My journey as a storyteller—from someone, to everyone, to no one
When I was young, libraries were like cathedrals, bastions of wisdom and depositories of all human knowledge. Before the internet, they were the only source of information outside of our own experiences and personal collection of books. Beyond the Bible and a dictionary, chances were that everything else you needed to know was to be found in the stacks at your local public library. This was how the world worked.
I found myself at the library recently, after a fairly lengthy absence, attempting to reacquaint myself with how things work now that there are no longer card catalogs. It had been a minute, as there is little you can’t find on the internet and little reason to leave the house. But I missed the sense of discovery and adventure that comes from finding something you didn’t know you were looking for. This rarely happens online because some algorithm has already determined what it is you want, whether you know it or not.
Finding a table and chair that wasn’t occupied by a computer was a bit of a challenge as it would appear that this is why most people come to the library now. YouTube rather than books. This is how people learn, I suppose. A young man nearby, a boy really, was watching a tutorial on the art of braiding hair. Black hair. That would admittedly be far more difficult to learn in a book, so entirely understandable.
In the back, which they called “the quiet section,” were several empty tables and chairs. I laid my things out and settled in. I figured out the card catalog well enough, although not the most intuitive system, now that we are so used to searching on Amazon. I began looking up various topics of interest, and as I found titles that sparked my curiosity, I kept being led down the same aisle, again and again.
I found myself sitting on one of those little rolling step stools libraries still use. They’re supposed to be for reaching a book on a high shelf, presumably for extremely short people, but most of us just use them to sit on. When not searching for a specific title, I will almost invariably choose books at eye level while standing or within reach while sitting. I am a profoundly lazy man, and I like to be comfortable when making difficult decisions.
Today, I found myself in a section that included many of my favorite authors. People like David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Anne Lamott, Calvin Trillin, and Nora Ephron. I began thinking that if I ever wrote a book, this is the section of the library I would want to be in. Then it struck me.
Oh! These are my people.
They’re all essayists, so that shouldn’t be much of a shock, but they’re also all introverted curmudgeons who prefer the company of, well, themselves. They are all smart and darkly funny, wise and unapologetically stupid all at the same time. They just happen to be the famous ones, but others like them, even the un-famous ones like me, are not to be found easily in the wild because none of us wish to be found. This is why I have never found my people before. They are not people you find casually, let alone gathered in groups. They are all, to a person, those who would never join a club that would have them. Fucking writers, as we are sometimes called affectionately.
David Sedaris might be an exception to this rule, as he seems to relish in the adoration of his fans and does so without ego or high expectations. His whole life, he dreamt of being famous, and now that he is, he can’t seem to get enough. That’s a healthy attitude, in my opinion. Maybe it’s the fandom thing. Who doesn’t want to spend time with people who think you’re a genius? It’s considerably different than just milling about in public.
Sedaris says that most people do not recognize him in his daily life and often confuse him for a mentally challenged person. I can think of worse things. At least they leave him alone.
“I always wanted to be a writer,” writes the author Susan Orlean. “In fact, as far as I can recall, I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer. In junior high school I took a career guidance test that suggested I would do well as either an army officer or a forest ranger but I didn’t care: I wanted only to be a writer, even though I didn’t know how you went about becoming one, especially the kind of writer I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a newspaper reporter, because I have never cared about knowing something first, and I didn’t want to write only about things that were considered “important” and newsworthy; I wanted to write about things that intrigued me, and to write about them in a way that would surprise readers who might not have expected to find these things intriguing.”
There was a time when I thought I wanted to be a newspaperman or at least a photojournalist. I watched “The Killing Fields” with Sam Waterson as a journalist in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and “Under Fire” with Nick Nolte as a photojournalist in Nicaragua during the 1979 Revolution. These were formative films. They were people with an ideological agenda who were fighting to uncover human atrocities. Noble, indeed.
I went to Temple University in 1986 and entered the journalism department with the intention of majoring in photojournalism. I would be a war reporter, I imagined. After one semester, I decided there was no future in newspapers, let alone news photography. I didn’t know they would be replaced by phones at the time, but I could tell the jig was up. There was no future in it. It would have been like learning to make wagon wheels just as cars were starting to take off. I went into advertising instead.
Looking back, I can’t think of a more cynical decision. I’d gone for the steady paycheck rather than the idealistic passion. At the time, I hadn’t really ever given any thought to making writing a career. It didn’t even seem like a career. Just something that people did when they weren’t making money. I was unlikely to write about dragons or space or political animals on a farm, so it didn’t seem like a profession for someone who needed to work for a living.
I always wrote, but it was just a hobby or a way to communicate at work. I loved books and stories, but I never thought of it as “my thing.” Honestly, I don’t remember when I started thinking it was. But my thing, it has undoubtedly become.
Tell Me More About My Eyes
I have no ability or interest in describing someone’s appearance in factual detail. I read descriptions writers use to try to conjure up a particular personality, such as having a broad forehead, a sharp nose, and a full mouth. What the fuck does that even mean? I might compare a person I’m trying to describe as someone else you might know, like a celebrity, or to an archetype I think they resemble. Maybe they appeared mean or slovenly. But outside of hair color and age, I’m usually at a loss. I never talk about cheekbones or chins, just as I wouldn’t think to mention someone’s ears unless they were especially prominent, like Dumbo or Obama. Even then, it wouldn’t likely be the thing I focused on.
