Joe's Best Story

One of the predawn regulars at the 24/7 coffeeshop I sometimes go to for my writing sessions is a software engineer named Steve who's trying to break into the young adult market. Like me he puts in a couple hours before heading into the office for his info tech job. When the barista — a young twentysomething named Joe — heard about Steve's ambitions, he told a heartrending story about how he and his (single) mom lived through a tough experience of his childhood. 

One bright hope was that he had been a precocious, talented kid who wrote stories and had dreams of becoming a novelist like John Grisham or Stephen King. Both he and his mom got pretty excited when they heard a new neighbor down the street was a publisher. Encouraged to show this man a copy of his best story, Joe gave him his only copy of it, something he'd typed out on his mom's old typewriter. He was just a kid at the time. Later when they followed up with the publisher, the man admitted to losing the entire manuscript. The only copy of Joe's best story. 

I sat in the next booth avidly eavesdropping, imagining the child's terrible dismay at hearing this, guessing that, given a rare chance to grab hold of his future, neither he nor his mother thought to make copies of it.

Then Joe went on to describe his story to Steve, with a startling command of the details, and it was a great concept, filled with imaginative ideas and interesting characters. The problem was, he persisted in seeing it as the "lost manuscript" that ended his future as a writer. He never wrote any more after that.

I wanted to tear pages out of my own notebook and tell Joe, "Here. Write it down. Write it down now. Begin with what you have." (Next week I probably will. I might be accused of being a buttinsky but it's terrible to see young people let go of their dreams, still half-baked). 

If you're going to write, you'll receive plenty of rejections from literary agents, but after a while they feel like the occasional fly that buzzes into a bake shop — your bake shop. You see them, you dislike being rejected, but they can't keep you from making your cakes and pies.

Pictured above is the work of Chinese printmaker Su Xin Ping. It's a personal reminder that most of our restrictions and confinements in life are self-imposed. Like shadows, they can be scary, but like shadows that fall over our faces, they only have the power we give them because in truth they're insubstantial. The bottom line? Most barriers are artificial.

You can do whatever you choose in life. You even get to choose what will stop you.