Twenty Something Writers Dot Com

Today is a big day. Today is the launch of Twenty Something Writers. Check it out!

When you get over there, you’ll find a writing prompt asking you to tell us about your writing history.  Here’s my response:

As a kid, I didn’t even dream of being the kind of person I am now. That’s one reason why I feel so uncomfortable with the way people characterize me. Organized? Consistent? Put together? Graceful? Smart? I am still that little girl who wasn’t particularly good at anything, who jumped from one activity to the next. I was in the remedial reading program until second grade when I was deemed just good enough to be pulled out of it. I played soccer, but never scored a goal. I tap danced, but wasn’t really into it. Sometimes I would do really well in school. I even won a few awards. But, I’d quickly lose interest and motivation.

The one thing I did do was write. In second grade, my teacher had us spend time every day working on books. We would write them, illustrate them, bind them, and then put them on the shelf for other students to read. I was in love with the whole process, and at home I would make my own books by folding over paper and stapling the sides together. I sometimes lacked the focus to sit down and put words to paper, but I was always motivated to participate in the process somehow.

The weird thing was that I was pretty good at writing. Even in elementary school when I was a sub par student, my teachers recognized my ability to write. I can’t explain it since I didn’t read often or well and I wasn’t good at anything else. It’s only looking back that I see it–the special opportunities they gave me, the awards they bestowed upon me, and the way they encouraged me. Maybe if I’d had confidence in my ability to write early on, I would have taken myself more seriously. But, it’s easy to get stuck in a certain way of seeing yourself, and I could only see myself as average and untalented.

In middle school, some kind of fire lit under my butt, and I transformed overnight into a good student. I didn’t know I had it in me. For the first time in my life, I started reading for fun. I read constantly. I would wake up early to read before school, I read on the bus to school, I read during breaks in class, I read on the bus trip home, I read until my parents got home from work, and I read before I went to bed. I was still in love with the idea of writing, and I started journal after journal, but I would always abandon them or destroy them for fear of my sister getting a hold of my most intimate thoughts.

In high school, it became a lot harder for me to deny my ability to write, but I certainly did try. I thought for a long time that our AP English teacher was giving everyone A pluses. One time I even grunted when she handed a paper back to me. She knew what I thought, and in my year book, she wrote, “You really are as talented of a writer as I’ve said you are.” I left thinking maybe I was good for high school, but now I was going to college.

I did go to college, and it didn’t matter that right away I was recognized for my writing, because every year I waited for each new professor to put me back in my place and let me know I was nothing special. It never happened. Actually, my professors became more and more encouraging.

All this time, I was secretly spending my free time writing fiction. I didn’t share this fiction with anyone. I didn’t even tell people I was writing. I did it just for fun. I wasn’t willing to subject it to public scrutiny, because I was convinced it wasn’t any good.

In my junior and senior years of college, I finally had a teacher get through to me. She had a PhD in writing. She was a writing expert. She taught me how to think about writing, and she did what none of my professors had ever done before. She didn’t just tell me my writing was good. She told me what about my writing was good.

With that tiny bit of confidence, I took what felt at the time like a risk. I applied to work at a writing center. The combination of studying literacy issues, taking a class on advanced grammar, and learning German had finally taken my raw talent and made it into something. And working in a writing center brought everything back down to earth.

Writing can be very elusive, especially when you wait around for inspiration and especially when you’ve been told you have some kind of talent for it. All those years in school, I’d felt the pressure to reproduce what I’d been told was good, but I’d never understood what I was doing or what made my writing good. When I broke down the process for myself and when I helped other students along as they figured out what makes good writing, I realized that writing doesn’t have to be so mystical.

Of course that didn’t stop me from fearing that it would be my grad school professors who would finally set me straight–that would finally tell me I couldn’t write. They didn’t. Again the opposite.

It’s only now that I’ve become comfortable saying things like, “I’m a good writer.” But, not too comfortable. It still makes me nervous just to have done it in this post. Still, I have a certain level of confidence now that I never expected.

It’s only with that confidence and a little bit of perspective that I can now say, fuck talent. You don’t need it. Write because you want to. Write even if you’ll never be any good. Because the truth is that you probably are talented, and even if you’re not, the only way to become a better writer is to write.