Becoming a Writer

Now that I am semi-retired, I need something to do. So, this past weekend I decided to become a writer. I wrote a couple of short stories, and I was proud of myself. I sent one off to a friend and to my sister, hoping for praise. Then I realized: these short stories are crap.

The problem is: I'm trying to be funny. Serious writers aren't funny, except (perhaps) in a subtle, understated way.

So today I started a serious story. It was about a man who had lost his two children. Every night, before going to bed, he gave a "high five" to the handprints of his children that were framed and displayed high on his living room wall. You know the handprints: the ones they do in pre-school, where a kid rubs his hand in ink and splats it onto a paper. One was red and the other was blue.

I stopped. I can't do this serious stuff. I went back to reading and editing my stories and laughing. Perhaps my stories aren't so bad. It's just that lately, to inspire me, I have been reading the masters, like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, or James Thurber's The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, or Haruki Murakami, or my personal favorite: Raymond Carver.

They are not inspiring me; they are making me realize I am crap. I should ask M-Rock for help. Reading his stuff will make me feel better. He won a huge sum of money for writing a travel article that included the immortal lines:

It was the best train ride you could ever imagine.

No, make that better than you could ever imagine.

Now, THAT is pure, unadulterated crap!