The Burroughs Moment

Well, it’s obviously been a while since I’ve updated this blog. I need to do better. To help inspire myself to do so, I want to reflect on how I started writing seriously in the first place.

I’ve loved stories all my life, but it was only in the sixth grade that I really started creating them myself and committing them to paper. My teacher that year gave a creative writing assignment every week on Friday to be completed over the weekend. What I turned in on Monday was usually two or three times the minimum length. At least. These assignments led to my first ever effort at longer fiction—a sprawling spy epic starring myself and the rest of my class (all fourteen of us). I think the handwritten draft is still in a Trapper Keeper somewhere deep in my parents’ basement.

Along the way, though, this creative urge got choked out by other kinds of writing. The essay and later the research paper took over my writing life. I may be one of the few to have ever done a non-assigned research paper for fun. I wrote maybe one short story in this period as a birthday present for a friend, but that was a rare exception.

I still read voraciously, fiction and nonfiction. But it wasn’t until late in my academic career that the itch to write fiction struck again. I scratched this itch by playing online RPGs—of the free-form collaborative storytelling model, not stats-driven adventure gaming. One was set in the Star Trek universe, the other in a fantasy setting. Developing the fantasy character’s backstory led to what became my Veldt series—a series I have more plans for.

But those stories might have remained unseen except for a defining moment in my writing path. I still remember when it happened. I was reading a book from the library by someone I consider a midlist fantasy author. I was fairly engaged in the story, but part of my brain was thinking, “I can write as well as this guy. If he can get published, why can’t I?”

That led to me taking my writing seriously—by which I mean, trying to get someone to pay me for it. I’ve not grown rich by any stretch of the imagination, but writing has definitely augmented my book-buying budget. Although I don’t publish at a fantastic pace, I’ve had stories published every year since 2007. The fact that I don’t have more credits is a reflection on my lack of discipline more than anything else.

All from reading someone else’s work and thinking, “I can do that.”

I’m not the only one this has happened to. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a failure well into his thirties. One day, someone handed him a pulp magazine. He read it and thought, “This writing is crummy, and they get paid for it. I can write as crummy as that!” He wrote the story that became A Princess of Mars. Then he wrote the first Tarzan story, and American fiction was changed forever.

I call the realization that I could write on a publishable level my “ Burroughs Moment.” I doubt there’ll ever be a city named after any of my creation, but who knows!

How about you? What was your Burroughs Moment? Or if you haven’t started writing yet, what’s stopping you?