Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
– Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5
That’s the full quote related to the tagline of my site. I chose it because perhaps that’s what will be represented here. It’s not that I consider myself an idiot, but I often wonder about the purpose of my writing. Does it signify anything? Doubtful it has meaning to anyone but me. Still, I find that I must write. It’s as fundamental to my life as breathing and eating. And so I write, usually in notebooks and notepads and scraps of paper. I write stories and prose journal entries and lyrics and emails and technical manuals. Mostly I write for myself because I feel that urge. But recently I decided it was time to see if anyone was interested in the story I might have to tell.
On July 1, 2020, I sat down and wrote the first pages of what would become my longest piece of writing in a long time. It was a story that’s been roiling around in my head for nearly twenty years. I had made every excuse known to not write it.
“I haven’t got time.”
“No one will want to read it.”
“You’re a talentless hack.”
It was the last one that worried me most. The story in my head was so personal to me, so meaningful. What if I tried to write it and failed? What if I wasn’t able to get the scenes in my mind into words on the page? What if they made no sense? What if it was bad? I didn’t want to face that possibility, so I blocked my path with obstacles of my own making. So, what changed around July 1st of 2020?
For one thing, I was facing layoff from my job as a college instructor. I’d been teaching some intro to programming classes for about eight years when the school’s accreditation decided that my English degree wasn’t good enough to teach programming. It still took the school six months to finally lay me off, but as I was staring into the void of what I would do next, I decided it was the perfect moment to jump into my story. After all, I wasn’t teaching anything and was barely working while still collecting a paycheck, so I had the time. And now I had a little more motivation. I wasn’t expecting a bestseller or to get it done and published in a couple of months, but it still helped move me along to actually sit down and write!
A week later, the layoff finally came through. It certainly freed up my time! I would do job searches during the day and then make time to write in the evenings. Before I knew it, I was banging out page after page after page. It was amazing how well it was going. Was it any good? I didn’t stop to see. The words were coming and I let them come. I was going to get it written first and then I’d worry about editing it.
Three weeks into my unemployment, a strange miracle happened. The boss of my job previous to teaching called to see if I might be interested in coming back to work for him (he wasn’t aware I’d been laid off). Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. I did, however, worry that taking the position might interfere with the writing that I was pursuing. Turns out that it didn’t. I had made my nightly writing enough of a habit that it continued even after I went back to work. On October 19, 2020, only three months and 18 days after I started, I typed the word “END” at the close of the final chapter and had a 79,000 word manuscript.
Is it a tale told by an idiot? Perhaps. Is it full of sound and fury? Most definitely. And does it signify anything? Yes. It signifies that if you put your mind to the thing you really love doing, amazing things can be accomplished. And while there is editing and revising to be done, the story didn’t turn out too badly. And that’s not just my take on it. The professional editor I hired to give it a critique seems to think I’m pretty talented as well.