Continuing

While teaching my writing class today, I was confronted with a fact I often talk about but seldom like to face the reality of: I hate to write. I do it fairly regularly, but not profusely, and it's almost always because I'm forcing myself to do so. I spend too much time agonizing over words whose placement most people will probably not care about, and I hate it a good deal of the time. About a quarter of the time, it's okay or even enjoyable, but most of the time, it's a chore. 

George R.R. Martin said, "Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written." Unfortunately, I seldom even enjoy having written. I wrote a 10,000-or-so words-long novella last autumn. I keep forgetting about it, because I pushed myself to write most of it, and when I was finished with it, I was relieved, but only in the sense that one is relieved with having finished a long, tedious, uncomfortable chore. I was not proud of my work. I was glad to have it out of the way, but that was it.

When my students deviated from the subject of character development to ask me how I keep myself writing (such tangents occur frequently in this class, and I encourage them), I told them that mostly I have daily wordcounts for myself and I'm fairly good at forcing myself to do work even when I didn't want to. But something urged me to let on to the fact that I'm less of a writing role model than they'd believe, and I told them the truth.

"You know, I very seldom feel like writing. I have no love for the art anymore, and every time I sit down to write, I'm forcing myself. Every single time. I don't know why I do it, other than that it's the thing I do. But really, I'm personally drained as far as writing goes. It's remarkably difficult and I don't know why I do it. May I get morbid? I'm going to make a morbid analogy. For me, giving up on writing is a bit like giving up on life. I force myself to do it, and I don't feel like doing it anymore, even though the people around me think I have such joy and skill at it, and I guess I could choose to stop, but I realize that figuring out how to quit and actually following through with it is much more hassle than I need, so I keep at it."

This whole thing was being overseen by a teacher who worked at the school I was teaching this at, and while she didn't interrupt my morbid comparison between ending my writing and suicide, she did say, "But you know, I think this proves that you're really a writer. Because your inspiration ebbs and flows, and you keep going on anyway and making yourself write. And one day, your inspiration will come back, and you'll have written throughout that whole time."

I was taken aback at this potentially true and startlingly hopeful statement. I gave her some sort of thank-you before breaking the prior line of conversation and got back to the point of the difference between static and dynamic characters.

After class was done, the kids thanked me and went off, and the teacher approached me and said something much like, "Your ability to write even though you don't feel like it is admirable. It shows you're a true writer. You don't quit, you keep doing it. And someday your inspiration will return. You're just going through a dry spell now. Did this start when your mother died?" (She died about five months ago.)

"No," I said. "It's gone on for over a year now."

"It'll end," she replied. "I was reading about Ernest Hemingway and how he was the same as you. He hated writing sometimes, but he always made himself do it. It proved he was a writer. You're a writer."

And maybe I am. Maybe a writer isn't someone with a bunch of brilliant ideas that they write out but someone who's able to make themself write out the ideas when there's no desire or even brilliance. Maybe a writer is someone who doesn't have the sense to give up. Maybe a writer is the person who decides that it would be harder to quit this life than carry on with it, and they choose the lesser of two difficulties and continue doing what they were doing.

I tell people that, by this point, I'm writing because "it's what I do, and by this point, it's so much of who I am that I can't stop". Maybe that makes me more of a writer than anyone who does it for love and who couldn't continue if that love went away.