On the bottom shelf, under a pile of empty shopping bags in my garage, there's a big beaten-up cardboard box. On its side, in faded marker, is scrawled “writing stuff.”

I'm working on a video about handwriting, and so I decided to crack open that old box and look inside for some examples of what my handwriting looked like when I was a much younger man. Inside are notebook after notebook full of stories and opening chapters and essays and journals that I wrote in the decade or so after I graduated from college.

I’d practically forgotten about all those many, many pages that I filled by hand with a ballpoint, sitting in the kitchen early in the morning before heading to the office, or late at night, a glass of dewars and water by my elbow, while my roommates boisterously watched the Yankees on TV.

I wanted to be Henry Miller or Norman Mailer or P.G. Woodhouse or John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway or Robert Benchley or Dylan Thomas. Maybe that was part of the problem—too many influences, too many different visions of what made a "real" writer.

It represents so much work, and I strained to remember what exactly I was thinking with all that effort and where I hoped it would lead.

Forty years ago, getting your writing out of a notebook and into somebody else's hands was a big undertaking. No blogs, no newsletters—just the stoutly gated world of agents and publishers.

Each year, I would buy a copy of the latest Writers' Market, thick as a phone book, that listed the requirements and POBoxes of every publisher in America. Periodically, I would mail off one of my articles or stories with an accompanying self-addressed stamped envelope, and weeks later, it would boomerang back to me with a form letter suggesting I try again in the future.

One winter, I signed up for a fiction writing class at the New School, and each week I would turn in a new short story. Once or twice, the teacher read one of my pieces to the class, and there would be some meandering discussion, and then the story would return to me with annotations in red pen, which I read and usually dismissed.

I wanted it to be easier. It's not that I was lazy, I never have been, but I just couldn't seem to wrestle with the process of revision. Basically, I was arrogant and impatient and entitled. I liked making up stories and flowing them onto paper but I didn’t want to spend time fixing them according to someone else’s opinion, some geezer I didn’t know or trust or respect particularly. My genius should have been recognized, but instead, I was doomed to write print ads for the Bowery Savings Bank.

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I sat on my garage floor and re-read quite a few of those stories and found them, to my surprise, genuinely good. The voice was engaging, the situations suspenseful, the characters eccentric but oddly likable.

In fact, a lot of them seemed like they had been written by somebody else, someone much more accomplished than I ever remembered being. Some of them certainly seemed like they could be in a magazine. And they absolutely could have been on a blog where ten people or ten thousand people might have read them and not thrown up.

What surprised me about this big box was just how much writing I had done in the hopes, I guess, of becoming a writer. I am a writer, of course. I've been an advertising writer and a book writer and an essay writer all along. But I never achieved that status as a writer that I thought might be within reach back when I was in my twenties. I never published literary fiction or articles in the magazines that I admired. As far as being a writer in the world, I just didn't exist. Sure, eventually, I did publish books and so forth, but I don't think anything that I had achieved was what I had imagined I would achieve.

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When I sit down today to write this essay, I have the same tingly pleasure I had sitting at my thrift store dining table in my Lower East Side walk-up. But I also have a little bittersweet melancholy, thinking about that version of me, that young guy making all this stuff that no one ever saw.

I have thought about going back to reconsider those stories and maybe polish them up, put them up on a website somewhere, and finally give them their due, but it always felt a tad ghoulish, this attempt at reanimation. And I think the author would be somewhat mortified by that, by the response of anonymous strangers who weren’t even born when he poured those words onto the page, unrevised, unpolished.

That cubic yard of yellowing paper tells a different story than I expected. I used to think these manuscripts represented failure - all that effort, all those words, and no literary fame to show for it. But sitting here on my garage floor, I realize they weren't a failed attempt at becoming a "real writer." They were me becoming exactly the writer I needed to be.

Those late nights with a notebook and pen, those earnest attempts at greatness - they weren't just practice for some future literary career. They were the foundation of everything I've done since: the advertising campaigns that paid the bills, the books that found their readers, the essays that connected with people in ways I never imagined when I was dreaming of being the next Hemingway.

My younger self might be disappointed that he never became that turtle-necked, pipe-smoking author he imagined. But I'm not. He poured his heart onto those pages, and that creative energy didn't disappear - it just found different channels. Through making a living, through parenting, through teaching, through connecting with readers in ways he never imagined possible.

Turns out that's what a real writer is: not someone who matches some romantic ideal, but someone who keeps putting words on the page, year after year, letting them flow wherever they need to go.

Your pal,

Danny