Not Quite Ready to Write, Right?

By: Phil Fitzpatrick

Most of what I've written has never seen the light of day, and so far, I’ve been okay with that. I'm a career educator, so I'd hazard a guess that I've written more on student essays and tests over the years than I'll ever be able put into the “Great American Novel" or a Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection. I'm not driven like many writers say you have to be in order to feel any sort of fulfillment. I don't get up at oh-dark-thirty and write for four hours every day, nor do I keep a little weather-beaten spiral notebook in my shirt pocket for those times when inspiration strikes and I have to scribble words of genius down. I have trouble following Sean Connery's advice in Finding Forrester: "Don't think. Just write. The first draft you write from your heart; the second draft you write with your head!" I stumble through a composition in fits and starts; I get up and sit down again, proofread what I've just written over and over again, second guess myself...it's just a train wreck, my writing. So where’s the upside?

I’ll tell you where it is. It’s in what F. Scott Fitzgerald calls “the infinite possibility.” Hardly a day passes when there are not a dozen or so moments that fairly shriek to be written about. The absence of a notebook is no deterrent whatsoever, nor are the widening holes in my memory. Each day is a cornu copia of possibilities, each person I encounter offers me pages of text, and each passing hour contains within it sounds and sights and fragrances enough to write six or eight trilogies. But experiencing all of this as “possibility” is getting old. I just have to have more time. I’ve got all the inspiration I need. As a matter of fact, my reservoir is overflowing. It got so full a few years ago that after I got myself a sabbatical, I wound up writing a book about golf, of all things. GOLF!! I call it my Practice Book.

That drained my tank enough to where I feel pretty good about launching into a project that has some heft and some muscle to it; I’ll not do anything so lightweight as a golf book this time. No way. I’m through with whimsy. People expect substance when they see your name on the cover of your book. They want thoughtful and responsible prose or poetry that makes them think. I’ve got plenty of prose and poetry waiting in the wings to be artfully and patiently and diligently coaxed onto the receptive pages with all the seriousness of purpose my gardening, grading, and golfing have so far succeeded in preventing. But one fine day, Boy, I’ll muster a book that won’t languish in a dozen boxes on the front porch the way this Pretender, this bogus (hmmm, sounds like “bogey”!) golf book is doing.

And so we beat on…trying to find time, and dreaming…dreaming of the possibility.