Small and shameful describes all creative beginnings.

Leaving what furniture I had and all my books behind in New York, I moved up to our empty farmhouse with a fountain pen, two bottles of ink, and a dozen blank yellow pads. There was no electricity. I couldn’t use a computer. The first day, I arranged a desk and a red armchair in a bedroom. The second day I started writing. As soon as I actually worked on the book for eight hours, with no distractions, I realized I had nothing. For months in New York I had been telling myself I only needed time. What true focus, what deep immersion immediately established was that I knew nothing about the characters, that I had no compelling story whatsoever and only the vaguest sense of what I wanted to say.

The next day was the same. And the day after that. For weeks and weeks, I worked and worked and produced nothing that anyone else would want to read. Each morning when I sat down in that red armchair and picked up my clipboard, I struggled to stay calm. How long had it been since I chose this direction, sitting on that low wall in New Haven? Six years. The time it takes to get a Ph.D. Or a medical degree with part of a residency thrown in. Or a law degree or an M.B.A and a few years at a high-paying job. My friends had invested this time so they could pay taxes, buy houses, and raise children, while I continued peeling off the years like bills from a wad in my pocket and gambling them on a dream. I had no audience. I had no published stories. I had no proof that I could really do this, although I did have Suzanne, who still lived and worked in New York.

Soon after moving to the farm I had a dream. I dreamt that I accepted a job as a banker in an office that used to be a house. My office was this exact house, this farmhouse, except there were desks and telephones everywhere and no beds. I didn’t work in my dream so much as buy things, and the things I bought appeared in this house. I dreamt of myself touching the leather on my expensive shoes, the wool on so many custom-tailored suits, the gloss on porcelain and ceramic vases, and the rows of bindings on my rare and antique books. And I remember this overwhelming feeling of peace and comfort, like the warmth you feel after being outside in rain, because I no longer had to worry about writing a book.

Some years before I sat in that red chair, I sat on a bus in England. A little blue and black and beaten edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson lay in my lap. As the driver announced my stop and people stood up around me, I sat staring at a quotation from Samuel Johnson—just gaping at it in utter incomprehension: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” It would have helped me to understand that. Why couldn’t I be more transactional about my writing? Why shouldn’t it earn me a living? But I disdained identifying writing as a career.

I also disdained help. How I wish I had served some kind of apprenticeship with someone. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I took no creative writing classes, never worked with an editor, read no books on writing. I had no training in the creative process, no support from anyone who had done this before. I insisted on finding my own way—although all that meant was finding my own way to the same way everyone else found without so much stress and anxiety. There were so many simple things I could have learned if I had even one friend, perhaps one slightly older friend, who was a writer. But no. The only person I talked to about my writing was Suzanne.

A good day began with a movement I almost didn’t see. It flashed at me from a corner of the page. A man putting a pen in his pocket that wasn’t his. A woman sitting down on a bench while listening to children in a natural history museum. I would describe the movement I saw. Who is doing this? I often didn’t know. Then I would hear a remark. And then a reaction to that remark. Is someone else there? Who? And why? What happened before this? I often found an entire scene this way, though I might find the middle first, and then the beginning, and then the end. I would write three or four different versions of the middle and as many different versions of the beginning and end. Events and ideas and snatches of dialogues lay jumbled across a dozen pages in the order they came to me.

But many days this didn’t happen at all. I saw nothing, heard nothing, wrote nothing. Those blank, silent hours left me frantic. They often went on from morning to night for a week at a time. Hardest to accept was how little control I had. The ideas came out until they didn’t and when they didn’t I believed they would never come again—until they did.

So the book came to me in painful pieces. How the pieces fit together I didn’t know. Some days I thought I saw a shape to the book. All those odd pieces seemed to draw together, and there it was. Yes! There in the distance shimmered and rippled engaging characters and a compelling story. I had done it! I had found a book. But next morning the sun shone harshly down on the same heap as before—that same pile of scraps and splinters. Creative isolation compounded my panic.

My mother, who still lived in New Haven, came up to the farm in July and August and brought two beagle puppies, one of whom she had named Hercules because he was unusually large. Four or five months old, he kept coming upstairs to find me. He would sit down in front of my chair and wait until I raised my clipboard so he could jump up and fit himself between my leg and the arm of the chair. I would move the clipboard back over his head and keep writing while he fell asleep, his nose and his long ears and his white front paws lolling over the edge of the chair. When I was cooking, he would sit on my feet, wedged between my shins and the cabinet. Gangly and pudgy at once, he felt like a sack of sand down there, but if a scrap of food fell he struck it like a rattlesnake.

