On Writing

Prepare for gut-spillage in 3.. 2.. 1..

As long as I can remember I have considered myself a writer. I am by no means in a perpetual state of writing (don't let the dozen half-started story drafts fool you: works in progress does not mean I am working) but I am in a perpetual state of thinking about writing. The stories and words floating around in my brain (or pockets if they manage to find their way onto a scrap of paper) are demanding, but somewhere along the line I learned to sort of drown them out. The little sprite turning the cogs in my brain itches for me to accept his requests for production of writing, but mostly I just tell it to shut up and let me live my life.

This won't do.

The formula is simple: write to become a better writer. You must read to become a better writer, too, but if you don't like to read then you probably have no desire to write anything worth reading. Skill as a writer and production of meaningful content come about only through hard, grueling practice. "I hate writing. I love having written." (attributed to Dorothy Parker, but really, who hasn't said this?) Many pages of utter shit must be written before a writer begins to sense a purpose to her work. There is no other way. One must write, to the point of madness, to the point where your teachers and parents are interrupting your work tearing the notebook from your hands so that you can finish math homework instead of writing page after page of fiction prose. To the point where the files on the computer fill so many separate folders that you can never go back and work on the draft you seek, you just sweep them all off into one directory and call it "1997" and don't open it again. The point that your journals begin to look the same on the outside from year to year: bound with spiral crushed and impractical, the dingy cover some degree of greenish-puke, the back of the journal hanging slack by a few diligent pieces of binding, scribbled and furry cardboard covered in labyrinthine doodles reflecting the inner turmoil of writing and never producing words that mean what they are supposed to.

The myth of inspiration is a cruel lie that young people tell themselves. "I won't be able to write a great novel until I've gone out and experienced the world's exotic sights and sounds." Words to pacify your sense of guilt and laziness. Just start! Write about your boring life. You won't remember it unless you do. You won't remember how foolish and bland your life was, and you'll crave it as you become older and complex, as you learn that love and loneliness are eternally dancing inside your noggin, tempting you with fulfillment and stunning you with misery. When you're a kid, how can you ever conceive the hardship and heartbreak that awaits you? How can you know of the interconnectedness of the human race through the emptiness and universal yearning within?
You can't. You are still figuring out how to pass seventh grade without becoming the target of a wedgie-nazi. So write about your pet dog and your nasty ill-tempered babysitter. Write some horrible poetry about the stars or the flowers or the wind.

It won't matter how terrible it is; it's not your voice. Your words are not your own until you've read so many tales that they all become a part of your fingertips. Strangely, this is how it happens. You meet so many minds that your own mind grows to encompass them all, and that is you, speaking through the hearts of many.

Don't be afraid. Yes, there is fear, but if you can break through it, find comfort in it, you will taste the reward, the energy of a writer, the passion that sustains.

short assignment: a year of not teaching

"I just don't understand," my mother looks across the table at Starbucks, "what do you live off of? How can you afford to pay the bills?"

I shrug. I haven't worked for ten months. The first three months was paid summer vacation, and then my paychecks ended during August, and my health insurance policy ran out in October. In December I took a vacation to visit my dad and step-mom in California, in January I stayed with friends and went to free concerts on school nights, in February I sold a record number of handmade items in my Etsy store, and in March I went outside every day and rode my bike for transportation. Things I could never have done while teaching.

Teaching is not a 9-5 job, I knew that when I started. I thought my love of learning and seeing kids grow and experience literature and writing would be enough to fuel late-night paper grading, rising up before dawn to make it to early morning duties, staying at school until my car was the last in the parking lot just to make sure I would have lesson plans for the next day. But it just didn't feel like I was using enough of my time to further myself.

I miss the bonds with the children. I miss the camaraderie of working with the other teachers. There are plenty of positive and negative pieces of school life that just suddenly were no longer there. I like to focus on all the things I can do now that I have freed myself from this demanding work.

First and foremost I was able to start exercising and taking care of my body again. No longer must I wait for hours before I can leave my little desk and use the restroom; I can pee whenever I want to! I can sleep in if I don't feel well. My lunch no longer has to be wolfed down in 20 minutes or less so that I have time to relieve myself before the children's lunch period is over. This is probably too much information, but my first year of teaching I suffered from dehydration and urinary infection because of the simple inability to control what was going in and coming out of my body and when.

I have resumed meditation practice, and regularly exercise and go for walks. I read more, I feel less stress, I craft, I sew, I clean. When did I do these things before? How did I feed and bathe myself when 65 hours or more of my week were dedicated to lessons and meetings and stress?

If I can't quit a job that isn't making me happy, now, while I'm 26, unmarried, and full of dreams, when will I do it? Sure, a well-balanced and mature individual may have, with discipline, been able to do all of the things I've listed above as benefits to my having quit the school. But who is that person? It wasn't me. I was suffering and my work was suffering for it, and I needed time to be me, apart from a class of kids who needed me.