Most of the time, I hate what I’m writing. Last week, I handed in some paper about electronic literature and why it frustrated me to click through hyperlinks. I wrote that I didn’t get anything out of it. The week before that, I wrote a 1,000 word installment describing the time I spent on spring break in Laos. I have 9,000 words to go and I still hate what I’ve written so far.
Besides an emotional, honest piece about my late uncle, I couldn’t tell you about most of what I’ve written over the past 3.5 years in academia. The pieces I’ve written for school have felt forced. I’m sure they’ve involved interesting people and fascinating places but I think I just wrote the papers and handed them in and I may or may not have smiled at the grade I got back. I really just didn’t like what I was writing about and now I’ve got this weird attitude about it.
Now get this: when I graduate in the spring, I want to be a writer. I live with two nurses, one political science enthusiast, and one girl who wants to go into occupational therapy so she regularly takes care of a quadriplegic woman. In fact, as I sit here writing this, she’s getting ready to go to work for the quadriplegic woman, whom she is a now friend to. I always hear the two nurses reminiscing about their patients and the smiles nurses can bring them despite their battles with cancer. They’ve seen two babies in an incubator holding each other and a woman giving birth and it’s all been beautiful. Last week I learned that supposedly, Ernest Hemingway was such a depressed writer that he shot himself before some of his final work was even perfected, so that’s not good.
As writers, we see people who wake up every morning and study how to cure people, defend people, or understand people through medicine, law, and science. They surround us and overwhelm us with their incredible discoveries. For the most part (at least it seems so for my life), I hand in a paper and then I move onto the next one. Maybe my readers like what they read but at the end of the day I’m already past it. Society tells us that when nurses and law students graduate they’re going to try to find jobs as… nurses and lawyers. But when an English Writing student graduates, well, we don’t exactly know where we’re going to find a job but hey, we still hope that we do.
So after I cried over my pessimistic view of my own writing capabilities, I got to thinking: maybe I can still cure people and defend them and even understand them like no one else can. I may not find the cure for cancer but maybe I can write something for a magazine that a cancer patient can read in the hospital and for just a few minutes, it can make them forget about their disease. Maybe I can write something that will help me understand people who do not live the same way I do, like the ones that I met in Laos in March. Or maybe I can write something in defense of someone who wouldn’t otherwise get proper recognition.
Writers: we’re forced to write things for classes that seem pointless. I’m sure like myself, many of you hate what you’re doing (or maybe you don’t and good for you!). You might be discouraged and you might want to quit. I did about twenty minutes ago. But maybe when we find something we want to write about, words will flow a lot easier and we’ll have the potential to make a much bigger impact on people that read our stuff. I think back to the pieces I’ve written for online publications and internships, vis-à-vis the ones that I’ve written within the confines of a syllabus, and I actually loved writing for the real world. I wanted to write this piece, so I stopped writing the English paper I have due tomorrow to take some time for myself. I’ll get back to graduating later.
So to all those little voices in your head telling you that you’ll never get a good job, you’ll be left writing pointless essays in a cubicle, or you’ll never do anything worth mentioning, tell them to f*ck off. If you want to be a writer, write what you want to write about. Hand in your assignments and don’t let them discourage you from writing more meaningful things. If you want to incorporate business or fashion or advertising into your writing profession then do it. We don’t all have to be great novelists or poets. We don’t all need those gold circle awards on the covers of our books. If you’re reading this and you don’t think I’ve written it well or said anything insightful, that’s fine. I just scrutinized Paul French’s writing in my class a few weeks ago and his book won both the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and the CWA Non-Fiction Dagger so I guess that’s the point of this whole messy writing conversation.
If you’re scared that you’ll never make an impact (which I often am), take it from Deryck Todd, a fashion designer I interviewed in August. In regards to living a creative lifestyle, he said: “Don’t be afraid. Fear is too common of a thing that rules people’s lives…[like] the fear of failure…fear of not meeting the right person…” But, “If you put your spirit into the right place, then the pieces fall into line…”
So maybe everything I worry about isn’t so scary after all. I mean the only thing that made me feel better about my quarter-life-writing crisis was to write about it.
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