I recently (finally) read (listened to) Stephen King’s much-hyped On Writing. I will say that all of the hype was absolutely deserved. i don’t want to go as far as to say that it changed my life, but i can say that i have started changing my life because of it. First and foremost, i’m writing again.
King talks about how he writes 2000 words per day. Knowing that this is a difficult goal for anyone who’s not a professional, he recommends 1000 words per day for the “beginning writer”. I’m actually going on a full week of 500 per day. Though it’s not the goal that had been set for me, i cannot even being to describe how good this feels. I’m writing again. and i’m not just writing any old thing. i’m working on my projects.
The first thing i finished, however, is a short piece based in the world of Stephen King’s book. I thought about what my ideal writing place would be like, and taking his ideas into consideration with that, this is what came out. Specifically, the idea of a “basement place” which is also a “far-seeing place” and the little muse who is a fickle bastard were all taken from Mr. King.
To some degree, this is the place i try to go in my head when i sit down to write. Here, let me give you the tour:
My shoes make a noise that is the mixture of a thud and a smack on the floor of the lobby. They make a distinct noise between them, but each makes the same, and so for the duration of the walk—which takes so long that I sometimes check my cell phone clock at the end of it—I end up creating a rhythm, which sometimes becomes a song, which sometimes gets stuck in my head.
I don’t even want to think about what the floor is made of; about the resources destroyed to create the intricate patterns, about the rare marbles and minerals that will never again exist on this planet, all just to create the appropriate color contrast for the inlaid design.
I finally reach the other side of the lobby.
Here I swipe the card I keep on a lanyard around my neck and punch my four digit code into the keypad. There are days when I wonder—never really seriously, but it does cross my mind—how many fingers punch the keys on this pad. These kinds of things can make you crazy, but it gives me something to think about as I board the elevator and take the long ride to my floor. Being slightly claustrophobic, I have to think about something, but this little bit of hypochondria makes the whole thing feel like using i’m using one psychosis to quell another, like eating a piece of chocolate in order to get the taste of milk out of your mouth.
This is another place where even a few seconds feels like an eternity, and I find myself checking my only time piece often. This is also where cell phone service disappears entirely. The tiny irony of checking my cell phone for the time, knowing that’s all it’s good for here, doesn’t escape me. It makes me smile. I fidget with one thing or another: my lanyard, my cheap briefcase, my phone, that thing on my arm that I think is a wart but i’m not really sure. At one point I think I hear the scanners making their sweeps, analyzing the inside of the elevator car for offending materials. Like the security card, the key pad and it’s code, and the other measures yet to come, this is more a comfort than a nuisance. The fact that I swipe my card everyday, enter my code everyday, pass the scanners everyday, makes me feel validated. Obviously, these terrible instruments of mistrust and paranoia have decided that I belong here, so I must belong.
I reach my floor, which I like to think of as the bottom of the shaft, but in truth I don’t have any idea how deep this rabbit hole is. I exit the elevator into a small white room, which leads to another small white room, which leads to another. Each room is more nondescript than the last. I know that there are more security measures behind the walls of these rooms, but I’ve started to lose track of what goes where and for what purpose.
Another keypad with a different code. This door also has a pad where I have to press my thumb so that it can verify my print. The door opens into a fourth small white room. “‘Bout time you got here, boy.”
“Mornin’ Lou,” I say, giving the small satyr behind the reinforced glass a mock salute. He pulls the unlit cigar out of his mouth and points at me with the wet end.
“You finally ready to get some goddamn work done?”
“I made it this far, didn’t I?”
“That you did,” he says as he settles back into his ratty metal office chair. “Wonders never cease.”
He looks at me with a gaze more piercing than any scanner or sensor. I know that he’s checking me; not just my identity like the finger print scanner, but he’s checking that I brought all of me. ‘Come any way but lightly.’ So the saying goes.
“I guess you are ready,” he says, replacing his cigar. “Get in there and get to work. I’ll be in there in a little bit to check up on you.”
He pushes a button on the counter in front of him. There is a loud buzzer and the latch of the final door unlocks with a loud “clack.”
The sound of my shoes echoes here also, but not quite like the lobby above. This is much more epic. The sound bounces from the concrete floor to the metal ceiling 50 feet or so above me; from the wall behind me where I came in to the end of the room, wherever that is. I saw it once the first time I came here, but i haven’t bothered since. I’ll get there again someday, many years from now.
About 20 feet inside the door is my office. It sits in a solitary cone of light shining from the hanging fixture above, the kind with a cage over the bulb. My desk with the dark red finish is in the center, the small bookcase in front of me where I keep my iPod speakers, the large bookcase full of writing reference and personal favorite books a few feet to the left, the table where I keep my clutter–so that it’s not on the writing desk–to my right. There is a large newsprint pad by the table and a marker board by the small bookcase, both sitting on easels.
I set my case on the table and sit down at the desk. There is a white legal pad and a black gel-ink pen ready to go. I start writing.
As I write, there are two things that hang at the edges of my mind. First, there is Lou the Muse, sitting in his little room behind me. The blinds on the window that looks out at my desk are pulled, but I know that he can check up on me at any moment. He might come in to check on me, make a suggestion or two, whatever. He might not. That’s just the way he is.
The other is the boxes sitting right at the border of the circle of light around my office. There are maybe a half dozen of them and they are lined up in a neat little row. The are full of notebooks, printed pages, cocktail napkins and other scraps, whatever I’ve already written: things that are “done” in someway. These pages date back to freshman year of high school; the year I decided that I was a writer. They include stuff from my high school creative writing class, college creative writing class, four screenwriting classes, god-only-knows how many personal projects stopped and started and never finished. These boxes are the first of my collected works, which will fill this room one day. Like a warehouse full of forgotten antiquities, this cavernous place will be full to bursting with books, boxes, stacks, and crates of pages full of my words.
After taking a moment to stare into the farthest unseen reaches of this place–imagining it full with golden light, pine smell, and book dust–I hear the small crackling noise of the blinds behind me.
I get back to work.
Here’s the part where we bring it all back around again. The image i want–the image i have in my head that i would love to see on paper–is of the room, the giant warehouse with the copy of my home office sitting in the middle of it. It looks to me like the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, except empty, like on the day when they brought the first dangerous artifact to hide away there.
