Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Notes from a Shameless Dabbler

by Guest Storyteller Jeff Osier

I used to think of myself as a writer. Never mind the details. Started when I was a little kid, went through a new phase every year (at least), started submitting stories to magazines in my mid-twenties, accumulated rejection slips, found some sympathetic editors in the small press, managed to get about thirty short stories published, co-wrote a nonfiction book that actually got published, wrote a couple of novels, one of which I had an agent try to sell. I never did sell one, though. Finally, I ran out of gas. I never ran out of ideas. I never suffered from writer’s block. I just gradually came to realize that I hated the way I wrote, hated everything I’d ever gotten published, and had grown dissatisfied and disillusioned with the whole enterprise. Besides, I was finding that idly drawing cartoons and playing guitar and mandolin brought me infinitely more satisfaction than writing.

See, more than anything else, I’m a shameless dabbler. I’ve spent most of the past few years content to think of myself as an ex-writer, when I’ve thought about it at all.

In September 2005 my wife and I visited my daughter in Austin, TX. She was a senior at the University of Texas at the time, and living in a co-op with about fifteen other people. As a result, we were spending a lot of time around twenty-year-olds who don’t live with their parents. In addition, my wife had brought along some early Elvis Costello, so I found myself listening to a lot of music I’d loved when I was in my own early twenties. Somehow, the conjunction of these two things, over the course of five days and a heat wave during which the daytime temperature never dipped below 100 degrees, triggered something in me. Something trivial, of course.

It got me thinking about… well… going to art school in the ‘70s. Things I used to do. Things I wished I’d done better. People I used to know. People I wished I’d known. And of course, things I wished I’d figured out decades before I did.

I brought a little germ of an idea home from Austin with me. It wasn’t a story idea. No, this was just fodder for what over the next couple of months became a ridiculously potent fantasy exercise: I’m 21 again, only this time I’m making more interesting choices, meeting cooler people, and screwing up in much more impressive and colorful ways. Just something to ponder when I’m too lazy to read or draw or practice the mandolin.

A job. A neighborhood. Art school, of course. Characters defined by a trait or an ambition or a resemblance to someone real. Or, sometimes, the real people I knew at the time. Underground comics and especially their spawn: lowbrow painting. And of course punk and new wave, 1977 style. A band.

Just props in this little scenario I was dreaming up.

Then there was the girl. I mean, what would my utopian art school experience be without the perfect art school girlfriend? Except that, of course, she was far from perfect. I tempered her character with the coolest maladies I could conjure. As fall progressed, I realized that everything else was just the background for the strange, spectacular girl I’d invented.

By early December, I was actually starting to worry about myself. These people were casting shadows.

In January I tried reading Don Quixote. I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed it too, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d sit there with the book in my lap for two hours at a stretch and read thirty pages… maybe. I was too lost in my own daydreams to even read. Finally, I sat my wife down and told her everything that had been happening over the past three-plus months. Her reaction?

“It sounds like a novel.”

“But it isn’t even a story. It’s just a series of triumphs and ridiculous good luck.”

“Well… start writing it down. At least get it out of your system.”

So, on January 10, 2006, I created a document and churned out several fragments: an introduction to a character, dialog between the two main characters, and another dialog between two other characters. Looking over it afterwards, it didn’t seem like much.

But the next night I created another document and did more of the same, just hopping around in time, introducing new characters or fleshing out the ones already introduced. The writing was no better, but what did that matter?

One month later, I had about ten of these documents. Out of curiosity, I created a new document and called it ‘timeline.’ I went through all of the other documents, copied the material I liked and pasted it into the timeline doc, in chronological order. It came to 110 double-spaced pages. The writing was awful, the characters were changing names and attributes daily, and half the scenes I wrote seemed unusable even as I was copying them into my timeline. But why did it have to be usable?

To focus myself a little better, I picked beginning and end dates and decided to limit myself to events occurring within that time period. There was no plot, just a series of accomplishments. In fact, the whole story could be summed up thus: boy meets girl, boy and girl start writing songs and painting together, boy and girl start a band, and, at the very end, boy and girl decide to start their own comic book. That was it. But since this wasn’t a novel, why did it have to be interesting?

