Now It Begins

Now It Begins

My First Thoughts on Campus

When I first walked onto the university campus after finally being accepted, albeit conditionally, I thought “Now it begins.” I will finally be moving ahead in my dream to be a professional writer, a published author. Some of my favourite books, and short stories have been written on these very grounds. Good writers have been inspired right here, perhaps where I am standing right now. I hope to become one of that number in my time here.

In high school I wrote a few poems that got published in the yearbook, but otherwise nothing I have put together has ever been published. Most of my poems had been inspired by walking the family dogs. But that could not happen here – no dogs as companions. And if I am to be honest, my poems lacked a sense of completion, always ending with a question or two that doesn’t get resolved. One that I remember is:

           Undecided

           He views gray rabbits

           in his pre-dawn dog-walk

           Startled when disturbed

           they are quick to retreat

           into some thick bush

           green hiding grayness

           perhaps.

           His sympathies are mixed

           with gray rabbits

           and with dogs and their walkers

           In that solitary time

           Someone should have

           the morning

           to themselves.

But I am in a different place now, the big league. Inspired writing is going to happen now. My favourite writer, Frank Firth graduated from this university and was an English professor here when he wrote his best selling books. I wish that he was still teaching here. But I found out after I was accepted that he has since retired, and has moved out of town. Still, in my mind’s eye I see him walking across the campus.

A Month Later

My mindset has changed now after one month at the university. I have had no writer’s inspiration yet, just a few false starts.  Still, I have hopes concerning someone that I am working with. Her name is Lacy, an older lady who is soon to retire. She works at the library, as do I, very much part time. I needed the money for the high cost of student residences at the university, plus having enough funding left over to at least have two decent meals a day. The job is ideal  for me. I’m in the company of books. All I have to do is re-file those that have been returned. If they look interesting, particularly the ones that are works of fiction, I flip through them for ideas that might help my writing. 

In the interview for the job, I told Lacy about how I wanted to be a writer, and said that my main inspiration was my favourite author Frank Firth. She told me that Frank and her had taken several English courses together about a generation ago, and she had a high respect for what he had produced over the years that followed their graduation.  She had signed copies of his best-sellers. I wanted to hear more about this, but we were there for me to answer questions, not pose them.  I made a mental note of asking her more later on about Frank and how he got his ideas for novels.

In the one instance in which I had to reshelve one of the books written by Frank Firth, I held it tightly in both hands and thought a silent prayer that some day some young author would do the same with one of my books-to-be.

The library was an old one, and was designed in a somewhat strange way. There were separate rooms for different subjects, although the doors that had once separated them were long gone now. While I say that, it was not true of one door in the basement. I wanted to check it out to discover what was inside, but the door would not open, no matter how hard I pulled on the latch and swore. I decided that I would later ask Lacy about it

My English Professor

           My English professor took classes with Frank Firth when she was a student some years ago. In our first class, she announced that with obvious pride. After the second class I asked her whether he had ever given his students tips on how to write. While she pointed out that such was not strictly speaking the job of an English professor to teach that, she did say that he told his class about how location, where he was when he wrote, was very important to him. He had joked about what he found to be the bad places to write on the campus. He mentioned the cafeteria in particular as just such a place because there were too many conflicting voices to be heard. His mind could not compete. Still, according to my English prof, he had told his students that after trying out several possible places, he had finally found where he would be inspired. She could not remember where it was. I didn’t want to press the issue, hoping that she would recall the location at a later time.

My Lucky Day

Monday, November 6, would prove to be my lucky day. First of all, my English professor told me that Frank Firth’s inspirational place was somewhere inside of the library, she wasn’t exactly sure where. Later on, when I was working in the library, I asked Lacy about it. She told me that it was in a small room in the basement, the one that I had tried to get into but failed.

She went over to her desk to find where the key to the door might be. In my impatient mind, this took a long time. Eventually, she found it. We then went into the basement. I had to restrain myself from running down the stairs.

She unlocked the door. In the darkness, we could see a dusty, dirty room that had little more than a desk with three drawers, with a fairly large object on it, a wooden chair and a light. When she turned on the light we saw that the object on the desk was a typewriter. I hadn’t seen one of them in years. There was a piece of paper with typed letters on it. When I looked at it closely, I could see that the words were those that I knew were had been written on the first page of his last novel, I remembered it so well. When we looked inside the top drawer we saw a series of similar pages that I knew in some cases to be the beginnings of his other novels. 

The second drawer had ribbons yet unused, and the third was filled with blank pages.

Lacy knew what I was going to ask her before I said a word. “Here is the key” she said, “I suspect that you will want to come in here to start your first novel”. She was, of course, right. 

The next day I typed the first two paragraphs of what I hoped would become a novel. After a couple of weeks, my first novel-length work was ready to be submitted to a publisher. I submitted it on-line and put the typed first page inside the top drawer.