How I became a writer Part III

As night was falling, Dad and I got out of the car, and headed for a trailer.  I was used to buying items from Hills or Kmart, in brightly lit stores, with friendly staff manning the cash registers.  (Yes, this was pre-Wal-Mart and the sad thing is, when Wal-Mart started it was just like that too.)  Sometimes Mom would stop at a garage sale and start examining boring clothes and stuff.  I went for the important stuff, like video games or toys!  These two places along with the mall are where I primarily shopped for things.  I tried not to mail order much because of the eternity you had to wait for such things (six to eight weeks!)  When I asked my parents about a “home” computer, I never imagined the quest for one would take us to a stranger’s trailer.  There on the kitchen table sat the object of my hopes and dreams...a Commodore Vic-20!  My Uncle Mark had shown it to me, made his own video games, and now I HAD to have it!!!  Dad immediately acted like he DIDN’T WANT TO BUY IT!!!  I couldn’t believe it!  Why had we come all this way if we weren’t interested in it?  I was interested let me tell you!  I was practically drooling all over the keyboard in desire.  The man selling the Vic-20 was firm on the price and I wondered why Dad didn’t just pay him and let us be on our way?  Finally, Dad did pay him and we carried our latest treasure out to the car.  No sooner had we shut the car doors, Dad sighed and said, “Adrian, when I’m trying to buy something like that you can’t act all excited!”  It was my first experience in dickering and Dad explained that if I had been more reserved he could have got a lower price.  The next time Dad took me on one of these quests was to get Joy a playpen (called playards today???  What a dumb name!  The kid has less room than an ex-con in solitary!)  I loved my sister Joy, she was so CUTE, so I couldn’t wait to acquire the latest necessary piece of furniture in making her life awesome!  BUT, I had learned my lesson!  I kept a poker face and watched the master go to work! Finally, after a brutal dickering session, the man said, “My wife won’t let me take less than such and such a price, so I’ll throw in twenty bucks and we’ll call it good!”

Was this story about my first word processor, a necessary step in any writer’s craft?  Are you kidding me?  The computer in question only had 3k in available memory!  Toys at the Dollar General have more power than that!  Most of your small word documents take more memory than that!  (To be fair I’m sure that memory usage represents far more than your brief letter to Grandma...if you actually send letters anymore:)  I wouldn’t own a printer for years and my first memory storage device was a tape cassette.  (Sure my iPod is amazing but there is something magical about the old fashioned tapes.  You could throw to your friend across the room or out a second story window, without being too worried about it.  Try throwing your cell phone out of the window sometime!)  I WISH I had been smart enough to realize the value of a word processor in writing!  My method was a fresh notebook (the paper kind) with cheap BIC pens that bled all over the place!  I hand wrote my first book of over 200, 000 words in 2010!  2010!  I had access to modern technology!  I used a word processor constantly as a pastor and coach!  What ever possessed me to HAND write the whole thing in a billion notebooks???  It wasn’t because of my neat handwriting, I’ll tell you that much!  My son Matthew and I spent MONTHS typing that beast!  At least I was using better quality pens...sort of!  Why I didn’t hang on to the beautiful, refillable, pens I was bought at graduation by nice adults trying to help me enter the wide, wide world?  I have no idea!  Well, sigh, that’s not true.  I probably lost them in a short time after receiving them.  So I learned my lesson after that first book, right?  To quote Vizzini from the movie ‘The Princess Bride,’ “NOT REMOTELY!”  Oh, you were expecting “Inconceivable?”  I would write the next ten novels this way!  I thought it was my “method”:(  Boy was I stupid!  I learned that, gasp, I could TYPE a story just as easily as HANDWRITE it!  My daughter Adrianna further expedited this process by giving me a high-end laptop.

