One Hell of A Story

For years I was pretty compulsive about devouring books one author at a time. The first was C. S. Lewis ... I read "The Screwtape Letters" and I was off polishing off everything he'd ever written plus several biographies of him. At the time I was in College.

Lewis led me to J.R.R. Tolkien and there's so much more than "The Lord of the Rings" and he led me to Charles Williams, he and Lewis' dark friend writer.

The 3 formed a group called "The Inklings" cause the didn't have an inkling of an idea about much anything. They met for lunch and pints every Tuesday at "The Bird & the Baby" and read each other what they'd written that week ... sort of a literally Acoustic Jam.

Then it was Hemingway. God the man was crazier than most anyone but he could surely write. I really began to learn how to write from him, copying the ways he did it and forever striving for the "one true sentence."

One of the reasons I like one sentence paragraphs to write a blog is the never ending search for simple, complete honesty in as few words as possible.

He wrote the shortest novel ever!

Here it is.

"For sale! Baby shoes. Never worn."

Doesn't that send your mind reeling?

Afterwards it was John McDonald and the world of Travis McGee, a self-described "salvage consultant" who recovers others' property for a fee of half of the worth.

Travis lived on "The Busted Flush", a houseboat won in a poker game moored in Ft. Lauderdale. There are 21 novels and I plowed through them all and to this day want to live on a houseboat.

Somehow I juxtaposed this with theology, especially the Third-World brand with authors mostly unknown in the United States ... Gutierrez, Dorothy Solee and ... Leonardo Boff ... who teach if salvation's coming we'd better get started helping it by overthrowing social, political and economic oppression ... which naturally led me to Che Guevara.

At the same time, I found Frederick Buechner ... my favorite author ever ... who happily bounces between fiction and non-fiction, combing his life dark through lenses of faith in a God who exposes himself beginning in a father's suicide and leaves one longing for  what's next.

Around this time, I wrote my own books ... ten of them all told ... combining ... or stealing ... elements of each of these heroes of mine.

"Your problem," a Publisher tells me, "is you won't stick to one subject and build on it until you get it right. That's why we won't do your next book."

"But I don't want to write what I've already written," I counter.

"That's how you build your audience ... your buyers," she snaps over lunch in an elegant restaurant that sat on top of a mountain with panoramic views of Pittsburg and the Allegany and Monongahela Rivers.

I didn't listen to her and it's probably why I'm not a famous author.

I kept writing what I wanted to write.

Just like I kept doing what I want to do.

Sure there are things I should have done though I'm not sure I'd be any better off.

"Your writing is so honest," I'm told as Sarah, Che and I march in the Tybee Island St. Patrick's Day Parade with our friends John and Judy.

 It's nice to hear because it's so hard to write that way.

Course it's hard to live that way too.

And I'm not saying I always do.

Sarah and Che remind me though, along with a Holy Host of others, that stringing together one true sentence after another makes for one Hell of a story.

Maybe even one Hell of a life!