I often dread that cocktail party introduction question. I haven’t come up with an answer yet that satisfies me. If I tell people that I’m an author, they immediately start to tell me about the books that they’ve got half-written in the bottom of their desk drawer. If I tell them that I own a writing business, they always hand me the phone number of a cousin who is looking for writing work. If I just say that I’m a writer, they want to know what I write.
What do I write? That in itself is a complicated question. I often evade the question by saying that I’ll write whatever they pay me to write. Which isn’t true but it’s an easy answer that holds enough truth to make it a reasonable response. Or I’ll talk about the odd jobs - the horoscopes I’ve written, the adult movies I’ve reviewed, the kinds of things that people want to hear about at parties. The truth of what I write is that sometimes it’s really boring stuff. It’s web content about real estate investing that’s written for the beginner and boiled down to the basics. It’s blog content for a site that describes the neighborhoods of the city I live in. It’s not bad work or work I mind doing, but I’m something of a research fan so it’s probably more interesting to me than to the average person.
But the problem isn’t even really that I can’t say what I do. It’s that most of the time, I don’t really want to talk about my work. Writing as a way of life is something that is complicated. You can’t explain to someone who isn’t a writer about the days that you get up and you sit at the computer and you force your fingers to create words but every single sentence is painstakingly slow. You can’t describe how frustrated you are because your clients won’t pay you and you aren’t quite sure what to do about and you’re too busy hunting down new work to pay the bills to really push them for the money. And you can’t describe why this work is so incredibly satisfying that you don’t mind these days much at all really.
What I do is write. What I don’t need to do is talk about writing.
When I was about eighteen, I signed up with Literacy Volunteers of Tucson. My work with the group didn’t last long (what can I say, I was eighteen and not exactly committed to anything for very long periods of time) but it left a lasting impression on my life. Although I obviously knew that there were illiterate adults living around me, I hadn’t really understood until working with one what that meant on a daily basis. And I hadn’t understood until that time what importance writing and reading held for me.
The man that I worked with was older than I was. I believe he was in his thirties at the time, although I have trouble remembering for sure. I know that he was older and that I didn’t really feel confident in my ability to teach him anything, although I tried to project a false sense of confidence (working off that “fake it ’til you make it” plan that had gotten me through most doors). He had two young children, and it had taken hard work for them to learn how to spell their names. He didn’t even know all of the sounds that the letters of the alphabet made so putting them together into words seemed like an impossibility. This posed problems that the average adult doesn’t think about; the impossibility of filling out a job application, for example. Most of us fear that our resume isn’t good enough, not that we don’t know how to write our addresses on the application.
My student worked hard, meeting with me twice weekly until our meetings tapered off. Life happened, I suppose - he had another thing to do one week and then I had something come up on my end and we stopped connecting and stopped meeting. I don’t know what happened to him. But I know that he was progressing during the time that we worked together, our pens tracing letters on large lined paper in the empty conference room of some nearby library. And I hope that he continued to learn … but I’m fairly certain that I took away at least as much from the experience of being a literacy volunteer as he did.
It wasn’t until meeting him that I realized that I read ALL of the time. I read signs as I walk or drive by them. I read the phrases on people’s T-shirts, the captions on image-based novels and the lyrics on CD jackets. Sure, I read blogs and newspapers, books and letters but it is the small moments of reading passing items that really tell me my place in the world. And I can’t even begin to imagine what my life would be like without the ability to read those words. I can’t imagine living in a country in which every single phrase around me was written in symbols that didn’t mean anything to me; and I can’t imagine that country being my home. Ever since then, I have felt lucky that I am able to read and intensely aware of the fact that other people cannot.
And there’s another point to this story: being a literacy volunteer literally changed my life. It took my experiences, informed them with something new and forever altered me. I didn’t do it for long and I haven’t done it since that time, but it is still a part of what makes up who I am. It’s a part of what I do every single day when I am writing for a living, creating a career that may affect many people but which will inevitably NOT affect a great many other people. And the point there is that you can never know how the things that you will do will ripple out and affect other areas of life. I’ll never know how working with me did or didn’t affect that student; but I do know how it affected me in a way that I couldn’t have known when we first started working together. And that’s one of the many reasons that I think it’s important that we all step out of our comfort zones and do things that may change us. Because you simply can not know what comes next but you can definitely make that first step and see what happens.
My favorite feeling in the entire world is inspiration. I love to be in love, I’m thrilled during days when I feel excitement, I’ve even been known to thoroughly indulge in immersing myself in red-hot moments of anger … but if I could only feel one feeling for the rest of my life, I would choose inspiration every single time. Inspiration is that hard-to-capture feeling of being simultaneously aware of your complete interconnectedness with the world around you and yet sure that your voice matters in the big scheme of things. It’s that feeling that you have been so touched by something in life that you are compelled to find a way to channel it through yourself and back out to others, to act as the prism for the light of creativity that surrounds you. Inspiration is why I get up in the morning and work.
