I guess I should credit Lorrie Moore for the form and direction of this piece, otherwise it's all original.
How to be a Writer
You have to start somewhere. Early on, you will struggle through writing. It’s not enough for your writing to be mediocre. You have to embody bad writing. In elementary school, struggle with basic sentence structure. Verbs and Nouns have no meaning to you. You know a sentence when you see one, but you would be hard pressed to construct a complex one on your own. You mother will continually stay up with you the night before a piece is due throughout your early school career, worrying if her son will ever be able to put two coherent thoughts together. Spelling is a must; bad spelling that is. You will start to write a children’s book series, but will only get the cover and first page done. You will have the first three books of “The Bean Brothers,” but won’t actually have anything written.
You won’t know how to spell anything without doing it in an embarrassingly phonetic way. All your dedications will be deadikated to your family, and jaguars will run with other jagwires. Words you can’t phonetically spell right will be a mixed up jumble of most the right letters. Later in life you will fake the fact that you have gotten over this by a series of embarrassing memories of particular words, and the assistance of spell check. All of this will make you dislike sharing the things you write, but will never stop you from exploring your creativity. Also, later in life you will take an important sense of irony from this particular beginning.
Nothing special, Join a gifted program that transfers you outside of your “normal” district. You won’t really think you’re better than anyone, but most others in the program will. Read stories all the kids two years older than you are, and not really understand them. Your two best writing ideas come from stealing the character Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes and ripping off an episode of The Twilight Zone. Both your teachers will be impressed by your creativity. Do feel bad about this. Later on you will tell a poetry-enthusiast teacher that you write poetry at home. In your closet you will probably have a notebook with a single poem in it.
This is where you will start to look at writing as something of interest. You begin to see some sort of spark of promise. Continue to struggle with editing. Work the hardest on a paper for English you ever have, and get yelled at for plagiarism. You won’t even know what that word means (let alone be able to spell it); but you will feel horrible about writing and that teacher for a short while. This teacher will cause you to quit the gifted program. You will feel it’s for the best.
Never forget what plagiarism is.
Then, progress In middle school, you will finally get the hang of the whole sentence structure thing (even though you won’t be able to tell a gerund from a preposition). English classes will be short on teachers, so yours will be taught by the librarian. She has you read stories that you read during the “special” program you were in and quit. You will have a superior feeling from the rest of the class, because you are doing things you have already done, and you will be doing them well. You’ll write papers on topics you have already covered before and do book reports on books you have already read. Improve your vocabulary in writing; learn a few words (among them deter) that you will continue to use on a regular basis. Your spelling will still be horable.
A burgeoning writer Freshman year in high school you will opt out of “Honors English” based on the idea that your class schedule is too much. As a direct result you will spend the entire year studying stories you have, once again, already read and going over grammar and sentence structure. Ifistory can be used to speculate whether this had a positive or negative effect on your writing, but there is no way to know. Get a “C” on the final, and write it off as a mistake by the teacher because you are convinced you are a master at English.
Your sophomore year will be a pivotal point in your writing career. Your teacher will have a lasting effect on your skill and development. In class you will read “The Catcher in the Rye” and you will have a sudden urge to write. About this same time, you will begin a crush on a girl you will have for the next two years. Luckily your class is starting a poetry unit, so the poems you have already written about her won’t seem so out of place. You will write more and more poetry about your feelings, and develop your creative writing skills. Use big words that don’t have any specific meaning, and generalized images to impress people. You may be the first person in your class to understand that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme.
Your teacher junior year will dock you points for not being able to locate your own thesis in your analysis paper. From there on out, you will make sure to have more concrete thoughts. The same teacher will take the class outside to write poetry in the woods. One snowy day, you convince the teacher to go out and write with only a handful of students. You sit in the woods and look around, unable to take your attention off the falling snow. It is poetry to you, and you will be at a loss for words. Sometimes, there are no words. You will remember this.
The final year in high school, your work will really start to exhibit the signs of good writing. Your crush is still beating strong, and your poems still show it.
It is necessary to feel the emotions everyone at that age does, so that you can write poetry about feelings that you think are solely yours.
Many of the girls in your class will write about “love” in the poetry unit. This will disgust you, and will cause you to title your own portfolio “Love?” You will write poems about an apple being devoured on the inside by a hideous beast and prose about a girl falling in love with each successive guy who passes her in the classroom. When you read your “Apple” poem out loud in class, everyone will wonder why the hell you titled it “Love?” You will develop a cynical nature about many things, and become increasingly aggravated with people and their illusions. Decide that writing against the grain is important. Defy the illusions. Curiously, this will be when you start to recognize the illusion of your own obsessive crush. The crush will linger and then fade, but your poetry will start referencing vague ideas of a “drug” before moving on to more introspective poetry. Write a poem about a man who is always running away towards safety. Decide that poetry is a wonderful outlet for emotions and feelings. Perfect your uninhibited-voice writing.
One day in the computer lab, when you are given 50 minute to write your essay for a test, you will spend the first 20-30 minutes joking around with your friend, turning his monitor on and off. It is only in the last 20 minutes that you will start writing, in which you will get a better grade than most of the other students. You become increasingly narcissistic as a result of whatever talent you have, and many of your friends will notice.
The Transition Enter college with the desire to major in zoology. Perform well on all of your written exams, and do poorly on the multiple-choice. Later realize that Zoology is not a field where writing is necessarily useful or practical. Resent that. You switch majors and find a way to incorporate writing into it. You pick journalism for its writing heavy concentration, only to find that journalism writing is not really your cup of tea. Generate a lot of emotional poetry. Refine your poetry skills. Write less about emotion. Write poems from various points of view, one about someone who is suicidal. Inadvertently scare your dorm-mates into thinking you are suicidal. Try to find a way to explain that writing doesn’t necessarily represent the author.
Write poetry that does represent you. People are less interested.
Post everything you have written online. Use facebook and your brother’s website. Get a decent amount of feedback from the latter, not so much from the former. Decide that online feedback merely feeds your ego, and is not much help. Continue to post it online.
Revise some short-stories from high school, but give up from writer’s block. Become distanced from writing, as you have no new creative outlets.
Your first writing assignment in a college writing class is about personal experiences. Get frustrated at teachers who like “bleeding heart” stories. Refuse to share personal details with a bunch of strangers, and write something general. Roll your eyes when people share traumatic life experiences in class so easily. Decide people probably make a lot up. 6 months later, write a reflection piece on the topic of death that you will consider one of the best you’ve done. Learn that introspection and personal writing work better as supplemental material to a main idea.
In your second year, take your first creative writing course, and have your interest rekindled. Convince yourself that you want to be a poet because that’s what you know how to write. Convince yourself that fiction writing is not your thing, and poetry is the much more sensible path for you.
Start assembling a piece entitled “Why We Write,” in which you gather various authors’ explicit reasons for why they write.
Because before there were no words
To drag into the light that which eats at me
Because I was the sole possessor of these 3 stories
Because it’s what I knowDesperately try to find a reason why you write.
Come up with very little.
Persevere.
Then take a class on fiction writing. Have what little interest you had in fiction writing explode in a new outlet for your writing. Dive deep into your desire to write fiction. Read Steven King. Only understand part of what he talks about. Think of it as a bible, and tell yourself you’re going to go back to it as a reference.
Increase the amount of books you read in hopes to discover what it is that makes good writing. Secretly hope that you have not lost out by having nothing accomplished thus far. Have a burning desire to show people that you can be a successful writer, but have very little to show, show them nothing. Write your first real story, followed by your first completed story.
Write a reflective piece about how you became the writer you are at this point in your life and come up with very little. Decide that what you had to say wasn’t all that important. End the paper early than you had planned. Hope that writing works out. Hope that you have the time and drive to make this work.
When you don’t have time to write, think about writing.
Just keep writing.
