I bought a new desk recently. It replaces an expensive and ornate Brazilian writing table that’s not that old at all, and I got rid of the leather and cherry-wood throne that went with it and that gleamed with brass studs and polished lacquer, and I opted for a vinyl office chair instead. The new desk was thirty-nine dollars, plus four bucks apiece for the legs, the chair more than four times less than the throne. Both are Ikea masterpieces of the minimal. They are so much more suited to me, or me to them. I feel more comfortable in my writing room.

I thought that if I could only be more comfortable in the room, I’d be able to write more. Not better–no need to hope for miracles–but just more. My writing output is abysmal, and something has to give, because I certainly won’t.

Unschooled

I’ve been writing since I was about ten. My uncle was an executive at Harlequin, and they had a pulp science fiction division that put out paperbacks with pop culture SF covers worthy of Analog or Asimov magazine. He used to bring armloads of the things to our house. I don’t believe I finished even one, but the covers were beautiful and horrifying, and I wrote part of a novel from the inspiration the pictures alone provided. During one of my parents’ many alcohol-fueled summer dinner parties, I read a portion of it to the assembled and slightly wobbly guests. Amazing, was the verdict, and he’s only ten! My first critique, and it was good. What do you want to be when you grow up, they asked. A writer! I said, thinking to myself how stupid the question sounded.

Once in high school, poetry was the next serious endeavour, the dreadful lyrical and love-struck stuff pardonable only for the young, and then came half-baked plays based on the Greek classics. Leaving my teens and entering my twenties, I turned to short fiction still rife with Greek influence, weird unprintable stuff full of obscene satyrs and noble centaurs. I decided against university, for the time being. I needed a break from school, I thought, and besides, I could do so much reading in the meantime.

I never went to school.

Future ruins

After high school, I didn’t work. I was unemployed for years, and lived at home while I submitted poetry to literary magazines across the country with no success. My personality was set against everything it was possible for a young person to do–get educated, find a career, have a large circle of friends, be gregarious, be likable. Be part of things.

I began constructing a novel of the far future, about a society discovering the ancient ruins of the twentieth century near the former site of Southern Ontario. The protagonist was a scholar, an academician who’d spent his life in the arcane and ritualistic institutes of higher learning of that far-off time. In faux-Tolkien style, I built a new language and alphabet and a different world than ours, and implanted my frustrations with love and academia in it. It was never completed.

On one of the happiest days of my life, I had a poem published in Quarry magazine. Welcome to print, came the hand-written reply months after my submission. I could have brought the house down with my screams of joy.

The folks were understandably starting to have enough of their adult son living at home. During one of our frequent fights, I was told by dad that I’d better jump when mom called because of her years of waiting on me, So you can just forget about that earth-shaking work you do back there, he screamed sarcastically, flicking his hand toward my dark bedroom, throwing his voice around the house like thunder.

I moved to Toronto, alone. As a young man on his own, largely solitary and certainly friendless, I was soon writing dire vignettes of a type that could be described as magical reality, and that revealed latent struggles with emotional health and profound loneliness. Nietzsche was the loneliest of men, someone wrote somewhere, but he liked and needed solitude. Maybe I was the same.

There was a serious attempt at fiction inspired by The Iliad and heavily influenced by Christa Wolf and David Markson. It was tentatively called “Polyxena”, an amateur corollary, perhaps, to Wolf’s brilliant Cassandra, but it was the first piece of fiction imbued with my voice, and my first experience of the joy of creating characters I believed in.

I waited on tables for years while in Toronto. In answer to the question, What do you do for a living, I routinely said that I was a writer. If they didn’t know about the waiter job, I didn’t tell them. In short, I lied, not least to myself.

