my human noise

I hate talking about myself. I hate consciously reflecting on my life as a writer. I prefer to watch my journey through revisions, through old journals. When I go back and read my very first short story, or my first writing journal, I simply inherently know that I’ve improved, that I’ve become someone else.

I dread first days of school. Each teacher, and later, professor, asks their students to go around the room and give a “fun fact” about themselves, or describe their hobbies. For any introverted human with any kind of social anxiety, this is a load of shit. I’ve perfected these answers, however. My fun fact is that “I hate this question,” and my hobbies are “reading, writing, Netflix, and sleeping.” I get away with saying as little about myself as possible.

A portfolio introduction is essentially a giant “fun fact” question, only longer, and with far more pressure attached. It’s asking Who Are You? Who do you want to be? How did you get there, and why are you special?

Well, I’m not. And I absolutely am. I’m one of a million aspiring writers. I’ve wanted to be one since I was little, but never thought I could “make it.” You know the rumor-statistic that there are more students in law school now than there are lawyers practicing? Law students are pretty screwed. I’m in an even worse boat. The chances of supporting myself writing are akin to being struck by lightning. I know this. I accept this. Here I am, aspiring anyway.

Why do I want to be a writer? Good fucking question. If she wasn’t so famous and wonderfully talented, I’d turn this personal statement into “Nine Beginnings” by Margaret Atwood – you know the saying, “good writers copy, but great writers steal.” I want to be a writer because it’s all I know how to do. Not because I’m not educated in plenty of other things. I am. Writing is the only thing that gets my heart racing in the this-is-what-I’m-meant-to-do kind of way. There’s a voice inside your soul that starts to speak when you write something worth writing. When you know you’re on a roll and what you’re writing is good, that it means something. Even sitting in a room all by yourself, you feel a little more connected to the world.

I’ve learned more than I could have ever thought possible in my creative writing classes. I’ve learned to allow myself to write terribly on a first draft, and then go back and revise. I’ve learned to kill my darlings, to cut my most treasured lines because they didn’t fit with what the piece has become. I’ve learned to let my characters be who they are. I’ve learned to go into a workshop humbly, to try not to crave praise instead of criticism.

My classmates taught me as much as the curriculum. I have been shaped by my close-knit writing groups. I’ve taken a small part of each of them with me, and it’s made me the writer I am today. I’ve loved and known some incredible people, and my relationships with them make me realize just how badly I want to be a writer. 

However, writing is hard. Screw the people who say it’s like brushing away dirt from a fossil, or chiseling away stone to create David. “The work was underneath the whole time,” they say. “I just had to find it.”

Wrong.                                                                                               

Writing is staring at the blinking Word document, hating yourself for choosing this career. Writing is pretending that thinking about a story in the shower is the same as writing. Writing is finding anything else to do besides write.

Writing is lonely, and scary. It’s hard to remember that you have something to say, and no one can say it like you. What if you get it on the page, and it’s nothing like you planned? What if it’s terrible? What if you show it to someone and they pity-praise it and you never get published (even though I have once – shameless plug) and you have to live in a cardboard box?

Writing is sitting at a computer and bleeding. You pour your heart and soul into a piece, into characters, into commas. You cry it out as you write it out. You face your fears, heartbreaks, mistakes, and regrets all by yourself, and for what? Why?

I write because I think it’s important we all know that it’s okay to not be okay. That it’s vital to be vulnerable, that it’s crucial to make mistakes. That it’s hard to seize our real estate as a human and be honest with ourselves and with others.

There is no cure for writing, thank God. I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. I write because I have to, and I want to be surrounded by fellow writers. I want them to read and critique my work and make it better. I want my peers to leave their personal stamp on my work, and leave mine on theirs. I want to be harsh and driven and ask the Big Questions of our pieces. I want to chase the high of writing with others.

I write because my characters teach me things. They write themselves. I learn new lessons every time I finish a story. I write because there’s a universality in the specific. I want to write like Raymond Carver when he says, “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.” I want to write that human noise. I want to articulate the things very few people can, the things that make us up.