Tag: A Writer’s Biography

Unplanned Posts

~ Jason Liegois ~ 4 Comments

There’s been a few times when something I’m writing has turned into something totally different. Usually that’s been a good thing for me, so I’m hoping it’s a similar situation here. It’s the first time it’s happened to me blogging.

Remember how I mentioned about that one blog post that I was planning on writing last week? The one about the thing that happened with me about an aborted project?

Well, now that’s turned into no less than three Writer’s Biography pieces.

Let me explain.

Without giving away the entire story before I write it, a few years ago I began initial plans for a nonfiction book, which was the first time that I had ever thought of doing anything like that. Essentially, the lure of fiction called me more than the subject I had been researching.

Last week, the guy who had passed the project off to me asked for some files that he had given me a few years ago because another writer was interested in it. No problem there, I thought.

So, that planned visit got me thinking about the differences between fiction and nonfiction writing – a difference I was familiar enough with from my dive back into fiction and my years in journalism. I thought it was at least worth a post.

Then Dale, the writer who first mentioned the project to me, came to my house last Thursday. Our conversation went into old journalism days, long-ago projects, and other related topics.

That got me thinking about three things. First, I realized that it’s been since last May when I last wrote one of my A Writer’s Biography posts. For those not familiar with this blog, those have posts that have looked back at my life and my experiences with writing and literature. Some might have noticed that I’ve broken them into Volume I and Volume II. Volume I has covered my experiences as a kid, while Volume II explored experiences I had as a young man. However, to my surprise, I’ve read through all of my Volume II posts and I have not yet written any post specifically about my years in journalism. Considering that I spent 12 years overall working full or part-time as a journalist, I though that was a bit of an oversight. So that’s has to be worth a second post.

That led me to my third realization, which was that I have yet to write a Volume III entry. I’m going to classify Volume III as stories from when I decided to rededicate myself to writing in middle age to the present time. It would make sense to add the whole nonfiction book story to that list, since that just happened a couple of years ago. It would be a good Part 2 for that volume.

Why Part 2? Because I also realized that Part 1 had to be an analysis of how I turned things around and got back to my passion of writing. As I considered this, I really tried to search my brain and try to recall a single instance where I decided to get back to what I considered to be my passion. I’m not sure there was such a moment, but I think there might be enough for me to talk about it in depth. Creating this blog was a big part of that gradual turnaround, but I haven’t discussed it head on before.

[EDIT: If you’re interested in (rough) timelines, etc., I’d estimate that Volume I covers 1980-1995, Volume II covers 1995-2010, and Volume III covers 2010 up until the present time.]

So, that means that I now have enough stories to last the entire month. Not sure about what order I will post them in, but they will be related to each other. It’s been a bit since I’ve been excited about upcoming posts. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of the process.

That’s all for now; I’ll write more later.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume I, Part 7: The Old Library

~ Jason Liegois ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday was the last day that I checked out books from the library of my childhood.

 

It’s not like my community (Muscatine, Iowa) is losing a library, like too many others have in this country and others. In about two weeks, the current location you see above will be closed for four weeks. That’s why I decided to stock up while the getting is good – and got all of my library fines forgiven, as well! Classy move from the librarians. (I admit I am an inveterate book hoarder who has been fined by libraries in four different Iowa counties.)

Afterwards, the Musser Public Library will reopen as the HNI Community Center and Musser Public Library. (HNI makes stuff like office furniture, so if you work in a cubicle you might be sitting on or working on something they made.) This is what it’s going to look like:

HNI Musser Public Library

I mean, it looks classy, at least. HNI had an old headquarters building that was just sitting around and said why not let the city have it, since the older place was getting a bit run down. Here’s some info on the project if that kind of thing interests you.

I think there were things like roof issues, foundation issues, and some other things that required the old place to get retired. They first built the library that I used nearly 50 years ago. I mean, it looks ultramodern and slick from the outside, but it was built in the past century… like me.

Musser isn’t like a nickname for Muscatine or anything – it was the name of one of the old families here in town beginning in the 19th century that were some of the first to make some money – I think in the lumber business. The original library, build around the start of the 20th century, looked like this:

img_5423

If I went to libraries in Illinois and Texas when I was a young child, I do not remember them. I remember the first school library I had at Grant Elementary, a modest room overlooking the parking lot where I first started sorting for books. Central Middle School had a third-floor library, tucked away from everywhere else. I managed to plow through all the books they had of interest before I left.

