I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without
it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.
WHY I WRITE
JUDINE BELIEVES THAT fiction writers are born to their calling. She believes that genetic makeup determines if you are suited to write stories for a living. Even if you decide that this is what you want to do with your life, you won’t be successful if your genes don’t allow for it.
I understand her point. Maybe you have to live with a writer to understand why she feels as she does. Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way. I am no different. I see something happen, read or hear about an event, and the first question that pops into my mind is, How can I use that in a story?
The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Who else do you know who lives life in two worlds on a regular basis? Fiction writers do. I have already said so. They live in the real world and whatever world they are writing about at the same time. They go back and forth between the two at the drop of a hat. What happens in the first suggests what might happen in the second. Daydreaming takes on an entirely new meaning. I am particularly bad about this. I can go away from a conversation in an instant, leaving this world for the one in which I am working, lost in an idea or a plot development. It happens at parties. It happens in the middle of conversations. I don’t have any control over it, and I am not sure I want to. I think it is the source of my creativity, and I don’t want to disrupt the process.
It may be that writers are actually happier living in their books than they are in the real world. There is evidence of this in the way writers immerse themselves in their fiction. How many times have you heard it said about someone that they are happiest at their work? Writers are like that, whether they admit it or not. But while most jobs fall into the nine-to-five category, fiction writing is a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don’t take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.
Whatever the behavioral propensities of writers and regardless of the prerequisite of a proper genetic makeup, they still have to find their way to their craft. I suspect that there are as many ways of this happening as there are stories of being published. Since I cannot speak for other writers in this matter, except to the extent that their experiences are the same as mine, I shall stick to what brought me into the fold.
I submit that it has mostly to do with how I grew up. But you must judge for yourselves.
I was born in a small midwestern town in the mid-1940s. Sterling, Illinois, had a population of about fifteen thousand and was situated directly across the Rock River from the city of Rock Falls with a population of about ten thousand. They were essentially steel towns settled in the middle of farm country about a hundred miles west of Chicago. My father, back from the war, worked at a small printing company where he was the junior partner. My mother was a housewife. They weren’t Ozzie and Harriet, but they weren’t all that different either.
Because my growing up took place during the late 1940s and early 1950s, my life was different from that of today’s kids. I know. Duh. But I mean really different. Allow me to illustrate. There weren’t any computers or video games. There weren’t any videos. There weren’t tape players or CDs. Television was a luxury. There wasn’t a television in my house until I was six, and even then it didn’t offer much programming for kids; Saturday mornings and after-school serials were about it. There were movie matinees every Saturday afternoon, but nothing midweek or at night. Mostly, there was radio, comics, and books.
I can see it in your eyes. How old is he?
There wasn’t a lot in the way of kids’ toys either, so even if you had the money, which most of us didn’t, there wasn’t much to choose from in any case. There was very little toy merchandising connected with television or movies. No one had tapped into that gold mine yet, and the world probably wasn’t ready for it anyway.
Mostly, kids were expected to entertain themselves and stay out of their parents’ hair. To that end, you were sent outside to play at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t an option; it was a standing mandate. If there wasn’t a winter blizzard or a spring rainstorm or a summer heat wave, you went outside and stayed outside until the next mealtime came around.
The neighborhood I grew up in was my designated playground. My boundaries were carefully laid out—west to Avenue J, east to Avenue G, south to 12th Street, and north to the cornfield, which at that time was somewhere around 16th Street. All of my friends lived within the perimeter of these boundaries, and we all hung out together. Today’s concerns about letting kids wander around alone didn’t exist. Everyone in the neighborhood knew who you were and kept an eye on you when you were within shouting distance, and you were always within shouting distance of someone because in those days women mostly were housewives and stayed home.
What did we do for fun? Well, we tried to stay out of trouble, of course, although I’m not sure that any of us ever figured out exactly how to do that. We invented our fun from what we knew, and what we knew came mostly from the aforementioned books, radio programs, and comics. We all read the same comics and listened to the same radio serials. We saw pretty much the same movies. We read different books, but mostly on the same subjects. We were impressed by these stories and played at being the characters. We would establish a story and improve on it. We were knights in armor one day and soldiers the next, cowboys and Indians one week, Sergeant Preston and his Mounties the next. We were anything and everything, and we invented role-playing before there was even a name for it.
