A man with no imagination has no wings.
-Muhammad Ali
One is the Loneliest Number...Or is it?
Part III: Continued from September 1
For a while, the writing came easily, pouring from my multi-colored Bic pens in a torrent of half-completed thoughts and sentences. In lime green ink was written the story of the oldest kid, Jeremy Olsen (affectionately referred to as “Germ” by his siblings) and how he successfully saved himself and a small child from falling over a waterfall. The twins came alive in purple ink on their first day of school. The thoughts and feelings of the lonely youngest Olsen were best expressed through blue ink. In an effort to individualize the triplets, one of their voices was told in first-person point-of-view, in the form of a journal.
Nicole and Michelle were thrilled with the exhilarating adventures found on the loose leaf wide-ruled notebook paper and I was thrilled with the reception my writing received from them. Yet as much fun as we had, by the time I got to page 38, I had ditched Nicole and Michelle, and now printed in Curly Q handwriting was:
The Olsens: A Novel
By Erica Michelle Acton
Did I abandon them due to their lack of effort? Shortage of input? Because they were unreliable and worthless in the storytelling process? While that’s all true, I am unconvinced that this is the reason I no longer wanted to write with them. I finally broke this revelation to them in the shade of the same mature oak that we’d met beneath so many recesses before. The memory runs like bad breakup dialogue in my head.
Me: This isn’t working for me. I think we should write with other people.
Them: Was it something we did? Was it something we said?
Me: It’s not you guys. You’re both really great. It’s me. It’s all me.
And the truth of the matter is, it was me. I didn’t want to share the creative process. I knew what was best for the stories and the characters and I didn’t need anyone butting in, trying to tell me what to make my characters say, feel, and do. Instead of a beautiful harmony, the piece was becoming three discorded voices singing off-key. To save the song, I realized, I must make it a solo.
Perhaps the experience gave me the misguided assumption that collaborative writing was not for me. But not everything that came out of this was bad. If pride is a sin, I was definitely going to hell over the self-importance I felt for this story. Back in the age when “good” stories and “talented” authors were judged by the length of a story and the difficulty level of the vocabulary, my peers deemed this story an incredible success. But perhaps my real growth as a writer was that, even beyond the external feedback and praise, I was proud of this story for the work I had put into it. The experience taught me the power of my own imagination, but more importantly, the rewards of perseverance. Boxes containing dozens of unfinished, abandoned stories now were balanced with this finished piece. As Jules Renard said, “Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page; it writes three hundred.” To be honest, it probably wasn’t all that entertaining to the reader, but more than a decade later, that point is moot because it meant so much to the writer. It taught this writer to keep writing because despite writer’s block, bad endings, and uninteresting characters, in the end, it may result in a piece I’ll be proud to put my name on. And who knows? Maybe someday my name will appear alongside another’s. After all, real life is stranger than fiction.
