To Write or Not to Write

When I was a kid, I loved to make up stories. I'd come up with tales off the top of my head about monsters, aliens, and magical creatures for my mother's entertainment. She seemed to enjoy hearing them and would tell me what an imaginative little boy I was for being able to think of such things. I loved to hear her praise and the more she praised me, the more stories I wanted to make up for her. I was in the first grade the first time I wrote one of my stories down for my mother's review, and she encouraged me to write down stories to my heart's content. I also began to notice that it wasn't just her praise that made me want to write stories. It was also the essence of the story itself that inspired me. I loved the act of bringing something to life that had not existed before I set my pencil to paper. It seemed like a magical process, and remains so to this day.

When I was in the second grade, I won a school-sponsored county wide contest for creative writing for a story I jotted down in about five minutes. The story was about a fat pig named Cloney who loved to eat jelly until he was warned by his friend Bony that the farmers were fattening him up with the jelly so they could make bacon out of him. With that revelation in mind, Cloney inspired his friend to help him invade the farmer's house, run the poor fellow out of town, and steal all his jelly.

I was doubly surprised to learn I'd won this contest because I had thought it was just an assignment from my teacher. I had no idea it would be entered into a contest.I reveled in the attention this award brought me from my teacher and the school in general. It made me feel like someone special, and caused me to identify myself as a writer. It seems to me that winning that award should have propelled me to making a career for myself as a writer. I should have written stories in a mad rush from that day to this. But that hasn't happened in spite of the fact that I still love writing stories as much as I did when I was a little kid, and that I take the craft of writing very seriously. Writing is one of my favorite things to do and an activity I consider almost sacred. In spite of this fact, at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, I still have not become the published writer I've dreamed my whole life of becoming.

I have had a few of my stories published on science fiction and horror fiction web sites, and have placed a lot of my writing on a site called fanstory.com, but overall I certainly don't have an impressive writing resume. I've never even completed a truly novel-length story although I have written some 150,000 plus words of one called The Legend of Dreaming Eagle. But I've abandoned that story recently because it reads so juvenile to me now although I haven't entirely given up on it. It's a story I've thought out so thoroughly in so much detail and the characters still seem very alive to me. It's just a matter of figuring out how to fix it up and being re-motivated to do so.

Getting discouraged and abandoning my work at certain points has become a pattern for me. Sometimes I think the idea that I could possibly write a story well enough to get an agent to represent me who would then be able to convince a publishing house to pay me for my writing seems like a far fetched dream, and that I'm deluding myself to believe otherwise. Every book I've read about writing declares in no uncertain terms that publishing a book is hard and that a writer should expect setback after setback before he experiences success, so who am I to believe I would be the exception to the rule--the one who was talented and dedicated enough to succeed where so many others did not? But on the other hand, I'm not always wowed by published books and rarely have the feeling that the quality of a book I'm reading would be beyond my ability to create.

I think the obstacles that have prevented me from fulfilling my writing potential are all within myself. I've always been a little embarrassed to even let people know that I write because it seems like a pompous statement somehow--like you're saying you're this dreamy person who claims to have this authoritative knowledge about the human condition or something. Then the person wants to know what you write, and then when you're forced to explain you write fiction and haven't published anything except for in a couple of obscure e-zines, I imagine people wonder how you even call yourself a writer with a straight face. But I do think a key for me in really becoming a writer would be able to make this statement with confidence and to not be so self conscious about revealing my work. I always feel like I want people who read my stories to feel the same passion for them that I do, and if they don't, I feel discouraged although I know logically that people's opinions about my writing should not matter so much, and that I, as much as anyone else, can benefit from constructive criticism. It's always a catch-22 for me. I want people to read my writing, but at the same time I feel very self-conscious about letting them. I've always felt that if I could actually publish something that would appear in a physical book, I would feel validated enough about my writing to be able to declare myself a writer without hesitation.

But I also realize that writing to get published is not the best reason to write. The best reason to write is for the story itself. I've come to discover that I have to keep this fact in mind if I'm going to write as regularly and with as much discipline as I should to accomplish my goals. I have to forget about writing for anyone but myself. If it sounds right and true for me, I should go with it, and if it doesn't, I should change it. I also have to remember that good writing is always about the story and the writing itself. It's really no different from when I was a little kid making up stories for my mother. I believe there are many unwritten magical stories residing in my imagination just waiting for me to let them out. I just have to have the faith and the discipline to let them be. Hopefully everything else will take care of itself, and if it doesn't--if I'm never the published writer I'd like to become, then at least I will have let stories come to be that would not have existed otherwise, and I believe there's something mystical and wonderful about that even if few people ever read my work and I know that the greatest failure would not be in failing to be published, but in failing to write at all.