The results were mixed. Some games were better than others. We had a great World War II version of Capture the Flag going for several weeks one summer. The Three Mesquiteers—Bob Livingston, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune—dominated a couple more. But when we cut off broom handles for lances, took up metal garbage can lids for shields, and ran at each other on our bikes like the knights of King Arthur, we knew we were on to something. Unfortunately, my mother glanced out the kitchen window, saw what we were doing, and quickly intervened. We talked about the possibility of hanging Frankie Clements after seeing The Ox-Bow Incident. It was his brother’s idea, I should hasten to point out. Frankie didn’t seem to mind; heck, he was eager to try it. I mean, we weren’t really going to hang him; we were only going to pretend. But his mother wasn’t very understanding when she found out what we were planning. She sent her own kids up to their rooms and the rest of us packing for home. I don’t know about the other kids, but the inevitable follow-up phone call to my parents got me just the sort of lecture you would expect.
When I was only five or six, I spent three days tracking a bobcat through the neighborhood. I can’t remember now how I learned about the bobcat, only that I did and I was sure it was coming our way. After all, it was sighted only two counties over. It was winter, and I found its paw prints in the fresh snow right away. Biggest cat tracks you ever saw. There was no doubt about what it was. I never actually caught up to it, but for those three days that I tried, I lived right on the edge of a heart attack every time I rounded a corner.
When I was not playing outside, I played up in my room. The rules changed, but the games were the same. Because we didn’t have our outdoor space, we had to give up our live-action adventures and go to figures. I had hundreds of them. Some were from sets, some came with plastic models, and some were paper cutouts backed on cardboard. All doubled at being more than one type of character and none ended up being used as the manufacturer envisioned. Weeks of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea utilized mostly World War II figures and some clay models. A Roy Rogers western set was used for everything from Zane Grey to Black Stallion.
It didn’t really matter. We weren’t in Camelot or Tombstone or aboard the Nautilus or anywhere but up in our rooms or outside in the neighborhood. What we created was inside our heads, because that was where it was most real. That was where it came alive.
But mostly it came alive for me. My friends played at these games, but they didn’t live them the way I did. I thought about them all the time. I was involved enough that I was content to play them alone, assuming all the roles. I was constantly reworking the story and redeveloping the characters. This fixation with playacting went on for a long time, and I know in the end, as high school neared, that my parents were beginning to despair. They didn’t say so, but I could tell what they were thinking. They were thinking I was not entirely normal.
What saved me was writing. Eventually, adventures with role-playing and figures became too confining and too predictable. I wanted a larger playground, and the only one that seemed sufficiently large was inside my head. I gained an inkling of the possibilities in the fourth grade when I wrote my first story. It was about a group of boys who accepted a dare to stay overnight in a haunted house and encountered aliens. The story earned an A grade. I was hooked. There were others after that, and somewhere along the way I decided that this was what I really wanted to do. I loved writing stories. I loved the puzzle-solving aspect of the process. I loved creating my own worlds, big and bright and colorful, the possibilities captivating and endless.
I didn’t begin by writing about elves. First I had to write a few dog and horse stories, then a few science fiction stories, a western or two, a war story, and finally a story about a great white whale. I didn’t finish any of them and none of them were very good. Nothing I wrote came out exactly the way I wanted it to. I can admit that now, safely removed from the immediacy of the pain such an admission would have cost me then. I had a story to tell, a really good story—I knew I did—but I could not seem to discover what it was.
The problem, I eventually discovered, was that I didn’t want to write stories set in the real world. The real world wasn’t large enough or strange enough for me to work in. I needed a place that was so enormous and so different that no one but me could even begin to define it. It could not exist anywhere outside my mind except in the words I wrote. It needed to be about places we knew, but about places we didn’t, as well. It needed to be about us, but about other people, too. Everything I wrote about had to remind readers of what they already knew, yet make them take a second look at whether or not what they believed was really true.
Writing is habit-forming. It is addictive. You get caught up in the challenge of the storytelling process. You become enchanted with the worlds and characters you create. The worlds are your home and the characters your friends. You come to know both as well as you know yourself. Born of you, they become a part of you.
What is interesting to me now, more than forty years after that first story, is how deeply enmeshed I am in what I do. It is beyond reasonable. If I don’t write, I become restless and ill-tempered. I become dissatisfied. My reaction to not writing is both physical and emotional. I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.
One of my writer friends has an ironclad rule about her work. She writes five pages every day—no matter where she is or what she is doing. It doesn’t matter if she is sick. It doesn’t matter if she has to get up and write at four in the morning. She does it. I understand why. She is afraid that if she doesn’t, she will lose her identity and her presence and disintegrate. She is the sum of her words. She is her writing.
I expect that is why Judine feels so strongly about writers and genetics. If you have a better explanation, feel free to let her know.