Word Addiction: A Brief History of My One True Love

Even if she wasn’t a huge reader herself, my mother knew the importance of making me fall in love with books. At an early age I was given a handful of little plastic-bound tomes to sift through so that I might learn the building blocks of what would eventually become my first real addiction. Had the doctors allowed such a thing, she might have brought some into the delivery room and put them in my tiny, placenta-covered hands to jumpstart the process. But, as was her fashion, she stuck to the rules and waited until we got home.

By the time I was in kindergarten, I knew the alphabet, and thus was bored to death as my teacher, Mrs. Young, showed videotapes of little cartoon consonants and vowels acting as though they were people. Instead of watching to figure out how a group of sans-serif individuals could befriend one another to make simple words, I resorted to looking out windows and staring at walls, wishing that I were at home.

That next year, during a parent-teacher conference, my teacher refused to believe that I could read a storybook deemed beyond what a first-grader was able to do. My parents disagreed, and so in a battle of wills, it was agreed upon that I would be forced to read the book in class. Aloud. In front of everyone. All in all, the book was pretty easy. It had to do with a star or a baby lion or something along those lines. Nothing beyond Charlotte’s Web or anything by Judith Viorst or even a James Patterson novel, for that matter. Still, I got up in front of my class and got about five pages in, a little more than halfway through the book, when my teacher told me that that was enough. “That’s all we have time for today,” she said, sending me back to my seat.

Throughout the rest of my grade school years I took an insane pleasure from copying down words and learning to spell, and on our visits to the school library my friends would find me salivating like a dog waiting on the promise of a treat. Every few months when my teachers would hand out the leaflets for a new Scholastic Book Fair, I would treasure it, worrying the edges with my fingers and taking in each title’s little synopsis with what amounted, back then, to ecstasy.

It wasn’t until middle school that I began to learn the joys of writing myself. Before then, my knowledge of composition had been limited to basic school reports, which were cookie-cut and had all the flexibility of a back brace. My first attempts at writing for fun were transcriptions of video games I’d played, scribbled in pencil in my school notebooks. Then came fantasies about spaceships from television shows like Star Trek scouring the galaxy for adventure. No one saw these. Not even my mother, who tried peering over my shoulder to see what I was up to, sitting at my desk, my back to my bedroom door, hunched over with one hand hidden and working furiously at something. Looking back, I suppose the concern she displayed might have been at the mistaken notion that I, at twelve years old, had prematurely discovered the fun that is masturbation.

From my space-bound adventures, I transitioned into more humorous fare. Namely, a collection of stories that concerned my friend and classmate Tiffany, who would make me laugh with her made-up recollections about living in a Mexican hut with a feline named HeyCat. The stories came out in a frenzy of excitement that was ushered in when I showed the first one to my language arts teacher, Mrs. Althoff, who would sit at her desk and read them, laughing occasionally against the hush of the classroom. The sound of her laughing was like a drug, and so I set out like a junkie looking for my fix.

At this time, books too became more adventurous, as I reached beyond the children’s fare of Judy Blume and Louis Sachar and into the deeper waters of Lowis Lowry and Rodman Philbrick, both of whom demonstrated a fascinating ability to achieve in me an emotional reaction. I read my first Stephen King novel my last year of eighth grade.

Throughout the rest of middle school and into high school, writing became more than just a hobby. I felt as though I had been called to write, and I took the mantle of doing so with all the seriousness and gravitas capable of a slightly overweight teenage boy into writing stories about talking Mexican cats and intergalactic spaceships. Stories stretched and reached for things which they had never attempted before. Characters grew larger as explosions diminished; humor took a backseat to my crazy, wild-eyed attempts at lassoing the same emotional power that I could see authors wielding in their works.

College brought on courses in creative writing, which introduced me to people who had the same desires as me. It felt refreshing to be in a room full of people who I imagined got the same thrill out of crating a well-worded sentence as me, even if in reality few of them actually enjoyed writing as much as they enjoyed having one less elective course to add to next semester’s schedule.

When I came into a class called Practical Criticism — a course dedicated to the routine dissection of stories, as if they were frogs — I first met Jason Wendleton, the coauthor of this blog. By the end of the semester we had struck up a friendship, one that I’m 98.6 percent certain remains to this day. Part of the draw was the mutual attraction to the limitless possibilities of writing. The magic of creation. The power of good prose. And, of course, our strong aversion to looking for real jobs.

After college was finished for Jason and myself — he with his genuine UM-St. Louis English degree and me with my still-in-progress dual major in Laziness and Procrastination — we started talking about our mutual desire to start putting our works out into the world. Seeing as neither of us had any major publications aside from some of Jason’s columns for The Current, the college newspaper, and a short story I’m managed to weasel into the UM-St. Louis LitMag, we decided to start a blog: this very one.

It is hard to believe how quickly time can pass. As most people do, I think the process gets quicker each year. It was approximately 365 days ago that Jason and I founded this little blog, this scattershot collection of random trinkets and pieces of work that remind us (or remind me, anyway) of why it is that writing draws us in like it does. It takes me beyond the ordinary, and it fills in the little gaps in life with things that I would never hope to accomplish. Through writing, both my own and others’, I have seen this world and more, lived years in other people’s lives.

My crazes for caffeine, candy, and fast food have all come and gone with relative ease, but the one thing that always draws me back, even when I try my hardest to ignore it, is the written word. When I sit down to write, I am reminded of the sheer power of imagination, and the everyday magic of creation. That, and it gives me the hope that, one day, I won’t have to have a real job.

Happy birthday, Scattershot.