The Day I Learned to Write

by Eric Witchey

I knew I could skate on chores and homework while my father concentrated on cutting, ruling, gluing, and cursing the newspaper ad layout for his small-town pharmacy. So, when he called to me as I tried to slip past the dining room and out the kitchen door to play on a warm September evening, it startled me.

“Eric!”

I froze.

“Is your homework done?”

“Yeah.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I was ten or eleven, and I had finished my 250-word essay on something or somesuch. I don’t remember the topic now.

“What did you have?”

Again, I froze. Tentatively, I offered another truth. “An essay.”

“Go get it.”

I might as well have been fifty miles from the door and freedom instead of ten feet. I ended up going back up to my room and my desk, retrieving the binder with the essay in it, and delivering it up to the scrutiny of my first editor.

Already in a critical mode, my father read my essay. When he was done, he locked eyes with me and said, “Good. Now you can rewrite it for a grade.”

“It only has to be 250 words,” I said.

“Can it be more?” he asked.

This was a novel thought to me. It had never occurred to me that it could be longer. When I hit 250 words, I stopped. I had done what was asked of me.

He frowned. “Read it out loud. Fix any mistakes you find.”

I spent the next two hours in my room railing at the injustice of the universe for having been born into a family with a cruel and unusual father who would make me spend a warm after school evening redoing homework that was already done.

After my two hours as a victim, I finally actually read the 250 words. I found lots of problems, and I painstakingly copied the whole thing out again without the errors. The essay got me the highest grade on a written assignment I had in my whole life up to that moment.

Stunned that something so simple as just reading the words after I wrote them could make a huge difference, I tried it again now and then. After all, let’s not be too uppity and intellectual and all. I was a ten-year-old Midwestern agriculture-and-steel-town boy.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

“Why don’t you hand in your essays?” The kind, hippy composition instructor said.

I didn’t tell her the truth, which was that I was way too busy with drugs and parties to be bothered writing composition essays. Instead, I arroganced my way through the interview in her office. “I get bored,” I said.

She gave me a “You lying sack of crap” look.

I doubled down. “I mean, they’re the same kind of essays I did in high school.” Okay, that was sort of true. Sort of true was better than a drug addict’s lie.

She found some grace beyond her anger and said, “I’ll make you a deal. You write one essay that I grade as a B or better, and I’ll pass you for the course.”

Seemed like a deal to me. One paper to skip out on an entire semester of grueling classes and papers? Perfect short cut. We hashed out the details of the deal, and I got to work. I can’t say what it was about that assignment that held my attention where others didn’t. Back then, I hadn’t been diagnosed with what I later learned was the underlying cause of my inability to focus on anything that didn’t sparkle or artificially stimulate the pleasure center of my brain. Whatever it was about that essay, it held my focus until I finished. I even reread it, not once but twice.

She looked kind of shocked when I handed it to her. On the spot, she graded it. When she was done, she looked even more shocked. I’ll never forget her words. “I’d like to, but I can’t give you less than a B for this.”

That was the day I learned to write, until…

I had dropped out of college and gone on the road. I didn’t know about Kerouac or any of the poets and writers who romanticized the life I was living moving from place to place, hitchhiking, doing more drugs, working here and there and generally telling myself I was going to go back to school and be a writer. I left a legal pad containing a couple of hand-drafted short stories on the counter in the bike shop where I was working. A guy in the shop read them. He said, “You should get these typed up so you can send them out.”

I found a typist, rode my bike over to her apartment, and handed the pages to her at the door. She glanced over the pages and said, “Do you want me to fix the grammar and punctuation errors?”

In all seriousness, because I was going to be a writer after all, I said, “No. It’s style. If you do that, they won’t know it’s me.”

She nodded, smiled, and said, “Okay.”

She typed them up exactly as I had drafted them.

I sent them out.

Asimov’s sent me a 6-page rejection letter that boiled down to, “You should go to school and learn to write.”

That was the day I learned to write, until…

I had gotten back into school and still thought I was going to grow up and be a writer. I had cut way back on drugs but hadn’t quite quit completely, and I was focusing as best I could at that time on the effort to learn. Most of my classes were going well, but one, “W. B. Yeats,” wasn’t. The readings were fine. The poetry was fun in a metaphysical, structural sort of way that caught my attention, but my essays weren’t getting me out of classes by a long way. Clearly, the teacher didn’t understand my style any better than the typist had several years before.

I protested a C on a paper. The professor, Carol Cantrell, sat with me patiently and pointed out that I was writing a 20-page paper on the numerical structure of the gyre as represented in the poetry of Yeats.

