Why do you write?

I’ll get to the pressing question above in just a moment, but first: a recap of my writing life since I dropped off the blog in May.

• I’m published! Granted, it’s a critical essay, but I’ll take it. Sidenote: Mason’s Road is a great way to get your stuff seen and possibly published without any submission fee! Reading period opens soon; in the meantime, check out the awesome stuff in this issue.
• My writing class at the library ended in May, and they’ve asked me to teach two workshops this summer: one on found poetry, one on horror/thriller writing for teens. The best news of all: this will be my first paying gig as a writing teacher. I hope to pick up the fiction class again in the fall with compensation as well. Fingers crossed!
• My favorite memoirist and I have made a pact. At least once a month, we have to send out a story or essay to literary journals and magazines. I’ve never actively tried to get published (except for my above credit), so this is a somewhat scary and exciting endeavor. I’ve tagged her blog here in hopes that she’ll feel inspired and/or pressured to update.
• I’ve just returned home from my last summer residency in the Fairfield MFA program. I graduate in January. Holy hell.
• All of this excitement coincides with my final semester; I have to write and polish my creative thesis–the first 135 pages of my novel–by Halloween. No pressure!

I think that’s all. Now, for the question of the hour.

“Why do you write?”

One of my favorite writers and teachers, Rachel Basch, posed this question during our residency workshop last week. She said we should determine the answer, distill it down to one sentence, and paste it above our work space at home to keep us motivated. A great idea, no doubt.

For me, though, “Why do you write?” is one of those questions that, as soon as it’s asked, wipes my brain clean of any answer; the same is true for “What’s your favorite movie?” and “What are you thinking?”. I’ve had some time, now, to think about this, and I figured my groping for an answer would be a great way to get back up on the blogging horse.

Blogging horse.

I write because I always have. I was raised in a house where my parents pushed me and my siblings to do whatever we desired. I tapped, I skated, I sang, I acted. If I’d cared enough, I could have pushed myself to make a living out of most of the things I tried as a kid, but none of them stuck. What was always there, what I never even realized I’d been doing all along, was writing.

The first thing I did when we got a computer was figure out how to do columns in WordPerfect and make a full-color newsletter for the kids in the neighborhood. I would force my brother and sister to take my reading and handwriting classes after school, with the help of a mini-whiteboard and old schoolbooks. I wrote a multi-chapter murder mystery in elementary school that beat out the middle school for best story and an essay about my hero–my dad–that landed me a meeting with Ruby Bridges. I typed up letters to the editor for my father and went on to write controversial editorials for my school paper on abortion, same-sex marriage, and our high school civics program.

I never put two and two together. I went off to college and all but forgot about writing. It wasn’t until my father passed away that I remembered. When something like that happens, it clears your decks of anything superfluous and leaves you only with what matters most. French and politics fell away, and writing rushed in. I wrote everything down: every memory, every question, every fear, every dream. It hurt, but it felt good. For the first time, my brain and heart were working together. A light bulb switched on somewhere, and I found my soul again.

So, that’s why I write. Why do you?

Fact to fiction

I tell you, I’ve learned more about myself in the past two semesters of writing than I have from mulitple stints in therapy.  For instance: when things get hard, I get paralyzed.

I finally put my second-to-last packet in the mail recently, after much procrastination. In the end, I came up with 20 pages of original work instead of the required 25: a gap I will have to reconcile in this month’s work. I’m less worried about the extra five pages in this packet than I am about the reason getting 20 pages was like pulling teeth.

Writing comes easily to me when what I’m writing is completely–or mostly–fictional. That’s why my last packet felt so easy and was so successful. There’s a freedom in totally making things up that lets me really spread out on the page. It’s when the work hits close to home that I have a problem.

This packet focused mainly on the main character’s relationship with her family: specifically, her brother and sister. These characters are modeled heavily after my own brother and sister, and something about this makes it terribly difficult to make them three-dimensional characters. Do you ever try and explain the meaning of a word, but keep using that word in your definition? That’s what it feels like.

But the difficulties did not only lie in trying to bring certain characters to life. I focused most of the pages around the death of the main character’s father and the aftermath within her family; ripped from the headlines of my life, as it were. Four years later and in the context of fiction, my father’s death is still not easy to write about. When I finally bit the bullet and tried, I got down a few lines, cried; got down a few more, cried again. You get the idea. I know this meant I was on to something real, but it was also really scary and paralyzed me for a while afterwards.

My first instinct is to step back from the super-realness of this packet and do some fleshing-out of some more fictiony areas. But some unfamiliar voice inside is telling me to push on that painful place between fact and fiction and see where it goes.

Why do you write?

Today is National Day on Writing. The Twitterverse is celebrating by answering the question: “Why do you write?”

My response:

This, of course, is the simple answer to a question I ask myself a lot lately (paying tuition for a writing program seems to need some justification in my mind).

The longer answer is that I know it’s what I’m meant to do. I know this because I abandoned it for years in favor of French and all sorts of other obligations one thinks are so-very-important as an undergrad. Then, my father died.

Nothing puts your priorities in check like death. Suddenly, it becomes clear that you’ve wasted your time on a bunch of stuff that will never matter or make any difference in the world.  Everything that lacks meaning in your life falls away, because you simply don’t have the energy for it. In this vacuum, you find what’s important; for me, it was my family and my writing. I could do nothing but write, all day, every day. It wasn’t good, or even all that understandable, but it just kept coming and coming. Everything needed a closer look: the picture on the wall, my cat, the river. It was my attempt to make sense of it all, it was the only thing I could do.

Writing’s been there for me in sickness and in health, in good times and bad. I’ve made a promise to myself with this MFA that it will never be a backburner hobby again; it is my vocation, my calling in life, and I’m going after it.