the Introduction from
'The Complete Short
 Works of Daniel Pagoda

I visited Professor Mark’s office later that day with a bag of tricks. She let me in, and before she had a chance to wring her hands and ask me how things were in the literary world, I removed two items from the bag. The first was a beaten-down spiral notebook, worn from years of being shipped around in book bags and boxes. Crease lines trickled across the faded green cover, like varicose veins poking through an old man’s skin. The other item was a stack of crisp pages. It was my only copy of “Swindled.”

I explained to her what had happened over the course of the semester, including the book and the conversation with Mike and the story and the joke and the scholarship and “The Face” and the call from the university and how everything under the sun was going all to Hell.

I gasped and slowed down, calming myself. After some momentary breathing, I told her I was going to refuse the school’s scholarship and tell the other university I no longer claimed any credit for “Swindled.”
For some reason, she hadn’t been able to follow my garroted babbling. She looked bewildered, like a child who couldn’t understand why she was being scolded.

I pushed the notebook across her desk. Despite the scrapes of time, the word Novelist, written by a young man of twelve in black, non-fading felt-tip marker, was clearly visible on the cover.

I told her a story about green slime aliens and magic wands and a young man who once won a writing contest. While feeling invincible, he decided the next logical step was to begin a novel. She opened the notebook and paged through the volume’s handwritten storytelling, which tracked along until page 42, where came to an abrupt halt.

We lifted the notebook and skipped to the end, where a series of drawings and diagrams dwelled. The diagrams, I clarified, were author’s blueprints for a screenplay, one that he hoped one day to adapt from his novel at the request of some imploring movie studio. The accompanying sketches were conceptual designs of his characters, labeled with key costume attributes. The first drawings were slipshod, but as we flipped along, each sketch surpassed the previous in quality. These were accomplished drawings, as if more time and detail had been implanted with every page.

“The day he finished the forty-second page,” I told her, “The author lost track of the story and forgot what came next, so he reread the whole thing. Do you know what he found out?”

She didn’t know.

“He hated it. He read it all back to himself a few times, but he couldn’t finish it. The story had lost all meaning to him.”

This author dejectedly paged back and forth, I told her, wanting to know where his intimacy for the tale had vanished, and then stumbled upon the drawings. The most recent ones he had been working on were labeled as action figure and playset designs, based on the assured success of the movie.

He suddenly understood why he didn’t love his story anymore. He wasn’t putting time into it to perfect his craft, or because he believed the story was worth being told. He knew what was really driving him further toward the end. And without meaning or pride in his work, the story was left unfinished. His resulting personal disgust killed any impulses to write for almost a decade.

“You need to take this,” I said, pushing “Swindled” across her desk. “You need to take it and never give it back. I’m afraid this author won’t write for another decade if you don’t.”