This piece by Keith Phipps at The Onion's AV Club, and the many reader responses to it, remind me of my own straying relationship with the written word.
Like Phipps, I went through the Tolkien-to-Beats phase, although my love was more for authors only tangentially related to the Beat movement, like William Burroughs and especially Hubert Selby.
It's funny--I don't remember when or why I started reading science fiction. The first "adult" novel I ever read was the novelization of Beneath The Planet Of the Apes--yeah, I know--and science fiction sort of became my default mode. Tolkien came into the picture when my brother Keith gave me a dog-eared copy of Fellowship Of the Ring. Much as I loved the Ring books (probably because I recognized them as an inspiration for Star Wars, and yes, I know that's sad), they seem to have left no permanent traces. Though I still have that same copy of Fellowship, I never felt the need to read anything else of Tolkien's. Not even The Hobbit.
On the other hand, Selby's Last Exit To Brooklyn blew open my mind, not always in good ways. My first, fumbling attempts at prose--scribbled furiously while bored out of my skull in high school study halls--blatantly copied Selby's mannered stylistic quirks, and his subject matter as well. What the hell did a farm boy who'd never been out of Iowa know about the inner city?
Dormant for a year or two, the will to write returned strongly, seemingly out of nowhere. My writing was stronger, more confident, and the more I wrote, the more I read. Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, James Joyce, Bobbie Ann Mason--stuff just connected with me, and inspired me. I'd finish The Violent Bear It Away or So Much Water So Close To Home burning with the desire to do this, to be able to create something like this.
This was my extended period of unemployment, my post-suicide attempt, live-at-home phase, kind of a cliche among among artistic types. In any event, since I didn't work, I stayed up literally all night, scribbling furiously, my hand racing to keep up with the dialog spilling forth from my mind. Whenever inspiration flagged, I'd pick up a book and think, This is what I want to do.
Literal piles of short stories and fragments of a novel littered my living space, but none of it went anywhere. The only things I could sell were reviews and opinion pieces, and as this came to dominate my writing, my hunger, my need, for fiction subsided. Nothing new replaced my old favorites, and even when I reconnected with them, the feelings were only fleeting.
It's that way still. All these books meant so much, but they're just words on a page now, a faded reflection of a person I barely remember.