I came up with weird ways of working. Sometimes I would thoroughly work out a scene in my head, write it, and insert it into the timeline. Then, a few weeks later, never having gone back to what I’d written, I would have completely rethought the scene in my head, so I would rewrite it from scratch. Only then would I reread my original version. A slightly modified version of the winner would get to take up residence in the timeline.

In March I started subjecting my main characters to stresses I hadn’t considered before. In fact, the characters themselves were always suggesting disastrous, life-ruining experiences to me. I still didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. They just… insisted on it.

And then I realized what I had to do. It was so simple. Since the bulk of the story took place over a period of exactly a year, I decided that I would make that year the best and the worst that either of the two main characters would ever have. Possibilities were bubbling up constantly and I followed every one of them, just stretching the characters to their breaking points to see what would happen.

Organizing this… stuff… into a novel wasn’t something I set out to do. But now, old habits were asserting themselves. I had no idea who would ever want to read this thing. It would help to have an audience, though, wouldn’t it? Not to motivate me, because I clearly needed no outside motivation. No, if I selected an audience I would feel more of a compulsion to make it interesting. You know… interesting to other people? The real ones, living outside my head? So I picked my wife. She was the one who really had played in bands and had led a genuinely interesting, exciting life. I tried to imagine, if this was a novel by someone other than her husband and she picked it up in a bookstore, what would make it interesting enough for her to want to read it?

On July 19, a little over six months after I started, I had a 754-page first draft. I had written the whole thing in a series of eighty-some individual documents and had alternate versions of many scenes, as well as scenes that never made it into the timeline. So who knows how many pages I really wrote over those six months. Close to a thousand, I imagine. To celebrate, I read the whole thing from beginning to the end (onscreen), rewriting like crazy and – just to make it look more like a novel – took the rash step of dividing it into chapters.

And so I found myself doing whatever I could to make sure that this thing turned out to be everything I swore I didn’t care about when I first started writing it. By the end of October, it was about 560 manuscript pages. My wife had already read a draft of it and made plenty of helpful suggestions, but I wanted other people to read it. I wanted confirmation or refutation of something that was starting to seem very insistent to me.

I was beginning to believe that I’d actually done something pretty good, something I wouldn’t have believed myself capable of: writing a snappy mainstream novel. I pushed my manuscript off onto other people, hungry for feedback. And, almost without thinking about it, I went out and bought a Guide to Literary Agents, and am trying to learn the craft of writing a decent query letter…

I don’t hold out huge hopes. Obviously. But it turned out so well that I can’t help but follow through. I’ve been churning out drawings and stories and playing instruments and writing tunes for most of my life, and I’ve never done anything that was so euphoric to work on and that I was so proud of when it was done. I’m sure that the pride I feel when I reread this manuscript is eighty percent my memory of the emotional state I was in when I wrote it, and that a great deal of what made writing this novel so incredible never really made it to the page – at least not in a form anyone else would catch.

It was never my intention to worry about those kinds of things. But suddenly I have this fast-paced, dialog-driven little novel that resembles nothing I’ve ever done before, and that seems to work better than anything I’ve ever written before. I’d be an idiot not to try to do something with this.

But of course I still think of myself as an ex-writer. Knowing myself as I do, 2006 could easily have been a fluke. I’m still trying to build my repertoire on mandolin, I’ve got some half-written tunes that require me to start playing electric guitar again, while writing a book about oil painters really makes me want to relearn how to oil paint, etc., etc. Who knows which of these things I’ll waste my time on in 2007? The idea that I’d just keep writing – that maybe I was on a roll and ought to try writing another novel while I still have the momentum – sounds like too sensible, too workable a plan for a shameless dabbler such as myself.

On the other hand, these characters resonated so much with me, and so many of them didn’t make it into the novel, I accidentally came up with an idea for a follow-up novel. A month or so ago, I wrote a four-page fragment. Nothing since, except that in my head, I’ve figured out the entire story. Names of characters, the subplots and the points at which they intersect, locations, conversations… all bubbling up in the same way they were a year ago. There is one difference: if I were to sit down today, I could already write a fairly detailed outline of this second book. But I won’t… I think I want it to stay fluid for a while longer. I seem to work better that way.

Wait a minute. Did I just say work?

I don’t know what the hell to do.

I may never finish Don Quixote.

—Jeff Osier

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4. 30 Days, 50,000 words… How, and Why?
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