The Great American Novel

The late Chuck Anderson, my colleague here at the Advance, my editor with Fire News, the Bellport-based trade paper for the fire and EMS audience and a published author himself, was always quick to praise my writing.

As a Hofstra University professor in related genres, his compliments always carried a little extra weight. His rare constructive criticisms were always taken to heart as well, and I don’t recall ever rebuffing his suggestions.

But what bothered him the most about my writing was that I hadn’t—or more appropriately wouldn’t—write a book. His enthusiasm for me to undertake writing at that different level was doubled when I gifted him a copy of my “short” story that had been published in a college Creative Writing course.

I was very proud of my not even quite “novella.” My professor was profuse in her praise, I got an A+ in the class, and she told me that she had shown it to a friend who published a Manhattan-based magazine that used short stories, and it allegedly had made the short list for publication.

Anderson said that I should start with a “Best of” my columns here in the Advance that date back to the mid-‘80s. Though I was very flattered at his suggestion, I considered that to be a sort of cheating. “That’s not exactly new writing, Chuck. If I could paste all my tear sheets together, you’d have my book without me ever touching the keyboard,” I told him.

Chuck doubled the stakes and sort of teased my ego a bit more, when in more than one of his published series of crime novels with his golf-playing private-eye heroes, he used my name and my very real job of writing here in this paper as sort of the local expert on whatever was happening in the crime they were trying to figure out. Anderson’s ploy was to intrigue me and if not to make me an author, to certainly make me a character.

But I would not bite, and outside of a comment or an aside over our breakfasts at Pete’s or the Bellport Deli, he kind of let it go.

Author Stephen King once said, “The scariest moment is always just before you start,” and therein lies the crux of my literary dilemma. I have many scenarios and plots and ways to build suspense, romance, or a deep, deep dark noir novel, but I just can’t seem to drag the damn thing up to the starting gate.

Some of that is due to another writing adage that I can recall, but can’t seem to find: that you have to hook the reader with your opening scene, the first page, or else they will put your book down. That’s a heavy weight to bear that almost invites a case of writer’s block before I even tickle the keyboard. Tickle? Did I really write tickle? See what I mean? I’m paralyzed, and I haven’t even started!

At least I get to feel the excitement, the thrill, and the beaming pride vicariously from my friend and Long Island Advance colleague Sam Desmond after she wrote and released earlier this year her first novel, “In the Light of Men.”As somebody who can’t even seem to put the key into the ignition, I marvel at all the hard work you did. Maybe some day…

Brian Curry is longtime Long Island Advance columnist and is a three-time winner of the New York State Press Association’s “Column of the Year”. You can contact him at currypointofview@yahoo.com