You Have to Start Somewhere Part III

In keeping with the theme of the last few posts, I scoured the hard drive of my old computer for one more example of my earlier writing. Unlike the last two snippets from my failed high school and college novels, which were selected more or less at random from the old files, I went looking for today's clip. It took a while, but eventually I found it.

What follows here are the first few lines of the very first draft of what became "The Lucifer Messiah" -- in other words, the first draft of the first book I was able to get someone to pay me for. It was written while I was in law school, maybe 1999 or 2000.

In my humble opinion, it was better than the stuff I put up here in the previous two posts (you can judge that for yourself.) But it still wasn't good. The following clip went through literally dozens of revisions before I settled on the opening lines of the book, sometime in 2005.


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

Flickering pools of light washed across the alley; rude, but momentary intrusions upon the shadows that were strewn like rubbish across the urban filth. For an instant, the hairless tail of a rodent slithered into view, and then just as quickly it slipped back into the rotting debris, and the gloom. A dented tin can similarly rattled along the slime, its path briefly revealed before it too clattered back into the stinking dim.

Just above the gutter level, though not more than a few feet higher than the rats and the rubbish, the milky, shifting lights crossed over a cloud of steam. The warm vapor glistened in the cold light, but only for a silent, aborted second. A rustle followed, rough cloth against concrete, the muted sound of a movement that was meant to have been concealed.

The shuffle of worn-out soles came next, and then the heavy noise of a man's breathing mixed with the crashing sound of a toppled trashcan.

The street-lamps cast their aura more evenly at the mouth of the alleyway, and it was there, for a moment, that a man fell quite accidentally into their harsh gleam. His face was hidden by a felt hat, sodden with sweat or perhaps something more foul, and his body was likewise obscured by the tattered folds of what could once have been an expensive overcoat.

Hardly a moment passed before he scrambled to his feet, and leaped back into the darkness.

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

I hope that these three posts show that writing takes time, and that it takes time to become a writer (a published writer, at least.) It doesn't happen overnight, and Christopher Paolini notwithstanding, it usually doesn't happen when you're in your teens, or (China Mieville notwithstanding) even your twenties. Becoming good at it is a process that takes years. It's frustrating. It's slow and it can seem like a futile effort. Very few people can pick it up right off the bat. The rest of us have to work at it.

So why do it? Not for the money, because I haven't made much of that, and my prospects for future earnings aren't much brighter. You do it because you have to, because you can't quite imagine what life would be like, how your day would be structured, if you didn't do it. Because you really don't understand how the rest of the world goes through their day without doing it, and you probably never will. That's what kept me going from that first, atrocious book when I was 15 to the first book deal when I was 33. Just keep at it.