From The What, How & Why Now Of My First Book by Adam Fike.
Part Two: The What.
When you’re still a couple years short of driving, sometimes you get stuck places with your family. One long and rainy Saturday, when I was in high school, at an antique furniture auction in rural Virginia, I bought a couple old paperbacks out of a wooden bucket and met Woody Guthrie.
Bound For Glory is the first book I ever felt was talking directly to me. I mean that in terms of writing style as much as, obviously, the person and story. It was as if somebody was sitting across the room, speaking in their own voice. Not their typewriter voice. Not their junior book editor’s voice. Their voice. Woody’s voice, as clear as any recording. Completely unfiltered. Almost shouting, this is how I tell it, want to hear my story or not? That Woody Guthrie sure was punk rock.
In the introduction to Richard Bach’s Illusions, he notes that it’s a book he never wanted to write. He simply had other things to do. But the book insisted. It’s not healthy or wise to compare your own stuff in any way to perfect works such as that one. So I certainly don’t. I just know my book insisted on being. And that Donald Shimoda also changed how my brain functions.
For a long time I got caught up with idea of how things are supposed to be. I looked at other books and wondered, why I didn’t just do it all the same way? I changed the tense back and forth. I fluffed out entire sections with pointless dialogue. I worried over word counts. Supposed-to’s are a real killer. The book didn’t care. It knew where to grow and where not to. I had to get over myself in order to figure that out. Took a while.
The stories started in college as a collection. I was essentially a history major, but took a 500-level Milton class my second senior year, in which we passed Paradise Lost around, each reading a part until the sun came up. Powerful stuff. Read my book. It’s all in there. At least, my version.
Then, while I was working on suburban newspapers, along came real life, real fast, which gave the fictional characters walking around in my head something to think about. These papers covered people where they lived. That close to home, small things leave big dents. Like, right in your driveway.
In long-form improv comedy, a building block is that people often operate from the function: When you do this, I feel like that. It works because that’s also true in life. That’s how folks do their thing.
I saw wins, lots of them. And losses, lots of them. What I took away is that look in someone’s eye when it’s all still happening. How their shoulders and voices rise or fall. How they frame their next thought. With any luck, I learned something.
We moved to Los Angeles. Another five years went by. Then all of a sudden I’d spend a couple weeks on it and the whole thing would get shorter. Then back in the drawer. Then, later, out again for a trim. Always adding what I’d learned and removing words in the process.
Then one day it was done. Simple as that. So I spent another five years polishing.
The constant polishing part comes from writing up countless unsold scripts, treatments and pitches, hoping to lure actors to lure money to make movies. Constantly trying to look at it from the other person’s point of view. Nothing is ever really done until it’s finished on the screen. Even then, it’s not really done so much as too late to make any further changes. There is no sharpening stone quite like: Well, did it work or didn’t it?
If newspapers taught me how to march, movie scripts taught me to fight. In a good way.
“I set down with my back against the wall, looking all through the troubled, tangled, messed-up men. Traveling the hard way. Dressed the hard way. Hitting the long old lonesome go.” Woody Guthrie, Bound For Glory (1943)
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