Feeding Stray Cats

That was when everything turned around for me. Of course, I didn’t know it when I first started. I had an inkling of hope that night, sure… but beyond that? No, I couldn’t have guessed that the familiar door upon which I’d been knocking for the last fifteen years would finally open for me. I guess the truth is that I’d long ago stopped believing it would ever open, or that it even could. But it did.

Earlier that day, I stumbled upon an online advertisement for a writing contest. At first, I thought the idea was genuinely bizarre. It seemed so random and weird. They wanted short stories that mentioned the words “green light.” This was inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby," which I’ve read twice in my life. I vaguely recalled the scene in question. Gatsby watches the green light on Daisy’s dock, and the reader is meant to infer that this light somehow symbolizes his love for her. Essays have been written about what that light meant or didn’t mean. Musicians have even composed songs about that green light. And now some online entity that promotes writing contests was asking for stories that mentioned those words, even if the themes therein didn’t necessarily refer to Fitzgerald’s work. The grand prize? Five thousand dollars.

My initial response was to click the webpage away. But then something stayed my hand. As a man who has been trying to launch a writing career for years, and who has already published a few books, I thought that winning such a contest would be a great step forward for me. The money would be nice, sure. But the idea of actually achieving something worthwhile with my written words would perhaps give validation to the thousands of hours of relentless toil I have dedicated to this fledgling career. That’s when I started feeling the inkling of hope of which I spoke earlier.

So I decided to do it. The limit was two thousand words. That’s nothing for me. I regularly churn out three thousand words of prose every day. But what should the story be about? I kept trying to picture some scenario that involved a confrontation between two drivers at a stoplight. But then I ruled that out. It was too predictable. I briefly toyed with the idea of doing some sort of supernatural horror thing, complete with some Spielbergian green light. But no, that’s just not me. I prefer to write about real life.

Not entirely sure about how best to proceed, I got up from my desk and left my study altogether. Pacing in the living room now, I ran my fingers through my hair and plumbed my brain for some kind of great idea. I knew that if I wanted to win the contest, the writing would have to be exemplary. And special in some way. That meant it would have to somehow stand apart from everything the other contestants were submitting. But what exactly were they submitting? I couldn’t know.

Then I started tormenting myself with an obsessive need to invent something with strong and crafty literary themes. It would have to involve some sort of object that could symbolize something else. Like a blackbird that represents my fear of failure, or a ticking clock that proxies for the sense of urgency I feel in developing my career. Or a green light that means something profound and interesting and clever. The best books ever written are teeming with that kind of bullshit. And the deeper you veil your theme, the more they hail you as a genius. (Although, in all honesty, I sometimes suspect that it’s only afterward, when readers say, “Oh, was your use of the beached whale a metaphor for the current political climate?” that the author, without ever having intended this at all, replies, “Why yes, how intuitive of you.”)

At that exact moment, while I was pacing and mumbling about all this stuff, my phone buzzed. I picked it up and saw that I had a new email message. Upon reading it, I learned that yet another literary agent had rejected my latest manuscript, which I’d sent out a few months prior. The reply contained the standard response: a lot of mumbo jumbo about how my story has strong merits but it’s just not a good fit and possibly some other agent might feel differently... blah blah blah. I tossed my phone on the couch and grunted with displeasure, recalling, not for the first time, that trying to be a writer in the Netflix age is like trying to thread a damn buffalo through the eye of a needle. Indeed, it’s a hell of a lot easier and far less painful to just saw your own foot off than to make it in this business.

I was still thinking about all that when my wife walked in. She’d been out in the yard, working in the garden. “What are you up to?” she asked, noticing my incessant pacing.

“Oh, I’m just trying to think of a good story,” I said. “About a green light.”

“Why?”

“It’s for a writing contest. I’m gonna try to win.”

“Why a green light?”

“Because it’s what they asked for.”

She went into the bathroom to wash her hands, then came back into the living room. “Green lights mean go,” she stated.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But for a story to ‘go’ anywhere, I have to have an idea of where that place is. The place I want it to go.”

She thought about this for a moment, then said, “I know you. You can’t write anything that doesn’t start and stop with whatever you’re feeling in the moment. That’s the only place you can go. So what are you feeling?”

I blurted out the first word that came to mind: “Frustrated.”

“With what?”

