Live It, Experience It, and Write It Down

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

—Ernest Hemingway

When I was 5 years old, I thought that a blank piece of paper was the most exciting thing in the world.

I can remember running to my dad’s home office, yanking a few pages of paper out of the back of the printer tray, and scurrying off to the kitchen table armed with nothing but a ballpoint pen and an abundance of imagination. Then I would go to work on creating homemade comic books, crafting adventure stories featuring superheroes that I invented myself.

Despite my lackluster drawing abilities, (that particular skill never really improved) my love for creating fiction made me think that I could really have a go at writing as a career. I started then and there at five years old. I started stapling together those scribbly stacks of printer paper and going door to door in my neighborhood selling copies. Each of my comics were drawn and copied by hand because I didn’t understand how a copy machine worked yet. I saved money on distribution costs by delivering my books by hand while riding around on my bicycle, as opposed to stealing my parents' car. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much, but my first comic book made more than $7.50 in profit. Not retiring money yet, but an excellent start, if I do say so myself.

I realized early on that good writing merely consisted of living life, finding inspiration from it, and then writing something down —be it fact or fiction. Seemed simple enough.

I used this principle to come up with my own column for the high school newspaper: WWED, or Watch What Evan Does. (Pretty dumb name, I grant it, but cut me some slack; I was 16.) My column consisted of me journaling whatever hijinks and adventures that I was getting myself into anyway as a rambunctious teenage kid. I wrote about my experiences completing ridiculous food challenges my friends dared me to try. I stumbled through an obstacle course while wearing special goggles that impaired your vision to the point of mimicking drunkenness. I nearly peed myself while stalking around a pioneer cemetery and searching for ghosts on Halloween night. I jumped into the frigid Riley Creek in the middle of a snowstorm in January. I wrote about whatever trouble I felt like getting into in my free time. I lived earnestly, and I wrote honestly.

The journalism teacher hated my column. While she always let my stories go to the presses around publishing time, she reminded me frequently that she thought the WWED column was an unprofessional cirque de sideshow. But my friends’ reviews were glowing. It made the students at my high school laugh, and getting a positive reaction from my target audience was more important to me than the approval of the journalism teacher, so I kept on living, kept on experiencing, kept on writing.

My senior year of high school, I wrote my first play: Knight School, the story of a teenager who signs up for a credit recovery class but finds himself in a world of sword fighting, princess-saving, and dragon slaying. I submitted my manuscript to the drama club, and a group of my friends came together to perform it during the fall one act play festival. Watching my writing come to life before my eyes for the first time is a memory I’ll never forget.

In college, I continued writing as a journalist for my campus paper. I also kept writing short stories and plays, submitting them to creative writing contests and one act play festivals. During my time serving in the Army National Guard, I worked as a writer and photographer for numerous outlets connected to US military public affairs. I’ve worked as a writer for the Army, for newspapers, and for nonprofit organizations. Now, I’m an English teacher, where I teach young people to master the fundamentals of the written word.

Despite my love of the craft, there was always one challenge that I didn’t have the courage to tackle until now: Writing a novel.

I’d always wanted to try, but writing a whole novel seemed like such a daunting task. Writing a sports feature for the Greenfield Daily Reporter was hard work, but I could knock one of those out in an afternoon. Penning a one act play for the Civic Theatre of Greater Lafayette required me to spend several hours hunkered down in the corner of a coffee shop with my laptop. But even so, writing a fifteen minute play was usually a weekend-long project at the most. A novel could take months, maybe even years of discipline. That’s probably why I put it off for so long. I was afraid.

But it dawned on me that writing is the only thing that I’ve ever really know how to do. From my humble roots as that five-year-old kid and door to door book salesmen, the truth was always clear to me. The instruction manual for crafting good writing has always been the same: Live life, find inspiration from it, and write about the experience as honestly as you can, even when you're making the story up. As many have said before me, fiction writing is little more than telling the truth about the world via a series of amusing lies.

So that’s what I did. I lived it, I experienced it, and I wrote it down. I did that every day until I had a full manuscript in my hands. If I’m lucky, my first novel will net me more than $7.50 in profits. Of course it’s never been about the money for me; it’s about the adventure.

Now that my novel is approaching the final stages of the publishing process, I’m excited to have you along with me for the journey ahead. Good writers are just people who know how to live life fully and record it honestly. This is what I intend to do.