"I always hated writing—but this is different!"
That's me. Might it be you too?
Last Wednesday I described the gamut of people who write with us on Zoom in the Prompt of the Week this way:
from published to no-intention-of-publishing
from "serious writing" to "just enjoying playtime with pen and paper"
from "I'm here because I'm working on a book" to "I'm here because this practice enriches my life"
from "I love writing" to "I always hated writing—but this is different!"
That last one is me. And a number of other people, too.
I always hated writing, even though I loved reading—or maybe because i loved reading. How could I ever write anything as good as Nancy Drew or Agatha Christie or Jane Austen or Dickens? It was obviously impossible! So I never had the ambition to write a novel until, in 2014, I started writing one.
I was certain that I was not a creative person. I hadn't yet met James Navé (co-creator of Imaginative Storm), who convinced me that everyone is born creative. Creativity, as he says, is a human birthright. But, as a child, I liked to follow instructions in building Lego houses. I liked getting things right, so that I spent hours writing each letter of the alphabet over and over in exercise books until my letters reliably looked like the model at the beginning of the line—and if I made a mistake, I threw out the exercise book and started a new one back at “a”. As a toddler I drew and made collages, but as soon as my rational mind kicked in, art went out the window. If I couldn't draw as well as my sister, forget it.
So, I never thought of any writing I might do as creative, since—in my absolutely certain opinion—I wasn't creative. Writing was drudgery. Thank-you letters for every birthday and Christmas present, which had to be long enough to go onto the back of the page. Many of them were for blank diaries that people insisted on giving me, which I never wrote a word in. Why would I want to keep a record of what I did each day? The boredom! The pointlessness! I was so emotionally numb after my mother's death that it didn't occur to me to use those blank books as a place to explore my thoughts or myself.
School essays were drudgery too, though they became a lot more interesting at university. But since English was my best subject, they were all about discernment, judgment, critical interpretation—which exiled the idea of creative writing even further into the stratosphere. I was a good critical thinker so I was a good critical writer, but I didn't want to become an academic. Another dead end.
But shouldn't I at least be “able to write”? By this, I meant what most people mean: being able to write something of quality, something that readers would enjoy, something more accessible than critical essays on long-dead poets. Certainly not fiction, since I wasn’t creative. But maybe travel articles, to help pay for my holidays?
I dragged them out of myself. Though they were stiff and overwritten, a few of them were competent enough to be published. Beyond that, nobody praised them. Not even my newfound English family: a family of polished, seemingly effortless, elegant and witty writers.
Still, that little chink of published travel writing proved Navé right (though I still hadn't met him): I couldn't help wanting to create. As I didn't have the talent or drive to create visual art and I did know something about writing (way too much, as it turned out—hence our concept of “write what you don’t know”), writing it would have to be.
Screenplays! Now there's an idea. They don't have to be well written in the literary sense. They don’t go out in public; they’re blueprints. They don’t have that many words in them, so maybe they wouldn’t take years to write. (Ha!) Of course they have to be good if they're going to get made, but I figured I could learn that. Aren't they all about form?
Learning the form was fun. Unfortunately, I had no decent content to fill it. I'll spare you the lambasting I got when I offered my first efforts up for feedback. Still, I persevered, because I'm the persevering type, and because I liked the idea of being a writer because it meant you could live anywhere. (This was before the internet.) I could no longer stomach working in an office—it made me feel that I'd sold my life away.
And then I came to Taos, New Mexico. And then I met James Navé. And then I learned to write like it didn't matter. And then, finally, I discovered that writing needn't be drudgery, needn't be reserved only for the Olympian talents or even the less-than-Olympian talents. Writing, just for the sake of it, publication irrelevant, could enrich my life—and, if I wrote from the heart and shared what I'd learned, it could enrich everybody's.
Visit imaginativestorm.com to learn more about our book, course, and online workshop Write What You Don’t Know, our other books for writers, and our in-person workshops. And please join us on Zoom for the Prompt of the Week every Saturday and Thursday. It’s free, there’s no need to pre-register or even email us, and the Zoom link is in the newsletter that lands in your inbox those mornings. It’s also always accessible in the footer at imaginativestorm.com.
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Allegra, I'm so glad it was "writing is what it would have to be."