The Secret of the Golden Pen

We all have our secrets. Writers have secrets too. I'm gonna locate my darkest secret and then I'm going to dump the truth on you and you'll think I must be who you now suspect I am because after all, I wrote it didn't I?

Renditions on this concerns came up all the time when I was teaching Creative Writing. Student writers were always wondering how much of themselves they dare to reveal, probably half afraid that someone would read what they wrote and hightail it to the guidance counselor and somehow all of this would end up in the dreaded "permanent record".

This is what I would tell my young writers.

Sometimes writers choose the third person and create a fictional character to reveal truths and secrets about themselves.

Sometimes writers choose the first person and write fiction that has nothing to do with themselves.

Sometimes he is I and sometimes I am she and sometimes we are all together and waiting for a moment to arrive.

In other words, unless a writer tells you the experience is a their true experience, we should hold back on assuming that it is. I don't think Steve King has murdered anybody. 

Even when a writer claims an experience....well the whole thing might be fiction especially if the writer him or herself is using a pen name which implies that the writer him or herself is fictional as well as the characters created although many an unauthorized biography has been written by someone pretending to be who they weren't and let's not even get into ghost writing where the writer isn't even the writer. 

Still writing in the first person can be risky as all writers know. We can leave our notes behind. Someone picks up our notes, jumps to conclusions and well, a lot can happen.

Here's what happened to me twenty years ago.

I was reading about the death of Kurt Cobain. At the same time I was restudying Hamlet. I thought that I would take what Ihad learned about the death of Cobain and mix that with Hamlet's soliloquy and mix that with a switch in point of view see if it might turn into something.

This is what I wrote.

Should I put up with this crap or not. Is it slacker to keep getting nailed by the ups and downs of my ridiculous luck or should I just pick up a gun and end it all. So I die, I step off so big wow and in that zonk I can forget about all the fame and the phonies and divorces and stomachaches and heroin and all that jazz...just zzz out like I do every day of my life and dream like I do every night.
But there's a problem
What kind of trip do you take when you're chilled max. It's wondering about those dead dreams that makes us put up with all this crap and live to be senile drainers because who would put up with all the jocks, the sellouts, the heartache of loving someone who don't love you who actually hates you; the judges and the bosses and the big shots and geting crapped on by jerks when you can just take out this gun and finish the deal.
Who's actually baked enough to sweat this life out except that we're afraid of the reaper; afraid of the dirt sleep from which no dude ever returns, We don't know what that gig is like so we stick with our familiar contract rather than sign up for the mystery tour.
The more we think, the more freaked we become. The hook of action becomes fogged with the shadow of grunge so we endure all of this temporary crap until we put down the gun.
Usually. 

That's the mix from as well as I could mix it coming from the point of view of a troubled, talented soul way beyond my pay grade. I liked it. I went down to the Xerox room to make a couple of copies, one of which I sent in as a letter to the editor of our local paper the Democrat and Chronicle. 

These were the dark, almost unimaginable days before email.

About an hour after my trip to the Xerox room, a knock came on my classroom door. One of my colleagues from the Math Department wondered if he could talk to me for a minute...it was kind of important.

I stepped out into the hallway. My dear colleague said, "Ice, we've known each other for a long time, haven't we?"

I said, "uh huh.'

With a wildly compassionate and nervous look on his grill he said, "are you allright."

I said, "I think so. Why do you ask?"

He hesiiated and then answered, "I was in the Xerox room making copies and I found this which you left on the copier."

And with that he whipped out the original copy of my piece on Cobain and Hamlet as if it were a subpoena or smoking gun.

All of a sudden, I realized my colleague had come to the conclusion that I was on smack, hated everybody and might have a gun in my pocket.

After all, he knew I was divorced and had a beard so he was putting two and two together and getting five.

I took the original copy and tried to explain the creative exercise in composition, point of view and empathy that had created it. In two minutes I tried to explain Hamlet, Cobain and the similarity between 
"should I put up with  this crap" to "to be or not to be".

I watched his realization melt away some of the edge from his nervousness.

The compassion remained.

He was a good man, probably doing what a good man must do when a good man finds himself in a situation like this good man had found himself in the Xerox room,

The story of this good man is a perfect example of exactly what I mean when I say that writers have to be careful when they use the first person in a story.

My letter to the editor was selected, published and went on to win a Golden Pen Award.

My colleague retired before I did.

I'd see him every once in a while at a grocery store or at the mall.

He always asked me, "how are you."