By the end of the summer, after all that work, I had made no progress at all. I decided to stay for the winter. Asleep by nine and awake by five as the days grew shorter, I started writing at six. I worked until noon. Then I did something outside for several hours—cutting trees, clearing brush, walking in the woods. After dark, I lit a lamp and spent an hour in my chair, thinking and looking ahead to the next day. For days at a time I spoke to no one except Suzanne on the phone.

October passed. And then November. In March, on the other side of winter, lay my birthday. I would be thirty. Then nine years until I was thirty-nine. The age of premature death. I continually cross-examined myself. What if you never find the idea that draws all these pieces together? I savaged myself with counterfactuals. Why are you doing this at all? I replayed my life, again and again, in a dissipated orgy of regret. Why didn’t you get a Ph.D.? Or apply to law school? Or business school? Not being published at thirty felt like a disaster. When will you finally stop trying? Next summer? And when you finally give up, what then? Do you even have a plan? Because whenever that happened, I had no way of earning a living.

When my mother had returned to New Haven at the end of the summer, she left me with Hercules. He was full grown now. He had a leash of thick, heavy rope as if he were supernaturally strong. His voice sounded like the gong of a bell and the roar of a lion. And he experienced my cooking and eating with a profound sadness about the constraints of his own existence. He followed me around the house choosing new places to circle around and flop down, chin on his paws, to gaze at me resentfully or adoringly depending on how far he judged me to be from feeding him or leaving the house.

The old house was not insulated. The wood stove consumed armloads of wood but didn’t heat any room except the kitchen for long. Pipes kept freezing. In that narrow valley, the sun disappeared before four. The yellow light of kerosene lamps, the white light of propane, and the long shadows in every room intensified my despair. Some nights it felt hard to raise my hand to a doorknob or put a toothbrush in my mouth. But Friday nights often brought Suzanne. One weekend was so cold we spent it under the covers or near the stove in the kitchen, blankets hung over the open doorways. “What have you done with our real sister?” her sisters asked when she told them, as if an alien had inhabited her body.

In the countdown to my birthday, I continued tearing paper off my pad. Yellow paper with blue writing continued descending into my scrap heap. At the end of every day, I sorted what I had done into labeled manila folders which I kept organized inside a cardboard Bankers Box. I never knew which of the ideas I found were the ideas I needed, so even when I made progress it felt like I had only walked in a circle. Sorting and organizing often gave way to that same savage cross-examination. How could you be getting so close to thirty with so little to show for your time? In the dark and cold of January, I tore fewer pages from my pad. And then none. Weeks went by without my writing anything at all.

And then one morning there I sat in that old red armchair—frayed pink under my knees, worn to white threads at my elbows. A brown clipboard rested in my lap. Under the steel clip waited yellow paper. Still blank. Hercules slept on my bed. Above my left elbow hung the narrow edge of a long, rectangular table. It was really a door, taken off the hinges, and set on legs. I sat at what was once the top of the door. And lying on the table, pointed at my head, was a double-barreled shotgun.

I turned my head. I stared into the two perfect circles. Like any tunnel, both barrels seemed to get smaller as they moved away from me. If the breech were open and the chamber empty, there would be two tiny pinpricks of light at the end. Two yellow shells closed the tunnel. But the trigger was still far from my finger or my toe.

The barrels were there to remind me. They were there as a promise. You can’t start writing again? You continue making no progress whatsoever? I will carry your box of yellow papers outside in the snow, douse your pathetic blue ink with gasoline, and set the last year of your life on fire. Then you will watch me sit down. Yes, in the warmth of the burning box I will sit down. Then you will see me put the gun in a place where I can pull the trigger.

My dream—the grandiose dream of reimagining what people needed from literature and creating that anew—the healing, helping dream—the Jesus Christ dream—felt like my dream no longer. It didn’t feel like a dream at all. It felt like my psychotic roommate. And we lived locked in this farmhouse together, half a mile from the nearest neighbor.

I stared at my clipboard. The yellow shells did not help me fill the yellow page. Blank it remained. I stared at my bed. Hercules slept curled up at the very edge of the corner closest to me. Lying on the bottom of the cardboard box, a thick red book kept the folders upright. It was a reference book, Smyth’s Greek Grammar, a souvenir of my trip through Greek literature. I hadn’t opened it for years.

