I am a writer. For as long as I can remember, I have been a writer. In fact, I’ve been a writer for so long now that I can’t really remember when my love of writing started. In elementary school, I was never bothered by writing assignments. Most of the time, I actually wrote more than the teacher required because I was having so much fun and didn’t want to stop. I just liked telling myself stories and letting my imagination run wild. Eventually, I began to write stories outside of class, simply because it made me happy. I was always carrying around those cheap spiral notebooks and filling them up with pages upon pages of fantastical tales about adventure and magic. Writing was an escape for me, the same way ballet and basketball and art were escapes for other kids. My stories didn’t have to play by anybody’s rules but my own. I was free to create an entirely new world that looked and behaved the way that I wanted it to. In short, writing was fun for me. Most of the time, it still is.
It wasn’t until I started college that I began to realize that writing could also be really difficult. I wrote all throughout elementary, middle, and high school, and never really struggled with it. Many days, it seemed like my river of story ideas was endless, and I had very little trouble coming up with the perfect words with which to tell those stories. Naturally, I imagined that I would become an author someday, just as I had always planned, and this dream played a large role in my college decision. In fact, a large part of the reason I chose to attend Sewanee was because of its long, illustrious literary history—not to mention the fact that it offered a certificate in creative writing. However, when I finally attended my first creative writing class, a playwriting class, I realized that my authorial aspirations might be harder to achieve than I had originally imagined. In this writing class, as well as the others that followed, I met students whose writing style was far more developed, and far different, than mine. While the majority of my writing portfolio consisted of unpublished, largely unfinished work, some of my classmates had completed entire novels, screenplays, and poetry collections. Some of them had even been published! To make matters worse, the work I turned in for these writing classes was subject to feedback from both my classmates and professors, and although the comments I received were never unfair or mean, receiving constructive criticism still made me feel like an inadequate writer. Suddenly, story ideas were extremely hard to come by, and every word I typed into my word processor seemed completely and totally wrong. For a long time, I actually questioned whether or not I should even continue to pursue the creative writing certificate and writing as a career, since I didn’t seem to be any good at it.
And yet, despite all of these doubts, here I am. On Thursday evening, I’ll be reading a portion of my creative writing capstone as part of a presentation at the McGriff Alumni House, along with five other students. In May, I’ll graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English and a creative writing certificate. I don’t know if I’ll become a professional author one day, although I hope I do. However, even if I don’t, I know I’ll keep writing. In the end, I guess that’s why I’m a writer—not because I’m a published author or particularly skilled, but simply because I can’t stop writing. I would continue to write stories even if I never made a dime off of them because the process of creating them brings me joy. It’s part of who I am. That’s why I am a writer: I just love writing.
(F.Y.I. The creative writing capstone presentation will take place on Thursday, March 23rd at 7:00 PM at the McGriff Alumni House. Hashtag shameless self-promotion.)
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