Once, back when I lived in Des Moines, and was an uptight straightedge that didn’t do anything much other that work at Archives, a new record store I’d been hired to start and manage (oh, about 1991 or so), I bought a manual typewriter across the street from my apartment building at an antiques store. It was perfectly functional and as there was nothing to do but run, work out and watch cable TV (being Des Moines and all); I immediately set upon writing a story. It was to be about the origin of the shop where I bought the typewriter. I was really getting into the atmosphere of the store, and started working on all manner of details of what secret treasures might lay within. Right about that time, Davo Wilkins, the only punk rocker in Des Moines other than me at the time, knocked on the door and came on in. I’d met him not just a few days earlier at the record store and he decided that we were fast friends although our lifestyles couldn’t have been more different. He thought American punk music was the only valid music and I was into British punk. One of the conversations we had over and over was that punk started in the U.S., caught fire in the U.K., and then came back over. He brought a six-pack of Mickey’s wide-mouth beer for himself and was smoking a cigarette. “Hey,” he greeted, totally disturbing my concentration. Well, I guess my place had turned into a party and there wasn’t much I could do about it. So, that would have been version # 1 of that story, which I ended up calling, “Idol Curiosity”. When I attended Kansas University’s summer workshop with fellow Psychedelic Action Dog (PAD) alumni Alvin Mullen, Chris McKittrick, and Kij Johnson in 1995, I reconstructed “Idol Curiosity” and submitted it as one of three stories for the workshop. There were eighteen of us, with three stories each. We had to read, examine and feedback on 51 other stories. This was the biggest workshop to date. The overwhelming feedback that I got on the story was that the main character (my first person perspective main characters are almost always nameless) didn’t deserve his fate. I went back to work on the story, now working on an Apple Macintosh computer, with a whopping 1 MB of RAM (plenty for word processing). Now, changing the title to “Antique Fetish”, and putting the dictionary definition(s) of fetish at the top, I resubmitted it to the group with some changes to the character’s character and hoped it would please. The group had lost interest. I toyed with it for a while with the local writers’ workshop group, which met weekly for cheap margaritas on Tuesdays, but still wasn’t finding the tone that I wanted. Last year, I stripped it down, reduced it to its constituent parts, got some editing assistance, and I finally submitted Idol Curiosity a few days ago. It really isn’t all that different from the story I started in Des Moines 22 years ago. If Davo just hadn’t broken my concentration… who knows? But, I think, if you keep at something long enough, and don’t give up, even the most pitifully whining mediocrity can give way to greatness. Or maybe other people’s opinions just aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. As helpful as the workshop process is, a writer just has to discover his voice and confidence and damn everybody else. If the reader enjoys it, that’s all that matters. They, after all, are the ones buying the magazines.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 18:59:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015