Why and How I Write

I grab motivation anywhere I can get it

I’m a writer, I declare in my Instagram bio. It’s quite a claim. Look at me go!

I’ve received a lot of encouragement for my writerly pursuits, and I am grateful for that. Writing is difficult because I have to hunt myself into a corner to get anything to come out. When someone says, “Hey, I liked what you wrote about spilling coffee,” it does help the effort feel worth it. Unfortunately, positive feedback isn’t very helpful when I’m stuck in the mud. But I have found a lever that does help me get back in motion: Vengeance.

For three summers during my college years I sang in an a cappella group called the Hyannis Sound. I lived in a house with nine other guys and performed all over Cape Cod from May to August. I still need to write about that, and I will.

One evening after a show, we were schmoozing by the exit as was our custom. A woman who I wish I could describe in some hurtful way—but all I can visually recall is that her hair looked too blonde and too crunchy—stopped and stood in front of me.

“You go to the University of Virginia?”

“I do!”

“That’s a great school. What’s your major?”

“English.”

“Ha! What a WASTE!”

I paused for half a second as the moment engraved itself deeply and permanently within the folds of my brain. I knew I’d remember my retort forever, so I tried to make it good.

“I don’t feel that way at all.”

What do you think? I’m fine with it. There’s a scene in the excellent movie A Knight’s Tale when Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany) is roaming nude after suffering some misfortune and responds to a dullard laughing at his situation: “I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw…I was naked for a day. You will be naked for eternity.” That would have fit snugly.

And there ends the portion of the conversation I confidently recall. She may have sputtered on after that, but to my recollection, she didn’t do anything to suck her words out of the air and back into her pie hole.

You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.

This woman does not know she is my nemesis. In that moment I vowed to dedicate the rest of my life to proving her wrong. She and her wine breath couldn’t stop herself from hip checking me, and I didn’t budge. Her dismissal of my choice only reinforced my conviction.

I do tend to self-deprecate on the rare occasions college education comes up in conversation. “Ha - yes, a bank loaned me a lot of money to drink beer and sing a cappella for four years.” I think I’m done with that. Here is the fuller explanation that my weak assailant needed but didn’t deserve (and didn’t get):

I didn’t go to UVA with a plan. I had more faith in what I didn’t know yet than in what I felt sure of by eighteen. I took a slew of different courses over my first two years as a Wahoo: psychology, physics, astronomy, calculus, biology, history, econ…I remember stuff. I remember learning about Capgras syndrome and the Drake equation and the freedom lawn movement. Voluntary trade benefits both sides. For a brief shining moment I could calculate integrals.

One day during my second year I was in Clark Library reading “The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope. Yes, that Alexander Pope, the guy from the “A. Pope interred” clue in The Da Vinci Code. “The Rape of the Lock” is a mock epic about a guy who loves a girl who isn’t interested in him. At a function he sneaks up behind her and cuts off a lock of her hair (this is the type of guy who would definitely buy Sydney Sweeney’s bathwater soap). He sneaks into her powder room to hold the stolen lock of hair and have his wank and is horrified to see the leftover detritus from her makeup routine and her chamber pot with poop in it.

I felt my whole brain light up and I realized, “Oh - this is funny.” I was reading a tongue-in-cheek epic poem from 1712 that a weird guy with a crooked spine wrote to make aristocrats feel bad about themselves. I was laughing and I felt connected to this guy and everything everywhere all at once. I had resurrected him. We shared a laugh across three hundred years. And that is when I decided, or realized, that I was an English major.

I did not want a backup plan. I knew the feeling of writing something and feeling good about it and seeing it elicit a strong response. I knew it enough times that I felt it would be a waste not to follow that compass. I worried that if I charted a viable backup course, I might not build the nerve to sail into foggy, windy conditions.

I further ensured I would have no backup plan by having an extended meltdown during the back half of my college career. I took a semester off, restructured my major, was grateful for the AP testing program at Marshfield High School, and set a course to limp out of UVA with a Bachelor’s in English.

The final hurdle I had to clear was an essay about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, originally due in April, that I submitted in July of 2013. I was bumping up against my stay-of-enrollment deadline and for months had been unable to hit any key but “backspace.” Strung out on light beer and energy drinks in the basement of the Hyannis Sound house, I had no cognitive powers available to dress up my thoughts with academic pretense.

Do you know about Gawain (GAH-win) and the Green Knight? It’s a great story about a guy trying to look cool, being too scared to get laid, chickening out of a dare, and his friends liking him anyway. I wrote about Gawain being a modern hero. In the Hyannis Sound we sang without mics - I was good at projecting.

Up until then, the characters in Arthurian legend had all fully embodied some vice or virtue and their rewards and punishments were meted out accordingly. But with Gawain, some full spectrum humanity was injected into the storytelling. A fallible hero. My professor wrote me back quite quickly to let me know I had officially passed the course and that she particularly liked my Sir Gawain essay, that it gave her a funny feeling, and she was going to hang onto it.

A few years ago I looked up that professor and sent her an email thanking her for her compassion and patience during a difficult period. We exchanged a pair of heartfelt messages peppered with clever little twirls of phrase. I wept.

hA! wHaT a WaStE!

Does that sound like a waste to you, Mrs. _____? Bet you wish you hadn’t tried to belittle me twelve years ago after an a cappella concert! Consider yourself eviscerated.

My real message to her is of course, “Thank you for the gift. I’ve made great use of it.” I’ve got a couple of other “gifts” I’ve received over the years stashed away in a little sack. They aren’t doing me any harm. They’re just firecrackers I can light off to pep myself up.

I think when you’re facing a decision and you find the right thing - person, partner, home, job, pet—whatever forces are applied to it, constructive or destructive, somehow manage to propel the system forward. So go ahead. Give spite a try. I’m sure you already do.

Epilogue

Welcome to the Post Script. How do you feel? You just read an original piece of writing by a cool guy. You’ve been enriched. I’ve told you the truth. And now you might be thinking, “Heh, I’m gonna be clever and say something nasty. He thinks insults are more useful than compliments.” If so, then yeah, that’s fine. Go ahead.

P.P.S. I didn’t write this because I’m stuck or ruminating. There has been a recent flurry of Pope news and every time I hear about the Pope, I think about the “A. Pope interred” clue because when I read that I thought, “Hey, I know that guy!” and then I think about that moment of clarity I had in the library and so on and so forth.