It was my local newspaper. I had won a contest, with the prize being a chance to appear in real print.
I wasn’t paid. Losing my amateur status wouldn’t come for another year, when I started stringing on sports stories for the same paper.
Still, it was a big deal—my first chance to see my work in print that wasn’t a student paper.
My mother, who both encouraged and was amused by my ambition to write for a living, clipped the short piece out of the paper. She put it on our refrigerator and showed it to people—particularly my grandfather and my aunt, her father and sister—when they came to visit.
I, though, couldn’t look at it.
Even though it was short, maybe 300 words, I’d sweated over it—writing, rewriting, rewriting yet again, then rewriting still more. I wanted it to be perfect.
Wanted it to show that I had talent.
That I could be a writer.
When it appeared, however, it embarrassed me. I realized, for the first time, something that many writers before me and many writers after me also have discovered.
The act of publication brings a writer’s work into a different and, in some ways, sharper focus. Once it’s out where readers can see it, stylistic infelicities that hid themselves during the writing process suddenly seem nakedly, glaringly, blatantly apparent. All the places where the cadence slipped because I chose a word with either one too many or one too few syllables, or the tone shifted like a grinded gear on an old truck, now stood out.
All the things the writer could have done better—should have done better—take a turn in the spotlight.
When that first piece appeared, I wasn’t proud.
I was mortified.
I’d written it to show that I was good. That I’d make it as a writer.
Instead, when I saw how clunky it was, how much the language strained and struggled to gain altitude without ever leaving the ground, it felt like I’d done the opposite.
I’d just demonstrated how inept I was.
I’d shown everyone that I’d never make it.
And my mother had the proof taped to our refrigerator door for all my relatives to see.
I was young then, not yet 17, and didn’t know much about life or work. I didn’t realize that I was learning something that all writers learn and must learn to live with.
There is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing.
Constant dissatisfaction is part of the process. The writer who becomes content, who grows complacent, stops progressing. The prose loses its vigor and its snap.
And the writer drifts.
My mother kept that piece for years afterward. She removed it from the refrigerator door after a time, maybe because she realized my feelings about it were more complicated than hers, and packed it away.
But she saved it through a series of moves, until it was thrown out in one of her last downsizes.
I can’t say I was sorry to see it go. Its disappearance is no loss to literature.
Its appearance marked the beginning of my true education as a writer. I learned that talent and intelligence by themselves aren’t enough to enable a person to make a living with a pen.
No, it also takes perseverance, a willingness—no, a determination—to wade through failure after failure after failure in pursuit of creating something good.
Something beautiful
Something essential and true.
I remember when that piece appeared and the swing from exhilaration to near despondency that followed it.
A half-century later, I still get excited when a piece of mine is about to appear.
And I still feel let down when I see it in published form and direct a critical eye at its flaws.
When I see all the ways I could have done it better.
Should have done it better.
But then I pick up the pen again to write, spurred on by the forlorn but undying hope that maybe, just maybe, this next time I’ll get it right.
