The selfish writer

I started writing when I was 7, which makes me sound like a prodigy, when really it was all about on the one hand a kind of selfishness, and on the other hand a monstrous arrogance. (Can you be monstrous when you’re 7?)

It was selfish because I wanted to own writing.

I had read a lot (for a 7-year-old) and been read to before that. I had visited the library and been impressed (intimidated?) by the hundreds of books on shelves that went up to the ceiling. It was a Carnegie library, one of many funded by Andrew Carnegie, who made his money in steel, just as my father, who worked in the hot mill at Republic, did (although Carnegie made a lot more). Later on I was allowed to go there by myself – it was 3 blocks away, at the end of our street – but when I was 7 I was always accompanied by my mother and my baby sister, neither of whom wanted to stay at the library as long as I did.

I loved books and reading so much that I didn’t want them to be separate from me. Borrowing books from the library wasn’t enough, nor owning them, the books I got for Christmas and birthday presents. But, in a kind of 7-year-old logic, writing them myself might be.

And here is where the arrogance comes in, because I thought, why not?

That first thing I wrote was a novel. I had read some poems and they were OK but I thought they were too jouncy and jittery, too brittle, too rhyme-y (sorry poets everywhere, and in particular, sorry to my poet sister). Whereas prose was seductive, smooth, long-running, a journey as well as a picture.

I only wrote 3 chapters, and the only readers were my parents.

Once when I went to the Antioch Writers Workshop I attended a presentation by a writer talking about writing his novel. The thing about a novel is that it’s so long, he said. He pulled the word out beyond its four letters to comic effect: llooooonnnngg, and we all laughed, his audience of writers and would be writers.

I had written one by then, but I discovered a thing that other writers I know have also discovered: just because you’ve done it once, doesn’t mean you actually know how to do it. When I had attempted it again, it seemed as if, instead of having accrued skills and techniques that would stand me in good stead and be repeatable, that I’d experienced the literary equivalent of a lightning strike. A one-and-done. My first novel taunted me when I was working on my second, and I’m ashamed to admit that it worked – I was never able to finish it. Novels were hard, and they were so so long.

Something I know now is that I’m very good at writing beginnings, moderately good at writing the middle parts, and not so good at getting to the end. If I can get there I can write it, but getting there is hard, because novels are long (llooooonnnngg). During the writing of every novel, there is a time when I quit for a while because I can’t figure out how to go on. Sometimes they languish for quite a while before I take them up again. (I have one now that is lying in its metaphorical drawer, waiting for me to woman up, to walk in my invented spaces and get my characters talking to one another.)

It's good to know your weaknesses, but it can be lowering.

When I wrote my first 3-chapter novel, I didn’t think of myself as selfish and arrogant. And later on, when I took up writing again in a more serious way, I would probably have denied that I was. But I am thinking now that a writer needs a little bit of those. A little selfishness – to grab time for herself and her writing. A little arrogance, to be able to say “I’m a writer,” when there’s no evidence to prove it, when the writing doesn’t come, when it comes but no one is interested in reading it (or publishing it).

I wasn’t able to own writing, ever, but I have been able, mostly, to own myself as a writer in the world, which is like standing on shifting rocks in the lake when the water is up to your knees and the waves are pushing, some gentle and some fierce, as you struggle to stay upright.