I’ve been a “writer” — minus the “author” evolution — for quite awhile now. Going on 20 years, in fact. Well, “writer” in some respects, anyway. Not necessarily, ya know, a paid writer for all that time, as a few of those years I was in high school and a few more I was almost getting paid to write for the student paper at the University of Tennessee, so “writer” may be a relative term. Let’s say I’ve been writing very regularly since 1996, in a variety of formats from newspapers to magazines to blog posts. I’ve written about sports — lots of it — politics, music, movies, straight news, science, human interest, etc. I’ve interviewed Hillary Clinton — name drop! — and John McCain, Tiger Woods and LeBron James. I’ve spent days at the U.S. Capitol and White House, and I’ve spent them in press boxes in stadiums across several different states.
This isn’t meant to brag (especially since I doubt many of you find this particularly impressive), but to give a glimpse at where I’ve come from. And with all of that, I wrote. I wrote news reports and features, most around 500 words, some up to 3,000+ words. Over time, I honed what I hope is a somewhat distinct voice that I write with, and it’s comfortable. I just slip into it as my fingers start typing. There’s a rhythm to it. Everybody has that in them, but most haven’t really banged out enough words over enough time to figure it out. It’s essential, though, for whatever writing you’re doing.
Pretty much all of that writing, though, was non-fiction, which has its advantages. One of them is, well, you’re often excused for your piece mostly sucking. The story is what it is. If you’re assigned to write about it, you have no control over whether the information is scintillating, or dull as hell. If your editor wants 400 words on the grass’s harrowing journey from being short to long, damn it, that’s what your editor is going to get. A good reporter is going to do his best to spice it up with quotes from people around there, maybe toss in some stats or color from the event. But, sometimes, there’s just not a lot you can do. I mean, it’s not like you can just make shit up to make it read better. Not unless you’re Jayson Blair, that is.
An evolution to fiction had been a somewhat foreign concept to me, though, until fairly recently, when I decided to plow forward with my book idea. As a “warmup” of sorts, I submitted a piece to the Creative Loafing Fiction Contest. Since I didn’t hear anything by Dec. 18, I’ll assume they weren’t terribly impressed. Prior to that, I hadn’t written fiction since high school, when I wrote a number of pages of a story titled “Phobia” on my old Brother word processor. As I recall, it was a Stephen King-inspired (I was reading a lot of Stephen King back then) horror story about some sort of supernatural evil doer who stalks teenagers by killing them via whatever their greatest fear is. My friends and I thought it was great at the time. Sadly, I fear that entry in the “Jeff Haws: The Early Years” canon is lost to time … unless my mom still has the printed copy stuffed in a box somewhere.
What I’m discovering during this evolution into the fiction-writing world is there really are no excuses with this. If my content is boring, you know whose fault that is? Mine. Totally, completely, utterly, depressingly mine. There’s no way around it — it’s up to me to make the story worth reading. In a way, it’s intimidating. On the other hand, it’s pretty freeing. If somebody’s quote is bland and pointless, just change it. She can say whatever I want her to say … well, within the framework of the character, anyway. If the scene is bland, make it not bland. Figure some shit out. Toss in some details. Stories that don’t suck > Stories that do suck. It’s a hell of an epiphany, I know.
So, for me, the difference between a writer and an author (besides the fact that authors wear tweed jackets with elbow patches and are often disheveled, if I’m to believe what I’ve been told) may end up being that I’m in complete control of my own work. I write what I want, how I want, when I want — until and unless editors and publishers get ahold of it, then steal my soul out from underneath it. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
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