Fixin' To Get Ready To Write

Forty years ago - the autumn of 1983 - was a weird time in my life. I had just transferred from Ohio U to Bowling Green and was trying to acclimate to a new setting and rhythm. When asked why I changed schools more than two years into my academic career, I usually say, "I sobered up," chuckle, and let it go at that. However, I was never much of a drinker, and that trite comment simply plays to Ohio U's reputation as a "party school." If pressed, I will generally cite financial reasons, and that is a more legitimate answer. I had a great summer job at the Catawba Island Club and was offered the opportunity to work weekends into the fall. Working the dinner shift on Friday and Saturday and the brunch shift on Sunday, I could easily pocket $100 per week, a tidy sum in those days. Bowling Green was less than an hour away, while Ohio U was well beyond reasonable driving distance.?

The price, of course, was that I had to leave Bowling Green right after my last class on Friday and didn't return until late on Sunday or, occasionally, even early Monday morning. As a result, I never made any real connections or felt like I was part of the school's culture. As a "late-stage" transfer student, I was placed on a floor for "non-traditional" students in Harshman Quad. My roommate was in his late 20s, perhaps a drug dealer, and never around. There were weeks when I hardly spoke to another person Monday through Thursday. Bowling Green always felt more like a commuter school to me.??

The upside was that I had free Saturday mornings and early afternoons with a few dollars in my pocket. I could go to Jim Swift's for a haircut, get a perch sandwich at Jolly Rogers, catch a matinee movie at the Sandusky Mall, or meet up with my high school buddy Jeff. It was also the first time I began to think of myself as a writer.??

I had picked up the non-fiction Stephen King book?Danse Macabre?at the bookstore on campus and read through it. While it is less about writing and more about horror fiction and the media, it made me consider for the first time that I could write horror stories and sell them to various publications, as King had in his early years. I penned a couple of (terrible) short stories I shared via mail with my other high school buddy, Carl, who was attending Northern Ohio University a few miles down the road. One I recall involved the resident of an apartment complex who disposed of his victim's bodies down the garbage shoot, and another, a traveling salesman who ran into real ghouls on a small town "ghost walk." While his criticisms were polite, Carl's lack of enthusiasm for the writing told me all I needed to know.

While my first attempts at putting pen to paper in a commercial sense didn't work out, they at least got me started. The simple truth is that to be a writer, you have to write. It doesn't need to be great or even good, but you must do it. Not think about it. Not plan it out. Not fixin' to get ready. Just write.