Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.

Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)

In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.

No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.

A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”

By the time I got through college, I’d tried my hand at various sorts of writing for coursework — fiction, a little poetry, “creative non-fiction.” I’d worked on college newspapers and yearbooks, and edited an opinion/”investigative journalism” magazine. And I’d also been a stringer for a while for a local newspaper, writing New Yorker/”Talk of the Town”-type pieces about local spelling bees and Christmas-decoration contests.

Out in the workforce then. Out in real life. Married, even. With no clue at all what it meant to write “professionally” or, really, at all seriously — not now, absent the instructions from higher-ups (teachers, editors) I’d gotten used to. Driving a cab. Working on the housekeeping crew at a hospital. Driving a cab some more, and teaching…

Eventually my first marriage broke up and I lost my teaching job. By then, I could barely remember what it was like to write at all. I tried a few things with short stories, experimented with poetry, started a novel even. But I never submitted anything anywhere, knew no other writers, and — most importantly, most destructively for my writing, I think in retrospect — never set aside regular time for writing. I waited for the thunderclap of inspiration.

But at the back of my mind, not quite forgotten, was a tiny little grain of conversation I’d had with my ex-wife shortly before our breakup. It was pretty clear the marriage was unraveling, and she was describing her sense of panic: I feel like there’s a scream caught inside my head, she’d said.

The chemical process of crystallization goes through two stages. In one, the crystals that form aren’t really strong enough to hold together, so they keep falling apart and re-dissolving in whatever liquid they’re suspended in. Eventually though, given enough time and other conditions, the crystals cross a threshold: they suddenly start actively to grow.

The scream in my ex-wife’s head was one such crystal — the one from which, unexpectedly, my first “real” story grew.

Mixed in with that crystal were a bunch of others I picked up along the way, little bits plundered from everyday life in a greedy scavenging of memory. A certain kind of crossword puzzle. The memory of the antics of unthinking boys, and an accident resulting from them. An ex-girlfriend’s favorite music. One of my regular cab customers, and his weekly Sunday visit to his middle-aged sister in a state hospital. Some little fragment from an art-appreciation class.

It all got swirled together in a bath of language and — although he didn’t recognize it at the time — a rinse of the author’s own frame of mind at the time he wrote it.

The resulting story, for many years and versions called “Screams,” later “Dissonance,” to this day gives me the creeps. It’s not a horror story, I don’t think it is anyway; but when I look back at it now I find it frighteningly chilly, almost surgically dispassionate. The protagonist of this story — the anonymous narrator — has very little clue what the myriad details of his everyday life add up to. He wants to understand it, but the only sort of understanding he wants is intellectual. And he has very little sense of humor about what he’s experiencing, has ever experienced.

“Dissonance” remains overwrought in spots, even after years of scrubbing. Still, it’s the story whose completion pushed me over the edge into an awareness of what it meant to write fiction: to take the stuff of everyday life (even if experienced second- or third-hand, even if imagined), mash it together, and bake it into something which — as a whole — resembles the original ingredients (almost) not at all.

“Enjoy!” seems like an odd way to offer “Dissonance” to you. So I’ll just say, maybe, Hmmm.