Learning to be a Writer

     It’s what I’ve always wanted to be. I probably started saying so in Junior High, around age 12 or 13. But I probably felt it even before then, from the time my love affair with books and reading began, by age eight if not earlier.

     But I wasn’t ever the kid who wrote actually wrote stories, or who made them up to entertain my friends. Rather, it was something I thought about and imagined. I did well enough with school essays to be complimented on my writing. But, with very few exceptions, and all of them school-related, I don’t recall that I did any actual creative writing until I was an adult.

     So, where did this profession of ambition come from, anyway? Why have I always held to this desire, even while I did so little to realize it? The inquiry is deepened by the fact that I find writing hard, taxing, full of difficulty, and I generally procrastinate and avoid having to do it. Writer’s block to me suggests the always necessary breaking down of mental and emotional walls before I’m even able to start composing a piece. I don’t even feel that I have a particularly good imagination.

     The only thing I can think of, that actually operated in my life to get me writing, to be passionate about it, and to feel driven to it, is communication via letters. And that must have started in earnest with letters to my mother. I corresponded with her from about age 11, a couple of years after my parents’ marriage dissolved, and the time that my living with her ended forever. Aside from my brother, she’s the person I was closest to. And she’s someone who in many respects I was very much like. It’s from her that I inherited my love of books, stories, mythology, and my curiosity about how things work and why things happen. Maybe most of all, a fascination with things I couldn’t figure out, did not understand. What I most remember of the years living with her was our continuous, ongoing conversation, about everything. So, when Mom and I were suddenly and irrevocably apart, letters began to take the place of those conversations, and I began to learn to pour my heart onto a page.

     After my mother, it was girlfriends, and sometimes male friends, to whom I learned to express myself through writing, able to say with time and thought what I never could in person or in the moment. Letters to girlfriends became a way to say the unsayable, to uncork my pent up mind, and to release at least some of that torrent of wondering and feeling and speculation that alternately flows, swirls and erupts as bonds proliferate and strengthen, or erode and wither.

     And then, it was journals. I started keeping a journal just as I turned twenty, and I kept at it for well over thirty years. So while I wasn’t writing stories and submitting them, as I assume other developing writers were, I was sending letters to others, and composing letters to myself in my journal. And while I never thought much about plot, since that was mostly supplied by life, I was much concerned with emotional truth, and how to find and make it plain.

     Here I am now, in my sixties, with all of a half dozen, very minor publishing credits to my name, short stories and essays for which I’ve been compensated a total of maybe six hundred dollars. I still want to be a writer, even if I can’t say exactly why. I know it has something to do with conveying emotional truths, as I struggled to as a teenager. And it has to do with understanding how people connect and making relationships work, as I’ve tried to do throughout the rest of my life. But all that seems almost given, and also almost unrelated to the process of being a writer in the working world.

     Now, I have to learn (and put into practice) much, much more about a business that sells entertainment, experiences and edification. I have to learn to funnel my thought and energy into blocks of constructive time that have little (or at least less) to do with my personally lived life. I must learn about editing and shaping a manuscript, and about addressing a paying audience: agents, publishers and book-sellers as well as readers. And I must learn to make my own, private passions and obsessions shareable, so that others will find a place for them in their own lives.

     And I know that all of this is only just the naïve, outer skin of my own imagined life as writer, as I take the first steps toward actualizing it. There’s so much still that I don’t understand. But I aim to begin. And to succeed.