And some days, I don’t “work” much at all. But for writers, days off aren’t really days off. Sure, you may take a break from writing (you may even take an unfortunately extended break from writing) but if you’re living life, you are collecting material. Most writer’s books or art guides that you’ll read (and I can say “most” because I have a penchant for such books and have read many of them) will tell you that you need to consistently replenish your creative well. I’ve heard it described in dozens of ways, but what it boils down to is that it’s perfectly okay to give yourself permission to not work and to just be … because for someone whose life work is creativity, just being is the same as working. Because when you are out observing and absorbing the world around you, you are placing yourself in a position that allows for inspiration.
I wrote poetry on the insides of my eyelids the other day as I wandered around SFMoMA. There was art of all kinds on the walls around me … urban drywall installations covering entire rooms, photographs of dancers captured in the height of their movements, scupltures by painters and paintings by sculptors … but I didn’t look too closely at any of it. Instead, I just wandered, meandering through the crowd that fills the museum on free admission day. People-watching. My eye was caught by an older woman dressed in bright blue, with a scarf to match tied around her hat. The hat was yellow straw but she could’ve been a member of the red hat society if her vibrancy was any clue. I eyed her for only a moment, lost her in the crowd and moved on.
The flecks of paint swirled around me on canvases encased carefully on the walls of the museum and crusted onto the jeans of the art students who critiquely walked the rooms. Momentarily, I met eyes with the strikingly bold irises of a student writer who was gathering material for the character for his next book. Or so I think he told me in the brief glance that connected our gazes before one of us turned away. I don’t remember anything about him other than the brightness of his eyes, made brighter by what seemed to be natural eyeliner rimming the bottoms of his lids. The funniest things will make impressions on you if you’ll let them. So I sat and I walked and I stood and I watched, soaking up what was around me without planning to turn it into any kind of writing. I was simply allowing myself to be filled up with impressions. I was refilling the artistic waters of my creative well. I was opening the door of my writer’s mind to the inspiration that I am always hoping will walk through it.
Not all days are good days, creatively speaking. But all of them have the potential to be.
* The drawing is Escher’s … he’s one of my favorite famous artists because of the unique perspective that he brought to his work. I firmly believe that all artists should look at life from their own eyes out and share that vision the best that they can, irrelevant of how the rest of the world might see things. I hope that as a writer that’s something that I do. Welcome to my blog!*
There were a dozen different ways that I thought of starting off this blog. Having worked on numerous professional blogs over the last few years, I’m knowledgeable about all of the different things that I “should” use this blog for and all of the ways to do those things. I know the ins and outs of writing for my audience, selecting keywords to make the posts searchable, planning to tag the posts for promotion on social bookmarking sites … but I don’t want to use this blog just as a tool for self-promotion. Yes, that’s a nice added benefit, but it’s not the reason that I’m bothering to write my own blog. Instead, I want this blog to be a place where I can really connect with the people who read my work and who like what I do, to collaborate with others on creative projects and to really just share what my life is like as a writer.
Hence, the title of my web page and the name for this blog. You see, I always kind of wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be a million other things (I’m certified in massage therapy, I’m interested in photography, I have degrees in social service and public agency work and I had a brief stint in law school). But through it all, I wrote. I wrote letters, newsletters, poems, stories, articles, vignettes, books and a whole lot of nothing much sometimes. And for many years, even though I did all of this writing, I didn’t consider myself a “real” writer. Sure, I wrote stuff all the time. Sure I started to get paid for it. But it seemed like there was some sort of level of “success” that I needed to achieve as a writer that I hadn’t yet reached.
I wasn’t even sure what this level of success was defined as. I just knew that I wasn’t yet a “real” writer. And I hoped someday that I would be. And then, subtly, it happened. I began to just associate myself with being a writer. It wasn’t related to getting published or having my own writer’s website or being listed as a contributing author on a nationally-selling magazine. It was simply because I write. That’s what I do … on most days anyway. I write. And that’s what makes me a writer.
And the truth about being a writer is that some days I write stuff that’s terrible. I write things that don’t make sense. I write things that make sense but about which I’m not passionate. I re-write things that I’ve already written before hoping to make them better this time. And that’s what this blog is all about … writing bad stuff sometimes and not being afraid to share it with the people that read my work. Writing is a process. It’s an ongoing thing. And being a writer is a way of living. It’s a choice - one that’s messy and confusing and satisfying and wonderful - and one that I make again and again every time that I choose to keep writing.
So, yes, this blog is going to be messy sometimes. It’s going to detail the ups and downs of what writing is and what it means to me and how it changes as I change. It’s going to share my work and share stories about the days that I just don’t feel like working at all. It’s going to be real words (probably with typos sometimes although I’ll do my best to act like I edit!) from a real writer who is working in the world of writing right now.
With words and kisses,
Kathryn
