All I know is I have a first sentence

All I know is I have a first sentence
                        

“You should write a book.”

I’ve heard that suggestion so many times in my life that, just to end the repetition, I ought to do it.

I tried twice.

The second time was with my brother and it was at the insistence of both of our wives, though back then, I wasn’t married.

We were spending a week on the beach, his family and my fiancée and me, having a great time in a place called Ocean City.

The one in Maryland.

There are others.

And in the course of one of those delightful sun-splashed August afternoons – the kind that that you work all year for, just hoping to experience – the ladies in our lives had it all figured out.

We brothers would collaborate and write a best-seller.

They were so convinced we could pull it off that they were already planning all the ways we would enjoy the millions we’d make.

A cross-country trip, taking in all the sights, from Mount Rushmore to the Grand Canyon, see LA and San Francisco, dip our toes in the Pacific, maybe bop over to Hawaii.

Heck, why not travel abroad?

See Paris and London, maybe Marrakech or Singapore.

Oh, how they fashioned our futures.

From their point of view, I suppose, it made sense. By that summer, my brother – who had earned his doctorate in English at the tender age of 26 – was already a published professor, having written a 255-page book titled, “In a Dark Time: The Apocalyptic Temper in the American Novel of the Nuclear Age.”

What’s that?

You don’t have a copy yet?

Well, it sold for $27.50 back then, but I’m sure you could get a deal now.

As for me, well, I’d been writing a weekly “human interest column” for a few years and had been invited to speak at several places, mostly high-school classrooms where the kids were nice enough not to nod off as I rambled on about life and love, the Beatles and the Stones, and why baseball’s strike in 1994 had doomed America’s pastime.

Between us, we had enough ego to actually consider the possibility that we could work together and, well, write a novel.

And so it happened that in March, in the year of our Lord 2000, we settled in to do just that.

Our collaboration lasted less than a week; in fact, we called it quits after two days.

There were many reasons. For one, we decided to alternate chapters, figuring we could bring perspectives from each of our major characters.

We flipped a coin and I became the voice of the woman. That was fine with me, since my brother preferred the male protagonist.

Things went off the rails almost immediately.

We had imagined a scene set in a funeral home where our two main characters, both of whom had known the deceased but had never met, brought their back stories to the fore.

In my mind, the woman – who was named Kate – was a baseball fan and, for reasons that would become clear later in the narrative, decided to wear her Yankee cap to the calling hours.

I put the finishing touches on the chapter, saved my work and handed the helm to my brother.

Later that night, I re-read what we’d written and discovered something was missing.

“Hey,” I asked, “what happened to Kate’s cap?”

“I got rid of it,” my brother said.

“Why?”

“Who wears a baseball cap to a funeral home?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “Kate does. Obviously.”

“I didn’t like it,” he said, “and I hate the Yankees.”

And that, faithful readers, was pretty much that.

Our novel, to be titled “Gull’s Way,” died quietly that night.

Goodbye, Morocco.

Hello, obscurity.

In all fairness, my brother was probably correct when he described our aborted collaboration as being akin to having “two steering wheels in one car.”

But our wives have never fully forgiven us for abandoning “Gull’s Way” so quickly.

“A stupid baseball hat,” his wife said.

“It was a cap,” I said, “and it was an important image.”

My wife shook her head.

“All you had to do was write a simple love story,” she said, “not create some piece of serious literature.”

I looked at my brother.

He looked at me.

We smiled but stayed silent.

There was nothing left to say.

Writing is a purely personal passion, or at least most of the time it is. As Hemingway famously said, “Writing is simple. You sit down and you bleed.”

In my life, I’ve written probably half a million published words, twice that if you count letters and journals and short stories and post cards and junk I’ve just jammed into desk drawers.

Words simply flow from me and I don’t know how it happens. It’s like a fugue state. Sometimes, I have no recollection at all at how a particular piece ended up the way it did.

They say everyone has a book inside them, just waiting to be written.

I don’t know about that.

Maybe it’s true.

All I know is that I have a first sentence.

In my 63 years on the planet, I’ve managed to come up with exactly 21 words that could – I stress “could” – actually lead to a novel.

Want to read them?

OK.

Here they are:

“He’d seen her before she’d seen him, of that much he was certain, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure of anything.”

Well?

What do you think?

Yeah.

I know.

I’ve still got a long way to go.

Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun on his Facebook page.


Loading next article...

End of content

No more pages to load