Why I don't write for a living

I'm not sure what's gotten into me this evening. Nostalgia, perhaps. I dug out my writing folder from college. It contains my collected works, at least the ones that I have on paper. I have more on my hard drive, and on floppy, each backed up and stored in random (and unknown to me at this moment) locations throughout my house.

I don't think I'm the typical writer type. I don't read much - relatively speaking. My wife and daughter read constantly - annoyingly so on occasion. I listened to Stephen King's On Writing on CD (his autobiography, not one of his horror stories) and he recommends that any aspiring writer read constantly. If you have 15 spare minutes, he suggests, you should fill it by reading. That doesn't work for me.

What really inspired me to even begin writing was the promise of a high school course taught by one of the most revered teachers at Albert Lea High School (Mr. Cooper) called "Humor and Satire". My older siblings raved about it. I've never heard such hearty laughs. "That's for me," I thought.

Sadly, mine being the era of declining enrollment, that course was no longer offered by the time I could take it. But Mr. Cooper did teach a creative writing course, so I snagged it instead. He remembered my siblings being a creative bunch but did not burden me with their baggage (I remember meeting my 6th grade teacher and he told a friend of mine that his brother had been in his class a couple of years before and that my friend had "big shoes to fill". It deflated my friend, always having to hear about his wonderful older brother. Since that day I've always really appreciated teachers who treat each sibling independently.)

I wrote 2 stories that I remember for that class. I have since lost the paper versions and all that remains are the summaries, but I think it'll give you an idea of my work.

The first story was about a night lotman at a drive in theater. I literally plagiarized the first 2 or 3 paragraphs from a story my brother Ted left in his old bedroom (my bedroom my senior year of high school). Ted had been a night lotman at the drive in theater in Albert Lea and had a great start for the story. I asked him later where the rest of the story was and he said he'd never finished it, so I don't feel bad having stolen the first couple of paragraphs. Anyway, in the story, this night lotman is summoned to retrieve something from a storage room and while there he finds a peephole into the ladies' bathroom. He spies a gorgeous woman - I remember a line like "her breasts bounced to and fro like jello when one jiggles its bowl". He follows her back to her boyfriend's Trans Am, then pouts about his lot in life. After his shift, so late as to be near sunrise, the lotman arrives home to see the local news, where that same Trans Am has been destroyed in an accident. "Both passengers were killed" says the anchorman.

I think there was a word limit to the assignment so I killed her off. I do remember Mr. Cooper pinged me because she was the passenger and her boyfriend was the driver, so the correct line should have been "Both occupants were killed."

I thought I was being pretty risque for a small-town high school senior. I don't know what anyone else wrote, but I'm sure mine was pretty different.

The second story (made up completely on my own this time) was about an aging football player. He was an offensive lineman - a thankless position usually filled with relatively anonymous men. His assignment was to block the nearly unblockable man in the biggest game of the year. I remember setting the unblockable man up as a near mythical creature by having the anonymous o-lineman see him a crowded restaurant the night before the game. Our aging hero watched this nearly 300 pound man (that was a HUGE lineman for the 1980's) chase down and catch a fly using chopsticks while nimbly negotiating a crowded Chinese restaurant.

Our hero performed admirably on game day until a pileup late in the 4th quarter of a close game. Crazy things happen in those pileups on the goalline, you see. In this pileup, our hero's hand somehow ended up in the pants of the unblockable man. The unblockable man ejaculated on the hero's hand, right there in the pileup. I believe there was some kind of terrible pun in there:
Aging Hero, challenging Unblockable Man to a fight in the pileup: "Come on, man!"
In the words of our hero, "and he came, right there, on my hand."

Eww. Isn't that awful? In my defense, I was only 17.

Anyway, I've linked a story I wrote my senior year of college at the bottom of this post. My very last quarter in college I had 3 night classes - Computer Science 3400 - theory of algorithms, Art History - the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and Intro to Fiction Writing. An easy quarter by any measure. The story linked below was an afterthought I threw together 2 days before it was due. The class had only 2 writing assignments - a long short story and a short short story. Below is the short short story.

It's kind of a stretch for me. I'm definitely from the "write what you know" school of writing, so writing a story from a woman's perspective was a challenge. The professor, who was a woman, absolutely loved this story, much moreso than my long short story. I thought just the opposite. Anyway, if I get around to retyping the long short story I'll post that too.

Anyway, I really like the opening paragraph of this one. Click the link and enjoy. I had fun retyping it. I probably haven't read it for 15 years.

The Reunion by Phil Gonzalez, 1989