The Bicycle-ness of Writing

An Essay on Writing
by ryan stuart

It was the stars, I swear. It was the galaxy of shiny little stars that made me want to be a writer.

Fourth grade. Picture a 1960s classroom, pictures of famous dead white guys (no black guys, no women) on the walls. A room full of white kids. Little white milk cartons passed out at snack time. A class probably bored and hot (it's Phoenix, before the installation of air conditioning everywhere), fidgety, except for me: I am rapt.

My teacher stands before the class with my alien-invasion story. It's covered with little stars.

She's explaining to the class that this is a great story. And she's explaining that it's a great story because... because I used concrete details (inventing an interview with Time magazine). Because I used dialogue. Because there was suspense. And so on... I had no idea I had done anything special.

But as she talked a fuzzy thing became clear: writing was not a mysterious gift. It was not a dispensation from a nebulous and possibly cranky muse. It was just a skill, a craft, and if one applied oneself, one could learn it. Writing could be taken apart and understood as easily as taking apart a bicycle. Granted some bicycles were more complex than others, but all could be reverse engineered.

And if one studied enough bicycles, bicycle-ness would eventually, like a photograph in developing solution, come clear.

So I set out to read. For thirty years I read about 150 books a year. When I was busy dropping out of high school, I could usually be found hanging out in an empty lot with a book. When I was in the Army I used to go to the firing ranges with a paperback. In college majoring in English, I and a friend would pile up our books and measure the height of the stack each semester (as I recall he kicked my butt with a 3-foot stack one semester).

I am without doubt a book junkie. There are alas no 12-step programs for me.

And for the last five years I have turned serious attention to writing. I've spent a couple years writing short stories, screenplays, and a stage play. A novel died of bad timing, but that's ok , lesson learned. I find I now pretty much have the chops to say whatever I wish to say, although I don't always know what that is until I begin to write. Writing to the length of a novel is still daunting, but I've no doubt I could do it.

And I have blessedly run out of excuses. I found my writer's voice (a suspect phrase to me) by putting enough words on paper. I can't claim I have no time, because I know I can in fact devote a couple of hours a day to writing, and that's all it takes. I've made dreams of fame and fortune walk the plank, because they made me fret over whether what I wanted to say was marketable. One might as well chop off my fingers. I have finally grown up enough to be self-disciplined (I think that was the hardest part). I've even spent a year choked and mute because of... who knows, I don't believe in writer's block, not really. But there it was.

And now I am ready to embark. This year I will write a full-length work, either a novel or a stage play, and polish it and re-work it and perfect it, and even try to sell it. This is not wishful thinking, this is a fact. I believe my long apprenticeship is over.