The library of Muscatine High School, where I spent four years, was an ultra-funky layout that spoke to the building’s 1970’s origins. It was and is located in the center of the main building, on a mezzanine level between the ground and second floors. Back in the days when I went to school there, the sides of the library were open to the walkways of the ground floor below. A few years after I had graduated. apparently some students had thrown some smoke bombs from the library down below into those walkways to cause some consternation among the faculty. Well before the time I returned to the high school as a substitute teacher, they had walled off those open areas with paneling to prevent that from happening again.

However, it was the Musser Public Library that soon became my home. It’s a little difficult for me to recall how I first started getting there. I have to assume that my parents were willing to take me there as a child, to drive me there. After all, the location was catty-corner from the building where my engineer father spent the vast majority of his professional life as an engineer.

What I remember about those times, both before and after I started hauling myself to the library on a moped and then in a car, was how every topic I wanted to read about was there, open for me, at the library. That was where I was able to indulge my love of Stephen King, and, years later, Richard Laymon. I started learning about how good biographies could be, and how a book about building a castle could keep my attention until it had finished explaining how such a structure could be built. That’s where I learned about tourism guides and how they could become useful tools in my research. I believe that’s also where I learned about young adult writers like Julian F. Thompson, on Koertge, Paul Zindel, and others. I also got into Michael and Jeff Shaara and more historical fiction than I could shake a stick at.

I also remember the big comfy chairs, either over on the side or in the new additions area, where I hunkered down and started reading stuff. I would spend hours there, and had to make sure that I had enough quarters there to feed the meters or I would have to pay paring as well as book fines. (That didn’t always work out.)

That library was one of the main influences on wanting to write. I wanted to see if I could create something that could sit on the shelves along with all of the other works. I still might manage that.

 

A Writer’s Biography, Volume II, Part 4: Reviving An Old Writing Project

~ Jason Liegois ~ 5 Comments

As a kid, I took my music seriously.

When I was into rock and roll, I really dived deep into the history of the music, especially Sixties and Seventies rock. I grew up as a little kid starting to hide my interest in heavy metal and punk from my mom, who thought the music just a little harsh for a kid my age to get into.

By the time I was off to college, the alternative rock and indie rock surge was all around me and I truly got into that. Nirvana was one of my biggest bands and I still remember driving in a car when they announced Kurt Cobain killed himself. One of the things that I did admire about Kurt was how he promoted and discussed his musical influences, the musicians not only from the Sixties and Seventies, but the underground rock acts of the Eighties that helped pave the way for bands, like his, like Black Flag, The Minutemen, Husker Dü, The Replacements, Dinosaur jr, and many others.

In the years since then, I’ve expanded my musical interests into many other genres and styles, but I still appreciated music made by people who believed in authenticity and emotional honesty. From that love of the music started to come the origins of an idea.

What if I wrote about a fictional band from that 1980’s era of underground rock? What if I was able to put together a whole fictional history for that band, make it my version of some mix of Nirvana and Sonic Youth? And like Sonic Youth, what if that band had overcome personal and professional adversity to make it to widespread fame by the 1990’s?

So, I started writing a book, several years ago (closer to the beginning of this decade than the end of it). I got into the origin of the band, spouted off a lot of word salad about the meaning of music, and the effort petered out after I got somewhere around 35,000 words. I’ve talked before about how I used to work; that was one of my creative casualties.

So, after I got finished with the first draft of The American Nine this year, I was sort of puttering around and decided to take a nervous look at what I’d produced and see if there was anything worthy of getting on with. My verdict:

  1. I was very happy with the characters I’d produced, especially the band members. All of them had different personalities and had different reasons to come to the music, but that mutual interest and respect drew them together.
  2. It was way long-winded, back in the days when I never worried about word counts except for the time or two I tried to do NaNoWriMo. Managed to cut down what I had to just over 30,000 words without too much trouble.
  3. Even with those cuts, I think I’m still going to have a book that’s not going to be able to fit under the 100,000 mark. I have the feeling it might fit more into a series – a trilogy, actually. If I do a trilogy, the ending of the first book will have to take some planning, but I think the rest of it is coming together.
  4. I think this is something that could work.

So, that’s my initial impressions of the new project. The advice that I would give you today is that even a project you think didn’t have potential might look better after some time away from it. Don’t ever throw away mistakes – you’ll never know when they’ll be, as Bob Ross once said, happy accidents.