Light at the Beginning of the Tunnel 

by Terry Davis

This isn’t about me. I’m not trying to sell myself. But to make my case, I need to use myself as an example. So many people want to write. Some of us love putting words together, and some believe we have a story to tell. For most of us the motivation is pure; we do it because we want to make something beautiful and valuable to give the world, and maybe we hope the world will see something beautiful and valuable in us. Most people don’t do it to earn celebrity; it’s tough, though, not to hope for recognition for hard work, and writing is certainly hard work. I see my friend Nicole Helget achieving this dream now as her memoir The Summer of Ordinary Ways earns wonderful reviews everywhere.

Writing is tough in itself, and breaking into the writing business is so tough it can seem impossible. For most of us, though, there’s a best way to do it, and that’s what I’m here to sell.

First, though, I have to say this: by most of us I mean people not blessed with genius or even talent. These gifts are not necessary; they’re sweet, but not necessary. If we can learn skill with storytelling and with prose, we can create the illusion of talent. And if we have a great story to tell, we don’t need the skill with prose. Most of us work to be fine prose stylists because we love language, but a fine prose is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to achieving success with writing. This is made clear every day in the world of books, but you’d be astonished at how many people – including people who teach writing – don’t understand it. When most people in the world say so-and-so is a great writer they aren’t talking about prose skill, they’re talking about storytelling. They mean the person is a great storyteller. They mean the writer creates a plot, a series of events related by cause, that engages them. The essence of writing stories is not writing; it’s stories. The few people who read stories for the writing have been educated to do so. If we do not choose a subject of sufficient magnitude – Aristotle’s word, although he meant it more in the sense of scope, I think, than the weight or what’s at stake in the story – we sentence ourselves to a readership of the tiny percentage of people who read stories for the quality of their presentation rather than subject and theme, which is to say rather than their value as imitations of human beings in action.

Okay, I promise no more narrative theory and way fewer italics.

For most of us, especially when we’re starting out, the best place to find the most valuable story is in our own lives. Granted, it’s cliché: write what you know. But it’s the best advice for those of us not gifted. And then if you are gifted and skillful and tenacious and lyric and wise enough to write out of your own life, as Nicole Helget is, then who knows how many readers your work might touch.

Davis, you say, your first novel has been in print for most of the past twenty-six years, and that’s got nothing to do with being gifted?

No! That’s what I’m here to tell you. Nothing to do with gifted. Not in my case. And only the most basic skill. There’s not a gram of virtue anywhere in the story of me writing that story. Okay, there is one gram of virtue: I had the tenacity to put all those sentences together. But because I chose a subject from my own life, one I could write about with authority and passion, the story called me to the keyboard. In my case, it was a storyworld I loved. But we don’t have to love our material. We might hate it. What we must feel is passion for it.

I wasted two years in an MFA program trying to write what I figured was literary, and it was only out of the purest desperation on the day I was cleaning out my desk that I gave up and turned to the material I should have been working all along. I wrote about a high school athlete at my school in Spokane, although I gave the school another name related to an historical theme in the book. The kid was a way better wrestler than I had been. He possessed my personality, and the physicality of the state champ in my weight class on our team. He had my family, lived in my house, was friends with my friends, drove my car, worked my job at a hotel downtown, read the books I liked, and dreamed the dreams I dreamed; I gave him a romantic life way better than mine, although with the same girl. Of course I could create him and his world with authority. My composition skills were solid. I created with imagination what I couldn’t drag from memory. I used a simple plot: the quest. And a most un-literary quest it was: cut weight to wrestle the other best wrestler in town.

Geeze, Davis, what you’re saying sounds simple. But it can’t be that simple, can it?

It sure as hell can be. We look into our lives, and we feel the hot spots there. We allow that mix of memory and imagination to cook, and we make our peace with what rises to the top of the stew – and sometimes it’s a nasty stew. If the material is fun, we rejoice and get to work. If the material is painful, we summon our courage and get to work. We write without affectation or self-consciousness; we trust the voice in our heads that we’ve conversed with our entire lives, we create the storyworld in our heads with absolute accuracy to life as we know it, and then we report it on the page with all the clarity we can summon, so it’s accessible. Then we give it to the world.

And the world responds. If we write about our own lives with specificity, clarity, accuracy and honesty, people will respond. Not everyone, of course. But we’re all members of the same family. Close relatives will get it; those estranged from us won’t. So what?” It’s a huge family.

My little novel found kindred spirits out in the world. Twenty-six years after I wrote the first and last sentences of the book, and knew I could write the world in between, kindred spirits are still responding. These two emails arrived recently:

I wasn’t much of a jock growing up. I was the kid the jocks pounded into the dirt. I grew up hating people involved in sports. But then I read Vision Quest. And I GOT IT. Suddenly, the whole mentality made sense to me. I could understand the love of sports, the team dynamic, the importance of challenging yourself physically AND mentally against others, against yourself, against history.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

I just wanted to thank you for writing Vision Quest. Words cannot express what I think about the story.

I’m 31 years old. I started wrestling in 8^th grade in Ohio. I wasn’t any good. Anyways, my parents got divorced, and we moved to Choctaw, Oklahoma. Since my parents were divorced and I was the oldest of 5 kids, I started taking my little brother, who was in first grade, to wrestling practice. My brother started working hard, and I continued to coach him.  

Fast forward to today. My brother is an All-American at the University of Oklahoma. He placed 4^th in last year’s NCAA’s as a redshirt freshman.

 

When I was in high school I used to watch the movie Vision Quest anytime things were hard. We were really poor. Every time I watch the movie it inspires me. My little brothers also love the movie.

Imagine how these notes touch me. There are few things that make a guy feel as valuable in the world as being of use to others. It was that desperate, end-of-the-road decision to turn to my own life for story that has allowed me this.

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