String on the Bow

I am the type of person who wants the instructions. Tell me what to do, and I execute. This, of course, reveals my small-mindedness. How narrow would life be if we all followed the same instructions? More than anything else, books taught me that the bow of humanity has many strings. Or, to put it more colloquially, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

I will read any book, provided it is honest. I have no desire to hear, for example, the life story of someone who never made the wrong choice, was never tempted, never struggled, and never doubted. There are such books. They are false, and easily identified. But there are other books, essays and poems, which, upon reading, one feels like a tuning fork in the vicinity of another. Feeling the vibration in another fork, I find myself quivering with something true, something akin. Fiction or nonfiction, we make sense of our experiences through stories, and those stories have opened worlds to me.

Impossible, then, to say that one story most affected the way I move through life. There have been many that influenced me in different ways. A recent one serves as an example.

In his book, “On Writing,” Stephen King wrote readers a “permission slip” to write. He wrote that words have weight. His own work illustrated this. Mr. King was the prolific master of suspense, a genre I scorned when friends described the implausible premises.

Then I read his books. Like a frog dropped in warm water and gently heated, I did not realize I felt terror until the slow burn had started. By then, it was too late to escape. Upon reading his memoir, “On Writing,” I realized that he was just as talented when expressing humor, when giving practical advice, and when recalling in painful detail his early efforts and rejections as a writer.

I did write, surprising myself by unwittingly becoming published on Amazon, the result of a writing contest I entered. I did not win the contest, and you are part of a limited audience who knows I have written a published book. It is not my best work, but it lit my desire to do better.

Now I write as a practice. I realize now that I’ve always seen the world through the filter of my own perspective. And yet, when I try to recognize my point of view without writing, it is like trying to jump over my shadow. The recognition eludes me. So I embarked on writing a memoir. It is, as yet, unpublished, a story of foibles and trials. Some are humorous, some are pitiful. Some will make you wonder if I am making it up. I assure you I am not. It’s just my story, another string on the bow.