If prostitution is the oldest profession, then surely storytelling takes second place. For as long as humans have been able to gather and speak, I think there has always been some imaginative soul to distract them from their troubles by telling a bunch of interesting lies.
Those first storytellers were important to the tribe. They entertained them and gave them hope, and by doing so kept them from thinking too much about their reality, which was mainly being hungry, cold, scared, sick, and in constant peril of losing their lonely place in the universe. Hope is one of the most powerful motivations for survival there is. We already know that storytelling is the foundation of history and religion, why not human civilization itself?
Now that we’ve established how incredibly ancient and cosmically important my job is, let me tell you how it all began, thirty-five years ago, when for the very first time I was paid money for telling stories.
Before there was goth, punk or grunge, there were the disenchanted children of the early seventies who had no name for their angst. I admit, I was their unacknowledged princess. We didn’t want to wear platform shoes, wrap-around skirts, or dance to the disco music all of our friends loved. We went barefoot, dressed in black before it was cool, and stayed locked in our rooms as we gleaned wisdom and understanding from the likes of Sylvia Plath and Paul Zindel. We weren’t even friends with each other – that would make us too much like those little jocks, rah-rahs and glee clubbers at school. No, we had to suffer alone, in artistic solitude. No one understood our pain.
In between composing rather bitter blank verse about How Sorry Everyone Was Going to Be When I Was Dead and scheming to run away on a Greyhound bus to New York City (where I would immediately be given a rent-free loft apartment, make a large circle of friends who would wear only black and chain-smoke and drink instead of eat or work, and read my amazing poetry to the adoring masses who would naturally think I was better than Sylvia Plath, etc.) I wrote short stories. They were the lies I told myself, the heart-rending sagas of pure-hearted, highly intelligent and infinitely desirable teenage girls who looked exactly like me – well, a bit taller and with no acne – and who were always getting in and out of ironic situations only to die, tragically but beautifully. After which Everyone Was Really Sorry.
Telling stories to other people is always fun, but one can only lie to oneself for so long without getting bored out of one’s skull. In time I started writing different stories, where the girl was not me, or was sometimes a boy, or occasionally a radiation-mutated dissident or an exotic alien life form. The tiresome ironic situations morphed into highly-unlikely adventures in faraway places, and although the story themes remained staunchly on the dark side, I didn’t always end them with the tragic but beautiful death scene.
My mother, who bills herself as my very first fan, actually could not stand me writing back then. She refused to buy me the typewriter I desperately needed (too frivolous) and complained about all the filler paper I went through which I should have been using for homework instead of “that stuff” (simple wasteful.) She would also duck her head into my room on regular basis and tell me to quit writing and go out, get some fresh air and play. This offended me to no end; I was an extremely mature thirteen-year-old, immersed in exploring alternate realities and working up the nerve to begin writing my first novel. I did not play.
After a few months of this (and once getting grounded for being fresh to Mom during one of her lectures about the evils of staying indoors and writing) I decided I needed to prove that I was doing something important and worthwhile. At school one of the English teachers had posted a notice about some writing contests being held by a local arts festival, and from her I obtained the necessary application to enter the short story contest.
I spent a week polishing the best story in my collection, took it to school and typed it up during typing class, filled out the application, stole some postage stamps from Mom’s desk and mailed in my submission. It was a terrific feeling, finding the termerity to do all that by myself. I think it also gave me the final push I needed to move into the next phase of my work: writing my first novel, which I started the next day.
Weeks passed and I forgot about the contest, until one day I got called down the front office, where the English teacher who had posted the notice informed me that I had placed second in the short story category, and that I would be presented a ribbon and a check at the art festival’s awards ceremony.
There was just one little problem.
“You checked off the wrong box on the application,” the teacher told me.
Busted. “Does that mean I don’t win?”
“No,” she admitted, “but technically speaking, you shouldn’t have.”
I already had a game plan for that. “I’m sure they won’t care.”
Upon hearing that I had won a writing contest, Mom told me only that she didn’t have time to take me to the awards ceremony. She changed her mind when she found out there was prize money involved.
“We can use it for groceries,” she said, as firmly and proprietarily as only a single mother of five making minimum wage could.
On the day of the awards, I put on the dumb blue dress Mom had bought me from Sears when I made the Junior National Honor Society (it made me look stupid but also a little older) and we went to a lovely beachfront art museum that was all glass windows and steel beams. There, in front of a crowd of about two hundred, I walked up to claim my prize. First place went to a man who was old enough to be my great-grandfather, and third went to a scowling forty-something lady who eyed me like I’d stolen her glory.
Which I had, because I hadn’t entered the student category at all. My story had won second place in the adult category.
As the award presenter handed me my ribbon and a check for $25.00, she peered down at my face and asked, “How old are you, dear?”
“Eighteen,” I lied without a hitch. What was she going to do, ask me for ID?
After the applause I marched down and dutifully handed over the check to Mom, who took a picture of me with the big ribbon pinned to my flat chest. Then we got the hell out of there before anyone could talk to us or mention how young I looked for an adult writer. The best part was Mom stopping by Royal Castle on the way home and celebrating my win with a box of burgers and milkshakes.
Mom kept looking at the check as if she thought it were fake. “I didn’t know you could make money for doing this stuff. Too bad you didn’t win first place. That old guy got seventy-five bucks.”
“Maybe I could write something better next year,” I said, very carefully, “if I could get a typewriter like a real writer uses.”
Mom did spend my $25.00 for groceries that week and part of the next (things were so much cheaper in the seventies.) But a month later she also bought me a used Royal Academy typewriter, upon which I wrote my first five novels. While definitely humble, my first sale fed my family, saved me from writing everything in longhand, and illustrated beautifully that I was doing something as important and worthwhile — even if I had to lie a little to prove it.
