Mama, I don’ wanna write no moe’
“Carry on, carry on; nothing really matters”
Fiction by Tom Mahon
I got into writing on a false promise. Early on, I read where James Thurber said he became a writer because it was the only job that let him stare out the window all day, and people would say, “Leave him alone. He’s working.” That sounded good to me.
But in fact, writing’s not like that at all. It’s hard work. First, you need to come up with a whole lot of words. And then put them in some kind of order that people understand. (Unless you want to be one of the “moderns.”) Finally, you have to spell the words and punctuate them the way everybody else does.
My first objections: Words.
Words can be fraught with horrible memories. Verbs, prepositions, participial phrases that sting like needles.
Take the word “want” for example. A perfectly good word and there were many times I yearned to use it.
But I cannot use the word. Because like Proust and that damn cookie of his, I am flooded with remembrances of winters past, when I stood in snow up to my knees, looking in the windows of warm, cozy restaurants. I was a victim of want, and I wanted to be inside with people who seemed to want for nothing.
It was the dark days of winter. I had to get back to work, though I did not want to go. I was a chimney sweep and it was our busy season. What we made in the winter would have to tide us through the coming summer of want. I was well-suited to the job, being lithe, pliant and supple.
To this day, I cannot use want in a sentence without becoming incapacitated with grief over a lost childhood. And there are many other word with a similar effect.
Spelling and punctuation:
I believe writers should be allowed to spell words any way they damn well please. It was the great Nobel Laureate, Mister George Bernard Shaw himself, who spelled the word fish, ghoti, and got away with it. That is, he took the gh from tough for the f sound; o as in women for i; and the ti in nation as sh. Voila, fish!
And do not get me started on punctuation. I am tired hearing people go on, and on, and on, and on, about the Oxford comma, like theologians arguing about angels on pinheads.
Up your chimney
So you ask, how does a lithe, pliant and supple chimney sweep, become a literary lion so successful he can afford to blow it all off.
As it happens, sound travels very well in chimneys especially when the bricks are cold. (We prefer not to work in chimneys that are still hot.)
Many of our customers were among the great and the good of our society, and they assumed no one else was privy to their intimate conversations, especially in on cold winter night without a fire. Especially when they were guests in someone else’s rooms.
There were very few places in our town then to learn how to ‘sweep while simultaneously taking dictation. But old Mr. Twisty McGintey was only too happy to help a boy eager to learn, as I was.
Those conversations I took down in the chimneys on those long cold winter nights which I was not able sell back to the one(s) whose words I had transcribed, well, I could always sell to publishers.
At first, of course, only publishers of pulp fiction were interested in my tales. But I continued even after I grew too big to remain in the chimney hygiene trade. Then I would make stories up, whole cloth, which paid even better.
But now Alfred brings me the morning mail and I see there are the usual ten or a dozen royalty checks from leading publishers worldwide.
And I look up at the monitors in my office, and there is Raoul in the 12-car garage washing my little collection of beauties to a perfect polish. And Simone is managing her kitchen staff preparing another delightfully scrumptious repast. And away in the far end of the East Wing, Durant is answering my voluminous correspondence.
Faced with the vexation of having to create another story, I stroll out to the waterpark in back. And my resolve to stop writing disappears like the morning mist.
There are the two co-eds. Babbette and Brigitte, who followed me home from a recent book signing. They smile and wave across the pond, then continue giggling and splashing in the waterfall, like the children they are at heart, pretending to wrestle each other.
I recline in my cabana, enjoying the little drama across the water and toast them with a bit of the old bubbly. And as I doze off I hear Alfred tell a guest, “Please don’t disturb him, he’s working.” And then, I want to tell you, all is well with the world.
© 2019, Thomas Mahon
