Selling My Soul (In a Good Way) is a weekly journal
about my efforts to get a debut novel published.
This thought, this week: where did my urge to write begin?
Most honest answer: not sure.
Another answer: definitely by high school.
I started writing a novel during high school. Let’s say I was sixteen. My faulty memory believes I never finished the first draft of The DiGorgia Incident. My less faulty memory is confident that I didn’t know what I was doing. I was clueless that a first draft—if finished—would lead to more drafts. While not completing the story, I obviously recall the book’s name. I also recall—since this was in the Cold War and since I loved reading spy novels (take a bow, Scottish-American author Helen MacInnis, whose novels I devoured)—it took place in California and Italy and nasty Commies were involved.
Write what you know, they say. Ha!
Knowing nothing about spy craft, Italy, or weapons didn’t stop me, a geeky, introverted high school student, from trying to create a story.
In college, I always felt more comfortable with essay tests.
In college, I also discovered the unbridled power of (wait, wait) revision. When registering for classes in my first semester at Fresno State College, I confronted a huge roadblock: hardly any classes were available that matched my needs and interests. As a lowly freshman, the non-computerized system was designed for first-semester students to be last in line. In a cavernous gymnasium, with tables sprawled across the basketball court, with hundreds of staff and students milling around, the classes available and the classes filled were marked on sheets of paper taped to walls and bleachers. I desperately wanted (and needed) an English class.
All gone. English 101. English 101. English 101.
Then, in the midst of the panic and sweat and noise of the crowd, an English 101 class was hastily added, scrawled onto the bottom of a huge piece of paper. I hurried over and registered. The class was taught by a Ms. Floy Paynter (yes, I remember her name) and would be held in the Engineering Building not far from where Fresno State’s Agriculture unit . . . where cattle gathered and the wind in the wrong direction was, er, uniquely fragrant.
The class was a revelation. Ms. Paynter, a short, dumpy, high-energy lecturer with bottle blonde hair, forced us to write every week.
I enjoyed writing!
Every week!
But I also enjoyed procrastinating!
I never turned in anything that hadn’t been written the night before (or the morning of) the due date. I suspect I was not alone in my embrace of APS (Academic Procrastination Syndrome). As we approached the final for English 101, Ms. Paynter demanded that we bring in a favorite essay from our semester of weekly assignments.
Though the final test likely included a few other since-forgotten questions to answer, the bulk of the grade would be based on REVISING our favorite essay.
Revelatory. I earned my A. I learned that writing is revising. I yearned to write more and to write better.
I’d take another class from Floy Paynter at Fresno State. But I would soon graduate, get married, go to seminary, have my grandfather get murdered, go through a divorce, and—before ever starting to serve in my first official church—I started to write the draft of a novel.
It would be about what I knew: death and divorce and a family in anguish.
It would be accomplished with what I had learned: it’s all about revisions.
I still write, fool that I am. I still want to tell stories. And my life, certainly the best parts, always involve . . . revision. Admitting mistakes. “Killing” off the darlings. Trying to craft sentences that help me, and the reader, feel the joy and pain and love and cruelty of being human.
Since last week’s Selling My Soul, I sent three (3) new queries and received five (5) rejections. Agent #62 wrote, “This is a unique premise and certainly has strong appeal. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I didn’t find myself as pulled in by the narrative as I’d hoped to be, so I’m going to step aside.” A total of sixty-five (65) queries have been launched.
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“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” – Flannery O’Connor