Control: 1998–2007
Aka my twenties. When I was in my twenties I wrote a couple of novels. They were bad novels. I didn’t have the life knowledge to write effective novels. I, Dalton Lewis, wrote an early draft of My Little Paradise and Illusionary Paintings. I wrote them with the help of a guide book which told me not to write in order. It was a writing guidebook from an obscure writer, and I shouldn’t have used it as a guideline. It didn’t work for me.
Why do we use guidebooks? I suppose that it is because writing is hard to do, and one can feel helpless and hopeless without a guidebook. A guidebook can help give us steps to accomplish. It can help us get work done. It can help us write a solid and respectable novel.
In my twenties I drank too much alcohol on the weekends. I lived in Japan in my twenties for about nine months, or the duration of one school year. I was terrible at Japanese at the end of those nine months because I didn’t memorize the words from chapter to chapter.
The problem is that writing is based on knowledge of life and understanding people and dramatic conflict. It’s hard to explain or teach. I wrote two novels and then took some time off. I actually started to talk to the voices inside of my head, which wrecked my ability to pay attention to the world around me.
I moved home at 23 or 24 or so. I could hardly function or finish sentences. I could hardly communicate with people. After about a year like that I started to drink heavily. I started to date a girl, and it went poorly. I could hardly talk to her, and it went poorly.
I moved in with Gilbert and moved to Pennsylvania to be friends with him. It worked out okay but not great. I got a job as a cashier at a grocery store. I held it, and I don’t know how I held it, for nine months until I decided that I had enough of that. I went back home to my parents’ house.
I drank for a couple of years. I also went to some of those focus groups for alcoholism and mental illness. I took a number of those classes,and they didn’t seem to help much. I’m sorry, and I know those people worked hard to help me, but that was that. I wasn’t impressed.
It took half a dozen tries to quit drinking. I then went back to writing, novels still. I wrote a couple of terrible novels that didn’t make any sense. I still wrote and tried to get something done. I didn’t have the ability to think about my writing and enchant the audience and tell a story. I wrote a bad screenplay and some bad novels.
I don’t know what to say. My twenties were a period of failure and mental illness and drinking and barely doing anything productive at all. I got more done during my thirties. I think that the twenties is an era when some people shine, but I’m not one of those people.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
