I was writing my first novel when I met my wife 33 years ago. It was an exercise and a test of whether I could do it. An examination of my own determination. I had no intention of ever publishing that book, and I never did. I knew it was bad writing. Really, really bad. I did finish it, and I don’t think I ever let anyone read it. It was a self-challenge to see if I had the ability and perseverance to write a long-form piece of fiction of over 300 pages.
That was 1990. I was 23 years old. I’d written some fiction before. Short stories and longer prose poems. Some department in the arts college at the University had chosen one of my very short stories, submitted by my creative writing professor, for publication in their yearly magazine. That was the first time I ever even considered the idea of being a public writer. A published writer. I was working the night shift at a juvenile detention facility, and I had to monitor all the audio and visual security monitors and do “rounds” every 30 minutes. Several times a night (on busier nights) the police would bring in an arrested juvenile and I’d have to process them and write reports. Sometimes things got exciting. But for six or seven hours on most nights I was doing absolutely nothing (we didn’t have cell phones or anything like it back then, thank God.) So, I started typing.
That’s what I’d call long-form bad writing today. Just typing. A friend asked my opinion of his novel one time. I said, “This is just typing, and it’s bad typing.”
But that novel I was writing in 1989-90 wasn’t when I started writing. I started writing when I first got to college in 1985.
Writing was different then, eighteen years old with no computer and I didn’t have a typewriter either. I wrote longhand in notebooks, and nobody read what I wrote or knew that I wrote unless I showed them. I wasn’t writing to be read and back then you had to write something long-form for publication (as far as I knew,) and then go get a copy of Writer’s Market for $14 at the Waldenbooks in the mall, and spend months or years sending off queries to agents or publishers—which I had no stomach for; Never developed a desire to do that game, and I never did. I wrote mainly very short stories or poems for myself, exercises in writing, and they were all self-indulgent and very bad. But I never planned on publishing and had no idea that Indie publishing would rise up a quarter century later.
People sometimes ask me when I started to write, and that was probably it, my freshman year in college. I was alone more than I had been in my whole life, so I read constantly. I’d always read a lot, but never seriously. Then I read seriously. Classics, sci-fi, fantasy. I read Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis. Crane and Hawthorne. Twain and Dickens.
It was at that time that I realized that reading was critical to an understanding of the world and the search for truth in it. I wasn’t a Christian then, other than nominally, but I had no prejudices about what I read. I read religious books and classics of literature and historical biographies too. Naturally, I started writing because I had an overwhelming desire to document that time, at least to myself. I think it was a way to declare to myself that my life had meaning since I documented it, and I was very impressed with myself for doing the work even though the writing was awful. That’s really how you learn to write. You write awfully, then embark on the long tortuous lifetime of making the writing less awful.
I didn’t use a typewriter until much later when I got a job at the juvenile jail. Then I had access to a government electric typewriter and all the typing paper I could want. But in ’85 and ‘86 I wrote longhand on legal pads or in notebooks and it was all really just for me. Short stories and bad poems and self-reflective nonsense a mile wide but an inch deep. I didn’t have life experiences worth writing about until the summer of ’86, and then they were mostly things I wouldn’t write about until much later. Disguised as fiction.
Writing is an exercise. So, when people say, “When did you start writing?” I say, “I’ve always written.” And by always, I mean – as soon as I had experiences as an adult outside the womb of my family. I didn’t know I was a real person until I wrote things down. I’m not sure I was a person until I started to write.
At first, you write shallow, self-indulgent nonsense with no real truth or reason. Then you learn to see and think and remember, and you live your life and have experiences, and if those experiences are interesting, notable, or universal, you can write about them and maybe someone, somewhere might be interested in reading them. Probably not, but they might. Most people think their thoughts and experiences are interesting because they happened to them. They probably aren’t. I was told by an Irish buggy driver in Central Park one time, “Hey, I want to write a book.” I said, “What would your book be about?” He said, “My life.”
“There are a lot of lives,” I said. I’m not discouraging anyone from writing, especially just for themselves or their families, but just because something happened to you in your life, doesn’t make it unique or interesting to the public. Writing isn’t a projection of a linear list of events that happened. The writing is the art part.
I came to understand that I am a “noticer.” I see things and notice them and remember them so that I can use them later. That catalog of memories and thoughts allowed me to write truly and in a way that people identified with.
After that first novel, I started writing mainly non-fiction. And that’s what I wrote for most of the next twenty years. Non-fiction was how I learned to express myself and my thoughts in a way that people could understand and track them. My non-fiction writing became very popular, especially when the Internet got going and journaling became blogging. That’s how I got better. I wrote every day and worked on the writing constantly. Fiction writing didn’t start again until I wrote my first published novel in 2011. And even then, I didn’t submit myself to the bone-crusher that is the mainstream publishing system. Later, I would experience it obliquely, but for the most part, I avoided it.
I’ve written a couple of dozen books, and published half of them. I’ve sold more than a half-million copies, and people buy my books every day of the year. The local bookstore carries my books, and they sell well.
And I still get paid to write today.
It’s been a heck of a ride.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.