A Blue Royal Typewriter from James W. Ziskin

 When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Who hurt you?

I knew I wanted to be writer when I was twelve years old. Can’t say today why I suddenly decided I wanted to write, but that’s when it happened. I wrote my first book. It was a terrible adventure novel about World War I. Just what you’d expect a twelve-year-old boy to write. One hundred and ten perfectly fine sheets of paper ruined...

If I recall correctly, I stayed up late nights banging away—single spaced—on a blue Royal portable typewriter. It was a lonely but exhilarating time. It made me feel complete. Made me feel like someone. Since I was a lousy two-fingered hunter and pecker, I used erasable onionskin paper so I could correct the typos. The result was a smudgy mess. I can still see the typeface: modern, mono spaced, with a computer or robotic vibe. Not courier, as you might expect from a 1960s machine. The letters looked like Olympia’s Senatorial typeface, but that would mean I might be misremembering the typewriter in question. I’m fairly certain it was a Royal, but the typeface looked like Olympia’s Senatorial. Like this:

As I mentioned above, that book was awful, but it lit a creative urge in me. From that young age, I set my sights on becoming an author. Of course it took another forty years before I finally wrote something someone wanted to publish, but never mind that tiny detail. Success was a long time coming. I wrote five more unpublished novels after that first book. No, none of them ever saw the light of day and they never will. But they were part of the journey. My training. And, to be fair, each one represented a step forward in quality and maturity. Each one was better than the last, yet still not good enough.

Of course I didn’t spend all of those forty years writing books that never sold. I went to college and grad school, lived in France, got married, and embarked on a long and successful career. I traveled and worked in India for nearly four years and had a blast. So, yes, life got in the way, as I’m fond of saying. And, in the process, my dream of becoming an author took a back seat. But all of it was fodder for my eventual writing success, humble though it’s been. I don’t regret my apprenticeship.

As for who hurt me? Well, perhaps the better question is who gave me this blessed longing? The stubborn, unfulfilled desire to create and to write stayed with me and defined my hopes for forty years before I finally managed to realize a piece of that dream. Along with those hopes came pain and failures aplenty. A dream deferred, to quote Langston Hughes. Or, as Tom Petty put it, “the waiting is the hardest part.” 

And that’s where the hurt in this week’s question comes into play. Wanting to be a writer brings with it with so much disappointment and frustration that it sometimes—always?—feels like a savagely masochistic endeavor. But as any masochist will tell you, they LOVE the pain. So I guess my answer is, “‘Tis I. ‘Tis I who hurt me.” And I’ve loved it all.