Writing down your life

It's said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people (Thomas Mann), but as a writer you tend to think--hope--that whether or not it is more difficult, it is still something you are good at, perhaps even better at than most people.

So when you take a first-year level class that consists of a lot of paper-writing, it comes as a blow to receive back a low grade on an essay. You stare at the grade, at the bleeding red numbers, and you wonder, What happened? You're a writer, aren't you? Everyone's said so. You've heard the litany for years from your parents, your English teachers, your friends--strangers, even: you have a talent for shaping words. This is why you're a humanities major, after all. You know you've no talent for science and math, that your brain just doesn't process the numbers and formulas and logistics the way that's expected for those fields of study, and you're quite content with being able to focus on the stylistics of a pretty turn of phrase or the semantics of word usage. Your roommate pities you for your endless papers, but you'd prefer them any day over her lab reports or Chemistry tests.

But that grade. That low, low grade. What does it mean? The more you stare at it, the more it undermines your own confidence as a writer. Maybe you were never as good as you thought you were. Maybe you were never good. And maybe a part of you knew that all along.

Isn't that why you never ventured to take an Intro to Fiction-Writing class? Or why you never committed yourself to NaNoWriMo, despite all your talk about it? You've read your friends' writings, their short, original stories. You recognize their talent--a wealth of originality and clever turns of phrase you could never manage. You recognize the strength in their writing, the depth, the capacity to integrate a cohesive theme and provoke thought or feeling.

Your fiction has always felt flat in comparison; you have very few pieces you are genuinely proud of, and of those, you still nitpick, you still compare and fall short. Your weaknesses gape wide under your eyes, permanent black marks against every attempt to improve. You wish you knew how to improve, how to write like those authors you read, but the task seems so monumental that most of the time you despair. Sometimes you think you have it inside you, that ability to craft words and mood and theme. You can feel it rising within you, struggling to burst out onto the page, into sentences, paragraphs, a roller-coaster of emotion that pulls the reader along. But there's a stop-gap between your mind, where the creativity is roiling, ever epic, and your fingers, which seem unable to output what might have been brilliance.

This is why you fear taking an actual writing class. You're afraid of feedback, of critique, not because you expect yourself to be perfect and for your writing to amaze all who read it--but because you're afraid that it will amaze no one. You're afraid that the class will confirm that deep-down fear that you are not the writer you think you are, that you are not a writer at all.

Maybe it's already been confirmed, though. Maybe that's what this low grade is--proof of what you've always feared: that you are incapable of excelling in anything, forever mediocre in everything. A slideshow flashes through your mind, rapidfire, images of piano and violin, of cultural dance and modern dance, of sports you never played and clubs you never joined. Wasted potential.

Excellence does not come easy, you know, nor does it come naturally. It takes work. But you feel as though you have worked for your writing; you know you've improved over the years. You can look at your writing from five years ago and compare it to your writing now and say with certainty that you are a better writer now than you were then. But that doesn't mean that you are a good writer now.

The fear sits low in your stomach. That doesn't mean that you are a good writer now.

It's all you've ever wanted, to be able to write. You knew too late you weren't going to be anyone of note in violin, piano, sports, or dance. Your regrets are endless, but you thought it might be all right as long as you could write. That was still something. Something to make you noticable, special, worthy.

But maybe you aren't a good writer. Maybe you don't even have that.

You try to tell yourself that it's just one grade, that all it indicates is that you didn't try hard enough on that paper, that you didn't give the professor what he wanted. It's a matter of failure in your effort, not in your ability. You cling to that fleeting excuse like a lifesaver in your river of denial; it might be true. It might save you from a life of being unremarkable, unnoticeable, and untalented--and you need that belief to keep going. The alternative is incomprehendable.

You don't know what you would do if you couldn't write. What would you have then?

The physical ache of not having written for weeks, not having written properly and giving some release to the pressing demands of creativity (you've never doubted that you had muses, but the ability to translate their urges into words has you terrified now), is nothing compared to the stomach-dropping, breathless fear that consumes you when you consider even the possibility of not being able to write.

I'm a writer, you tell yourself.A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. It's understandable, excusable, acceptable for writing not to come easily.

You look at the grade again. You try not to frantically shift through all your writing for the past five years to prove your own abilities to yourself. You don't know. You don't want to know.

You try to abate the panic. I'm a writer, you whisper. I just need to practice more, think more, plan more, write more. It will be all right. It's only a matter of effort.

You're a writer, because you can't not be.