THERE WAS A TIME by Greg Porterfield
Each of us has had the experience of allowing our stories to sit on our hard drives, or to discover them penned in our dog-eared notebooks, jotted down in a moment of haste. Rewritten and rewritten, cut and pasted to perfection, only to find them lacking or lackluster until edited once more.
One of my amateur thrills in life is finding a typo, misplaced word or phrase, a duplicated sentence or other grave mistake in a best seller produced by one of the big 5 publishing houses. With all the resources in the world, they still make mistakes.
There was a time that I knew everything. At least everything worth knowing. It now seems so long ago, that golden moment, when everything made sense, with nothing left to learn.
My introduction to the city library, a substitution for the ancient Library of Alexandria, shattered that illusion. Housed in a neoclassical limestone ‘temple of learning’, our small-town Carnegie Library was positioned next to an impressive Masonic Lodge designed as a castle. Climbing the broad steps to the library was like climbing Mt. Olympus. Massive limestone columns flanked an entrance arch with a lion-headed keystone at the apex. This ancient structure became my temple of learning. Beyond the long tables where scholars worked in silence, there were countless stacks where thousands of books were shelved. The wooden drawers of the card catalog gave a secret code for finding any and every topic of interest. After obtaining a member’s card, I never left with fewer books than I could carry.
Later, the possibility of owning books led to my demise. Discovering garage sales, estate sales, and antique stores added to my growing personal collection of books. In my travels, I sought out obscure used bookstores—my discovery of a six-story building in New York City packed with nothing but mystery books left me in awe. I even found a classmate’s father who produced miniature microfilm books. Amazing.
There were more books, more authors, more words than I could ever read. It was at that moment I decided becoming a writer mattered. With the millions of stories, thousands of authors, publishers and tales—certainly there must be room for one more.
And so I wrote, scribbled, and drew. On scraps of paper, notepad and page, the words appeared. An idea for a title received a double underline or two stars. Poems, paragraphs and stories appeared and disappeared into yellowed manila folders, stuffed into the back of a grey metal file cabinet and moved from place to place. From hand-written, to type-written, to computer keyboard—analog to digital—the stories came. A handmade book bound with dental floss threaded through tiny hand-drilled holes and wrapped in a computer printed cover pasted on index stock. My first book. The process. The Process—I kept telling myself.
The publisher’s page of any book offers further clues to the process—providing copyright, publisher, edition, and various disclaimers. Acknowledgement pages often list agents. What? More layers. The Process. The unraveling of the mystery continued. Six months of research into agents, and I had narrowed them down to a few. One at a time, I submitted per their guidelines. Then, after an appropriate waiting period, I received a response—“Thank you so much for allowing our agency to consider your material. Unfortunately, after carefully reviewing . . . .”
It appears that literary agents require either fame and/or notoriety prior to acceptance. But in these amazing times, other avenues exist. Print on Demand and Self-Publishing now make it possible to produce a book at little to no expense. My novel can be printed on quality paper with a gloss cover and bound cheaper than outputting the pages with my home computer printer. We have entered the age of enlightenment.
My thoughts, feelings, ideas, stories, poems, recipes, drawings, and jokes can move from my mind into the physical world—perhaps too easily—but I can now hold my book in my hand, quickly and cheaply. I'm still waiting for one of Spielberg's people to get in touch about the movie rights—but the pleasure I've had in holding a book I wrote is worth far more than going the long and winding road of the professional agent.
As I re-read my own work now, I still find mistakes, paragraphs that require new locations, misspellings, words, and phrases that had been correct earlier. A solution exists. Re-edit, Re-submit, and Re-print. The Process.
I often wonder why I write. Does anyone read what I have written? Perhaps it is a question every writer has asked. But, as a writer, does it really matter?
