Thoughts on Being

My friend Charlotte wrote a line once that I really liked. She's a better writer than I am, a freshman at Smith. She'll share an alma mater with Sylvia Plath so I already feel like she's got something going for her. Anyway. She wrote this line about instead of liking poetry, she is poetry--I am a poem, my hips are commas carving out a space in the air--I liked that line, and the rest of the poem was good, too, it made me jealous of her ability to command words to do something for her, to speak to people.

My creative writing professor told me once that I could make a living out of writing, he's told me several times that I'm good at it. I don't really know what that means. In a conference once I told him that writing was coming easier to me than I expected it would but I think I lied. Writing is hard. It scares the hell out of me because it means always putting yourself out there to be judged. And people are assholes, they judge, and it's usually not nice.

Any kind of writing is hard; academic papers are hard and short stories are hard. Plays are worse and don't even start on poetry. And the thing about creative writing is that it's big. How do you define "creative writing?" I think even the most scholarly of papers require some degree of creativity, and a lot of the smut at Borders has nothing creative about it. Then how do you define the writer? You've got the serious writer, who produces piece after piece that really means something, and then you've got the asshat who thinks his 14 lines of free verse will really capture the world. Sometimes it does. It's just so hard to talk about writing.

But...

Writing means the very real probability of someone reading your work who's smarter than you and not liking it. Or saying it's wrong. At least if it's an academic paper and they don't like it you can always say you misread the sources, or were offering a different interpretation of a common idea.

But if it's your work--your heart and mind on the page--Christ, that's a terrible thing to have shot down. Because if they don't like it, or they think it's wrong or--worse--bad. Well, what are you going to do? That's you on the page-not someone else's review of a larger piece, but you. Little bits of your psyche thrown up on the page for the world to see.

It's worse than being naked.

It's like being naked while having eggs chucked at you by people who probably can't write any better than you can, or worse, they can.

I am not a poet, a playwright, and I'm certainly not a novelist or even anyone "creative" or "talented." I just put words on a page that I hope make sense, that mean something to me and pray to God that I'm not suddenly naked covered in egg yolks by the time the thing's done.

I want so badly for my "work" to be good--but what is good? Good gets in the way, approval gets in the way right there along with trying too hard. I think that as a writer, I'm screwed. I haven't an idea in my head that hasn't been tried a thousand times. The emotions I feel are the same as yours, and how am I supposed to capture the way you experience your life? Who am I to think my life's trials are worthy of putting on a page and calling them literature? I'm not dark enough to be a poet's fool, witty enough to be a cynic's comrade, and certainly not brave enough to not give a damn.

When I was young(er) I had dreams of being the next great somebody, tough and resilient, with a John Wayne stagger and a stoic's heart. Only I realize I'm a sell-out. I'll write what people want to read, I'll write what people tell me is good, I'll push aside those pieces that don't go over well and people can laugh at the manuscripts when I'm too dead to care.

My flaw in writing is that I want to be the best when there isn't one. There's not a best--there's a talented, a prolific, a versatile, or captivating, and a lot of other basically meaningless adjectives, but I don't want to be an adjective, I want to be a noun.
I am a poem.
My hips are commas carving...

I am a writer.
Lips sketching.... sketching what? How should I know? I have no answers. Sometimes I don't even have a decent conclusionary paragraph.