On the Edge

I am on the verge of achieving my lifelong dream. I was born wanting to be a writer. Well, maybe I wasn’t born with that exact dream, but it was pretty close. I am thinking I’m an anomaly, because we are influenced by our environment, right? Well, it’s not the way things worked in my case.

You see, there were almost no books in my home, in the house where I grew up. I’m pretty sure the few we had were never read and were never removed from behind the glass door in the china cabinet by the register. (That is an old term for a heat grate, lest you confuse the register at home with the one that belonged in a department store). 

Nobody intended to create a word lover, let alone a child addicted to reading. Not in my family. You were loved, but you needed to figure some things out for yourself.

There were a few other reading materials. Those weren’t the books for grown-up readers. They were my books, and they had more pictures than words. By the time I had figured out that these objects with pages and covers were more than pictures, I had absorbed the words. They were the same ones the pictures were saying to me. It was amazing...

The words merged with the colored pictures because they were repeated over and over, by my mother and grandmother. The two of them, exactly twenty years apart in age, took turns shaping my brain. Inside me, my head took it all in and caressed it. There is no logical explanation - that I can see - as to why the affinity was so strong, so immediate. Unless, of course, that word world came bundled up in that simple living room with bay windows, a red cocker spaniel, and those two women who were so close and took me into their circle.

In other words, I did not learn to read; instead, I devoured words, I breathed in and they fueled something inside. They entered my baby body along with the two women’s voices. They gave story to the pictures of children and animals. They made kingdoms within me. A circus, a schoolhouse, a farmyard, a pretty jungle. I choose the term ‘kingdom’ un purpose.

If I had realized what was happening to me, I would have been terrified. The power of those sounds would have seemed overwhelming. I was still learning my way around the nooks and crannies of our dilapidated old house.

I really don’t remember any part of my life without words, written words. They were pretty. They gleamed. They needed me, and I needed them. Even before I knew what they were, those marks on the pages had the weight of all life would bring. I decided I wanted to be a writer so I could keep spending time with the turning surfaces and the things they held. Pages: words, yes, but also colors, drawings, smooth surfaces and rustling, and ideas. All those, but above all, ideas.  

I needed those ideas, in such a small town. They later mushroomed into pyramids and Pyrenees, places to see. They later made me question the artificiality of pink vs. blue, of running a dance instructor out of town because he was ‘like that’, of one political party as being moral and the other not.

And still I wanted books, because they had everything. They were worlds. I was born to imbibe, chew up, swallow, digest everything they had to offer. You have no idea what this was like. Everywhere I went, I was swirling in words. 

This condition was all the big lead-up to the awareness of how much I wanted to write. I didn’t have a name yet for the desire to be a novelist, but the seed was there. A story, a social studies report, a letter, a diary. I wrote all of those things, happily. By age six, cursive entered the picture. I knew that people sent greeting cards and used it to convey their thoughts. It was such a lovely way to represent words, so much better than printing. It said ‘We are human words, written by a hand. Our maker is old (young, drunk, sick, etc.), as you can tell by the way we look’.

By age six I had taught myself to write so I too might send pretty cards. Proudly, I presented something I’d written in cursive, and I signed the worksheet we did in class using my adult penmanship. Then I was told it was necessary to wait a year before entering the letter-writing world that grown-ups used to inhabit. No reason for the prohibition, just wait until second grade.

That was wrong, telling me not to make those flowing forms. I was ready to have my words dance across and down the page like cursive made them do. I think I cried a little, but probably kept writing at home. A poem or two was born, even, during the wait.

I wanted to be a writer even more when, in eighth grade, we learned to diagram sentences. We were back to the words and the drawings! It was so much fun. This was partly true because I was quite shy. My best friends were now the prepositional phrases and the adverbial clauses. Grammar words were not mean and threatening! They were supportive and they clarified things. They talked to me and arranged themselves in such lovely patterns.

I am truly devastated by the way people treat - or ignore - grammar these days. We need it in our lives, in order to tend to unruly words. Back then, we cared. We cared a lot. We loved language. It didn’t get in the way of our fun. It was our fun. We never thought about spellcheck because we didn’t have, need it, or want it. 

At seventeen I went to college to study something. Something with words in it, with lots of reading and no numbers, no math. The most language-y languages I knew were Latin and Greek. Still, in Classics courses we had to read mostly history, geometry, and poetry, because novels hadn’t been invented yet. (Nightmare world,one with no novels. Cervantes fortunately fixed that.) 

Aesop’s fables - the closest thing to short stories - were too didactic. College classes felt like Sunday School with a lot of parables. I craved fiction, but of course I had no way of knowing that because nobody ever looked at me long enough to see my deep longing, my addiction. I never took an English literature course while at the university, either. Nobody told me about creative writing. I must have gone through those years like a ghost inhabits the Castle of Otranto, or as if I were exploring the mysteries of Udolpho. My worlds were still being built for me and served up with fine flavors. I savored them all. Even bad novels had good ingredients, because they were pure words.

It doesn’t matter what I majored in, but I will say that I chose my major because I was lazy. My major left me more time to read, which was all I wanted (along with becoming a writer).

