Before I was an author I was a storyteller

I suppose if I am going to change the direction of this blog, I should begin by introducing myself again.

Not as Albert Stanley Jackson, the author. You can find the names of my books elsewhere on this website. I would rather introduce you to the person who existed long before any of those books did.

A ten-year-old boy sitting in a creative writing class in Germany.

I had never really written a story before.

I had certainly told plenty of them.

I made up stories for my brothers and sister, or for any friend willing to listen. Most of them began with something I had actually seen, heard or experienced. Then my imagination took over. Apparently, I was convincing enough that I earned something of a reputation for being a fibber.

Maybe I was.

But I think I was also beginning to discover the difference between telling what happened and telling a story.

Putting those stories on paper was different. Paper could be found. And there was someone in my home whom I was terribly afraid of angering. So the stories remained mostly in my head or were shared with whoever happened to be listening.

Then came creative writing class.

Our teacher began showing us that writing didn't have to be a report about something that had actually happened. We could invent people. We could imagine conversations. We could take something ordinary and look at it differently.

We started small, writing little stories only a paragraph or so long.

Then she gave us our first real assignment.

We had an entire week.

This time, we weren't supposed to write just a paragraph. We were to take what she had been teaching us and create a fully realized story.

For the first time, I was going to take one of those stories out of my imagination and put the whole thing on paper.

I chose a park bench.

The park itself wasn't particularly unusual. It was much like parks I would later see in America, but this one was in Germany, and pieces of it have stayed with me all these years.

I remember the pond where I collected my first tadpoles. I remember the weeping willow trees and the way their long branches moved with the wind. And for some reason, I remember the smell of brewed coffee.

I imagined a bench sitting there beside the pond, watching people come and go.

A young girl sat down to read her first romance novel and kept giggling at whatever she discovered on its pages. I had an older sister going through puberty at the time who did exactly that. I had no idea what she found so funny.

Then came a young couple watching their child play.

Later, a quiet middle-aged man in tattered clothes sat down and shared the little bread he had with the ducks.

As evening approached, an elderly couple came to sit together and remember the years behind them.

And then they all went home.

The bench stayed.

That was the first complete story I ever wrote.

I wish I still had those pages.

I would give almost anything to read the exact words that ten-year-old boy put on them. More than fifty years have passed, and somewhere along the way the original disappeared.

But I never forgot the story.

What follows cannot be a word-for-word copy. Some details have been lost to time, and I have reconstructed them as faithfully as I can from what I still remember. I don't want to pretend otherwise.

But the people are the same.

The park is the same.

The bench is the same.

And the ending, the part I remember most, is the same.

This is as close as I can come to giving that ten-year-old boy his first story back.

The Park Bench

The park bench sat beside the pond underneath a weeping willow tree.

It had been there for a long time. It watched the ducks swim across the water and the people walk along the paths. When the wind blew, the long branches of the willow moved back and forth above it. Sometimes they hung so low that they almost touched the ground.

In the morning, the park was quiet. There were not many people yet. Somewhere nearby there was the smell of coffee brewing. The bench liked mornings. It never knew who would come to sit on it or what kind of day it would be.

Before long, a young girl came walking down the path with a book under her arm.

She sat at one end of the bench and opened her book. She had never read a romance novel before and was not sure she was supposed to be reading this one. That made it even more interesting.

After reading for a while, she giggled.

Then she looked around to see if anyone had heard her.

The bench had.

She went back to reading.

A few pages later, she giggled again.

Sometimes she looked up at the pond, but not for very long. Whatever was happening in her book was much more interesting than the ducks.

When she finally reached the place where she had to stop, she closed the book but kept one finger between the pages so she would not lose her place.

She got up and walked away.

The bench wondered if she would come back tomorrow to finish it.

Later, a young couple came to the park with their little child.

The child ran ahead of them toward the pond, and the parents called for him not to get too close to the water. He didn't seem very interested in listening.

The mother and father sat down on the bench while they watched him play.

They talked about ordinary things at first. Then they began talking about their little boy.

"He needs someone to play with," the mother said.

"He has us."

"That's not what I mean."

The father knew what she meant.

They watched their son chasing after a duck that wanted nothing to do with him.

"Do you think we're ready for another one?" he asked.

The mother smiled.

"I think we might be."

They sat closer together after that and watched their little boy play.

Soon it was time to go. The father called to him, and after pretending several times that he hadn't heard, the boy finally came running back.

The family walked away together.

The bench watched them until they disappeared down the path.

By afternoon, the park had become busier.

A middle-aged man came slowly down the path. His clothes were old and tattered, and he carried a small bag with some bread in it.

He sat down on the bench and looked across the pond.

After a while, he tore off a piece of bread and threw it to the ducks.

One duck came first. Then another, and soon several of them had gathered near him.

The man didn't smile.

He just kept tearing off pieces of bread and tossing them into the water.

Every once in a while he would let out a long, heavy sigh.

The ducks didn't seem to mind what his clothes looked like. They didn't seem to care that he never spoke to them. As long as he had another piece of bread to give them, they stayed close.

The man ate some of the bread himself.

Then he gave some more to the ducks.

He sat there for a long time, watching them eat.

When there was no more bread, he brushed the crumbs from his hands and stood up.

The ducks began to swim away.

The man watched them for a moment.

Then he walked away too.

The bench watched him disappear down the path.

It wondered if he would come back another day.

