How I became a writer Part V

Title: How I became a writer

Part V

The rows of lights bake the thick stage makeup plastered on my face.  Sweat is running down my back because I’m wearing a jacket in a simulated Sahara desert...and I wouldn’t have had it any other way!  At that moment, I was waiting to be slapped.  That is the nice thing about theater, you know what is coming next...most of the time.  I knew this time!  The lead girl, Heidi, was supposed to slap me but this time it would be different.  You see the first two times she had done so, I thought it was too gentle.  I wanted to sell it.  I complained, “Heidi, you’ve got to really slap me!  I can take it!”  Now I let my eyes unfocus so as not to instinctively flinch.  WHAM!  Have you ever watched Looney Tunes, where Daffy Duck really gets hit really hard and bright lights flash in his eyes?  That happened to me and let me tell you, those bright lights exploding like fireworks in your eyes is exactly what happens!  Who knew Daffy Duck was an accurate documentary on various types of pain!  Suddenly I couldn’t see a thing and I had to get off the stage.  The slap was thankfully right before lights out, which is probably good because I don’t know how coherent I would have been.  I think I was more with it than, “Mommy, I want the blue balloon!” but I’m fairly certain quoting Shakespeare was temporarily out...telling you my name was a little iffy!  There may have been ringing in my ears too but all I remember is desperately groping for the curtain and hoping I didn’t stagger off the stage into the audience!  Those were the expensive seats!  Five bucks a ticket!  The reason they bought those seats was to be close to the action, not to have a stunned actor bring the action to them!  Somehow I made it blind and was able to recover without letting anyone know.  I never told Heidi how bad that felt but she must have realized it herself because she didn’t hit me that hard again. 

My director Mr. Henninger wrote that play.  He named it, “A Family Portrait,” and it had a two hour run time!  Two hours!  As a kid, I didn’t think about all the hard work it must have taken him to write such a long play and to compose musical numbers for it, as well!  Why is this relevant to my story of becoming a writer?  It matters because he was in charge of the creative writing portion of English class.  At that time, I didn’t think about how much talent it must have taken Mr. Henninger to write awesome plays year after year or how lucky I was to have him as a teacher.  I just trudged up the steps to his room, with my books in hand, counting the hours until I was free once again!

I’ll never forget him outlining the plot of a play using a flow chart early in the class.   He explained terms like rising action, denouement (which is pronounced nothing like it is spelled!  Curse you phonetics!), climax, conflict, and even deus ex machina.  I was riveted.  Suddenly I grasped how a story worked!  Maybe because I had been in so many of his plays, it just clicked.  Whatever the case, after a little more information, he turned us loose to write a short story as homework.  I had been enlightened!  The blind man could see!  I was ready to churn out a literary masterpiece!

Later that evening, in front of my dual cassette ghetto blaster, I sat down to write the short story.  Normally I slammed homework out so that I could get to other things but not this time.  I actually did a first draft and then a second copy with some edits!  I was very proud of the finished product and handed it to my mother in the morning.  My Mom skimmed it and said, “Adrian, I think this is the worst story I have ever read in my life.”  Mom is awesome but she is also very honest!  I didn’t understand it!  I thought my story (I think about a werewolf), was brilliant! If mom could read boring things like “Gone with the Wind” and “War and Peace,” certainly a werewolf story should really grab her attention, right?  Ah, the dilemma of the popular fiction writer when dealing with a literary critic...or perhaps it was my appalling grasp of the English language she was referring to. 

My next assignment was to write about the day of my death.  I immediately envisioned a thriller where I was gunned down on the steps of my church by a terrorist with an AK-47!  Yes, this was WAY before 9/11.  I sat down to write the tragic, might I dare add, instructive death of the protagonist.  Me.  Once again, I thought it was brilliant!  Mr. Henninger read bland story after story from the homework pile and I couldn’t wait for him to get to mine!  At least the stories were bland in my mind, as classmates died predictable deaths.  No one was chopped up by an axe murderer, exploded from a thousand foot drop in a car, or was vaporized in a nuclear blast.  Yes, apparently, I had issues, but I was concerned about terrorism as a kid and wanted to try to say something about it in my short story.  Mr. Henninger finally reached my paper and attempted to read it.  He read snatches of it very confused at first, changing to an aghast voice before quickly returning that gem to the pile.  As a kid, I thought he had set aside an epic work that would have moved everyone!  I also thought he should have tried harder to understand what I was saying.  Now I realize he would have needed several CIA cryptographers to MAYBE read that story!  After that, though, I insisted on reading my short stories aloud in class!  I never considered that my wretched penmanship, atrocious spelling, or my total lack of English skills might...might mind you, be a barrier to communication.

All too soon the unit was over!  We moved on but I missed writing!  To make matters worse we had to read books like, “To Kill a Mocking Bird” and “Macbeth” by the immortal bard.  Why didn’t we ever get to read the latest thriller or fantasy novel?  I missed the writing unit so much I wrote my own story.  It was a massive fifteen pages long and had a character named “Knife Con Mah” in it.  I handed it to my friend Kenny Foos, very excited to see what he would think.  He read it and fumbling for words he managed to say something on the lines of, “I can tell you worked very hard on it.”  He was being nice but I did not realize it.  He liked my writing!  This would be like an aspiring archer shooting arrows at a hay bale twenty yards away and missing spectacularly every time and then asking their friend what they thought about their skills.  There is the lie, “You’re the next Robin Hood!”  Then there is the brutal truth, “You have the skills of a dying carp...maybe.”  But there is the often used path of “softening the blow” or “being nice” by saying something relatively true and hoping your friend doesn’t explore the context of what you said.  Something like, “You’re off to a great start!”

The neat thing is that “Knife Con Mah” was an important character in several of my early works and went through several different incarnations.  I was so happy when book four of the Asylum series, “The Elf Princess,” included Knife.  After so many years, my very first character made it into one of my books!  I was a long way from publishing anything at that moment but I had no clue about that!  Ah, the boldness of youth!