“Yeah.”

One paragraph at a time, she walked through my paper and paraphrased the main idea of each paragraph. She then pointed to a paragraph near the end and said, “This paragraph belongs at the top of your first page.”

A light cut through the darkness in my skull. Instantly, I saw that the paragraph she pointed to contained a summary of all the thoughts the rest of the paper presented. With that, I realized how each thought should be ordered—how the paper could be “structured” to not only present the thoughts but to structurally mirror the presentation of those thoughts.

She gave me a chance to rewrite.

I did.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

I stood in front of my Interdisciplinary Thesis Committee. Three of the four professors had nodded and affirmed that I had fulfilled the requirements for their disciplines. Only John Clark Pratt, my Literature and Writing advisor remained.

He filled a long silence with the tapping of his index finger on the cover of my 140-page tome. Finally, he looked up at me and said, “In all my years as an English Professor, I have never seen a paper so riddled with typos, grammar mistakes, misspellings, and punctuation errors. It’s like you never had a class in English at all.”

I trembled. My knees turned to Jell-O. Tears welled up behind my eyes. I saw seven years of working multiple jobs, trying to beat my addictions, struggling with time and energy and focus all going to hell in one more sentence from his lips.

He tapped, took a breath, and said, “If this weren’t such significant work, I would not approve it.” Smiling, he stood and shook my hand.

After such a cruel joke, I never spoke to him again. I regret that. He’s gone now.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

I had spent my first week with James N. Frey at a cabin on the coast. Every day, we wrote, critiqued, and listened to a lecture. On the last day, my mind blown in so many ways, I shook his hand, thanked him, and asked, “Why didn’t they show me these things in college?”

He smirked and said, “In college, they describe things that have already been written then tell you to do the things they described.”

This confused me. It must have shown on my face.

“The college ideal of writing has nothing to do with the job of being a writer. It’s a foundation that allows you to begin to learn to write.”

That was the day I learned to write, until…

I won a slot at Clarion West, and George R. R. Martin challenged us to write a longer story than we had in the previous weeks under the tutelage of other authors—a piece of at least 10,000 words. At 2 a.m., I had 9,000 words with no ending in sight. I left my room and went to the common area for a snack. While I sucked down comfort food donuts, George walked in.

“How you doing, Eric?”

“Frustrated. I don’t have an ending for the assignment.”

He chuckled and said, “Don’t worry about it. Just get some sleep.”

Exhausted and feeling some shame and guilt, I took his advice. I think I slept for about an hour before I woke up knowing how the story should be rewritten and end. Feverishly, I worked for the rest of the night.

We were supposed to hand our stories in at 9 a.m..

I was running along a street in Seattle at 9, 14,000-word manuscript in hand. I blew into the classroom and handed in my story for reproduction and distribution.

Two days later, it was time to critique the long stories.

I sat to the left of George, and he decided to start with my story.

The first person on my left said, “I couldn’t get past page 3. Pass.”

The next person said, “There were to many stories, so I didn’t get to yours.”

This continued all the way around the table. Many people stopped on page 3. In my notebook, I wrote, Something is really wrong on page 3, but nobody is saying what.

When it was George’s turn, he said, “I got to page three and. . .”

I wrote, Oh my God, George didn’t even read it!

George paused. “. . . and…” He went on, “I can’t do this. It’s mean. We all read it and decided to play a joke on you.”

Shaking with relief and rage, I dutifully took notes when the whole process started up again. When the round robin critique was done, I found out I was the only one at the table who had written a longer piece and handed it in.

A couple days later, the director of the program thanked me for handing in the piece. She said, “I was out at dinner with George, and he said he didn’t think anybody from this year had the chops to deliver overnight. You did. Thank you for that.”

Later, I sold the story.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

At the Writers of the Future seminar, Tim Powers and Algis Budrys handed me a dirty coffee mug to go with my selected newspaper article and the idea of a long-haul trucker. I had 24 hours to produce a story that included all three items.

I did.

It sold.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

A teacher in Poland contacted me and asked permission to use my stories as tools for teaching English to his high school students. He said he would translate them into Polish then circulate them to magazines in Poland. I agreed. He sold a number of stories for me, and I began to think about the separation of prose and story in a new way—a way that might support translation regardless of language.

That was the day I learned to write, until…

Today, forty-one years after I told the typist not to fix my grammar and punctuation, I sat down to write an essay on the day I learned to write. I realized that today is the day I learned to write. Some days, I learn to write again. Some days, I learn to write for the first time. Every day I write, I learn to write.

-End-