On Not Writing, by Tom Dinard

He thinks he’s read somewhere that, for a writer, there’s nothing scarier than a blank page. But then, he thinks:

What about a blank 17 years?

He figures early 1993 was the last time he really wrote something, which seems odd considering would leave college a few months later and embark upon a journalism career that has seen him do a hell of a lot of, well, “writing.” But he remembers that 1993 piece well. It might be the last thing his fingers typed that he can truly be proud of.

Composed for a non-fiction class taught by a fading feminist semi-icon whose Brooklyn accent reminds him of his own Bronx-bred mother, the narrative, whose title escapes him, tells the stream-of-consciousness tale of a lovesick 22-year-old Creative Writing major shooting baskets in a local schoolyard in the dying desert sun of his college town.

The action sequences, which involve a few hot streaks from the corner and a fair share of rim-clanging bricks, are in normal type, but the key to this unearthed gem, the primary literary device, is the shooter’s italicized inner thought process as it sadly comes to the conclusion that no matter how many baskets he sinks in a row, he already knows: He’s not getting the girl, who’s already banging some tool with a ponytail and a motorcycle.

But just when this pathos seems to be peaking, a majestic moment pops up on the pavement nearby. A man in a wheelchair rolls along and our heartbroken hoops hero picks up the ball for a second, distracted. He stops shooting. He watches as the guy fights his way down the street, grunting, relentless. All of a sudden he doesn’t really have any problems.

The Arizona night air is getting chilly and he has bong hits to do back at his condo. He takes it to the hole one more time and lays in the last shot. He always makes the last shot. Come to think of it, it’s called “The Last Shot,” isn’t it?

He prints one copy, turns it in, leaves town, never gets the paper back or finds out the grade, and never cares. His roommate gets a new Mac and throws the computer the file is stored on into a dumpster behind the Student Union.

***

Those seventeen years go by with a few starts and way too many stops.

In 1996, one of his best friends is killed in a car wreck and he wants to write about the life of this man, so rare a human being, the kind with one foot on earth and the other in that great Somewhere Else, maybe outer space. Here’s what he comes up with:

My friend Cyril Vienna wrote a great story once. “Now this isn’t bullshit or nothin’,” he’d get back to saying, as if I had never heard it before, knowing that writing is what I do and at the moment he sells meat and fish out of a big truck, a rolling refrigerator, “but I wrote one helluva story in college once,” and after he’d say it, his unfettered Maine eyes would always sparkle the color of the Atlantic. Even though he’d lived in Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Northern California, Seattle and Montana, primarily as the bully that kicked the army brats’ adolescent asses, you’d still look at his shifty mug and see the city, catch the green in his stare and imagine the grass or trees of Maine and the choppy waters of his home.

That’s where that novel ends, save for a few outline doodlings, crossed out and tough to decipher, particularly on cracking yellow looseleaf.

After another eight wordless years and his wedding, here’s the beginning of the next one, a journey, penned furiously during a coffee-powered 45-minute wait for an airplane, inside the mind of a near-suicidal man hell-bent on seeking salvation in the comfort of a destined ten-minute conversation with his human obsession, Neil Young:

One of his favorite stories, one he’ll so eloquently tell strangers while sitting next to them on airplanes or at baseball games, in broken elevators or in DMV lines, goes something like this, with the emphasis and degree of color and detail, naturally, rising in lockstep with the gullibility of the audience member:

“So, I’m 14 years old, skinny but strong (subtle emphasis might begin here, with a simple bicep flex or even so much as a semi-demonstrative fist), and there I am, pedaling a clunky ten-speed with typical adolescent purpose through the rain-slicked streets of (suburban, but there’d be no need to spell that out here) New York on my way to the nearest Taco Bell.

“It’s dark and dreary, one of those 45-degree March days in Brooklyn (it was actually Long Island, and it wasn’t even one of the nicer areas in Long Island, but if you say ‘Long Island,’ you automatically get, ‘Oh, Lon-G’island!’ back, and that’s about as hardcore and badass as brass knuckles from Tiffany).

“It’s fuckin’ (curse words always help in this situation) pouring out, I mean, really torrential, and that pit of hunger in my teen stomach is crying out for those 79 cent tacos and burritos.

Right after he finishes typing the word “burritos,” he’s rolling. He drinks more coffee. He goes to the urinal and takes the computer with him, reading it over as he pees. He sits back down in the boarding area and calls his brother-in-law, a painter who knows art when he sees it. His brother-in-law likes the direction, likes the voice, loves that he’s writing again.

He emails the author of the definitive Neil Young biography and asks if he can use the book and author as characters in his novel.

The author writes back:

As long as Powers Boothe plays me in the movie version, I don’t foresee a problem.

The book doesn’t see another word.

***

Two years later he’s back to reading, sure as shit that a growing book collection will get him off his ass. He buys On Writing by Stephen King and doesn’t open it. He buys all seven novels in The Dark Tower series by Stephen King and plows through them in the span of three months.

He wrestles with and ultimately tackles the critically acclaimed first novel of one of his college fiction teachers, a hazy portrait of a drifter on the lam in a broken-down YMCA. The author is a no-bullshit Mexican-American who suffered through a few carpentry and construction jobs  – not to mention wives — before becoming one of Chicano literature’s new darlings. He finds the teacher online and pours out his heart in an email:

I’d be impressed if you remember me. I took a writing course from you, must have been 1992. The only story you remotely liked (or claimed to like) was about my father’s death and my memories of us at the racetrack and how I spread his ashes over the finish line at Belmont Park. I still have the copy of that story that you turned back to me. It’s the only one I’ve kept from college. You gave me a B.

I’ve been doing sportswriting since then, and I’ve co-written a couple of screenplays (still figuring out how to do that), but I’m itching to write fiction and have an idea for a novel.

I loved your novel and realized that you’re the guy I need to talk to to get me going on this novel. The idea is there, but I need to learn about HOW I go about doing it. Maybe you can’t tell me anything, but you were a friend back then to someone who was slightly lost, even if you didn’t realize it, so I figured you might be a friend now. If you have a free half-hour or something any time soon, I’d love to talk to you.

The teacher writes back five days later:

This is nice to get from you. Nope, sorry, no memory of you — but then nobody in the class either, so nothing personal.  Getting a B from me is good though.  Sounds like you have a very cool job, one that all dudes would envy.  I met another guy who was a sportswriter a few years ago — I cannot think of his name!  Horseracing was his, even a book.  I really can’t say I have any advice.  Aside from story, characters, a chair, and a keyboard.  You sound like you’re doing great since fiction class.

That just isn’t good enough. He emails the teacher again:

Thanks for getting back to me. I’d still like to talk to you. I won’t bother you too much … just maybe like 20 minutes or a half-hour? Can I call you? And if so, what’s your number?

The teacher writes back five minutes later:

You’re saying you want to be a writer, and you say you want advice.  Lesson #1:  Write it!

***

It’s 2010. He’s in his new house. His two and a half-year-old boy sleeps as he finishes Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which comes after Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction and John Fante’s Dreams From Bunker Hill.  As he’s about to erase an episode of his son’s favorite TV show, “Max and Ruby,” he catches the first minute of the “Ruby Writes a Story” vignette in which the seven-year-old bossy bunny suddenly stops this decade-plus of creative atrophy.

“There, a perfectly sharpened pencil,” she says. “I can hardly wait to start writing my story. I have so many ideas. Let’s see. Do I have everything I need? A sharp pencil, a brand-new eraser, lots of clean white paper, and a nice quiet place. Now I’m ready to write.”

He turns on his computer and begins.