtime with pals, and a short attention span. When I had finished, I would edit. This was editing at its most primitive: using a red ink pen to make notations about spelling and grammar. Scratching out words, phrases, even sometimes entire sentences and paragraphs. They sounded good when I wrote them, but did not pass muster in the cold glaring light of an editor’s eye. And then, I would rewrite the story again, incorporating my notes and revisions into the new draft.

A funny thing happened as a I spent the ensuing months performing this ritual. My writing actually started to get better. My characters became less stilted. Dialogue became properly punctuated. The prose lost its rough edges, and smoothed out like rough wood under the gentle rubbing of sandpaper. Of course, I had started at the very bottom, so I had nowhere to go but up, right? But the point is, I did improve as I gained experience and found my “groove”.

When I had the story written and rewritten (and rewritten again!) the way I wanted it, what did I do? I paper-clipped and tucked the slightly curled pages of wide-ruled notebook paper that contained my story into the deep bottom drawer on my desk.

I knew I would be starting a new story the next day.