 

“So...” you ask slowly, “what did the Vic-20 have to do with your writing?”  It taught me some important concepts about writing and it had keen “text” games!  How did it teach me concepts for writing?  I was a programmer and what I was doing was very similar to writing a story!  Let me start at the beginning.  When my Dad set up the Vic-20 (you just hooked that sucker to your TV and turned it on!  No updates were required...ever!) Richard, Kimmy, and I all wanted our turn on it!  Dad invented some kind of system of sharing but within two weeks, Kimmy and Rich lost interest.  We only had two games for it, Rat Race and a text game, and they weren’t that interesting.  I was hooked though.  I reverently pulled out the booklet that came with it on BASIC (a very primitive programming language) and began to teach myself the dark arts of “coding.”  A good writer has to understand the English language or whatever language they are writing in.  I wish I had been that zealous as a kid in English class!  That would have made a HUGE difference!  But no, I hurried through “boring” homework to do something more exciting, like programming or reading a novel.  I spent the summer parked in the living room, listening to Dad’s parakeet, while I mastered the basics of BASIC. 

A program is very similar to writing in that it has structure, it requires clear communication or the computer gets confused, it requires creativity, you to finish it to enjoy it, and it demands you edit it...sigh.  In addition, it is a process that is similar to writing in that you spend hours inert but for your hands moving.  At that time programming was so new, it was like the gold rush, and I wanted to get good enough to put a video game in the stores...which is very similar to an author wanting their book in print.  In seventh grade, my little Christian School (thanks to the tireless efforts of Mr. Lee), offered a course on computer programming!  We even got something called a floppy disk and a box to hold them in!  At first I was disappointed with the course because I had spent all summer teaching myself BASIC and now we were back to the beginning.  The class seemed to move at a glacial pace as my classmates tried to assimilate information I had mastered by working at it hour after hour.  But Mr. Lee built his class in such a way to accommodate that.  Once I got my computer assignment done (like build a program to add up groceries) I was allowed to do whatever I wanted!  He NEVER hovered over us or belittled us.  He let kids play video games like “Castle Wolfenstein”, which was a stick figure spy in World War II trying to sneak through a German base.  It was awesome!  (I actually played it at home on my Commodore 64, not wanting to waste precious time with the school’s computers.)  My sister Joy is a brilliant writer and her college creative writing class crushed her gift for awhile!  (She’s doing fine today, the first one in my immediate family to get a doctorate and guest lecture once at HARVARD!!)  Instead of empowering Joy to create, the teacher seemed obsessed with belittling her.  Personally, I think he was either jealous of her or he had too strict a picture of what “good” writing was.  If Mr. Lee had done that to me, I would have never grown as a programmer!  One time I was sitting in study hall with a book on machine language (the computers native tongue.  Basic is like talking to a foreign person on tech support who barely understands English.)  Instead of saying, “You stupid kid!  That is WAY over your head!”  or “Better hit the math books harder Essigmann” (I am awful at advanced math...like fractions and stuff like that:), he said something encouraging about my desire to grow.  Did I learn ML (Machine Language)?  Are you kidding?  It was way over my head!  But Mr. Lee was very encouraging!  So was my Grandfather Kienholz.  He lived far away, so I didn’t see him very often but I could tell my mother really respected him!  He found out I was programming and really encouraged me!  Aspiring writers need honesty but they also need encouragement.  A little encouragement from another human being goes a long way and has kept me going in my writing journey when I was tempted to quit. 

When did I lose interest in programming?  I realized I wasn’t good enough to get a game published.  The video game industry was starting to grow and get better, games were becoming way more complex.  My dream of building my own video game seemed to fade.  It is why I almost quit being a writer at one point...when I thought I would never write anything others would want to read.  I have a huge plastic container of stories, many incomplete, that I discarded over the years.  My failing to become a cracker jack programmer wasn’t Mr. Lee’s fault.  The last course I took from him was on animating figures and it was very good.  I began to realize the gold rush was over and computers were getting more complex at a dizzying rate!  Still I had learned to work very hard on imagining something, building it, editing it, and finally enjoying it!  I did build a primitive dungeon crawler, a transformer video game (a very basic one but I was proud of it), and a program to build cars in a game I played with my friends called, “Car Wars.”  I now had the rough discipline to write short stories but I had no idea I wanted to do that.  That would come in a creative writing course taught by Mr. Henninger...but that is another story for another time!