The Death of Fini

Our guest blogger this month is Phil. He's joined The 500 challenge, and regularly posts his pursuit of the challenge over at Tin Can Goat. Keeping himself honest to the task, he always posts his word count at the end of his blogs (and, it's always at least 500 words).

It amazes me what memories or specific instances stay with a person throughout their life; for me it was receiving a failing grade on a ninth-grade creative writing project.

I don’t believe my English teacher should have written me a failing grade and I’ve spent a whole lot of time these past years crushing on it. It was over one hundred pages long. It was my pride and joy. It was a creative writing project. Yeah, that’s right, a creative writing project. For crap’s sake, how does one fail a fourteen year-old kid on a creative writing project and still sleep at night?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know I spent a lot of time imagining and typing that story. Yep, typing. I typed it all; cover, content, and credits. Although the word processor existed in some form or another at the time, I didn’t own one due to a lack of parental sponsorship and financing. My mother insisted that I craft my story the way God and Hemingway intended; on that mechanical claptrap the typewriter. What a disservice to writers everywhere that machine was. If you’ve never written anything on a typewriter you’re missing out. It’s an experience like no other.

The whole process of typewriting is contrived. It starts with inspiration and ends in pain—bruised finger pads, sore knuckles, and bloody nicks and cuts. Typing with the keys is tough, like pressing your fingers into sun-baked Play-Doh. The type bars often stick to each other, or against the type guide and ribbon vibrator, and the feed roller is a vile piece of engineering with the sole purpose of catching long sleeves and fingertips.

The machine never had a delete key, only a backspace, which, when pressed, slowly reversed the carriage across the body of the typewriter. Another classic and overused feature of the backspace key allowed the ability to repeatedly darken letters or words—the vintage method of accentuating text in bold. Overall, my favorite function of the backspace key was its support in corrections and rewrites.

Corrections and rewrites followed the exact process of the bold function, but expanded the process by requiring that I hold a—shiny on one side, rough on the other—white tape against the incorrect word or phrase on the paper and with my other hand, hunt-and-peck the same sequence of incorrect letters across the keytop. The corrective process was never pretty when complete; the paper dotted with flakey white letters, marking the pages in dirty, white cirrus clouds against a darkening sky.

In the ninth grade I started thinking I was classically cool. I was classically cool and I wanted to share my classic cool with the world. So after I typed the final sentence of my manuscript, I pulled the carriage return lever twice more across my chest, tapped the space bar twenty-four times to center the type guide on the platen and typed “++ FINI ++”. Oh yeah, classically cool; just like they do it in those fancy Penguin paperbacks.

I ripped the paper from the machine and like Stephen J. Cannell, tossed the page in the air so that it would rock itself—as a floating feather—onto the manuscript pile; unfortunately I missed.

I straightened the pages, stapled it three times along the spine, and sealed it with a kiss.

I couldn’t wait to turn this masterpiece in. I was going to be the teacher’s hero, her Hercules sent to save the literary world. She’d fall in love with my manuscript and I’d be published within months.

I was wrong.

I read her note more than a few times, still shaking my head at the red letters across the page, and wondering how she failed to see my genius. “You can’t write a story in which the main character is the narrator and have that character die at the end,” her note on the paper read.

I’ve beaten myself up a lot over the years thinking of how I am right and she is wrong. I have driven myself to tears over it.

I’ve fabricated paths to fame and how I’d push it right back in her face. I’ve thought about how I’d take my fame and write a story in which the main narrator did indeed die at the end of the story and the book would sell millions. There is no way she was going to have the last word on that. I might even make the narrator die twice so she’d really get the point.

So far it hasn’t happened.

I think every writer experience instances such as this and I believe we all react in the same loathing attitude when it happens—some of us more than others. We may blame the person we feel wronged us, we may hate them for mauling our baby, but it’s not worth it.

We need to step back from our writing and view it objectively like others do. Sure it’s precious infant and needs protected, but often we’re overprotective and blinded by our internal visions of glory and grandeur.

When it comes to my own writing, it lightens my heart to say that those who criticize don’t know what they’re talking about, but I know I’m just being overprotective. I’ve found that if I keep and re-read critiques weeks, months, or years later, that I do gain insight from the reviewer’s comments. More often than I want to admit, even the harshest critics have helped me grow as a writer.

I’d like to end with words of advice that will reverberate in the reader’s minds; such as, the teacher was vehemently wrong—and she is—but nothing is coming to mind. Instead I will leave you with a phrase my mom was quite fond of and has contributed to the person I am today: “I didn’t gain weight until you were born.”

Yeah, I don’t get it either.

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