I’m a very visual person. I have spent a lifetime worrying about how things look, from graphic design and typography to cinematography and photography. But when it comes to writing, I rarely describe what something looks like. I focus instead on what they feel like. If done right, you’ll understand precisely what I mean, even if you have a different visual reference for what you think that looks like. What difference does it make if I describe it accurately if it evokes no mental image for the reader? Don’t tell me someone’s eyes are set far apart. Tell me they resemble a frog.
Years ago, I did some consulting work for the Walt Disney Corporation. They hired me for a week to art direct their in-house photography department. We were focused on their various hotels, specifically those with conference space for corporate meetings. I had a different perspective, unique to them, and so they wanted me to direct the staff on what to shoot and how.
My issue with how they’d been doing things was how staged everything was, how perfect they tried to make everything look. Nothing was ever out of place. Everything was in sharp focus, with every detail thought out and accounted for. It was excruciatingly dull, inauthentic, and fake as hell. It was devoid of human emotion because it was flawless. Humans don’t respond well to perfection. It gives us nowhere to go.
My advice was consistent and concise. Stop trying to show what things look like and start trying to show what they feel like. Reach people emotionally, not intellectually. You’re selling a dream, not technical plans for expansion. You must inspire lust, desire for the attainable luxury of fantasy, adventure, and romance. Real life is flawed, and we can only see part of it at any given time. Give people a glimpse of paradise, not a map of it.
I feel the same way about writing. If you want to set the stage for the story you are trying to tell, give me some idea of what it feels like, not what it looks like. Whatever I imagine will be different, so what’s the point in being technically accurate? Paint with a broad brush and give me emotional cues that will resonate on a deep, personal level. Make me feel—something.
A Man Is No One
One of the many advantages of being a Christian white male in America is that I am not required to identify as anything in particular. I’m not pro-Christian, pro-white, pro-men, or even pro-America. I see flaws in all and regularly criticize everything and everyone. I also happen to be heterosexual, but no one really feels one way or another about breeders. I didn’t even bother. I married a woman with three small children and helped to raise them instead. I’ve been snipped and clipped and never had another thought about it.
Like most people, I did not choose any of these identities. I was born here by chance into a Christian family, which was a choice my parents made without me, and my gender, race, and sexual orientation were not of my own choosing. They never are.
From a privilege standpoint, I hit the lottery. But more like a state lottery, or a scratch-off, not a Powerball fortune. I wasn’t born incredibly handsome or wealthy. My parents weren’t rich or famous. But all in all, we enjoyed a pretty fortunate upbringing. I was raised in the suburbs of America, where I was generally safe and secure. We didn’t have a lot, but we had enough. I knew no discrimination of any kind and was essentially free to go about life unencumbered with much in the way of undue baggage.
My ancestors were a mix, like most everyone else, but we were predominantly from Ireland, mixed with the requisite Scottish and English dalliances. While my grandfather and one uncle always seemed quite proud of our Irish heritage, it was never anything of any genuine interest to my father, and we never talked about it as a family. We were a clan of eight, which, to us, seemed like enough.
We didn’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with corned beef and cabbage or any of those things. We had zero ethnic traditions, although plenty of made-up ones. Ethnicity was sort of a non-issue, even though my surname was a dead giveaway. I would always be a Mick. But that didn’t really seem to have much of an impact on me. I would be well into my twenties before I came to understand how much weight people placed on their heritage.
My mother’s parents were Catholic, and my father’s were Methodists. My parents became Presbyterians instead, so I grew up as an Orthodox Presbyterian. We viewed ourselves primarily as Evangelical Christians, as I would say that is how my parents identified. That and being an Oklahoma University alumni (Go Sooners!).
Politically, I am quite liberal, and though I am a member of the Democratic Party, I wouldn’t typically identify as such unless asked explicitly or made to distinguish myself from the alternative. In my little corner of the world, it’s a given that I am a liberal, being that the alternative seems to include fraternizing or associating with stochastic terrorists.
I am who I choose to be, which is a privilege in and of itself.
I’m a writer, but I’ve also been a photographer, filmmaker, designer, and editor. All those things are professions, more than identities. When push comes to shove, I’ll say I’m a storyteller, a raconteur. As Geoffrey Chaucer, in the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, says, “I’m a writer. I give the truth scope!”
Like Ms. Orleans, I have no interest in the who, what, where, and when of things. I’m not motivated to report on what happened in the moment. Breaking news is a fallacy in that almost none of it is essential to us in the short term and more often than not, not much after either. I am only ever interested in the why.
Since we all filter the world through our own personal lens of bias, pride, prejudice, ignorance, and personal experience, I see the world in relation to my place in it. Everything becomes a fraction of a memoir, a commentary from the only point of view I can speak to with any real authority. My own.
We all like to think of ourselves as so terribly unique unto ourselves. But the undeniable truth in writing is that the more personal we make something, the more relatable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but that’s because we remain delusional concerning our own exceptionalism. We are more alike than not, and this is borne out in every quirky, eccentric, and otherwise noteworthy piece of drivel ever written. Whether accurate or not, we see ourselves in the words of those we admire.
Writers are the faceless men and women of the world, and we allow others to overlay their hopes, dreams, and fears onto our stories in the fervent desire to explain themselves. We allow ourselves to be the canvas on which readers paint the stories of their own lives. We compose the greeting cards that people share, telling others, “Here, read this. It sums up perfectly how I feel.”
I am a faceless man. Therefore, I can be anyone, everyone, and no one.
For I am a writer.