I’m back with another installment of Books and Reading. From Part
Four, music remained front and center in my teenage years playing in a band
with a couple of high school buddies. The plan was to write music, and lyrics
to that music, and see where music would take us.
But then came another piece to my life’s puzzle, not that I knew it
at the time. I was perusing a rack of magazines at a local convenience store distracting
myself from Grade 12 exams when the navy-blue cover of a paperback caught my
attention. Menacing eyes stared back at me from the cover with the threat, ‘take
me or else’.
The book was thick; an epic tale by most standards that I had to
have. Like Rush and their album A
Farewell To Kings, from my last installment, I knew nothing of the author
or the book. The novel—The Stand—was penned
by then little known writer Stephen King. Much more interesting than studying
for physics or algebra; I couldn’t put the book down. As a side note, in Mr.
King’s favor, not long thereafter, I found out that a girl I had eyes for had
read and loved that same book. I married that girl.
Stephen King rocked my world and was my initiation into what reading
would become. I followed The Stand with
several of his other novels including The
Shining, Salem’s Lot and The Dead
Zone; I couldn’t get enough from the King of Horror.
In a way that was the beginning of my writing life. I wasn’t exactly
writing but it was part of what I have come to understand as my 10,000-hour writing
apprenticeship (thank you Malcolm Gladwell); I was reading with unintentional
intent. (since then I’ve read much of Mr. King’s 74-book catalogue including The Dark Tower and his more recent 11/22/63.)
Discovering Stephen King, led to renewed interest in the literature
introduced at high school including classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Leo
Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Combine
these with Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
and Atlas Shrugged and Ernest
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom The Bell Tolls and a foundation
was forming I was unaware of.
Along with my renewed interest in reading, I did have encouragement
from some special teachers. Mr. Lewis in grade school, “read Hemingway, my boy,
for those short sentences”, or Miss Schmidt in high school, “find that café in
Paris and write” and Miss Surerus later in high school, “let talent take you
where your heart wants to go”.
I kept writing lyrics, even poetry, to the songs I wrote and the
band performed. But like with most plans life has a way of turning out differently and the
band broke up. I was devastated but continued to write music and lyrics branching into poetry and prose.
The time came to decide what I was to do next; life was moving me on.
Still confounded by writing and its format of subject, predicate and sentence
structure that were so much harder to understand than the easier formulas of
math and science, I chose to pursue engineering.
I’m reminded here of a quote I read from Daniel Pinkwater (author of
Lizard Music), “I went to college,
but I learned to write by reading and writing.”
This marks a good place to end Part Five of Reading and Writing and
bid you farewell until our next meeting.
If you haven’t yet read my books The
Actor or The Drive In, you can
get them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Chapters-Indigo or pretty much
wherever you find books.