The path here gets rather like a briar patch, prickly and painful, with no real direction. That, despite having acquired a college degree. Please do not think anything changed, because there was nothing and nobody around me to serve as a guide. That is why I still had that same serious craving to be a writer, but never thought about trying to be one. Nobody paid much attention to me, and certainly nobody cared about where I might go or where I might end up. 

I was starving.

That doesn’t make me angry, just sad.

While saying I had no encouragement to be a word worker, a syllable chef if we’re trying out creative phraseology, I have to admit there were really no barriers to reaching my dream besides the lack of interest in me from the people who knew me. At least they gave me their silence, and that too was essential. 

I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself.

Suddenly one day I awoke, having finally realized the real problem. I had too many languages to choose from: the language of Poe, of Hawthorne, of Frost and Alcott, Brönte and Crane. Naturally, this list is terribly incomplete. Add a few hundred more, at least.

Soon after English came other languages. Those included the voices of: Unamuno, Salinas, Laforet, Camões, Ramos, Arguedas, Rosalía, Campo, Queizán , and a thousand others. Oh, how obscure were some of the writers and their places of origin! But I l0ved esoteric and sought out the least-read beauties, from places like Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras. I forayed into Brazil and Portugal and became almost ill from rapture. New worlds, all waiting to capture me. Happy captive I was.

There was a forest of the voices with their mouths and sounds and they threatened to devour me (a thing I know a lot about), so I turned away and taught, thinking that way I could thrust out the words before they could claim my soul. 

That was so naïve. Here’s what happened:

It is important to point out that teaching position required me to publish if I wanted to achieve that magic status called tenure. Having tenure means nobody can fire you, even if they catch you doing something wrong, like reading a novel in your office instead of going to teach. Obliged to publish, I read and wrote about what others had written. I lost the dream of being an author of my own thoughts, with my own words, I guess. It didn’t matter, since I had everybody else in my quiver. I could fall back on them when I needed support. My job was secure. Why worry about doing something else? Words were still everywhere, swarming and gorgeous, after all.

Then it all came to a screeching halt. The years had flown by. Retirement loomed on the horizon, then became a reality. I thought it would be a big chance to get closer to words, try to do things that had been mere dreams for so many years. I could be with the stories all day and we could make up our own games, with our own rules.

It wasn’t that easy. I tried translation and words in languages other than my own linked arms with me, in fact. We found ways to be together, to cross bridges, to touch what needed touching. I was once more in love, like when I was in Latin class and traveling to Rome daily to learn how people talked or wrote. The language paired with English for the translations I was doing was no longer Latin, but it was a distant relative. It was a more than I deserved.

Once again, I had been shaped by books and words given to me by an adult. I didn’t choose that. Translating was like playing in two sandboxes at once. I started to understand what it offered and knew that a door had opened wider than before. Living and sleeping with other people’s novels has taught me that it is a vicarious pleasure. It has also reinforced the desire to do my own writing, to use up the wealth given me by so many incredible writers, to pass it on in the hope that somebody will like it.

Anyway, this is the reality. It took translation and a leap of faith, although I have no idea which faith that is. Despite all the hope and writing and rearranging, my novel has taken 13 years. I have a publisher. I have a deadline. I have an ending and am ready to sign on the dotted line. Yes, I am about to fulfill my lifelong dream. I am about to become a novelist.

I can’t. I can’t sign. Can’t say “The End.” Can’t finish. There is a logical explanation.

The novel, if it is published, and it will be, because of the publisher and the contract and the fact that I’ve finished the last chapter. However, those fatal words, “The End,” will be the end of everything. I will be what I’ve always wanted to be, or so I think. Living the dream, they call it. 

This is a nightmare. All those words accumulated over the decades, with pretty illustrations or not, will be released, used up. At that point I will no longer have control over them. They will speak for me and perhaps will say things I never intended them to say. Terrifying. Mine for decades, now free to roam.

I can’t let that happen. I cannot finish. 

If I finish the novel, I will finish the life spent wanting to write it. I will bring readers to me to judge, praising or defaming, embracing or rejecting. Now it doesn’t seem like such a good idea to be getting more attention.

More than the potential readers, I am concerned about the characters. If they turn on me, they will be a serious threat to my well-being. They will go out into the world with my words, claiming they are the owners, and I will be empty-handed. Or they will speak poorly, then blame me. I don’t know if I can shut them up.

I need to think, before my dream goes down in flames. I need my words to burn instead. Except there is but one burnable item here: my author’s galleys. Not enough paper to make for an Inquisition style bonfire. Plus, I bet my publisher has a digital copy and I can’t go searching the whole internet for it.

I am panicking now for real. The protagonists and antagonists, the reliable and unreliable narrators, the monologues and flashbacks, carrying the weight of my words, are trying to expose themselves. I am so ashamed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I never wanted them to happen. They are not to be trusted. Now I really want to eat my words or burn them at the stake so they won’t harm anybody. I don’t know how to stop them, how to shut them up, how to explain to the world that I have made a big mistake.

There is only one way to fix this.

The novel that is supposed to be published and on the shelves in a few days is Speak No Evil, written by K. N. March. 

The novel I am hoping to write but have not yet written, is Read No Evil. My name is K. Mörz, or Moares. I haven’t decided yet.

In other words, just ignore this whole story. It’s just something I made up, starting with the title right down to here ——>> . 

I am very much on the edge, you know.