Genuinely Real: The Introduction

I honestly don’t know what I’m afraid of.  I have no problem being critiqued or even if someone were to tell me, “It stinks.  It’s just plain awful!”  I’d be OK with that, really.  It’s just that I’ve started this blasted….thing, this novel or blog or whatever this will turn out to be this time….  I’ve started it many times before.  I think most of all, I’m afraid of failing.  I’m afraid I won’t finish it.  I’m afraid I’ll write endless pages only to have a virus enter the computer and wipe everything clean.  Well, thankfully that’s only happened once before.

I never know how to start, where to begin.  I know I want to write.  I know what I want to write about.  I just never know how get things going or how to take it from here to there.  At work, I start things off in my head and it sounds absolutely brilliant.  Of course, I cannot stop work and jot down everything into a notebook so by the time I get home, I’ve forgotten just about everything and wind up with long, run-on sentences that go on for days.  But what do you care?  Are you, the reader, an English major?  And so what if you are?  What can you do besides teach English?  And not the language, but the “art” and “study” of places verbs and pronouns into a rocket ship-shaped diagram.  Nobody wants to hear from you anyway.

Oh, and that’s another thing.  I go through various stages of what sort of writer I aspire to be.  Most of the time, I want to be Dave Barry.  Reading many of Dave’s articles have caused me to produce a sound many would recogonize as laughter.  It’s kind of hard to get me to laugh out loud, genuinely.  I laugh, I really do.  But to produce a genuine laugh, now that takes something really special.  It’s not that I’m a mean person, I tend to think of myself as more intelectual in fact that it takes a smarter joke to cause the sound of laughter to erupt from my gut.

On the other hand, an unexpected squeaky fart noise will cause the same type of laugh.

I thought I was funny.  I make people laugh at work.  I go back and read the pages and pages and pages of somethings I had written only to discover I wasn’t funny at all.  Heck, that’s not even interesting, I say to myself.  To be fair, about ten percent of what I wrote trying to be funny was actually funny.  Chuckle worthy, maybe.  Not gut-busting funny.

At other times, I wanted to write seriously.  I attempted to write a true life account of my husband’s life as a teenager in a seriously serious manner.  But of course I would need humor.  His hundreds of stories are not without genuine giggles.  I had the exact image in my head of what this story would be like, what the movie would look like and I had even picked out the soundtrack.  It was so perfect that even as I write this, I want to stray and go back to that project because I know how positively beautiful it could truly be.

But when I write, it never turns out like that.  No, it’s all out of order and that guy wasn’t even there, didn’t that happen before this, and this was much more funny/dramatic/sad/adventure-filled when it was told to me.

Maybe some stories are better off being told instead of written down.  Or better yet, maybe some things are better left to the professionals to write them.

We had discussions at great lengths about this.  I wanted it to be honest, funny, and for the reader to connect with the main character, my now husband.  But how would I write about someone else’s life?  How does one even begin to do that? 

You write as though the stories are being told to you.  You tell the stories as best as you remember and it will not be perfect.  And still, I have not gotten back to this.  I’m afraid I won’t be able to tell it correctly and that the stories won’t encourage the reader to laugh or cry as I did when they were told to me.  You see, it’s something I do not wish to even begin unless I know I can do it right.

Yes, then there’s The Blog.  I began keeping a blog--a sort of online diary or news feed or coupon database, whatever you wish--because I heard you could make money with blogs.  And some people do.  I assure you, I researched these folks that don’t even have a day job because of the money they collect from advertisers posting they’re brightly colored images of detergent and dog food on their own websites.

I never made any money on my blog because I was writing to make money.  My little stories were not funny because I wasn’t writing for me.  The best stories I ever wrote were because I wrote them knowing another soul would never see them.  I even wrote twenty-three glorious pages on what I’ve learned through my short years.  It was meant to be humorous as I guided the reader through the process of purchasing a “fixer-upper” home, first jobs, and learning how to cook as gravy quite literally exploded in the kitchen, covering every square inch of exposed space.

I meant to write a book and just never got back to it.  I became stuck.  I didn’t know how to lead the reader from the exploding gravy to our kitchen ceiling caving in, or what have you.  But it was good.  And it was funny.  All that holds true because I wrote it for myself with plans to take it to a publisher, rake in my millions and spend my days playing in my water park that was built in my back yard.

I never finished because I had become depressed.  It’s hard to write funny, let alone write funny when you are so deep into The Pit that you can’t see the light at the opening.  So I gave it up.

Oh, the depression comes and goes.  At least as longas I can remember, since around the age of seven or eight.  And along with this emotional roller coaster has always been my desire to write.  Even as a child, I wrote long, boring stories--the kind only a child can write--accompanied by illustrations and stabled bindings.  In high school, my English teacher offered to set me up with an internship with the newspaper.  She thought I’d be great in that type of setting.  I’ve come to realize that many writers get started in newspapers.  Dave Barry writes a weekly column for a newspaper and has oodles of books, not tom mention oodles of cash I would imagine.

My downfall was that I was a teenager.  A non-paying job?  No thank you, I said.  And from there I went on to work for a horrible apartment complex, cleaning urine from the crisper box of a refrigerator. 

I often wonder how my life may have differed had I take that internship.  I find myself thinking of all the different possibilities, where I’d be in life now had I made that one tiny decision differently.  Naturally, it’s quite simple to focus on the positive things that may have happened.  I might be making more money; I might have been on the Best Sellers List, and so on.

But maybe it would not have turned out for the good.  There are just as many things that could have gone wrong as could have gone well.  And see?  I did pay attention in English class.  I wrote “well” instead of “good”.  Though I’ve never been one to think that it matters.  Who cares if it’s considered proper English.  Who speaks that way?  The words both have the same meaning.  Some college professor somewhere at some point in time needed money so he wrote a text book on all of this and you know what?  NO ONE CARES!


So why write now?  Why right now?  Why do this at this present moment when I could be sitting in front of the TV eating potato chips and watching The King of Queens reruns on DVD?

Because I think I am supposed to.  All this time, all these trial and error moments, all the times I read an article about a writer, each time that I watch a movie that has a writer as the main character and I say, “I wanna do that.”  It keeps nagging at me, prodding at me, and it will not let me forget it.

I’m not sure what I’ll write about yet.  As I write this, I don’t know if I’ll forge another blog or leave this on my six year old computer’s hard drive for no one to ever see.  Even as my head throbs because my eyes keep darting back and forth from keyboard to computer screen, I know I am supposed to be doing this.  Even after three pages, my wrist aches from damaged tendons produced only from hard labor jobs.  I’m not gonna go back and re-read everything.  I’m not gonna have so-called proper grammer.  I’m not gonna flawlessly glide from one subject to the next.  (And so far you're saying to yourself, "Well, duh.")

I’m writing this because I think God wants to use me for something and I can only ignore God for so long before he pulls the chair out from under me.  I don’t care how long and drawn out each subject is as this intended-to-be-one-pager turned out to be.  It may not be funny at all times and it might even get down right boring.  This is me.  Raw and uncut.

…And my head is about to explode.  Where is the Asprin?
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