On why I stopped writing and why I'll start again

I think I’ll start with the story I want to tell you.

I’d like to say that I started reading Stephen King when I was a kid. That I gorged myself on horror and Sci-Fi as a kid, but as I matured, as I went to college for English literature I fell in love with the more complicated works. That the lilting melodies of the iambic pentameter inspire me, and that I’m often haunted by a crazed old man with tales of Albatrosses. I too wander lonesome as a cloud. I memorized the book on wines my father bought me. I see plays. I sit for hours in coffee shops, and my theory on the solution to the problems in the Middle East are more interesting and informed than yours.

I could tell that story. It would be true for the most part. But I won’t. It isn’t me. It’s my life, but it’s not me. And it’s all true—except the part about Stephen King.

The first King book I read was The Green Mile. My mentor—whom I called Doc. O—would sneer to hear me call it that, but this is my story. The seventeen-cassette audio book was the feature part of a vacation to Pennsylvania. We picked up a pile of audiobooks to pass the time in the car, and it ended up surpassing the battlefields and Amish as the best part of the trip. I remember crying when the mouse died. The rest of the details were lost to me until the movie came out. I didn’t pick up another of his books until I had already complete a bachelor of arts in English.

I’m not sure I ever really liked English class. In high school I was the kid most people hated to have in class. I never paid attention. In trigonometry, I occupied myself by writing Nirvana lyrics into notebooks, and making pictures on the graphing calculators (combine some variations on y = x² and y = log |x| and you get some neat butterflies). Yet I still remember the lone question I got wrong on a history test—Ethan Allen lead the Green Mountain Boys—and I usually set the curve in calculus. English, however, was hard.

My only C in high school was in ninth-grade English. They kicked me out of the accelerated classes, and a combination of begging, lying and misbehaving were the only things that got me back into them the next year. This started an incredible trend: my worst grades in both college (B-) and graduate school (C+) were in English classes. Something about that struggle—the unending marks of red on papers, no matter how rigorously proof-read, the unrelenting stream of weaknesses and way to improve; no other subject gave me that challenge, and I reveled in it.

To an egomaniacal teenager, writing was perfect. It was challenging, but it got me all kinds of attention. I spent that English class my first year writing—notes, poems, letters—lobbying for the affection of the girl in the seat next to me. But looking back, I had always been a writer. In cleaning out my bedroom in my parents’ house, I found an old journal from middle school, and I was already writing emo-boy poems in third grade. I submitted stories to the high school literary magazine, and then did the same in college. I had stories and poems published several publications, participated in poetry slams, and even won some writing contests.

And then I stopped.

I found another challenge, that swallowed my attention: Web design. One summer, while working evenings at a restaurant, I would regularly stay up until 4 a.m. reading reading specifications and studying the source code of sites I wanted to emulate. Like writing, it was challenging and complex. Unlike writing, people started paying me for it.

My dentist paid me $250 for a small site. My friend’s dad’s company paid me $500 for a real-estate database. Then Alma College hired me to teach and program—a real, honest-to-gosh job. With no other promising leads, I took it.

Ever since I’ve written a handful of poems, some lame blogs, and a magazine article about blogging. I’ve programmed a lot. I could lecture about the power of closures in JavaScript, or obscure CSS bugs and best practices, but I couldn’t express myself. I couldn’t express the frustration of watching seemingly perfect love melt away, or explain the abyss of stress and depression that swallowed an otherwise successful post-baccalaureate career.

In college, a fellow writer for whom I had immense respect (and no small amount of crush), intimated that of all the people she had met, I was the lone person she could imagine still writing after college. That comment, offered lightly at the time, both elates and haunts me to this day.

I found Stephen King just as college was ending. After listening to Dreamcatcher, I remember having a shitty day, taking a six pack to the fraternity house, looking around and thinking, “no bounce, no play—S.S.D.D.” Nobody I said it to got it. To this day, no one has. But King’s characters has somehow infected me. His gunslinger, Roland, did the same. After quoting a quip from the series, an acquaintance responded in kind, and suddenly we had an inexplicable bond. More than any of the hundreds of authors I’ve read—King’s work became a part of me. It twists the way I look at things; at times his characters seem more alive than the people I’ve met at work and school.

And King has brought me back. After only seventy pages of On Writing, I’m excited again. The release from putting thought to page, it’s the opposite of orgasm—not le petit morte, but the great alive. I’m alone. I’m drinking a three-dollar bottle of wine. Yet somehow, after 1,000 words, I feel better than I have in a very long time.