Potential

I write. A lot.

I don’t publish a lot (at least not ‘a lot enough’). My life is full of fractional stories, plotless narratives. These are bits and pieces of the tales I want to tell, someday.

I Tried to Finish a Dead Man’s Novel nearly destroyed my soul today.

One of my greatest fears in this life is my family handing someone else this curse and responsibility of finishing my briefcase-novel. It’s not fair to them. It’s not fair to me. But it’s my fear.

It is both a gift and a curse to be handed a briefcase containing a life’s work

I have two tales in me. One was dealing with the traumas around my time in the military (these were traumas of the soul and not traumas of violence as I am a peacetime vet) and one is the tale I currently tell mostly through D&D. That second one is captured in some of my fiction here as well.

But these stories are all over the place. Like Jim, the stories are bits and pieces. Scraps of notebooks, dead computers, hard drives that I’ve carefully removed and then ignored.

They’re all over the place. In closets, end tables, night stands, old bags, boxes. There’s probably a fragment in my dresser, and definitely many in a closet/storage room bin. Like Jim, they’re unorganized. Unlike Jim there’s an outline to both tales.

Correction: Both tales have outlines, plural. They’ve stopped and restarted at various points of happiness and sorrow.

I started writing a long time ago. As far back as I can remember doing things I can remember writing.

Compared to the general public I’m a rather prolific writer.

Sounder at Heart has in its archives thousands of stories I’ve written about soccer. TacDefiance and WeAreTacoma and SoundersFC and other sites have even more. There’s some stuff on The Guardian and Top Drawer Soccer and MLS too.

I’ve written about baseball for Inside the Park and FanHome.

One product on DMs Guild contains a few of my backgrounds and even how to do sports in Dungeons & Dragons. This site clearly has more of that type of thing.

My current role involves writing a lot of email and even some blogs about news-as-security.

While I love all of that writing, none of it causes me fear.

Fiction makes me afraid. Fiction makes me dread sharing my deepest soul and fiction is only excellent when you do that.

Much like how the unfathomable expanse of our universe might be traced back to a pinpoint, the briefcase novel originated in a single cigarette. Jim started his novel in 1974 as a way to quit smoking. “He needed something to do with his hands,” Laurene explained. “He’d go to a restaurant and sit for hours.”

Quitting smoking didn’t last for long, but the book stuck around. By the time Jim was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in 2013, it had been nearly forty years since he started his novel. – Richard Kelly Kemick

I didn’t start writing to get away from something. I started because I couldn’t stop.

Portions started to pile up. School helped me put out some works. They were good enough to turn in, decent grades. Nothing accepted. A now-abandoned Hotmail address contains a folder called “rejections.”

This didn’t dissuade me.

Every box I pickup from either parent includes at least one notebook, legal pad, sheaf of papers with things related to the two tales I want to finish — this papers are from before I discovered the stories’ meaning.

Lists of names. Tables. Plot outlines. Novel structures (in the Army when standing in line I would focus on a bit of the camo and think “what story would be structured like that pattern”).

And I just keep writing unfinished thoughts.

I may in fact be an essayist. That might be why the Propagandist is my favorite personally developed subclass (it may also be because I like Cawti, Kelly, Val, Peter, Bean, Paine).

Maybe I’m not a fiction writer. Maybe the fiction just kind of happens in fragments because the fiction helps tell the reality — that’s how fiction shows up at Sounder at Heart!

Maybe I’m a storyteller.

That’s probably why I currently tell most of my fiction via D&D.

D&D is a lot like the oral tradition of fireside storytelling. It reacts to the audience, builds in real time and doesn’t follow formulaic narrative arcs. It is from a time before such a thing.

But it also means that without a fire pit, without a bar rail, without a D&D table my tales may never be finished.

Honestly my tales may never be finished even with those things.They aren’t finish-able. They exist and shift and change via the day, the month, the year, the decade, the LIFE.

That’s how I’m the most like Jim. It’s not that his briefcase-novel lacked genre or voice. Every element of the briefcase-novel was a moment in his time. Jim wasn’t a surveyor. He was a storyteller. Those scraps and notes were part of the tale.

Scraps and notes are part of our tale.

I’ve been watching The Magicians quite a bit lately. We won’t get into the whys. The final two seasons have a consistent thread about how we each have our own story. Our friends (and our enemies) help its telling, but it is ours — alone.

We own our own story.

We write it. If that means it is spoken, written, played out on stage or screen, via short-form text, or micro-videos, at a D&D table, in a big damn novel or in a briefcase full of loose pages like a specialty tea — that’s writing.

That’s Storytelling.

I am so very afraid that my family is going to pick up those notes some day and try to figure out who I was. It’ll be quite confusing.

One page will mean something to one of them. Another notebook will remind a friend of what we did together without mentioning them. An abandoned blog will cut through and release emotion locked behind a veil.

I’m simultaneously Jim and Richard.

I’m always Dave Clark, the full moon storyteller. My complicated self who found a medium via dice, friends and paper. I’m me, the person who can’t finish a novel, but will never stop trying.