About Storywriting
Know and Honor Your Gifts
Like other writers, I have good days and bad days. We all question ourselves. Second guessing. On those bad days, I like to remember my first year out of college.
I was older, having gone through school on the G. I. Bill, and the question of what I wanted to do in life was urgent. My degree was in American Studies, and I was in love with Carpenter Gothic and Queen Anne and the colonial fieldstone houses and barns I’d studied. Although writing short stories had always been in my head, historic preservation, and actually getting my hands dirty doing the work, interested me as a profession. Because one of my uncles had been restoring and remodeling homes for a number of years, I signed on with him, figuring I’d learn the basics and move on from there. We worked together for a while, but there are just some family members it’s best not to work with. I moved on earlier than I’d planned.
The next crew I worked with was certainly more professional and far more apt to help me learn on the job. The problem was that I had no talent, which I should have already known. But this crew was kind. I have no complaints. I wasn’t exactly a stellar carpenter’s helper. In fact, I was pretty lousy. Through it, I learned something that has been far more important than any of the building trade skills I was not born to master.
The boss often assigned me as “helper” to an old WW2 vet named Bud Houtz, a gifted carpenter and master storyteller. One afternoon as we finished cutting and then nailing diagonal cedar siding onto a sandwich shop, Bud stood back, as he liked to do, and said, as he liked to say, “Let’s just take a look at this job. You gotta stop and admire your work every now and then.” And so we did.
We’d made something rather different, something unusual for that town up in the middle of the Pennsylvania valleys. I felt proud and knew that that’s what I really wanted to do—to make things I could stand back from and feel proud about. As I found my way to writing and telling stories, I always remember that day when I knew I just wanted to make things.
It wasn’t long after working with Bud that I remembered I wasn’t too bad at making things with words.
A lot of life is finding out what you are not good at and then finding something that speaks to you and that you can do passably well. Even if our gifts are small, they are gifts, and we should honor them.
It’s good to remember that on the bad days.