The First Time I Decided To Write

I was sitting in my grandmother’s basement, a dollar store notebook in hand. I drew my main character on the first page, his face elongated and out of proportion but good enough to come across as a person. The story was full-blown fantasy, since that was the only thing I believed to be real literature at the time. And the setting took place very far away from the real world, no modern technology for me, thank you very much.

I never finished it.

I have since learned that there is a lot more to real literature than fantasy and that the real world, in all its complexity, and yes, even its modern comforts, is one of the best settings for a story, because it grounds each of us and reminds us that narrative is not an escape from reality but a deep dive into it.

This post and the ones that follow are my attempt to keep plodding along through the imaginative life that started with the notebook in my grandmother’s basement. It is an attempt to dive back into reality and hopefully bring you along with me.

This journey may include stories, ponderings, rambling metaphors, or just thoughts about the world and what it means to be alive within it. As a result, my writing will almost never come in bite sized pieces, it probably will not be quick or easy to read and thereby finds itself as a bit of an oddity within the world of the internet.

Despite this fact, my hope for both myself and whatever reader wishes to come along is that I might claim as my own the task that Joseph Conrad believed every writer must attempt to achieve. My task is, “by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything.” As Conrad writes, “If I succeed, you shall find there . . . encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

I close in the hope that my writing can give you the space to hold still for a moment and see the world. To rest and be curious, and hopefully, glimpse some bit of truth you weren’t expecting.