The clipboard dropped into the box. I stood up. The beagle unclosed one eye. I broke the breech and pulled each shell from the chamber. The empty gun returned to the table. It still pointed at where my head would be the next time I sat in that chair. I stood each yellow shell up on its steel base and set them both next to the trigger. Then I walked downstairs and sat by the wood stove.

Life is struggle. Struggle requires effort. Anyone can reach a point where more life isn’t worth more effort, where we choose not to swim any longer in the open ocean, sinking now rather than sinking later. There isn’t always folly in that. But there was folly here. This wasn’t any kind of swimming decision. It was rage that all my effort, such gifts as I had, would not deliver the result I wanted. The result I wanted was to be remembered. The rage that stopped the light in those two barrels was nothing grander, nothing less selfish, than a refusal to accept I would die. And of course—you see the comedy now—here I was threatening to murder myself because I wasn’t going to live forever.

Hercules waited to see if I came back. After a few minutes, he followed me downstairs. He stretched, looking at the shoes under the coats. He understood shoes. Then he straightened up and looked at the door. I took the invitation. I put on my shoes. And we spent the rest of the day in the woods together.

The next morning, I stood staring at the empty red chair, holding a cup of coffee. Squatting down, I leaned forward, stretched out one arm, and yanked the box out from underneath the gun. Then I took the box downstairs and worked between the two windows that caught the most winter sun. The gun remained pointing at where my head would be if I sat in the chair. Eventually, I put the gun away. But I didn’t sit there again for months.

I worked at a card table between two corner windows. The moment the box slid across this table, I knew why I had stopped making progress. I needed to spend time designing the plot. Actions and dialogues filled my manila folders, but now I needed to step back and think about the structure of the story as a whole. A basic lack of craft knowledge, of professional know-how, had unleashed my homicidal rage. I was like an architect considering suicide because no one taught him how to draw an elevation. Hey asshole, you just learn it! You take the gun out of our mouth and figure it out!

The town where I lived was called Huntington. I supported myself with a small amount of money I inherited, as well as odd jobs. I worked at the gas station in town. I also cleaned stalls at a barn about two miles up the road. I walked to the barn in the winter, because the road wasn’t plowed in that direction. As I made this walk, a few days later, I composed my obituary, or at least the opening lines of my obituary:

A thirty-year-old Huntington man, employed part time as a stable hand . . .

Amusing myself and torturing myself, I repeated these lines often as my thirtieth birthday approached.

The man who owned the gas station was also my nearest neighbor, the father of the family who lived a half mile down the road. People he didn’t like in town he called “a waste of skin.” When he had good luck, he cried, “What a country!” as if the flag and the Constitution were responsible. Bernie hated routines, he couldn’t follow rules, and hardly a day passed when he didn’t argue with a customer. On the window in the door to his office he put a black bumper sticker with white lettering: “What part of NO don’t you understand?” But he enjoyed me. We enjoyed each other. I spent whole afternoons staring at the back of that bumper sticker, sitting next to his wood stove, with my vehicle still parked at the pumps.

He and his wife married in high school. They graduated with an infant. Their daughters were teenagers when Suzy started inviting me to dinner. Their son was eleven. “How’s Suzanne?” she would ask as I pulled out a chair. Her kitchen was bright and warm. “And how’s Hercules?” Then the sound of all the other scraping chairs as the kids came into dinner and Suzy fit the last of the food on the table. Bernie hunted and kept a big vegetable garden. He loved to lean back, survey the food, and declare, “Everything was either grown or shot on this property.” Then he would tell me how he shot the particular deer we were eating. They all told me family stories. I heard about boyfriends, the bus ride to school, and the teachers they all hated. Everyone complained about the long drive into town, especially during the winter.

The stream that ran past our house and then past Bernie and Suzy’s house ran into a river which once flowed through another valley. The road into town used to follow that river. When you followed that road now, it wound along with the river for about a mile and then disappeared into the beginning of a lake. For years, you could still see the double yellow lines going down into the water. The Army Corps of Engineers had built a dam at the far end of this valley and flooded the village and the farms. One night in early February, Bernie and I went ice fishing here. We parked his truck where the yellow lines disappeared and walked out into the center of the frozen lake, above where homes used to be. We drilled holes and stood next to them under a full moon and the high night sky until we couldn’t stand the cold any longer. As we walked back to shore, stepping across fissures in the snow-blown ice, Bernie broke a silence to ask, “So what about you?”

I didn’t understand. We hadn’t been talking about anything at all. “What do you mean?”

“What about you and Suzanne? When are you two going to get married?”

And that question seemed to come from a long, long way away.