It was proposed in my writers group that we begin some fun
extracurricular activities to help motivate our work. The question was asked, “Why do you write?” It took me aback momentarily. What a silly question, I thought, but was
stimulated into deep contemplation. The
short answer is that I write because I must. There is an undeniable yearning inside me to tell stories and so I do. Of course, it was not quite so easy to fully
embrace my calling.
My journey to this place where I, after all of these laboring
years, finally feel comfortable calling myself a writer and desiring to make
money solely by creating works of fiction has been tremendously long, winding,
and often confusing. Kind of like the
previous sentence.
My fondest early childhood memories include reading in bed with
my mother. I lay swallowed up under the
adult sized blankets with a stack of Dr. Seuss books as my mom embraced an
Agatha Christie mystery. Those fond
memories also include my father telling me absurdist bedtime stories where the
characters were creatures that did nothing except be exceptionally silly. Better yet, late Sunday mornings when I was
(finally!) allowed to wake my dad up, I would crawl into bed with him while he
spun tales of animals who would never coexist on earth having an
adventure. Imagine a giraffe and a
penguin going to the candy store together—those were the best of times.
I will provide some context by saying that he was and still is a
blue-collar warehouse worker and my mother a housewife. I didn’t grow up in a house of artists or
writers or film makers but I was reared in an environment where
imagination was celebrated and encouraged.
My language arts skills were nurtured further in public schools
where I was years ahead of my peers in reading and writing. I even had the honor of reading a copy of The
Tortoise and the Hare on stage at my kindergarten graduation. In third grade, I had a poem about a snowman
submitted by my teacher and printed in the local newspaper (the clipping still
lives between the thin plastic sheet and sticky back of a photo album in my
parents’ house). In later years, we
were assigned to write stories that would be shared with the younger grades. These works of fiction were even illustrated
by us, laminated, and spiral bound.
In fifth grade, I wrote about two neighboring dandelions that
fall in love and in sixth grade about a skateboarding ten-year-old boy who
plummets down a sewer and ends up in the land of the Leprechauns where he is
charged by the Leprechaun King to find his lost daughter. (Steal these ideas if you like—Just remember
they were written by a ten and eleven year old girl, you horrible person, you.)
In eighth grade I wrote an autobiography as a final project for
English class. In the section where we
project what our future will be like I wrote that I wanted to be an English
teacher or a writer.
Then came high school. Oh that glorious period of endless mischief, reckless abandon, and
insane freedoms. Those four years
transformed me. By graduation I had my
heart and mind set on becoming a criminal profiler just like Clarice Starling
in Silence of the Lambs (which I read numerous times the summer between
senior year of high school and freshman year of college). After one semester of criminal justice, I
reckoned that lifelong exposure to death and the criminal psyche would be too
damaging to my spirit and so fell back upon my original passion, stories.
I changed my major to English and my minor to Creative Writing
since it was not offered as a major.
This plan also flopped. I didn’t
want to spend the bulk of my time critically analyzing old pieces of writing
as English majors do. I want to spend
my time writing new pieces of fiction. So, I came to the conclusion that I should quit school and rethink life. This, coincidentally, is an extremely easy
decision to make at age 22.
I chose to go back to school after a year or so of working part
time with no aim or goals to fuel me. I
knew I needed some direction or I would be destined to slave away at retail
stores for minimum wage the rest of my life. What could I do that would be an affordable education and
rewarding? I landed on interior design,
which I postulated would satisfy both my left and right brains with its mix of
creativity and logical order. Boy was I
wrong. Studying interior design was
essentially studying architecture, which for me left very little room for the
kind of freewheeling open-ended creativity that I yearned. Buildings exist in the real world, after
all, and have to be structurally sound.
After a period of soul searching I quit Interior Design and
moved on to art school to study what I really wanted to study: Fiction
Writing. Yes, there really is a BA (or
BFA if you’re so inclined) in Fiction Writing available and I have the student
loan bills to prove it. The two years I
spent constantly creating fiction were some of the most rewarding years of my
life. I left them behind feeling
impassioned toward my calling. I also
left them with a desire to seek out a stable form of income for myself and so the
career-building phase of my life began.
I quit what I considered my “while-at-college-job,” moved across
country for what I thought would be better work and came back to the same
“while-at-college-job” within a year of receiving my BA. It was a crazy ride that pushed me farther
into financial troubles but it was well worth the effort if only for the
intense personal and spiritual growth I acquired while on the journey. I regret nothing.
The latest phase of my life has been my coming to grips with the
fact that there is no stable form of income to be found if I’m going to do what
I love. I need to create a job
for myself, not work for someone else. What I intend to create is a career selling fictional tales that I have
conceived and written.
The last 18 months have been all about finding a balance between
working a day job, writing a novel, and having a personal life. It is not easy. I’m still learning but getting better with every month that
passes. I’m also unlearning bad habits
like procrastination and being overly critical of my first drafts. I feel more fulfilled now than I ever have. I will keep my pen on the page and my fingers on the keyboard until I look back and find a body of work of which I am proud.
“Seek and you shall find.” Never a truer statement was said. I sought out a path that never existed because I didn’t trust my
instincts or my heart would lead me right. I think that is something we all have to go through, a testament to the
power of personal growth. And maybe
some of us don’t. Maybe some people are
born knowing who and what they are and work every moment toward those ends. It matters not what path you take get there
as long as you arrive.
Why do you write? Post answers in the comment section. I'm interested in the motivations of other writers (and people in general) and would love to hear about your journey.
I wrote the original draft in my first fiction writing class back in 2005. It was the telling of a dream that I had six years earlier. This dream was so unusually vivid, emotionally intense, and completely terrifying that I remembered every detail. A few years after graduation I resolved to focus on my passion for creating fiction and dug up some old short stories that I could edit and submit. One of them was this particular original draft which I entitled "Thirst."
Here we are on the first day of November and another NaNoWriMo. I'm still weaving through the various interconnected threads of the same story. The lesson for me is to trust in the creative process. Trust that you have the skill it takes to complete your novel. Trust that your characters know who they are and will not lead you stray. Trust that your vision will coalesce into a readable draft. It may feel awkward or strange or the quality poor but there's a lot of value in what you learn by simply doing. However, I'm also an advocate of having some sort of outline of events, a road map of sorts, however vague. For me it all works best having a balance between these two philosophies and certainly neither is right or wrong, simply different strategies to the same end. 
