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Fellow 2k12 member AC Gaughen recently reminded our group of this poem and how well it applies to the writer's life. I pulled up my copy of "If", something I printed and framed for a student's bar mitzvah several years ago, and had a read through again.

The words are golden and so right on.


If—

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
     And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
     And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
     To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
     Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

—Rudyard Kipling

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In high school, I fancied myself the trippy beatnik 21st-Century version of James Joyce who would write The Great American Private Detective Epic Poem.

I filled up endless notebooks with crazy stories that still make me giggle, but I learned all the skills that, for better or for worse, have kept me writing today.

New York Observer book editor Leon Neyfakh took me back to those days with his interview with a 17-year-old writer named Alec Niedenthal who just published in the pages of the New York Times Book Review.

It got me thinking fondly about my high school notebooks. I'll bet you have some pretty funny stories about growing up as a writer. Tell me about it in the comments: What kind of young writer were you?

Here's the original letter: "Mr. Editor, well, we’ve been whiling away for a long time, persisting on raw fish and Red Bull in the frozen caverns of the blogosphere; and we don’t mean to boast, but, to be perfectly honest, we think you’ll be more than impressed. We’re standing beneath the adit of our long-desolate cave, proffering a sheaf of papers that you might consider a manuscript."

 

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this is the original pen representation of my 2007 Krampus Kard. The outcome can be seen here or here.

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