It's you. It's aways been you.
My long, strange trip with writing
I wrote my first song in middle school. I was a tall, skinny lad and in a band with schoolmates . I wanted to write an original song. The song I wrote was called Climbing to the Top. The guitar riff, which I thought was original, was the same as a Judas Priest song called Devil’s Child. Did I subconsciously copy Judas Priest? I wasn’t aware of the song. A friend who came to a band practice alerted us to our thievery. Climbing to the Top died that day, which is ok. It was an awful song.
As a child, I wrote comic strips, news skits, and a screenplay for a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. But music took hold. In high school, with different bands, I and other musician friends always tried our hand at songwriting. After high school, my brother and a few friends formed a band called Another Pretty Face. This was a prolific time for me in regards to songwriting. I didn’t know it then, but what drove me wasn’t the music. Don’t get me wrong, I love writing music. But it was a vehicle for telling a story.
When the band broke up, I was lost. Up until that point, my one goal was to be a Rock Star. All we did was practice and play gigs, trying to make it big. I was the one responsible for breaking up the band. I have a vivid memory of playing at a backyard party. We were playing the song Creep by Radiohead, one of the few covers our band played. As the smell of booze and weed surrounded us, it occurred to me that nobody cared. They were there to get drunk, high, and/or laid. We were the background music to their lives. I had written stories and put them to music—stories to be heard and appreciated. I felt as if no one was listening. So I quit.
I went on a cross country road-trip with my friend Anthony, moving furniture for Mayflower and living in a tractor-trailor for a summer. When I returned home, I returned to my job working at Sears, lost without music, and aimlessly walking around the aisles in the men’s department. A co-worker, sensing my crisis, asked if I could do anything what I would do. I instantly replied, “Make movies.”
I enrolled in film school and enjoyed learning the art of cinema. I spent hours and hours writing original scripts. Although I still enjoy making videos on YouTube, the filmmaking part is not what drives me. I’ve been on set in every capacity, and nothing matters to me more than story. It’s all very interesting to me but the reality of making a film is very tedious. However, in hindsight, it was just another means of telling a story.
My bookshelf is full of writing books, and I always pick up more at thrift shops when I find them. I have been exploring the craft of storytelling all my life, thinking I needed a vehicle to tell my stories: music, film, comics, and so on. But now I know I only want to tell a story. I want to write, and that is good enough. It took me a long time to realize that.
Today, I have been working on writing short stories for submission. I co-host the Writing Fiction podcast with Regina Saint Claire and put together Book Worms Horror Zine with her. My YouTube channel has become an outlet for discussing my love of books and writing, bringing me to this Substack account's future.
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Stay gold,
James