A Wordsmith Reflects
by John Wolf
As I lift my pen fetal to write down how on earth this word-warrior ever began to write seriously, I have to chuckle. I am the last person that should have ended up being labeled a writer, much less an author.
My self destruction as a writer began with an acute case of attention deficit disorder. I grew up in a rural area on the edge of the prairie. The wide open spaces were just across the street. The lure of being outside running, jumping, and throwing rocks was a powerful draw. If not hunting down lizards, shoot arrows, I was on a bicycle roaming the streets. The whole concept of reading escaped me, much less the idea of writing.
I'm slightly dyslexic, even to the point of actually exchanging words, not just letters. I still do that as a form of perturbing the right brain by the left brain. I don't think the left side talks much to the right side. I confuse "in", "is", and "it" all the time and never can find the errors unless a deliberate search is done.
I also have a distrust and rebellious spirit against authority, so when sitting in what I thought was a boring class and told to read some huge tome of verbiage, I found every excuse not to. I think I read most of a book called The Monitor and the Merrimack during elementary and junior high school. That's it. Later I read King Arthur and some of The Lord of the Flies on the threat of failing an English class if I didn't.
One thing I did like to do was to diagram sentences. I thought that was cool before being cool was cool. Then the unthinkable happened.
I was placed in an advance English class in my freshman year of high school. I thought it was some kind of mistake or punishment for scoffing at language teachers or the act of bitter, twisted-lipped English teachers, bent on revenge.
To my shock and awe, this teacher gave me the gift of admiring vocabulary. We were given a box of word cards and had to memorize twenty words a week. That was hell. My sister drilled me relentlessly. I was mumbling in my sleep words like curriculum and rubric, words I never ran into again until sitting in a class of university instructors at age 60 deliberating on which state-of-the-art system should be chosen to replace the dysfunctional practices evident from last semester.
My interests early on became focused on technical terms. I liked engineering and science. The words sounded made up, pulled out of the air. I didn't realize at the time there was structure and reason behind every syllable.
These events shaped my future as a writer, but what boosted my verbal entropy was what happened when I stopped doodling in class and started writing short stories.
I wrote little tales of knights in castles, caves into the darkness and what lurked inside them, which mainly explained the doodles. I wrote poems, trying to be as dramatic as I could. Then later, while at college, I would write an annual summary of my life—really introspective stuff. I'm sure it was driven by the loneliness of being away from home. I was able to stay in school by participating in a technical co-op program that paid my way. I worked two semesters then switched to classes for two semesters, including the summers. There is nothing like the loneliness of being at summer school in the middle of the desert with very few other students around.
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My first assignment away from the school was to live in American Samoa for nearly a year while working for a Pacific Missile Range program that hired college students to man satellite tracking stations. It sounds lofty, but amounted to little more than a glorified ham radio shack with a teletype attached to send tracking results back to the States. I started reading James Mitchener—first Hawaii, then Paradise and Return to Paradise. I had the time.
The wonder of words finally caught up with me. I loved being inside the story. The visual patterns that filled your mind was better than a motion picture. I loved it. Maybe because the descriptions were just what I was living through at the moment. I could relate to the story.
The next assignment was to northern Japan. I read Sayonara. Once again, it hit home. Later, while stuck on endless flights as a navigator on a C-130, I would read all the best sellers from bookstores visited in Taiwan that pirated everything to include the Encyclopedia Britannica. Then I drifted into the doldrums.
I left the Air Force and got back into engineering. Twenty-six years of working long hours that precluded any reading on the side except technical material. All the writing during that time was technical specifications, which are toxic prose designed by the devil himself to destroy the English language. For instance, each sentence had to use the verb "shall" to reflect a required engineering function or "will" that only implied a feature that was a given. We used phases like "reply soonest" to mean ASAP, along with a zillion other meaningless acronyms that had to be redefined for each project, because they meant different things for each endeavor.
The first time I wrote out a book length novel I felt a rush like no other, but it was literarily unreadable—except to me. I had the good fortune to live next door to a retired professor emeritus of English from Rutgers University, who took an interest and steered me to the true path of enlightenment.
I busted my buns to read grammar texts, pull cool words from books as I read them, listed every unknown word I came across and religiously looked them up, trying to elevate my vocabulary to add punch to a story, sentences that flowed, and connotations that actually pertained the the topic.
I'm a lifetime behind in getting started with the learning process of sticking words together that convey any kind of meaning and deliver an emotional relevance, but with each 100, 000 words written with coherent purpose, it gets better. It's never too late to do this. I am living proof of that, so what is the morale to this essay? If you feel something good inside the warmth of your writing, you must travel the distance. The journey will be most satisfying. Read and write until you run out of breath.
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John is a writer in progress. Word by word the trail of communications gets clearer. Maybe someday the message will be picked up by a distant ear and the effort to be heard will be reached. Until that day, the keyboard clatters endlessly into the night. |
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