Scared in the Dark
Today in the rain, I got hooked into a movie I had seen and resisted for some time. It’s called Genius and is the storyof Max Perkins, the famous editor at Scribner’s who discovered and published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Jude Law plays Wolfe and he is a desperately troubled figure that has an overactive mind and an out-of-control literary ego that may have helped him produce four great novels, but also drove him to an early death at age thirty-seven. While Perkins helped Hemingway keep himself from self-destructing in the bullring, the Spanish Civil War and on the open sea on a fishing boat, and helped Fitzgerald through his struggles with writer’s block and with Zelda’s schizophrenia, it was Wolfe who presented the greatest managerial challenge. Wolfe had the problem of prodigious literary excess. He wrote books of hundreds of thousands of pages. It was said that for every 100 words written by Fitzgerald, Wolfe wrote 5,000. At one point when Perkins was trying to explain to him the ubiquitous need for writers, he said that when man lived in caves he huddled together scared in the dark until one of the people stood up to tell a story to sooth the fears of the group.
I often wonder why I am drawn so much to writing and it sounds very noble that somewhere someone decided that it was for the greater good of the community that they launch into an exercise of storytelling. I’m inclined to think that at least part of my reasons for writing are about soothing those around me, or at least soothing them by entertaining them. I certainly don’t do it to annoy them even though I do that at times. I attribute that to the fact that what I consider amusing isn’t always in synch with what others find amusing. But at least I rest confident in the belief that my intentions are good and that I am getting better and better at anticipating what might annoy rather than entertain. But this morning I read an article in the New Yorker about how people think. The biggest difference is between visualizers and vocalizers. There are strata among each category, but the fundamental difference in how we formulate and express thoughts is thought (at least by this author) to be a function of how visual or cerebral we may be. I am always drawn back to that cap awarded to me last year by a member of my motorcycle group that thinks I worry too much about assault rifles (he is a manufacturer of said rifles). He gave me the hat that says, “Hold on, let me overthink this”. It was as funny as it was and it resonated with me as much as it has because it is based in truth. I do tend to overthink things. But my very nature is that I only consider it overthinking in the context of how other people choose to think. To me overthinking is just thinking and thinking is the essence of how my verbalized mind seems to work.
The more I read of that New Yorker article, the more I sensed that I somehow straddle that divide between the visual and the verbal. As I read about the way in which each is manifested, I see characteristics that I recognize. I believe that I do have the ability to see pictures and even videos in my mind. While I am not so much a visual artist as I am a storyteller, I have recently proven to myself with my totem pole, my boulder art and my overall creation of my gardens, that I do have a visual side to my brain and it may well take the total freedom and flexibility of retirement to release that. But none of that makes me doubt that I am, at my core, a storyteller.
I revel in storytelling. I am driven to tell jokes and good jokes are not soundbites, they are small stories told with a storyteller’s bent and enthusiasm. When I am in a gathering of almost any type, I like to tell anecdotes. I am always reminded of Steve Martin’s line to John Candy in Trains, Planes and Automobiles when he says, “when you tell an anecdote, have a point.” I find that the only way to tell a good story is to have it be relevant to the conversation underway. If you tell a story about something totally out of context it loses relevance and is not as funny, entertaining or interesting. The same story told at the right moment and during the right conversation can warrant a completely different reaction. But the real test of my being a storyteller rest in these daily stories that I write. They come easily to me, especially now that I am so practiced at the writing part of the storytelling. I often said that I am less a writer than a storyteller, but I’m no longer sure that is the case. I have definitely passed the 10,000 hour mark when it comes to writing, so I think it might be fair to say that I am equally a storyteller and a writer. The other piece of evidence I have is that I have now ghost written three books, two of which are in print. When you write other people’s stories rather than your own stories, that’s pretty good evidence that you are a writer as well as a storyteller.
I am at a point in my storytelling that I am wondering what direction I am likely to take next. I see no reason not to keep writing my daily blog stories like this one. It is now ingrained in my daily routine and I would have a gap in my day if I stopped doing it. Some friends wonder when I will run out of things to say or stories to tell and my simple answer is, never. I truly have more story ideas in a day than I have time to write them. They come to me all the time. It’s as though I have trained myself to find stories in everything around me, but it may realistically be a reversal of that cause and effect and I am probably compelled to tell stories because I see them all around me. My daughter recently gave me an early birthday gift of something called Storyworth. It is set up as an online mechanism where you are fed story themes and then given a platform on which to write them into what become chapters in a sort of autobiography that gets put together after a year as a proper book. It is sold as a way to give your grandchildren a better version of the verbal history they might one day want in their search for their heritage.
I was sent the program and the first question about ten days ago. Since then I have submitted four stories totaling 50 pages in the book. Three of them are completely original and written for this purpose. One is a story I wrote before and cut and pasted because it was a theme I had already written about. I have ten more questions on deck and a host of themes generated solely by the platform. So, I am way ahead of the normal Storyworth schedule and plan to keep writing and, where appropriate, cutting and pasting until I have what feels something like a true autobiography. The problem with being an overthinker is that I’m sure I have more thoughts about my own life than anyone, even a grandchild at some future boring moment in their life, would ever find as interesting as I do. I think the quality of this book, which I have temporarily titled Carpe Diem: That’s Rich is all about editing. To be honest, Carpe Diem has been a motto of mine for many years and seemed a natural title for an autobiography, but the subtitle really needs to be attributed to my nephews Josh and Will, who pretended to want to write a TV series called That’s Rich about this whacky guy who is constantly driven to overachieve and stumbles his way through it. I feel comfortable using the subtitle, because my nephews have what we used to call a high talk to ticket ratio and they never really did anything with the idea, so I feel it still exists in the ozone of the unclaimed. So, when my grandkids are sitting around and are scared in the dark, they can read my stories and hopefully lighten their mood.