“My career. My writing. Myself.”

“Write about that,” she said, walking into the bedroom.

Then, out of that conversation, a possibility entered my brain. What if I wrote a story about writing a story? What if, instead of telling some run-of-the-mill made-up story about a green light, I told the far more interesting and relatable story of trying to write about a green light for the purpose of winning a contest? Maybe that was a tale worth telling. Maybe other writers could relate to that. Maybe injecting the truth about the writing business into the story would endear my readers enough to give my meager offering an actual shot at winning.

The more I thought about this, the more confident I felt that I was on to something. Because, really, when you think about it, what kind of people enter writing contests? It’s not like Stephen King is going to do it. Or Margaret Atwood. Or Salman Rushdie. They don’t need to. No, the only people who enter writing contests are others like me, people who love writing and live for it, people who could maybe use five thousand dollars, people whose careers need the jolt of a win. Surely such people would understand the grueling, demanding, and seldom rewarding uphill hike that is the writing industry. Ergo, if I told the story of writing something for a contest and included all the frustration and self-doubt and uncertainty that goes along with such an endeavor, perhaps that alone would be enough to make my offering stand out.

But then I remembered that my writing style isn’t exactly what professionals look for. I end sentences with prepositions and start them with conjunctions. I have my own beliefs about how commas should be used. I much prefer the passive voice over the more popular and desired active voice. And I split infinitives like Einstein split the atom. What’s more, I often think the holy grail of grammar, Strunk and White’s "The Elements of Style," is hopelessly outdated and not near the paragon of perfection it’s hailed to be. So a decision had to be made. Would I clean up my style to make it more presentable, or would I just be myself and write the way I always do? Ever the deviant, I opted for the latter.

By now the sun had gone down and a warm, muggy night was settling in around my little house in the city. I sat back down at my desk, briefly eyed the black sky through my window, and then opened up Microsoft Word. I firmly believe the best way to write is to turn off your brain and begin typing. In fact, I’m convinced that writing is something that happens not in the mind but in the fingers. Others might think this is crazy. But I defer to Hemingway, who said writing is as simple as bleeding.

And so, with my mind turned off and my fingers ready to fly across the keyboard and my soul ready to bleed… I began typing. Before long, I had a hundred words. Then two hundred. Then a thousand. Barely any time had passed, and I was already talking about how many words I had typed, already wondering how to close the story.

At that point, I stopped typing and again got up from my desk. I went out onto the back porch and listened to the stillness of the night. One of the stray cats we feed was loitering around our gate, sniffing something in the grass. He ran off once he noticed me, the little shit. He eats the food we put out, but he never lets us pet him. That’s a cat for you; all take and no give.

Then, still mindful of bullshit literary themes and whatnot, I began to wonder if my writing career was not unlike a stray cat. All take and no give. It feeds on whatever I provide, the better for survival in a harsh world, but it never actually offers me anything in return. It’s always just hanging around on the peripheral, lurking within sight but not within reach. I keep feeding it because I hope someday it will be good to me and let me wrap my arms around it. But somewhere deep down inside I know that it will most likely just go on being a little shit. And just like a cat, its allure is so powerful to me that I just don’t possess the ability to walk away and forget about it. I’ll keep putting food out. I’ll keep watching as it nibbles. And I’ll keep hoping that someday I’ll get to pet it.

With this in mind, I went back inside and wrapped up the story. It wasn’t quite two thousand words, but I felt I had said enough. No sooner had I finished than I remembered that the submission was supposed to be fiction. What I’d written wasn’t exactly fiction. It was more like an essay or an autobiography. This posed a problem. So then I had to go back and alter the details just enough so that what I had here was a fabricated parallel of the real events. I even added a section about a conversation with my wife that never actually happened. Hell, we don’t even have a garden. But now the story was closer to two thousand words… and could loosely qualify as fiction.

Over the next few days my wife and I proofed the story and edited it, getting it ready for submission. I don’t know if it will win or not. But as I said at the beginning, the night I wrote it was the night things turned around for me. Not because I won. It’s still too early to know if I won. No, things turned around for me because that was the night that I realized that even if I never get to pet them, feeding stray cats is the right thing to do… because it’s who I am. And the closed door upon which I’d been knocking for so long? Self-acceptance, plain and simple. Now it was open.