I’ve always been a writer. But a traumatic experience — at least for the 5-year-old I was at the time — almost threw me off the vocation I love. I thank a crusty old university professor for helping me find it by saying the right thing at the right time.
I’d loved letters even before I decided to impress my parents with the few words I had already learned to scribble in kindergarten. Unfortunately, I chose my mom’s best linen tablecloth, spread for a Sunday meal that included “important people.” How important was beyond my grasp at that age. But that was what my dad called them, and they must have been special, judging from the yelling that followed. Imagine. There I was, my Eeyore under an arm, full of pride and waiting for praise. Instead, I was sent to my room, crying and sans crayons for the next week.
It was a searing experience that must have stayed with me for decades. Back then I spent hours carefully fashioning letters with curlicues and other embellishments as good as a kid my age could make them. Suddenly they were my enemies. My Grade One workbook was a mess from A to Z, each character distorted, as ugly as I could make it. I could not avoid writing in high school and college, and my essays lacked nothing in information. But in terms of words, they were sparse, “Just as many . . . as necessary,” to quote Mozart when talking about the number of notes in one of his operas. I was reading pretty well everything I laid hands on by then. But I still was anti-letter when it came to writing. What I couldn’t have known was how useful that would soon turn out to be.
I’d been avoiding a reality check. But just a few weeks away from my BA in English-German Literature it was time. What was I going to do with my love of Goethe, Byron, Shakespeare, and Thomas Mann? Chances of tenure after grad school at a university German department looked, in a word, unwahrscheinlich. Even the slightest thought of teaching high school English bored me. The only other jobs I had any experience in were driving a forklift and killing people, at least in theory, from my Canadian Army years. So, I turned to Prof. Atkinson.
We started on the wrong foot and looking back, I guess it was my fault. But as a brash young undergrad, I’d been furious when he returned my first paper on one of Shakespeare’s comedies (can’t remember which one) with angry notations in red punctuated by exclamation marks, all screaming variations of “Don’t do this!” We did become kind of friends. But only once I stopped rewriting the Bard. He admired my knack for getting to the point in fewer words than the rest of his students and at some point, I started going to him for questions other than how Shakespeare used comic relief in his tragedies. Among them were relationships, and I still remember suppressing a smirk as he waxed poetic about the joy of long-term ones, speaking about the pleasure of falling asleep next to his wife of nearly 40 years in terms that I could not comprehend. Not then, at least. But he was good at other advice. Including what I should do with my life. Become a journalist, he said. You write well. And above all, you don’t waste words.
I’d chosen majors in German and English for the love of reading their best authors, not realizing how much I would have to write their works until well into my first semester. But I had become good at it, or so Atkinson said. What grabbed me most about what he told me about journalism was the importance the trade placed on conciseness. More important was that I had little choice. I wasn’t skilled at much else than writing. My university offered an MA in journalism. I enrolled and found immediate satisfaction in making certain that I didn’t waste a single word when writing practice news stories. Hewing to the essentials later served me in good stead when I worked as an editor for The Associated Press. But by then, I was having fun way beyond being a word Nazi. I was a foreign correspondent traveling five of the seven continents and being paid for living adventures others would have spent a fortune on. Much of what I wrote about were wars and insurrections. But my favorite stories were about the people I met on the way — people displaying exemplary courage, love, and humanity You can’t look at word counts when you write about such emotions, So, I came full circle from the boy of five decades ago. Again loving letters and the words they created, I wrote as long as I needed to do justice to the stories these people told me.
And then, I retired. Boom. Tennis. Running. Nothing else?
The answer came to me in a dream a few days later. I saw two men, one an Islamic warrior, the other a high school history teacher bound to each other bound by the soul they shared. I started writing The Sword and the Prophecy the next morning. And by day three, I thought nothing of using hundreds of words to paint a mind picture of the shimmering sands of the Sahara at noon, or the turmoil in the mind of the hero as he weighs killing the man who raped his love.
I was a writer as a child. Then a journalist. Now, I’m an author.
