Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
(“Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but they are all unmourned, and consigned to oblivion, because they had not their sacred bard.”)

– Horace

I first read that quote on a webpage of Latin mottos where it was offered as just the first statement- “Vixere fortes ante agamemnona”- to mean that heroism exists even if no one notices it. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this is a perfect demonstration of the power of the pen. The quote itself extols the role of writers and poets in giving heroes immortality.

The metacontext of the quote is that when Horace wrote the passage in his Odes, he was simping for the original “sacred bard” Homer, author of the Iliad where Agamemnon’s story is recounted. Some translators have taken a little poetic license on this and interpret the passage (the way I first heard it) as “Brave men lived before Agamemon, but they died forgotten, for there were no poets before Homer.”

The meta-metacontext is that, if you read the Iliad at all, Agamemnon is pretty much an absolute knob, a coward, a monster, and absolutely responsible for all of his own failures including and especially his own death. So millennia of writers and poets have been needed to burnish his story into anything remotely resembling a hero.

That’s what we in the creative business call “serious workshopping.”

A Story Worth Tellling

A person who wants to communicate will always find a way.

What stood in my way was a speech impediment, bullying, and anxiety. What stood in my corner were books, comics, movies, and anything that held a story I could lose myself in. I absorbed folktales and mythology, especially. The heroes, the clever underdogs, the depths of evil and hate found in the villains- all of them leaned on my shoulders as I stared at lined paper sheets until I felt enough weight to put something on a page.

I do not currently write as much or as often as I think I ought to. This suspicion, apparently, is extremely common among professional writers. I think it was Ursula K. LeGuin was said she realized she was a professional writer when she really didn’t feel like writing once but did it anyway. Half the time I truly think that I’m just fooling myself– that the folks who do read this blog belong to a cabal of very kind strangers who just want people to feel good and proud of making something. I’ve learned to half-embrace this delusion, and hope that I can count as a member in their conspiracy of joy someday.

More and more, though, I am learning that I’m at least as much a storyteller as a writer, and that that is the bit I don’t suck at.

How can I tell this?

I have a pretty nice writing desk at home where I wrote that introductory paragraph, but as soon as I realized I hadn’t been outside at all today and it was half-past-3 in the afternoon, I wasn’t able to pull another word out of my head.

Sweater and scarf, boots on, bag and tablet packed up- down to Horse Brass for a pint. By the time I sat down, I had an idea of what to write next. Before the pint of beer landed, I was beginning. The rausch marzen is warming at my right hand at one of Horse Brass’s small side tables- the kind that’s perfect for private writing or people watching. It’s hard to imagine a situation more conducive to a good story.

What I do spend a lot of time on listening, reading, and observing. You have to spend time absorbing the reality you want to present to others- whether by lying, elaborating, regurgitating, or creatively reinterpreting (as in the case of Horace’s translators.

How does one find good stories? You go looking for them, and absorb as much of the world as possible so you can spit out the good stuff.

A Telling Worth Hearing

A writer, then, needs to write. They need to read, live, and observe in order to gather things worth writing about. They need to have some practice in the best ways to, per Neil Gaiman, “put one word after the other until it’s finished.” None of this guarantees that one will make a living out of being a writer, only that one will arguably not suck at it.

That, I think, is the single greatest challenge for becoming a writer. You have to learn to enjoy sucking at it. You have to spit out page after page of garbage, have it handed back to you AS garbage, and say “I want another go at it.” As you get more notoriety for being a good writer, you become more suspicious and terrified of sucking until you can’t write anything at all. You need to accept the need for being bad at it and learn to enjoy it, or else you’ll never stick around long enough to become good.

At the beginning of one of my books, I described the rebirth of this blog as “If I wanted to be a food writer someday, I needed to practice writing. With a head full of Hunter Thompson and Anthony Bourdain, I started writing in the blog again.”

Reading told me I could be a writer. Writing made me prove I was a reader. To this day, I know I’m not as good as I want to be- but I love it enough to keep trying. I used to say that if “I could tell a story like Anthony Bourdain with half the romance Harold McGee reserves for eggs, I could pave my driveway with Pulitzers.”

Yesterday, as I was walking around town looking for people, lunch, and stories to tell with a little black notebook in my pocket, I realized there was a lot more to it than that:

“If I could write a story like Anthony Bourdain,
with the passion and rage of Hunter Thompson,
the class and humor of M.F.K. Fisher,
the romance that Harold McGee reserves for eggs,
and love the process the whole time like Terry Pratchett*,
I’d never worry about making money, because I’d have written something worth the whole world reading.

*Terry Pratchett was co-author of Good Omens (along with Neil Gaiman) and author of the massive Discworld fantasy series. Compared to other authors, Terry Pratchett’s goal word count was only 200 words per day. The blog post you just read was over 1100.

Stay Classy,