So, what the hell is this?
A short history of my life as a “writer”
Nobody wants to be an essayist when they grow up.
I’ve always wanted to be a writer, though — and truthfully I’ve always thought of myself as one, going all the way back to a one-page neighborhood newspaper I made a few times as a child.
Almost as soon as I gained access to the internet I started writing on it; blogging before “blogging” was a thing. I became a big Star Wars fan around the same time, so naturally my writing gravitated in that direction — documenting news about the franchise’s endless firehose of novels, first on my own and eventually for TheForce.Net, then the most popular fan site in existence.
News coverage, what might be called “curative fandom” these days, was a breezy and fun way for a young nerd to find his voice as a writer, but it didn’t encourage a lot of deep thought. Not only are you not required to dwell on the information you’re relaying, the longer you do think about it the less relevant it becomes. As I got older and my interests evolved, the novelty wore off and it became a grind, consuming energy and attention I might have devoted elsewhere.
Eventually I hung up my newsman’s cap, but in my heart of hearts I remained a writer — and even though I no longer had an outlet, I never stopped having things to say. Trends that I felt other fans were missing, stories and creators that weren’t being given their due. What I ultimately concluded was that I am in fact an essayist at heart: absent any outside commitments, what actually gets my butt in gear to sit down and write something is having an argument or observation that I need to articulate to the universe. I write to explain myself.
In 2013, I finally gave in and started a new site of my own, Eleven-ThirtyEight — this time with several friends as staff writers, and eventually, more than fifty guest contributors and a following of thousands. This time I sidestepped the news entirely and focused instead on long-form editorials and analysis — the exact type of writing I felt most compelled to produce, and to read myself.
When you find the right path, movement becomes natural, progress almost effortless. This July, Eleven-ThirtyEight will come to an end after ten years of operation and nearly one-and-a-half million words of original writing.
While I wrote only a fraction of that myself, the vast majority of it I personally reviewed and edited — sometimes superficially, sometimes substantially. Embracing my identity as an essayist had the unintended consequence of making me a very confident editor. If the axiom that every writer has a million words of garbage in them before they become truly great also applies to editing, well, I’m there. So what do I do with that?
While most of my actual output has been pop culture-focused, I’ve had other ideas too. And about four years ago, as the site’s output was slowing down, I began outlining a novel.
Over the course of my adult life, inspired by the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Alan Moore and heavily influenced by the Tao Te Ching, I’ve developed certain models and philosophies about not just humanity but the universe writ large that I’ve never really had a satisfactory mechanism for putting forth in detail. It’s too much for any one essay, and would probably turn out preachy and didactic if I tried. But perhaps, I thought, I could attempt a sort of essayistic fiction, articulating my worldview by boiling it down into a representative sequence of events?
On some level I suppose that’s what all novels are supposed to be doing; whether I could do it successfully was unclear, and still remains to be seen. But with a million words of editing under my belt, what I do know is that I’m pretty good at turning a shitty first draft into something much stronger — a skill that I do believe would cross over from editorials to fiction, provided I’m able to write the damned thing first.
I committed myself to setting aside an hour every week to work on it, and amazingly, I pretty much stuck to that. Some hours were more productive than others, but I never stopped, and fifty-three thousand words and one pandemic later the end of my first draft is finally in sight — close enough that I’m willing to talk about it openly for the first time.
Writing a novel, I’ve come to understand, is like building a brick house, except first you have to form and fire all the bricks yourself. The first draft, then, is just a shitload of bricks, hopefully but not necessarily arranged into the rough form of the house you’d set out to build. Now that my bricks are mostly in place, I can finally start thinking about whether the kitchen needs a second entrance or the stairs need more head room — to say nothing of painting, or furnishing, or decorating.
That’s where notepad.exe comes in — so named for that most basic of word processors, the one that to this day births everything I write. The pieces that follow here will be my way of exploring how that whole “essayistic fiction” idea could actually work in practice — experimenting with various eldritch blends of narrative and dissertation; theme and tone; and knowing me, lots and lots of em dashes. Some things may end up as pretty standard short stories, some more traditional editorials; I’m really not sure yet. What they’ll definitely have in common, this piece included, is the full weight of my experience as an editor. One draft and some proofreading will never again be the end of it.
Truthfully? The novel is a tall order, and I may never get to a place where I’m fully satisfied with it. This blog will help with that, ideally, but first and foremost it will be a place where I can actually release some new writing in the foreseeable future. Writing that’s good on its own terms, that doesn’t lean on one of the most popular franchises known to mankind. Just to prove to myself that I can.
For all my time as a creator, my identity has been bifurcated — my friends in real life know me as a videographer and projection artist, and my friends online know me as a writer. Even my name varies these days; the writer is M. Dean Cooper, but the videographer is Mike because like hell am I going to start introducing myself to people as “M. Dean”. By expanding the horizons of my writing, I’m hoping this blog will also begin to blend those two identities together a bit, with material that incorporates the whole of who I am and what I’ve experienced.
So whether you know me as a video guy or a Star Wars guy, welcome and thanks for reading. Let’s see what this ends up being.
Next: I’m not holding myself to any particular schedule here but I do hope to maintain a regular enough output that every time I run one piece I’ll already know, and can tee up, what’s coming next.
Perhaps naturally, my first couple ideas for this came from things that had really happened to me — so before I dive into full-on fiction, I‘m going to start with a personal experience that struck me as narratively interesting, and hopefully ripe for embellishment into something thematically meaningful: my recent ordeal being trapped in Buffalo, New York during the Christmas bomb cyclone.
