The Bridge to Writing

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time. But it wasn't until this past summer that I got the picture to go with it. This is the Yaquina Bay bridge in Oregon. I wrote about this bridge having never seen in person...until that day. But there is more to this bridge, and this story, than just that.

I've had several people ask me what started my writing path. Truthfully it went back early in my life. I wrote my first short story in the sixth grade. It was a horror story (a genre my first accepted short story tried to hold - more on that in a minute). I was hooked. Between then and now I wrote many more things. Several things that won't see the light of day, and some that shouldn't have. Where I am now is a result of one of those failed stories. And it wasn't just a story, it was a whole novel.

Back in the late aughts, I wrote a novel about a husband whose wife ended up in a coma. He couldn't deal with his grief and fear, so he took off running cross country, Forrest Gump style. Such a terrible premise. And my wife couldn't help but identify with protagonist's wife, asking, "Why did you put me in a coma?" It will remain forever shelved in the Do Not Read wasteland.

There was something about that feeling, that grief, that fear, that kept gnawing at me. One day I decided to rewrite just one scene from that awful novel. It was such a cool mind exercise to try and shove a novel's worth of feeling into a short piece. Honestly, I think this story really made me understand the value of a story at sentence level. In something that brief, every word, every piece of punctuation - even every pause - counts. I haven't heard of other writers shrinking a novel into a short story. It felt very backward. But it must have worked. That story ended up in Coffin Bell Journal and honestly became the beginning of my writing life. It spurred me on to keep reading and writing more. Now, there are two traditionally published novels with my name on them.

So this picture is of the bridge the story centers around. I got to drive across it this past summer. It did not feel at all like the monster I made it out to be in my story. It was beautiful, even on that gloomy day. It further confirmed that the monster in the story is our grief and fear. This bridge became a circular moment for me. Just like my writing life, I couldn't see it or touch it when I started. It was theoretical. And it seemed a world away. Crossing it felt like I had somehow driven into myself, or at least the self I'd been trying to become. If you have a bridge you are afraid to cross, if you are staring at it, fighting off some grief of what could have been, start driving toward it. You never know where you'll end up.