There was a long lapse of nothing. My later twenties rolled by vacantly, and when I hit thirty, my body of output was an embarrassing sheaf of typing paper and a stack of longhand notes that wouldn’t have filled a desk drawer. True, I’d kept a journal all those years, and had a dozen notebooks of something resembling writing, but I had nothing that could actually be published. I gave up. Perhaps I had in mind the comment of a co-worker at the restaurant: Louis, you remind me so much of my ex-boyfriend. He wanted to be a writer badly too, and he also never made it. Ouch. Time to stop with the pipe dreams and move on, maybe.

Writing code

In 1997, I left the restaurant and started an IT company with Alex, and turned my back on writing. Instead of its impossible demands on my undisciplined mind, I slid into the beautiful and orderly universe of computer code. A small Windows utility for developers was published in a web design book. My web-based customer interface was one of the first of its kind in the late nineties (there are dozens now of varying degrees of quality). I felt like coding was a kind of creativity, a sort of unforgiving writing that had its own demands but that brooked no bullshit, and so was easier to do. I thought I’d leave the task of writing to writers. I was happy to stop pretending to do something I so obviously couldn’t do successfully.

Nothing’s so easy, of course. Throughout, I wrote a few things here and there of no consequence and with no desire to do anything other than look at them now and then.

One night, I was on a walk by myself when I had one of those wouldn’t it be funny if moments. Because of my job, I’d been thinking a lot about computer code, and artificial intelligence. I’d also been reading the hell out of anything to do with World War II and the Third Reich (Kershaw, Brown, Evans, and others). Wouldn’t it be funny, I thought, if there’d been some kind of artificial intelligence as full of fanatical zeal as the Nazis, and maybe as powerful?

By the time I got home from a forty minute walk, I had the outline of a story in my mind, and a few months later, I began my first serious attempt at writing a novel. It was a genre novel, of all things (back to sci-fi with me), but it was full of my voice, and, for me, it was alive with characters I really, truly loved. I wrote drafts and drew maps and images, and had sixty-thousand words of second or third draft before I hit a wall.

Another long lapse of nothing. I hadn’t quite given up–I was hooked on the feeling of writing well, of writing quickly, of writing anything–but once again, my impetus to actually do the stuff of writing, to engage in its mechanics, to sit down and write it out every day, vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived. No writer, I.

Flashes

On a winter hike with Alex, I picked up some evergreen leaves and did something stupid with them later that night, and once again a flash of inspiration had me at my computer for a couple of weeks. The result was a story whose characters I loved and deeply identified with. It happened again shortly afterward while on a drive alone in the country at night. Back at home, I had the outline of what would become a ten thousand word short story tinged with elements of horror, and, wonderfully, two characters I was deeply in love with and that inhabited my dreams.

I had more inspirational flashes and wrote down quick drafts and fully-formed scenes for several more stories. A theme formed, something that could bind these stories and characters in a collection. I was thrilled. Another full short came, and outlines for several more. Could I actually publish this stuff, I wondered. Would anybody care? Would they take me seriously, a forty-eight year-old nobody with no writing credentials?

And so sets in the doubt, and the writing goes back to a crawl. Nights of sloth seem more important than nights of writing (and a hell of a lot easier). What business do I have writing anything, anyway?

An outline of failure

Sam Harris suggested that the phenomenal success of a talented individual has more to do with his or her personality than with any innate ability. He drew a true-life comparison between two scientists. I don’t remember the details, but let us say that one has an awesome flashing personality, the other is inward-looking and socially disabled. Both are paragons of intellect; one is a successful Nobel laureate, the other a failed academic, with no mystery as to who is which. The circumstances of luck and personality guarantee the outcome of two identical minds.

This to me, at my age, is both a comfort and a warning. It suggests that I may still have things in hand, but darkly hints that time is running out. I keep reading of authors publishing for the first time in their fifties, of well-known craftspeople still writing in their seventies and eighties. The code that has become my livelihood, my life, works itself deeper into me, an unforgiving maze of rigidity and logic. The year 2020 beckons, the year I might retire.

In my head–deeper than that, somewhere not even I can see–the irresistible urge to write something, to tell some story however arcane, keeps winking up at me from its remote depths. All I have to do is look its way.