Oftentimes I’m asked what it is that I write in my pocket notebook and my responses are generally quite honest: I’m scribbling down what I most certainly will never remember. The people I meet. The addresses of galleries or tailors or the names of movie theaters or coffee shops. Interesting, and sometimes foul things overheard. Lines of dialogue. Grocery lists.
I’ve struggled with drafts for this introduction and there are many iterations that exist in my pocket notebook. They’re mostly attempts at creating a theme that circles back to my love for writing and where it stems from.
In those drafts, I wrote about my first attempt at a piece of short fiction titled “The Monster of Horror,” which came about when I was six or seven; I wrote about my grandfather’s stacks of legal pads, where he tracked the numbers to all of the lottery tickets he ever bought–and how his incessant ritualistic tendencies sparked some curiosity in my own attempts at expression with the written word; I wrote about Tyler Dilts, a crime-fiction author who, later on, happened to be my creative writing professor when I attended California State University, Long Beach. In any case, I was struggling with writing a satisfying story arc that kept me engaged, and, moreover, I found that I was overthinking the entire thing. I closed the notebook and shoved it aside for a couple of days.
In that short time span, I ideated on concepts that were forgotten as soon as my attention turned to something else. Only, later on, usually before bed, those ideas would bubble up to the surface and I’d consider them once more. They’d peck and scratch and suggest to me—if only in the subconscious—that I was their steward, and without putting pen to paper, they’d die on the cutting room floor (as they always have, for years of inaction).
Of course, I thought, it can be that easy. Its time to leave your stresses and worries at the door, they’ll never treat you right. Write the damn thing.
So therein lies the concept of All Pen–the ideas that walk away but come back, the people and places that compel me to write about them.
Join my newsletter as I explore the stories in every corner of my world—the real and the imaginative—and the moments in between, where the two intersect.