The afternoon slowly became evening.

The shadows from the trees grew longer, and there were fewer people walking through the park.

Then an elderly couple came slowly down the path.

They sat together on the bench.

They didn't say anything at first.

They didn't have to.

After a while the woman looked across the pond.

"Do you remember when we used to bring the children here?"

The man smiled.

"I remember chasing them."

"You never caught them."

"I caught them sometimes."

"Only when they let you."

The woman laughed and rested against him.

They began remembering things.

They remembered when their children were small. They remembered birthdays and holidays. They remembered places they had gone and people they had known. They even remembered arguments, although now neither one seemed to remember what most of them had been about.

Sometimes one would remember something the other had forgotten.

Sometimes they remembered it differently.

They laughed about that too.

The sun was getting lower.

"We should go," the man finally said.

"In a minute."

So they stayed another minute.

Then another.

Finally, the man stood and held out his hand. The woman took it, and he helped her up.

They walked away slowly, still talking about things that had happened many years before.

The bench watched them go.

Soon the park became quiet again.

The ducks settled near the pond. The wind moved through the long branches of the willow tree, and the air began to grow colder.

No one else came.

The places where people had been sitting were no longer warm.

The bench was alone again.

But it had been a good day.

A girl had discovered her first romance story. A young mother and father had wondered if their family should grow. A quiet man had shared what little bread he had with the ducks. And two people who had spent most of their lives together had sat close and remembered when they were young.

The bench had shared a little time with all of them.

Now it was dark.

Tomorrow the sun would come up again. People would return to the park. Someone would sit beneath the willow tree.

Maybe it would be someone the bench already knew.

Maybe it would be someone new.

And maybe they would have a story to tell.

And maybe they wouldn't.

The bench didn't mind.

It looked forward to tomorrow.

The Teacher Who Saw a Storyteller

My teacher saw something in that story that I didn't.

Until then, I had been the kid who made things up. The fibber. Give me something that really happened and, before long, I could turn it into something else entirely.

She gave that a different name.

She called me a storyteller.

She took me under her wing after reading The Park Bench. She encouraged me to keep using my imagination and told me never to stop writing.

She was also honest with me.

She told me that I would probably never make a living as a writer.

My mother had told me much the same thing, although her message was different. Don't waste your time writing or drawing, she would tell me. You can't make a living doing that.

Two people told me essentially the same thing.

One gave me a reason to stop.

The other gave me a reason to continue.

I continued.

Writing became the place I could go when I needed to get away from whatever was happening around me.

When my own life was difficult, I could write about someone living in a mansion with more money than he could ever spend. But even then, I would usually give him something money couldn't fix. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe the people around him didn't really love him. Maybe all that wealth hadn't bought him happiness after all.

Somehow, that made my own circumstances a little easier to bear.

When things were going well for me, I often did the opposite. I wrote about people struggling with broken lives, loss and heartbreak. Maybe it reminded me that happiness could disappear if you weren't careful with it.

And sometimes I wrote simply because something caught my attention.

A person.

A conversation.

A dream.

A place.

A park bench.

I never stopped.

But there was one thing I didn't do.

I didn't let anyone read much of it.

Fear took care of that.

Fear of rejection. Fear that I wasn't good enough. Fear that nobody would care about the people and places that seemed so real inside my head. And perhaps more than anything else, fear that someone would laugh at something that mattered deeply to me.

So I kept writing and kept most of it to myself.

I didn't publish my first novel until I was sixty years old.

There are things about that decision I wish I could change. I wish I had taken the chance earlier. I wish I hadn't allowed fear so many years to make that decision for me.

But I can't go back and give that younger writer courage he didn't have.

What I can do is talk to the writer who might be reading this now.

Where We Go From Here

And that is where I would like this blog to go.

I am not going to tell you how to become a bestselling author. I wouldn't know how.

I'm not going to promise that if you follow ten simple steps, find the right editor, build the perfect website, master social media and spend enough money promoting your book, readers will suddenly discover you.

My own experience has taught me that it doesn't work that way.

What I can do is share what I've learned from more than fifty years of putting stories together and the much shorter time I've spent trying to put those stories into the hands of readers.

We'll talk about where stories come from and the strange places characters sometimes come from.

We'll talk about first drafts that refuse to cooperate.

We'll talk about fear and rejection.

We'll talk about self-publishing, including some of the mistakes I've made and pitfalls I wish someone had warned me about before I encountered them myself.

We'll talk about what happens when you put everything you have into a book and the world doesn't immediately notice.

And we'll talk about something I think writers sometimes forget once words like sales, reviews, algorithms, followers and marketing enter the conversation.

The story.

Because long before I knew anything about publishing, I knew what it felt like to wonder about the people around me.

That began with a park bench.

More than fifty years later, I'm still doing it.

I don't know whether anything I write here will help you sell a book. I hope sometimes it might help you avoid a mistake I've already made.

But more than anything, if there is a story inside you that you are afraid to write, I hope you'll write it anyway.

It doesn't have to make you famous.

It doesn't even have to make you money.

And maybe someday you'll share it with the world.

And maybe you won't.

That's okay too.

There will always be another person, another place, another ordinary moment you hadn't noticed before.

Another story.

As for me, I'm still sitting beneath that weeping willow, wondering who might come along tomorrow and what story they might have to tell.

And maybe they won't have one at all.

I don't mind.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow.