I Am Not a Writer

This essay received second place in the BYU Studies 2013 Essay Contest. Original image of typewriter by Bernard Walker via flickr, Creative Commons license. 

I Am Not a Writer

“For when you become a writer!” read the note on the most expensive pen I had ever touched, a pen I would never consider buying for myself. The pen was a gift that I received on my seventeenth birthday.

A year and a half later, I decided that if I wanted to be a writer, I needed to write. I found a pretty notebook. I removed the pen from its soft, velvety case. I took off the cap. And I began to write, using the conveniently simple subject predicate structure I have so masterfully demonstrated in this paragraph.

Several hundred wretched words about a frozen woman later, the pen exploded like a piece of dynamite placed on the track of an enemy train—Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai, you take your pick.

This was figuratively, mind you. Explode might be the wrong verb.

What actually happened is the ink coming out of the nib began to congeal. Picture curdled milk, the kind you get at a cheese factory. At the same time, ink began seeping through every crevice in the pen and spurting out the back of the pen onto my hands (which were dyed blue for a week) and my shirt (which was fated, as the cliché says, to never again see the light of day).

I considered it a sign. Not, of course, that it might be a bad thing to take a pen on multiple international flights with varying air pressure. Not, of course, that it might be a bad thing to expose a pen to extremes in temperature (from 12 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit, thank you very much). And not, of course, that the best way to maintain a pen is to use it. No, this was a sign that I am not a writer—I merely touch the writer’s pen and it explodes.

*****

A doctor doctors. An accountant counts. A cook cooks. A plumber plumbs. A teacher teaches. A seller sells. A detective detects. A joker jokes. A driver drives. An owner owns.

This is all very clear to me. Change an occupation noun into a verb, and you not only have alliteration, but you have direction, meaning, purpose for those seconds that turn into minutes that turn into hours that turn into days.

So it should be clear to me that a writer writes. But it is not.

Saying a writer writes is like saying a lady-in-waiting waits. A pianist pians. A surgeon surges. A cobbler cobbs (or cobbles?). A physicist physics. A psychic psyches. A pastor pastes.

If I happen to paste one thing to another, I am not a pastor. If I happen to write a word, a phrase, a sentence, I am not a writer.

After all, an accountant takes a test. A certification. He gets paid for what he does. Others entrust him with money—before he has even performed a task. He goes to work for eight hours—or perhaps for ten or twelve, if he is young and inexperienced or seeks a promotion or is unattached to his wife or finds a thrill in the long hours.

There are no promotions for writers. No movement from assistant writer to writer to special writer to official and true writer. Yes, traditionally poet laureates and others received patronage—a place in the royal household, money, food, and wine—as long as they turned out the proper poems for the proper occasions, they could write as they liked. Universities provide a similar patronage today: teach our students, publish in these journals, fulfill other commitments to the university, and you’ll probably have time to write at least a little of what you want. At least you won’t have to take a second day job.

But having a bit of time and energy to devote to writing just never feels like enough.

To say, “I am a writer,” is to invite the gnawing worm of self doubt. I picture the squirming creature from Star Trek’s The Wrath of Khan: placed in the ear, the eel drills into the skull, controlling and feeding off of the brain, ultimately leading to the death of the individual. This parasitic invertebrate whispers, you are not a writer. That’s a bad idea. You don’t have anything worth saying. No one cares what you have to say—no one even read what you wrote. You don’t have a divine Muse tucked in your pocket or sitting on your shawl, and if you ever did see one of those nine Greek goddesses you probably wouldn’t recognize her.

While having a self doubt parasite nest in your brain is bad enough, perhaps the most trying part is the sense that you have not arrived. You are not truly a writer until you can quit your day job. Until you finish or publish or find an agent or sell that next novel. Until that revision squeezes every last bit of pulp out of your ideas and makes it palpable in words. Until you master the sonnet, the villanelle, the essay, the memoir, the revolutionary war fiction, the picture book, and, of course, the paranormal romance. Until you write that work of creative nonfiction that not only makes the New York Times bestseller list but can make your readers laugh and cry at your profound themes and clever sentences. Until you, like Walt Whitman, revise Leaves of Grass “just one more time”—for surely this publication you will get it right.

To win $200 in a contest is not enough. To write and revise a hundred page honors thesis—and then to fruitlessly check, every six months, to see if someone, anyone, has checked it out from the university library—is clearly not enough. To tell the 60 college students who signed up for my writing classes that they were writers and to teach them rhetoric and MLA and structure and transitions and style was not enough. I always believed that my students were writers—that they could write with power and purpose and make a difference in the world. But for some reason, I can never believe that for myself.

Yet surely it is sitting in an ivory tower to say, “I have not written everything I want to write, or had my writing do everything I would like it to do. Thus, I am not a writer.”

After all, it would be strange to hear a chef exclaim, “I am not a cook! I have not yet cooked a Turkducken.” (I have never seen a Turkducken, so I am assuming—perhaps fallaciously—that most chefs have never attempted stuffing a chicken into a duck and then stuffing that duck into a turkey.) Or perhaps our chef has cooked a Turkducken, but something went wrong. Perhaps she ended up with turkey skin, duck wings, chicken breasts, and stuffing splattered, unceremoniously, all over the wall. Perhaps she will not admit that she has cooked—using the concept liberally—a Turkducken. But she is still a chef. I would not take that title from her.

I am now able to say that I am a mother, something my running, talking daughters can attest to. Whether I’m terrible or great, as soon as my first child emerged from my womb, I officially donned that title. I want to be a great mother. I want to be always loving and always caring and always cheerful and always giving good advice. Whether or not I always succeed—as long as I don’t fail miserably, to the despair of local social workers—I will still deserve the title of mother.

So perhaps I am a writer. I have good intentions. I give birth to ideas. I try to nurture them, help them grow and develop. And then I dress them and send them out the door and into the world. Is that not what writing is?

*****

When a doctor errs, a patient dies, takes a while to heal, or goes to a different doctor to get the prescription she really wants. A pianist misses a crucial chord at her concerto or doesn’t sell enough CDs and has to teach rich, uninterested children to play. The cobbler misplaces an important stitch on a shoe or loses a button, realizing later that night he has not truly sold the service his customer paid for. Or his profession slowly disappears because no one in their right mind would pay to repair cheap, mass-produced, 12-sizes-fit-all Payless shoes. The detective leaves yet another murder unsolved, knowing her adventures will never be featured on a TV crime show.

What happens when a writer errs? A manuscript collects dust. An idea fails. Or perhaps your writing hurts someone or has unforeseen repercussions, sending a reader into depression or straining a relationship with a family member. Perhaps you sell out on yourself or your masterpiece of words becomes the propaganda tool of a future political tyrant. Or you die lonely and alone. The consequences seem dire. Yet still doctors doctor, pianists pian, cobblers cobble, and detectives detect. Writers write. We all dream, we all live, we all die, and perhaps our dreams aren’t fully realized. But they’re still worth dreaming.

In a sense, no matter what we do or how we define ourselves, we are essayists. For an essayist assays—attempts. Attempts to make meaning, attempts to find answers. Attempts to lift up a stone and look at it anew.

In third grade I learned a game from my red-haired teacher Mrs. Spritzer (who reminded me of Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus).  Mrs. Spritzer had a bucket of random items—often broken parts of toys or scraps of things, perhaps recognizable for their origins, but not always. We would sit in a large circle, and some lucky person (I’m sure I would remember if it had ever been me) would get to pull an item from the bucket. Then, the item would be passed around the circle, and each person would be required to transform it. You could make it bigger or smaller, change the color, add something to it. You could also piggyback off of someone else’s idea, as long as the result was not exactly the same.

A pen cap might be enlarged into a giant rolling pipe for the playground, or be stretched into a powerful telescope that can see across the galaxy. A paper clip becomes a fishhook, a nose-picker, a modern metallic picture frame. A fuzzy piece of fabric transforms and we discover an Eskimo’s blanket, a pouch for mama’s wedding ring, soft padding for an old-fashioned, jingle-bell sleigh ride. There was no final answer, no final conclusion: simply a sharing of the journey your mind took from object A to object B.

It seems to me that this is the attitude of the writer. To read the world, as Roland Barthes would say, in a writerly way, as a text that is not complete, requiring my contributions, my interpretation, my meaning-making, my pen to be made whole. A writerly person gets up in the morning ready and willing to act: she isn’t simply acted upon.

In kindergarten I was disturbed by the story of Icarus. A little boy dies, after all—and simply for doing something that seems so wonderful: flying freely through the air. Perhaps the lesson is a good one for a child. Taken to an extreme, any action or desire can be a bad thing. Fly too high, and you will die. Ride your bicycle too fast, and you will fall and scrape your knee. Get too close to the stove, and you’ll get burnt. Eat too loudly, play too wildly, act too freely, and there will be consequences. These might, as was the case for our mechanically-feathered friend, be irreversible.

While from a logical perspective the Icarus myth is rather true to life, it continued to nag at my mind. Months later, without intentionally creating a palimpsest, a rewriting, I wrote my own story, “The Turtle That Got Too Close to the Sun.” Meet turtle, a standard green ectotherm. One day, he’s walking through the trees, and sees a pink balloon. He jumps (yes, jumps) on the pink balloon, and it carries him away. He floats upward, past trees, upward, past mountains. And then the unthinkable happens—he gets too close to the sun. The pink balloon pops, and the turtle falls, falls, falls into the ocean. Luckily, like most turtles, our turtle friend can swim. He has not encountered the sun unchanged though; with the profound wisdom of a 5 year old I wrote, “Then the turtle was yellow. Then the turtle felt different.”

I want to be like turtle, because feeling different is a good thing. If anyone feels different because of my words, even if it’s just me, then my writing is doing something right. I want to experience the world in a writerly way, as something unfixed and still open to meaning-making, because if I do then my assays, my attempts, can create transformation. I can rescue Icarus and paint him yellow.