Beginning with 'THE END': The Birth of a Manuscript

"THE END," my son Diego said, and I typed the words, thus finishing his first official manuscript, a short story entitled ALIEN!!!!!!!!!!!  Without getting into too much detail, it's something he wrote for his Language Arts class at Ridgeview Middle School, and it tells the tale of a man named Brian who encounters an alien, Dexter.  It is a cautionary story about what happens when one takes something that belongs to someone else without asking.  I had agreed to be his "scribe," and to type as he told it.  

The story is maybe 500 words in length or so -- about a page and a half long.  The length is irrelevant, however, as is the subject matter, really.  What struck me most in this experience was that moment of completion.  It took a while to get there, yes, as I had to remind Diego at times to slow down and let the story unravel.  He couldn't wait for the "then-the-alien-appeared" moment, and I had to convince him to set the stage -- to describe the place, and put the reader there, so that when it came, that point in the story would be even more powerful.  He bore with me and added the odd detail here and there, and I think he got it when I hit him with my old writing teacher mantra:  "Show, don't tell."

"Can I staple it together?" Diego asked excitedly, as the three pages, including the cover, above, came chugging out of the bowels of our printer.  

"Go for it," I said.

His eyes appeared brighter than I'd seen them in a while, and he had that half smile that told me he was happy but didn't want to let on.  And then it hit me.  I knew what he was experiencing, because I've been there myself.  In the old days, it happened after you yanked that final page out of the typewriter, with a winsome shriek of the roller, and you placed it underneath all those other pages you'd written, with the cover page on top, your byline nicely centered underneath the capitalized title.  You banged that stapler, or clipped that paper clip, or punched those three holes, or however you bound your finished product.  

And then you held it lightly on your fingertips, and you felt the heft of your work.  

I witnessed that moment when my 11 year-old son felt that wondrous feeling for the very first time, and said to me quickly, as though almost hoping I'd miss it, "That was fun."  Of course I have to tell myself to calm down and not make too much of this.  This doesn't necessarily mean he'll become a writer like his old man and his grandparents.  

But who knows?  Maybe it does.  Maybe someday someone will be interviewing him for the New Yorker or the Paris Review and they'll ask him about when he first knew he wanted to be a writer.  And maybe he'll think about it for a moment and then he'll say, "You know, it may have been the moment I held that first completed story in my hands, shortly after writing the words, 'THE END.'"