the drunken writer's first stumbles

i had to write this for class, but i thought i'd put it up here. i wrote a poem about this same book called "The Black Book of Lore" check em both out...

         The intimate relationship I have with writing began on the first Christmas right after the clocks hit double zeroes. Somewhere between all the random junk family members pass to each other on this sacred holiday was a gift that actually meant something. Its cover was shiny black plastic, and it was bound with several large rings. Inside were 500 pages of lined blankness starring me in the face. I had scarcely read a book that long before in my life, but now I was being informally asked to write one. Thus began my crusade with the written word, and no man could say who would emerge the victor.

            The first thing I remember writing in it was a letter to my girlfriend. Our awkward courtship had begun only a couple weeks before, but a 17 year old’s passion burns hot enough to think any unordinary acquaintance is preordained by Heaven. The letters I scribbled out were horrible and were mostly made up of movie quotes I felt better fit us than the characters who were created for the single purpose of selling tickets to ignorant teens. By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, I was single again, but my affair with writing, which started off as a one night stand, was gradually becoming more of a full scale relationship.

            I had been taking a creative writing course at my school and was required to write about once a day in the journal the teacher provided, so the new journal was mostly neglected until the summer came around. My first main purpose I created for the journal was my attempt to write a novel/movie script, but after about two pages my brother read over what I had written and said, “It sucked.” I read over what had taken about twenty minutes to spew out and agreed with him. Discouraged, I put the journal back on the shelf for the rest of the summer.

            My senior year of high school blew in with no fanfare, and the only highlight of the upcoming year was taking the second part of creative writing. I had experienced some minor success at the end of last year by having a handful of poems squeezed into the school’s magazine at the 11^th hour. Once again, the class was given journals to write down their work, so I slapped a picture of Rocky Balboa on the cover and neglected the black behemoth I had barely filled with a drop of ink to obscurity on the shelf.

            By this time, I was more in the habit of writing poetry because we had to write about a page a night, and this method made it easier to write more while writing less. This poetry was mostly philosophical and therefore terrible. I cower like I’m about to get a blow to the stomach when I sit down nowadays to retrace my first clumsy footsteps. However, inspiration soon found me in a seventh period art class.

            Her name’s not important, yet she was the muse who finally took the shackle off my tongue. I knew I had to write about her, but I dared not put forth these feelings into something that a respected teacher would read. Instead, I returned to my pathetic library and pulled the forgotten black journal off the shelf. Opening to a fresh page, the first real images and strong symbols flowed from my hands onto the empty sea of white paper. Over the months, page after page was filled with writing either about or dedicated to the woman who I loved the idea of more than any physical qualities she possessed.

            The vagueness of my writing evaporated like a shallow puddle. Poems to impalpable motifs were replaced by sledgehammers and cinderblocks of images that I wanted to assault the reader with. Even the teacher I so admired, who lorded over the creative writing class like a red haired Zeus, acknowledged my writing’s increasing strength. By the end of the year, I had as many pieces of writing allowed filling up real estate in the illustrious high school literary magazine.

            Eventually the girl disappeared. I continued to write her poetry in passing as a yearning for days past, but even those soon came to a trickle before finding their place in my bone yard of writing topics. Luckily, as the corpse of her memory festered into putrid goo in the remote abyss of my mind, the sheer joy of expressing myself through writing had filled any void that may have been left. When the time to scuttle off to college came, the ever expanding black journal was one of the few relics to make the journey with me.

            Writing in the journal finally became a daily habit of mine during my freshman year of college. Every night around 11 o’clock, I would take the book and a pen used only for it out of the top drawer of my desk and lumber down three sets of stairs to the first floor study lounge. Sitting at the same desk every night, I would stare out the window before settling into a trance-like state and begin the night’s work. I was still writing mostly poetry, but it wasn’t just to take up as many pages as I could with minimal effort. No, they actually meant something now, and even if no one would ever read them, I wanted them to be the best work I could wring from my saturated mind.

            I fell out of the habit of writing every single day, but I was persistent enough that by the start of my junior year the book was filled. Upon its completion, I took a moment to reflect on what I had accomplished before reaching for a fresh journal that on the outside resembled a small Bible. However, I had grown weary of the task of physically writing everything down and had developed a taste for writing with a computer, a thought I abhorred in high school when I saw writing as analogous to praying. Needless to say, the new journal was disregarded shortly in favor of a keyboard.

            In the years since, most of my writing has been done in the middle of the night on a computer with a glass of bourbon not far from my reach and headphones serenading me with the voices of Adam Duritz, Eddie Vedder, and occasionally Neil Young. There have still been poems written on napkins and cartoon doodles on the backs of old test papers, but my real writing is done exclusively on a machine. This is not a reliable method as the old pen and paper, a computer crash and a foolish website editor has caused a good portion of my work to be lost, but I find it easier to translate the words from my mind to text in this fashion; there seems to be less delay in thinking up something and seeing it splayed out before me. 

            For the black journal that began my writing habit/hobby/obsession/vice/whatever, I discovered it again on a visit to my mother’s house. It was in the top shelf of an old dresser, blending in with old photo albums and yearbooks. I took a few minutes to reread a few of the more well remembered works before I closed it, admiring each scuff or tear in the cover as a badge of honor. A list of names that formed an ongoing dedication page scribbled inside the front cover was now barely readable to the ignorant eye. I returned it to its resting place and thought about how my friend had commented that it would one day be in a museum. That possibility seems unlikely, but it will always hold a place of honor in my heart.

            The blink of an eye it has taken me to get from that fateful Christmas morning to this period in my life was paved with the pages from the fabled “Black Book of Lore.” Writing isn’t about following a recipe to arrive at a standard result; it’s about being unafraid to fail over and over again, making the minimal amount of progress with each new draft. True writers need a place to hone their craft. Whether it is forgotten chalkboards, cocktail napkins, word processors, or the old standby journals, the journey from novice wordsmith to publishable author is fueled by an unrelenting desire to be the best at something only a sliver of the population cares about for reasons the author no longer remembers.