Fifteen Minutes

A rare day off work.  What to do?  

I have been writing fiction since I was in middle school.  There was a hiatus of maybe a decade and a half during which I was learning “higher education” ways of expressing myself.  But the call to fiction was too strong to ignore.

One of the most influential people in my life was a teacher whom I never had in class.  He was the faculty advisor to the creative writing club.  In high school he urged me to try to publish my work, but publication was too scary a step, and I didn’t know how.  Fact is, I still don’t.  Only now I’m old enough that that doesn’t stop me.

Mr. Milliken said that the key to writing was constancy.  Write at least fifteen minutes a day.  In some form or other, I’ve been doing that for decades.  I realized on my day off that I had dozens of stories half-finished, some of which I couldn’t remember writing.  I also had dozens finished that I have never tried to publish.  Some with reason.

My day off sudden had a purpose.  I would organize the stories into those that were finished and those that were not.  And these are just the stories that I have in electronic form.  Next to my writing chair is a shelf unit full of pocket folders.  Each folder has one or two stories in it, written by hand.

To me this is kind of like the day you look down at your gut during work and realize that, somehow, you’ve become fat.  You didn’t see it happening, but there the evidence sits, halfway to your knees.  A plethora of stories.  A surfeit.  And only ten published from the lot.

I’ve never tried to count how many stories I’ve written.  Some aren’t far enough along.  Others seem more like impressions than stories.  Some are prose poems and others gruesome thoughts.  Some are as gentle as a newborn kitten.

It became clear that one day off would not be enough to organize all this.  It also became clear that some were written with software my computer no longer finds legible.  I saved them as text files and moved on.  Too much to do, with life so short.

I have a writing partner who’s not yet twenty.  She is a very clever writer and asks difficult questions.  My advice to her is just keep at it.  By the time you’re my age, you’ll find yourself drowning in words.  And you’ll not regret it, even when going down for the third time.