A version of the following essay was submitted to Gabrielle Fullam’s “Untitled Unfinished Stories Project”, which I assume will be debuting at some point in the near future and which I will link to here when it does.
It would have been a bad book, let’s get that much out of the way right now. I was fairly impressed with myself at the time, but it’s obvious in retrospect that the things I liked about it then are exactly what would have made it so cringeworthy. Time travelling detectives!
Exactly what a fifteen year old boy would love! Time travelling detectives. Exactly what a fifteen year old boy would love. The whole thing was a pastiche of all the nerdy obsessions that occupied me in the summer of 2013 – obsessions which I had more or less forgotten about by the autumn of 2013.
The USB containing the draft is somewhere around my house, but my vague memory of the plot nicely illustrates the narrowness of my influences. A gruff, cynical detective is leading an investigation of a major criminal organization (Breaking Bad). One day he is shot in the back by a man he incorrectly assumes to have been one of the gangsters he’s investigating but which later turns out to have been his future, time-travelled self (Twelve Monkeys). The incident puts him into a coma for a few weeks and when he wakes up, his wife decides she needs to divorce him and take custody of their daughter on account of his gruffness, cynicism and dangerous job (Die Hard 4.0, I think?). Later, he is woken up in his divorced-dad apartment by lights flashing “S.O.S.” in morse code from a building across the street (Panic Room). He goes into the building to investigate and finds a portal which takes him back to a specific time in the past (11/22/63), a week or two before he was shot. He teams up with another detective to stop himself from getting shot (Looper, Back to the Future, but it eventually turns out that this other detective knows more than he’s letting on about the whole situation (Primer). I seem to recall there was also some intrigue within the criminal organization, my depiction of which was inspired by Love/Hate, a show I had never seen an episode of.
Non-linear storytelling. One-dimensional characters. None-dimensional female characters. Three different Bruce Willis movies as inspiration. The whole thing was a teen-film-bro starter pack in the making. Ultimately, the work itself is much less interesting than the place it holds in my own personal biography. At the time I wrote it I was an archetypical alienated teenager. I had friends in my all-boys secondary school, but my apathy towards sports, video games, and hardcore pornography left little overlap between their interests and my own. The typical response to such a situation is to take up a hobby. Learn to play an instrument and let that be the thing which makes you interesting to other people. But I never had the discipline to practice every day, so writing became the default option. I drafted the book, titled, “…---…” (ie., morse code for S.O.S. (I was very pleased with myself)), 1,500 words at a time on a tiny laptop I inherited from a recently-graduated sibling. About halfway through the summer I broke the left half of the screen at the Gaeltacht, so I had to adjust the Microsoft Word doc to make the page fit into a space the size of an iPhone screen.
***
The plan was always to abandon the project after the first draft. The way to get good at writing is to finish things, and books take way too long to finish. It was time to move on. A few weeks after I wrapped up and went back to school, I joined a youth theatre and found my people. Vital, brilliant, beautiful people who wanted to make things with me. For two years we played, and made, and fell in love. When the CAO rolled around, there was talk of a course in Drama and Theatre Studies, but it wasn’t for me. I was confident that I could change the world, and I was confident that stories could change the world, but I was skeptical that I could change the world by writing stories. I gave social sciences my first preference. In any case, I could always keep writing fiction in my spare time.
But then I didn’t. There’s no one good reason for why. I focused on other things, I lost confidence, I slept too much. It would be satisfying to say that I took a step away from fiction to focus on reality, but the truth is there are plenty of people who manage to do both – I just didn’t. Still, it’s a strange experience, abandoning one life path for another. I got to see my old playmates continue their journey into the world of theatre, and meanwhile I was back at the start of a new expedition, trailing behind those who had set their course years earlier. I dropped a lot of things to let myself catch up, and one of those things was my own storytelling.
I was writing again by the end of college, but it’s all non-fiction now. Essays and podcasts and arguments in the comments section. I love it, but now that things have stabilized a bit, I’ve begun to notice an imbalance in my life. People often say that writing is like exercise: You have to do it every day, it’s difficult but it’s rewarding, etc. If that’s true, then I think non-fiction and fiction are two different sets of muscles that each need to be exercised. After years of focusing on evidence and argumentation, I still have no vocabulary for describing the sensation of being alive. I have, in a literary sense, been skipping leg day, and it’s beginning to affect my life. My bedroom is tidy, but not decorated; my diet is healthy, but not nourishing; I listen to podcasts, but not music. I am, to hammer the metaphor into the ground, unfinished.
***
One of the funny things about the book draft I wrote when I was 15 is how rarely I’ve thought about it since. There was a time when writing that story was a central facet of my self-identity: my first serious effort at writing, the prelude to my life in theatre, the first project I saw through to (some kind of) completion. This is itself a familiar kind of story – the artist as a young man, blossoming into creative maturity. But as I drifted away from theatre, that story stopped being a useful guide to my life. When you’re forty five minutes into a two hour meeting about non-hierarchical governance structures, tales of time travelling detectives tend not to get recalled.
Now when I tell people the story of how I got to where I am, I begin with that fork in the road at the beginning of college. It’s a story I’ve gotten pretty good at telling, emphasising all the sundry moments of conflict and failure and personal growth along the way. But it, too, has come to feel insufficient. If I’m going to move beyond my tidy, healthy, well-informed life, I need to start telling a richer story about myself, one with something to say about artistry and pleasure and romance.
There must be some possible synthesis of these two stories, of politics and poetry. That’s the story I’m trying to write now, one day at a time. It’s going to feel uneven and jarring at first, revisiting a plotline abandoned so long ago. But events have a pleasing way of logically arranging themselves in retrospect. If nothing else, I have role models in my effort to tell this story: in Audre Lorde and Arundhati Roy; in Michael D. Higgins and Fintan O’Toole. I can see that it’s possible. I doubt I’ll ever be “finished” in any meaningful sense of that word, but that’s ok. After all, the pleasure has always been in the writing.
Further Reading:
Uses of the Erotic and Poetry is not a luxury by Audre Lorde
Writing and Politics by Fintan O’Toole
Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield
Share this post