​How Ken Learned to Write: How I Learned to Write

By
Ken Kakareka

I don’t know. But I will by the end of this piece. Only writers know: there are things you don’t know you know until they poof out of thin air and flop like fish on the page in front of you. It’s the magic of setting pen to paper, finger tips to keys, or however you write. It’s how I plan to learn the mystique behind the title of this piece.


It began with reading. Reading provides great clarity for both aspiring and seasoned writers. If you’re like me, you need to visualize it before you can do it. And I would argue that most writers are voracious consumers of the written word before they dip their quills in ink.


I started to become infatuated with travel writers during high school. Jack London and Jack Kerouac in particular. There’s something about the name Jack for me. It could be why I argue with my wife about naming our first boy Jack. At least she’s privy to the idea of Jaqueline for a girl. I think the name carries great adventure.


I scoured a thick hardback of Jack London’s greatest short stories with a rugged cover photo of him on a boat out at sea. I traversed wildly through Jack Kerouac’s entire catalogue but Tristessa was my favorite. The romanticism these guys poured into their work infatuated me. They were a large part of the reason why I moved to South Korea after college – a boy from small town Pennsylvania who’d only ever been to Mexico before that – probably because of Tristessa. These writers allowed me to feel the freedom that could be expounded on the page – boundless but always in search of purpose.


The awareness of form didn’t grip me until college when I read writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Flannery O’Connor. But it was Hemingway who made me see how words fit together. I was floored after a semester of ravaging his work, thinking: this is what I want to do with my life.


After college, during the few months before I left for Korea, I became obsessed with Charles Bukowski. His grit, honesty, and lack of formality all fused into a cocktail called Style. He awakened me to the notion that voice is just as important as any other element in writing.

I had a thorough education from several different writers on content, form, and style by the time I was 21. But it was time for me to pop my literary cherry – I needed to write.


One reason that made me think I might’ve had a knack for it was because I always excelled naturally in English classes. No curriculum from any other subject absorbed into my brain as easily. Most of my grades in other subjects hovered on the fringe of C’s and B’s but English was always juxtaposed by an A. They say to gravitate towards what comes naturally and what you’re good at, and it didn’t hurt that I liked English classes, so I majored in Literature with a concentration in writing at college. But I think I learned more from reading other writers than I did from my professors about the art of writing itself. It wasn’t until after college when I had moved to South Korea to teach English as a second language that I hunkered down and put pen to paper. I started by writing vignettes and journal entries if you could call them that. Pieces that barely had form or could be classified as any respectable genre. It was all just pouring out of me the way it does a horny, pent-up individual raring to scribble – curious of his own writerly attributes.


Most mornings in Korea, I holed up in coffee shops to write. When I look back at those notebooks, the vignettes and journal entries could never be misconstrued as poetry or anything else decipherable. It was bad, but necessary. I was like a kid with training wheels trying to figure out how to do it on my own, and those early yrs. really helped me find a groove.


When I left Korea and moved home to Pennsylvania, I was 25 and my ambition blossomed into an undeniable tumor. I ached to write something big, like a novel. It was 2013; typewriters were not a thing then. But I had one that my mom gifted me for Christmas one yr., so I made it my thing. I seized it from the basement, dusted it off, and went to work. My first lengthy, literary adventure. Every day, when I came home from work, the typewriter was waiting for me on a farm table in the kitchen. So was our family dog Mylo on the tiles beneath the table; he knew that I was about to embark on a 2–3-hour key-punching brawl so he lay in a sprawl and let the click clack be his late-afternoon hum.


My first novel was completed in 3 months at 200 pages long. It was a story about a relationship between a young American man and a Korean woman much older than him, loosely based off my own experiences in Korea. The book was published with Black Rose Writing – a very new Indie Press at the time. Ecstasy riddled my soul; it pumped me with confidence that sent me on a literary rampage over the next several yrs. I went back to Korea for a short stint but didn’t write a lick. It wasn’t until I moved to California at the age of 26 that I got serious about writing.


When I moved to California, I worked evenings, so I continued writing mornings. But Korean culture was different. Despite their work-crazed culture, most coffee shops didn’t open until 10 or 11 a.m. I think it was because the culture thrived at night. It’s why the title of my first novel was called Late to Bed, Late to Rise. In California, I got up every morning at 7 a.m. and was in a coffee shop writing by 8. I focused on short stories during that period; all the writers whom I read in college made me fall in love with the form, and I always wanted to be good at it myself. It was also during that time that I started submitting my work to literary journals and magazines. All of my short stories got rejected until an acceptance revisited me in 2018. It took 5 yrs. from the publication of my novel to have another publication. Writers, be patient. If any writer tells you they don’t care about getting published, they’re lying. Or they’re not serious about writing.

Rialto Cafe - Restaurant in Downtown Fullerton
(where I like to write)

Eventually, I ached to write something long-form again, so I wrote a novella in the third person. It was a little out of my comfort zone because I was used to writing in the first person. I was proud of the work, but ultimately, I felt like it wasn’t my story to tell. So I kept it shelved and unpublished. Then I wrote a collection of essays and another novella after that – both unpublished as well. I didn’t send them out to publishers very extensively; what was more important to me during that time was experimentation. One thing that has remained consistent in my writing has been the inconsistency of genre. I’m always carving new terrain, trying to create and learn. I think that’s imperative for a writer, especially if you want to be good. I even tried writing a movie script with a friend which didn’t pan out because of conflicting schedules – not because of our ineptitude.
 
More of my short stories got published over the next few yrs., and then a new genre pummeled me in the face for neglecting it for so long. Poetry. I never liked it, never understood it. The word itself seemed grotesque because of the ubiquitous poems taught in school. I liked Bukowski’s poetry, if you could even call it that. Elusiveness enthralled me. Something pulled me to try my hand at writing poetry, and it’s been a mad joy ever since. My poetic output has been prolific, having had a bunch of stuff published over the yrs. I love how the writing process for poetry begins as a burst and is later refined. Yet still wild in all its unhinged form. I think poetry is the toughest genre to define. There’s so much freedom when writing it, and if you feel free writing anything, you’re probably headed in the right direction.
 
So really how I learned to write is just like anything else – exploration, experience, and practice. The learning never stops. I wrote a poem called “Education” that’s published in Gargoyle Magazine #74 and the idea of the poem is that education is multi-faceted. You’re never too young or too old to learn. I hope that I never feel like I’ve mastered the craft of writing. I don’t think I will. That would be an insult to all the legends who taught me how to write. I wouldn’t want to make them turn in their graves. I’m too grateful for their help in finding the greatest thing you can find in this life besides love – purpose.

Submitted by Guest Author
Ken Kakareka

Ken Kakareka lives in Fullerton, California with his lovely wife. He is the author of Late to Bed, Late to Rise (Black Rose Writing, 2013). Ken's words have appeared or are on their way in a number of rags including Gargoyle Magazine, The Gorko Gazette, The Beatnik Cowboy and so on. A list of selected publications can be found at kenkakareka.com.