Writing

[Biographical note: I worked my way through college as a journalist, earned a BA in English, and assumed at that point I would always earn my living by writing. Somewhere along the way the need to feed a family pushed me onto another path, and I discovered skills that proved more valuable in the marketplace. But . . .]

Sometimes I hate being a writer. Often I deny that I am one.

But denying the truth doesn't make it go away, and the truth is, I can't not write. Even when I'm disgusted with it, even when no one reads it or even has a chance to read it, I write.

I write to think. Something can be a jumbled mess in my mind, but if I write it, thoughts flow, connections become apparent, logic asserts itself and, in the end, there is a conclusion. Sometimes I advance through the day in a kind of solo social media experience, wherein I'm constantly adding comments and updating my status as a way of clarifying these new ideas that keeping boiling out of my brain (picture the centipedes coming out of the old tree trunk in the movie version of Fellowship of the Ring).

And most days I churn out pages of business writing. That's the art at its most workmanlike, leading out words like draft animals to be put in harness in e-mails, memos and reports that attempt, as mundane as they may be, to be true to the capacity of the English language not just to communicate but to stimulate. It's like singing opera in a honky-tonk.

But in addition to those functional uses for writing, I have this need to sculpt words. I'm long past the days when I got paid to write -- in fact, my current career field values writing only if it is terse and unambiguous. But that doesn't stop me from sneaking away now and then to romp through the playground of language like a schoolboy playing hooky. Words have meaning. Years ago in my Infantry Officer Advanced Course one of my Tacs was fond of saying "Use precise terms precisely;" in that world, where decisions are made on the fly and sometimes under fire, the job of words is to transmit information efficiently and accurately. But words can do much more than that; in addition to their Webster definitions, they are nuanced, and they have shapes and sounds that combine to evoke for me colors and flavors and textures and tones. Writing can be like cooking and painting and singing all at the same time.

That's why I often return to authors whose stories I find ordinary (Neal Stephenson and James Lee Burke come to mind) but who regularly craft sentences and paragraphs that are so exceptional that reading becomes the mental equivalent of fine dining. 

And it's also why, without encouragement or affirmation, I continue to write. True, some of my writing escapes in the form of the occasional blog, and a few of those are well-received. However, most of what I write never matures enough to be released into the wild. That majority is, I think, what makes me truly a writer, because it exists only to give expression to the impulsive/compulsive something in my heart that demands a voice.

If I were a professional writer, some of that work would eventually be scrubbed and fashionably dressed and then sent out with a polished resume to look for a job. It is the curse of my success in other fields that there isn't enough time.

But I write anyway. I write, and I get frustrated because I start but don't finish. I write, and then file what I've written because it is poor work done with the dregs of my energy and creativity. I write and become depressed because this is what I love but there's so little time for it, and so little progress. It seems futile, my own rolling of the stone uphill. 

So, just like the day I stopped being paid for it, I decided again this summer to quit writing -- like a smoker, I've quit frequently over the years. But even so, last week I finished another chapter in The Great American Novel, and I also drafted the outline of another speech. And today there's this blog, more expository than beautiful but still, for all its unimportance, an outlet.

That's how, even though the world sees me as something else, I know I'm a writer.