On Being A Writer

I have always wanted to be a writer. And it is, as V.S. Naipul notes in his reflection on his own path to becoming a writer, "...mysterious, for instance, that the ambition should have come first—the wish to be a writer, to have that distinction, that fame—and that this ambition should have come long before I could think of anything to write about." But it does make sense in light of the difficulties I have experienced in the pursuit of that dream. For although I have always wanted to be a writer, I am not one. At least I am not the kind of writer I always wanted to be. I want to write fictions. To tell stories. To make magic. Except I'm not very good at any of those things. I can never think of what happens next. So, instead, I write applications. And proposals. And reflections. And evaluations. And models and essays. And letters. And now, blog posts. In other words, I write everything but what I want really to write: Stories and books and plays. And despite an MFA in writing with a concentration in fiction, I still cannot do the thing I would so like to do. And what's even more upsetting to me is that I cannot figure out why this is so.


I have been writing since I can remember. I still have one of my earliest stories, "It Happened on Manioc," the heroic journey of a breadfruit with a single leg who grew to great stature having saved his planet, Manioc, from hostile invaders. Upon his victory, he is given the hand of the princess in marriage and they live happily ever after. My command of the narrative arc-- rising action, conflict, climax and denoument-- was unself-conscious and bold. I was not afraid of cliches because I had no idea what they were; instead, I blithely told my breadfruit story. Readers raved (my parents, siblings and teacher) and I was content. And I called myself "writer."


Where did that abandon go? I imagine it went the way of other delights such as lazy summer days that promised to last forever in the same way that childhood feels as though it is a world without end. In other words, I grew up. I became conscious and I developed fear-- along with an incredible willingness to consistently trust the assessments of others over what I knew I liked, allowing so-called "experts" to judge my writing and continually find it wanting. I learned to hate the blank page. I always tell my students that sculptors are fortunate. They simply have to let hand and chisel do the work and shape and form emerge. Writers have it hard. First they have to make the rock. By the time I get around to sculpting the rock, I am so much part of its composition, its sedimentary makeup, that I cannot free myself from its origins. Revision, for example, undoes me.


Perhaps, because I was so interested in others' response to my work, I failed to actually nurture the work itself. My writing became a means to and end-- one that never came. I wonder if the desire for recognition that drove my earliest writing efforts somehow impaired me from actually being able to write truthfully. Although Naipul also notes in his essay that "...it is mysterious still—that out of artifice one should touch and stir up what is deepest in one’s soul, one’s heart, one’s memory..."  which makes me think that I should not judge my youthful desire to be extraordinary too harshly. And it is true that even the act of attempting to become the writer I so longed to be taught me things about myself that I, quite possibly, would not have learned otherwise. And so, with that knowledge in mind,  I wonder if it is time to re-cast my view of what writing means to me. To validate the writing that I do. To make it count in my own mind. To be able to call myself a writer... despite my reluctance to do so.