"So what do you do?"
I'm a writer.
That's what I want to say. That's what my heart whispers. But that desire doesn't always match what comes out of my mouth.
"Well, I do this now, but eventually I want to write full time."
"Oh, that's cool. What do you want to write?"
Stories. Words. Beautiful things that capture emotion. That capture beauty, suffering, pain, euphoria, tears, laughter. I want to take the human experience and describe it in a way that makes people laugh and cry and feel like they left a part of themselves with my characters. I want to captivate people with the beauty of language.
"Novels.""Oh, that's nice."
///
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
— Ernest Hemingway
There is something about being a writer that captivates me.
It is painful. It is hard. It requires me to dig into the depths of my soul. It asks me to confront the things about myself I often wish to ignore. It asks me to take the human experience — my own and others' — and craft it into poetry, into sentences that flow and captivate and illuminate.
There is something about a story that captivates me.
It is beautiful and lovely. It is heart- and gut-wrenching. It is delightful and funny. It is words and phrases and images strung together to create something that looks different in the mind of every person who reads. It is an imagined world filled with beauty and wonder. It is the way in which we convey our experiences to the rest of the world — the people we know and the people we don't know, the people who live down the street right now and the people who won't be born for 100 more years.
///
I've known for my entire life that I wanted to be a writer. I've always been fascinated by story. I've always had a supreme love for a beautifully crafted sentence.
I'm at a point in my life where I'm finally legitimately heading in that direction. I'm blogging a lot. I'm writing a book. I'm looking for freelancing opportunities. I'm starting to make strides to make that dream of calling myself a "writer" true.
But what about now?
I have a hard time calling myself a writer sometimes. I qualify my experience. I say that I eventually want to be a writer. The word "eventually" implies a destination, somewhere I arrive at a later point in time. And since I have a full-time job and I only write in my free time, it implies that I haven't arrived yet.
But when will I arrive?
Will it be when my blog gains a bigger audience? Will it be when I have articles published in magazines or newspapers? Will it be when I publish a book? When will I reach the destination I have aimed for my entire life?
///
When I think about my desire to write, I'm reminded of a scene at the beginning of the movie Anne of Avonlea.
Anne is much like me. She loves stories. She loves words. She loves imagery and imagination.
But at the moment she teaches. One afternoon, she is walking along and is struck with inspiration, so she stops and writes down the words in her head. She is enraptured by the beauty of the words, the imagery and leans back to soak them in. As she lays there, the many pages of her working manuscript float away in the wind.
In the next scene, she is walking through a field, collecting her scattered pages and a man picks one up and brings it to her. She thanks him and he asks if she's a journalist.
"No, a teacher. No, I'm a writer. Actually, I write books."
Anne struggles to describe who she is. She knows what she does (teach). She knows what she wants to do (write books). But which of those things makes her who she is?
Sometimes I feel confident. When people ask me what I do, I tell them I'm a writer. If they ask further, I may explain that I don't yet receive my paycheck from writing, but I am still a writer.
Other days, I don't feel so confident. I hide behind "want to" and goals and dreams and "maybe one day I'll get there." I tell them my job that gives me my paycheck and characterize being a writer as an eventually.
///
I look at other people, other aspiring authors like me, and sometimes it is their accomplishments that make me feel like I'm not quite a writer yet. Or at least not a real writer.
I don't spend every spare minute working on my manuscript. In fact, sometimes I go days or even weeks without opening up that Word document. I've never queried an agent or been to a writing conference. I haven't taken a class on writing or gone to a critique group.
The way people talk about dreams sometimes makes it seem like if you're not pursuing that dream with every spare minute you have, it's not a real dream.
They talk like it's just a hobby or something you enjoy doing. They make it seem like if you're not blowing off relationships or any extracurricular commitments in order to spend all your free time with your manuscript, you don't really want it. They say that if you really wanted it you'd be willing to get up 30 minutes earlier or stay up 30 minutes later in order to get it.
A lot of the time, I'm not willing to do that.
And so I sit and I wonder, "Am I really a writer?"
///
I've written before about finding balance. And I'm learning that I can be a writer, want to be a full-time writer, etc. without sacrificing everything.
Sometimes it will take sacrifice. Sometimes it will mean I can't go to that event because I have a deadline. Sometimes it will mean that I stumble through the day slightly exhausted because I had to stay up late to finish a chapter. Sometimes it will mean that I am so soul-tired from pouring myself into my writing that I can't pour in to others.
There is always a cost in creating something beautiful.
But if I push it all aside — blow off my relationships, sacrifice my sleep and my health, push aside my other commitments and obligations — there won't be anything left when I'm done.
Sometimes I wish that I had more motivation, that I felt the compulsive need to write thousands of words in my novel every single day. Sometimes I question because I feel like if I was really meant to do this, I would have more drive. Sometimes I forget that there is a life outside of writing.
I love to write. I always have. I always will. I firmly believe that the Lord gave me a talent for writing and it is part of His good purpose for my life is that I use my talent and love for writing to tell stories that show His glory to this broken, hurting world.
But I also believe that He doesn't want me to give up the rest of my life for that one thing.
He still wants me to fully engage where I am. He wants me to balance my purpose in writing with my purpose in the rest of life. He wants me to represent Him in the way I live my life, not just the words that I write.
And sometimes that will mean a coffee date over adding 2000 words to my manuscript. Sometimes that will mean morning snuggle time over 30 minutes with a Word document. Sometimes that will mean an afternoon walk in the sunshine over finishing chapter three. Sometimes that will mean giving hugs as tears fall over editing the prologue.
I can be serious about my writing without having it take over my life, because one thing is true — I can't write about the human experience if I haven't lived it.
Do you want to be a writer? What is it that prevents you from calling yourself one now? Do you feel like you need to "arrive" somewhere before you are a real writer?
-----------Photo Credit: Lin Kristensen. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
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