On Wanting to Write

And on not stopping

This image is a leftover from the DALL-E newsletter, because the thought of digging up a stock image of a stack of books, or blank paper with a tastefully-placed fountain pen, is repellent to me. This image features a writer, so it’s on-theme.

As a child, like many (most?) children do, I loved making up stories and writing them down. I wrote unprompted and with great pleasure. My first opus was an illustrated booklet, written at age six or seven, titled The Unicorn and the Hunter, which was much cooed-over by my teachers. My enthusiasm didn’t diminish with age. Creative writing class was always my favorite part of school, and I produced new stories at a regular clip.

Self-consciousness crept in, as it always does. There are dozens of books that promise to help you return to childhood states of uncritical creativity, but if you believe, as I do, that cultivating discernment and technique according to one’s values and principles is essential to art, these are of limited usefulness. Still, I retained an essential confidence in my writing, bolstered by years of praise from teachers. Essay-format exams were even a source of glee for me, because I knew I could nail them and nail them exactly. The feeling of effortlessness and mastery I felt sitting in a quiet exam room and penning, from start to finish, an analysis of a poem or a novel, knowing it was good — that’s a kind of joy it’s been difficult to recapture.

Then it was time to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I saw myself as a pragmatic, private, and risk-averse person, which made three strikes against writing. Also, I lusted for money (an enduring character flaw I may write about one day).

But, most seriously, I was developing a worldview that explicitly rejected any idea of building my life around art. And not just writing: it also precluded my becoming a musician, which was certainly for the best (more on that here). I knew that very few people successfully made lives for themselves as artists, and that struggling without recognition was the norm. My fate would likely be no different. To think otherwise would be to think that I was different, that I had something that thousands of other kids whose teachers told them they were “good writers” didn’t have.

Maturity, I believed then, was about relinquishing any lingering belief in one’s own specialness. I read the explicitly discouraging Charles Bukowski poem “so you want to write poetry”, which admonishes aspiring writers that “the libraries of the world have / yawned themselves to / sleep / over your kind,” and advises that writing that does not come urgently and unbidden is an exercise in ego-satisfaction and little else. “unless being still would / drive you to madness or / suicide or murder, / don't do it”, he wrote. Well, I had decided not to be a writer, and was not losing my mind or doing violence to anyone. Therefore, his “don’t do it” warning, as I saw it, was addressed pointedly at me.

But then I quietly kept writing, and sometimes showing it to people, primarily because I needed somewhere for my thoughts to go. I wrote scenes of novels. I wrote short stories. I sent character dialog to a man who created “conversation pack“ mods for the video game Baldur’s Gate II (he rejected all of them). I wrote two hundred and fifty entries in an online diary, on a non-livejournal website obscure enough for me to be certain no one I knew would find it. I wrote margin notes in my books. I did NaNoWriMo. And in that halcyon post-hotmail and pre-Facebook age, I wrote long emails — I only wish I had saved them.

In my mid-twenties I joined a writing critique group. The first story I brought them to workshop was autobiographical, about a girl-crush I’d nursed during the year I lived in New York City. The group’s response was encouraging, but with some healthy lashings of criticism. One man told me that the NYC setting was superficial and lacking in sensual details. New York smells, he said emphatically. I still hear his voice in my head whenever I read fiction set there. But one comment in particular, from a woman with a European accent I couldn’t place, was a jolt: “hundreds of stories just like this are published each month in second and third-rate literary journals,” she said.

At first I took it as something of a compliment, even though I knew it wasn’t: she was saying my work was of publishable quality! But it also confirmed what I was already inclined to believe: that there were hundreds of middle-class white girls just like me who’d once been told they were good writers, composing their mediocre girl-crush New York stories and sending them out, sometimes getting published, but generally adding nothing of interest to the world. She clarified to me later that she hadn’t meant to discourage me, but her words fit too neatly with the reasons I’d already given myself not to write.

After all, when I opened literary journals, how often did I read drab, colorless stories that seemed like the author had nothing in particular to express except the desire to appear in a literary journal? How often did I see novels about young women just like me: in boring jobs, full of malaise and guilt and amorphous yearnings, no literary subject other than millennial alienation? “It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day,” writes Richard Ford in The Sportswriter. I wrote more stories for the group, but I stopped sending things out for publication. To want to be published seemed almost immoral.

Sometimes, the dream would reassert itself. I’d meet people who published essays or books and think to myself: they’re not superhuman, they’re not very different from me, there’s no reason I couldn’t do what they do. Then I’d start fantasizing about saving up money and living in a cheap apartment in Montreal and doing nothing but writing. But then I’d check myself: if I’m not writing anything brilliant now, what makes me think I’d write brilliant things in Montreal?

But I kept writing, because I still needed somewhere to put my thoughts. I wrote a blog about opera, first for my own pleasure and then professionally. Then I was co-running Dames Making Games and started to write for utility. I wrote a widely-read piece about learning to code, which was written with good intentions but which I now feel somewhat ambivalent about.

When I moved to Seattle I started a newsletter out of loneliness, private and distributed only to friends. It became problematic: boyfriends felt uneasy about it, not because I wrote about them but because I didn’t. It felt easier to stop writing the newsletter than to placate them, so I stopped. And I still couldn’t shake the feeling that wanting to write and be read was a little bit embarrassing at best and narcissistic at worst. Not that I had a problem with anyone else writing — it’s the nature of these anxieties that they apply only to oneself, that you believe you alone should feel bad.

That newsletter was the ancestor to this one, which will be two years old later this year and which I sit down to write on Sunday evenings after dinner. I finally feel comfortable with it being findable by the public. And I’ve been attempting fiction again.

I have one and a half novels (unpublishable) on my computer written over the last three years, and short stories I’ve been sending out. The stories always come back with polite rejections, which is no surprise; I take some comfort that this year’s work is at least better than last year’s. And I feel as though I’m making an intellectual transition from being hideously insecure about my fiction, wondering if it’s hitting the notes it needs to hit (Helen DeWitt has a great paragraph in her short story “Remember Me”, describing a writer’s despair at producing characters who are given names and hair colors and then “[go] plausibly about their business like impostors in a witness protection program”) and instead thinking more about what’s interesting and vivid to me, what kind of writing would best communicate what I find exciting and important in the world.

I also came to realize early last year that it’s pointless to think about whether or not I “should” be writing, whether or not my writing is good or my voice is unique or valuable and so on. The fact is that I have never stopped writing and, barring catastrophe, likely never will. This is a freeing thought: when I feel morose about the quality or prospects of my work, I think: well, what am I going to do, stop writing? Even if I stopped I know I would only start again. Perhaps I meet Bukowski’s requirements after all.